Kingdom Crossovers
by HVK
Summary: A reformed Invader Zim has been chosen by the Keyblade and travels the multiverse with his crew; mad scientist Calvin, Aslanite knight Hobbes, the extremely lost Fire Lord Zuko, talking skull Morte Rictusgrin, the mighty Kamina, Sierra the giant ogre-woman, Marceline the Vampire Queen and more, under the patronage of Autochthon the Great Maker.
1. A Dreamer Awakens: Zim Gets A Clue

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts or any of the characters in this story that I don't own.

...

In the almost incomparable vastness of space,within the almost but-not-unentirely-unimaginable width of a universe that happened to be fictional, dominating a small system of worlds, there was an short green alien that lived on a orange planet.

None of the inhabitants really knew why it was orange; it just was. To the general population, the same reasoning applied to why recently there was no unified leader; there just wasn't. No one really cared. Some of the more politically astute thought that it was a bit strange, but even they didn't mind: it was better than having a president too incompetent to remove the hanger on his shirt before wearing it.

The green alien in question was named Zim. He had no last name; his people, the Irkens, didn't have last names, as they didn't have families to be a part of. He thought his name probably meant something neat, but lately he was running out of interesting possibilities. He felt that once you hit a thousand and three different possibilities in the major languages of a half dozen planets, including this mudball, you'd hit bottom.

It had occurred to him that he was starting to run out of things to do at night.

He wasn't that tall, only being about three and a half feet in height. His head was a bit rounder than an ordinary human head, with a more simplified skull structure and lacking ears or a nose. Two antennae, narrow and the ends round, stuck out the back of his head. His eyes were unusually large and slightly oval in appearance, lacking scelera or pupils, just a reflective red color of varying shades at the lighter end of the spectrum. His unusually smooth skin was a tan green, unmarked by so much as a single follicle of hair anywhere on his body; there were a few small and nearly unnoticeable scars, but that was it. His teeth were a strip of enamel that were shaped and fit together like the 'teeth' of a zipper. His muscle structure was what one might expect of someone whose body chemistry was subtlety regulated to make him an adequate soldier, physically speaking anyway. His hands had only two fingers that ended in a slightly curved round tip, lacking any nails; his thumb was slightly larger in proportion to the other two fingers. His feet, visible through his shoes had only two large toes, similar in appearance to his fingers, but making up at least a third of his foot.

He wore a sleeveless shirt with no collar, colored a bright yellow. Over this, he wore a beige raincoat that slightly dwarfed him, even though he'd cut off the arms and tail so his wrists came through the sleeves and it ended at his knees. For some reason, it was covered head to foot in emoticons that made appropriate noises when you pressed them. He wore a pair of Bermuda shorts, light blue with patterns of spiraling vines with stupid monkey figures jumping across them. He also had on a pair of Japanese sandals, he forgot what they were called, you usually saw them paired with kimonos. He was also wearing a dark red hat; it looked vaguely similar to a beret; he wore it at a bit of an angle, causing one of his antennae to poke out from under it at an angle in a manner he thought to be jaunty.

The slicker and shirt had two large holes cut on the back of them; through them was a round piece of extremely advanced alien technology; it resembled a hi-tech back pack, attached to his body via two vertically placed ports on his back. It was a whitish off-gray color, with three red disclike things with grooves running right through them; they were in a pattern, one at the top, one at the upper right, and one at the lower left. It was about the diameter of the area of Zim's shoulder blades. It was an improvement on the old one Zim used to have, a little functionally smaller than the old one.

At the moment, he was squatting on the roof of his house, doing something really uncharacteristic of his usual slightly crazed hyperactive demeanor: he was brooding.

He gave the surrounding neighborhood of his particular part of Nicktown a disgruntled look. The depression was starting to get to him, _again_. The fact that the area around him reminded him of his current place in life didn't help matters.

"Stupid thoughts..._WHY WON'T YOU JUST SHUT UP!_" He shrieked self-dramatically at the sky, which, being a cluster of atmospheric layers, was oblivious to his self-important rantings.

Not really noticing that, he made what he felt was a victorious pose, starting to feel better.

Then he slipped on a loose slate and fell off the roof of his house.

When his startled scream was interrupted by the impact of dirt and mud splattering into his mouth, he started to feel the extended middle finger of discouragement settle on his his mind.

Spitting the ground-up earth compounds out of his mouth, he sat up and flecked a stray clod off his antennae.

As he brushed dirt off his two fingered hands, he paused when he saw a dirt clump.

He stared at it, spreading his fingers and raising it up.

He crushed it in his fist, letting the dirt crumble out in a small stream. He grumbled inaudibly, his antennae waving agitatedly. Not that long ago, he would have completely freaked out and caused mass destruction for the Earth's part in causing him injury. Two years ago, he had a false mission. Two years ago, he had a utterly misguided purpose.

Two years ago, he had been completely unaware of the way he'd been wasting his life.

As in with many things, the general population had mostly forgotten the fact that their planetary system had had a civil war two years ago.

The inhabitants of this particular world held interesting lives with strange frequency, and with them went irritating antagonists. They lived their lives mostly oblivious of each other's existence.

Then their enemies decided to gang up on everyone else.

Forming an alliance, the megalomaniacal freaks assaulted their victims quietly, without warning or mercy. They jumped from world to world, obliterating what they didn't need and stealing everything else. They were preparing for the really big war; Earth, the central planet of this world chain, which held the vast majority of their enemies.

Then the problem of the mighty Irken Empire came up. They had an...agent of sorts present on Earth, so they had an interest there.

They sent an envoy to the Armada's flagship, the Massive, to invite them into their alliance. They felt fairly confident about their chances.

The reply came when the envoy returned to them in the form of several dozen packages,followed by the Irkens proceeding to wage war on them.

The problem was neatly resolved by the Martian Emperor Bog, who destroyed the Irken home world.

The Irken home world was the seat of the mightiest empire there ever was in their particular world sphere; appropriately, they had the defenses to guard themselves from their enemies. But all the force fields and giant fighting robots they had couldn't save the Empire from a tactical black hole vortex that appeared at the very core of the planet.

Due to the nature of it's people, as much as half of Irk's population was generally off-world at some point or another: Almost the entire military force was held up in the Armada, and the best of them, the Invaders, were off observing various other planets, too widely separated to serve as calvary. And that didn't include the various researchers and scientists on the other planets. Irk as a planet was almost only a symbol of the Empire and not much else besides a place for the smeets to be born and grow up on. Bog realized this, and made a conclusion.

That conclusion was that none of that couldn't stop the empire from crumbling apart as Bog predicted. Without a home base to rally behind, any opposition the Irkens might conceivably pose would disintegrate, and they would cease to be a threat. With only a few birthing facilities off-world, the Tallest wouldn't be able to afford to lose troops. With their most powerful and deadliest weapons gone, they would be powerless against the enemy. The Irkens would be no more than a footloose band of height-obsessed screwballs, dangerous only to themselves. And the Irkens had another special weakness. Their bodies were simply a vessel to hold their Paks. As long as the Pak survived to be plugged into a new body, they were effectively immortal. But if the Pak was destroyed, they would die. To that end, he designed a virus to completely scramble the Pak's software. That done, he decided that they were finished.

He was wrong.

Whatever else you could say about the Irkens, they were not a people prone to kick their legs in the air, lie on tilled earth, and hold up a lily flower presumably whipped from a pocket dimension for that general purpose. The near-genocide of an entire sentient species alerted the remained unaffected planets to the danger of the Alliance, and in a rush of ships, the Allies swelled like a Froad's throat-sac; alarmingly large and semi-transparent. To resolve the Pak problem, the Irkens made a dramatic change to themselves, making their organic brains their true brain rather than the Pak's, not to mention building new Paks that could withstand the virus.

Zim, of course, was the last Invader to get the call.

This, for a change, wasn't due to Red and Purple's vague dislike of Zim or for that matter, the fact that he wasn't an Invader and refused to admit it. The Tallest spent most of their time lazing around and eating snacks, but the leadership and general qualities characteristic of the Tallest rank was ingrained within their very genetics. They knew that despite the overly obvious fact that Zim was an eccentric screwball, he had a capacity to be a one-man wrecking crew, not to mention a staggering talent for walking away from even the most absurdly dangerous situations. Unfortunately, he had a less pleasant characteristic as a soldier; a complete and total obliviousness to anything besides what he was doing at the moment. While this helped to avoid distraction, it also meant that he, to turn a phrase, didn't play well with others.

They had absolutely no intention of his short-comings tripping him up and making him screw up whatever he did in battle. This made delayed deployment and awareness of the war a necessity. Whatever else might be happening, once he became aware that the empire was disintegrating, he wouldn't wait for orders; he'd immediately drop whatever he was doing and rush off to a random area and blast the hell of whoever and whatever he perceived as the enemy who had the misfortune to occupy the area. That, and in recent communications, he had been strangely uncommunicative about his invasion reports.

When Earth got reluctantly involved in the big galactic war, everyone who was capable of doing so became involved.

Zim became aware of the war soon enough, and in a mixture of disbelief that the Empire was utterly doomed, horror that it had happened at all, and rage at the enemy for all that, he rushed off into space with his sidekicks, Minimoose and Gir, and he found it necessary to take along his rival, Dib. Realizing that the idiotic humans had already been drawn into the war, he concluded that Dib, as the single most intelligent and capable human he knew, would be an asset in the fight, despite his inferiority. They had an adventure during the war.

That caused two extremely weird things to happen.

They wound up in a strange adventure, which had the bizarre side-effect of Dib and Zim becoming friends. Zim had no idea how it occurred, it simply did. One day, you're battling hostile life-forms, and the next, you're talking to an increasingly less inferior being about your lives, what with Dib being the end result of a experiment gone wrong and Zim being a embarrassment to the military, and by extension, the entire Irken Empire, all your life spent in order to earn some respect.

Strange the way some things work out.

The second extremely weird thing happened when Zim ended up captured by the enemy. After judged guilty for the crimes of mass destruction upon the Alliance, senseless rampaging on military bases, the inability to grasp the English language coherently despite being on it for two and a half years, and generally being a royal pain in the ass, with the sentence of execution and with no opportunity of parole. Zim pointed that that was a redundant sentence, but they paid his opinion about as much attention as they had about his other inane rants throughout the mock trial.

They judged the method of execution a fitting one. He was to be placed in the hermetically sealed single chamber of the Overview Omnipresent Perspective Sphere, a device of destruction so bizarre, it's rumored it's oddball inventor's comment upon it's creation became it's eventual acronym. It was at this point that Zim became certain that he shouldn't have shared innovative ideas formulated while drunk with the other mad scientists on Friday nights when he was a researcher on Vort.

Then again, his sense of irony told him, it was sorta funny.

The device worked not unlike the Total Perspective Vortex on the distant and throughly unpleasant third Frogstar world. However, whereas the Total Perspective Vortex showed the victim the whole of the universe and themselves in relation to it, the O.O.P.S. had a more personal aspect to it. Essentially, by psychically backtracking through recesses of one's mind, the machine plugged into the Universal Unconscious. Then it gave the victim a single moment of perfect empathy with the whole of the universe, or at least that portion of it represented by thinking creatures. The user thus felt precisely what harms they had done to people they'd known, rudenesses committed to people they'd briefly met, and what they mostly likely would've have done to people they might've met, what they'd done reflected a thousand-fold. Metaphorically, it forced the victim into God's outlook, but without the whole omnipresent thing.

It's too much for a mortal mind. After all, it's creator reasoned, if sometimes simple empathy can cause a being to change their entire life, what would the next thing to universal consciousness do to someone? He observed, after a few 'tests', that when a mind was exposed to perfect empathy, their minds were completely exposed to the input and blew out due to the sheer impact, not unlike a nudist randomly being hit by a tactical nuclear strike. Concluding prematurely that it was a success, the scientist felt it was a obvious next step to installing a system to reduce their matter to energy that quickly dissipated unless it was used to power devices; utilitarian bioethics was a philosophy he adhered to closely, making it fitting that he was it's second victim. His executors felt that a mind so warped as to create such a machine was one that was nothing less than too insane to live. Didn't stop them from repeatedly using the thing, of course.

They were, of course, unaware that it was the product of a careless drunken Friday night conversation at a bar that went something like this:

"Hey, you know what, Kuuk?"

"What, Zim?"

"You, you ever wonder what would happen if you, y'know, exposed a mind to the whole universe filtered through the perspective of all other s-s-sentient minds in the universe?"

"Hee he-huh?" Started with a laugh, ended with a note of confusion. Like most Comedy Central skits.

"You know, force 'em to feel perfect empathy! Or somethin'."

"Like, ah, what's the word, arrgh, I know this, God?"

"Yeah, but with less of that 'higher being' thing."

"Hey, it'd totally blow their minds. Like what this whiskey's doing to my squeedily-splooch!" Hiccup.

"And hey! Wouldn't they feel ev'ry t'ing they've done to everyone else?"

"Y'know, you talk funny after you've downed five Ga'yannocs." This spoken with a great deal of stuttering and incoherent mumbling.

"Yeah, I'm a weeeird drunk!" Giggle.

"Whaddaya mean 'drunk'?" This caused an explosive outburst of laughter from both sides.

Of course, Kuuk forgot the conversation after the next morning's hangover, and believed it to be his idea when he had a dream about being tortured by lab Megarats. Zim completely forgot about the conceptual O.O.P.S., until the moment he stood directly before it. Then he remembered the entire conversation with a fairly large degree of apprehension.

"Shazbot," was his only comment shortly before being forced into it, and the machine was activated.

It was a strange experience, being forced to see the universe through the eyes of it's inhabitants for a brief moment.

And in that moment, something unexpected occurred. For the users of it had never tested it on a creature with two brains. They were unaware that the Pak on the Irken back was more than a biokinetic backpack with interesting features; it functioned as another brain.

Perhaps because of this, his mind wasn't destroyed once he was exposed to the all of the universe. Instead, he had a moment of clarity, an instant where he truly understood where, in the grand scheme of the world, he currently was at the moment and the actual impact of his actions.

It made him want to cry.

As it was, his mind didn't implode from the shock; his Pak brain absorbed most of the impact, somehow. Not suspecting that Zim's two brains had somehow helped him survive the experience, the Court initiated the clean-up procedure; a action which filled the chamber with dissembling that destroyed the victim's atomic lattices, turning the victim's structural matter into pure formless energy. Fortunately, he vanished before he was absorbed into the universal battery that powered the Alliance.

With Zim it was no different. He still considered the experience of being torn apart at the cellular level, transmuted into biocurrent and reduced to almost nothing one of the more painful memories in his life.

But that was nothing. He finally saw himself, reflected through the eyes of everyone who truly knew him. He saw that he wasn't the big wonderful and bright being he had always taken himself to be. He saw that he was an overbearing, obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant jerk and had almost no concept of other people. One possibly positive thing that had occurred was that Zim's previously dozing conscience woke up. And it had a really bad case of the morning grumps.

What the Court would have been well advised to consider was the most esoteric facts of science: matter and energy were just two ends of a single spectrum, therefore interchangeable by the semi-sane laws of the universe. The vanished biocurrent that was Zim inexplicably popped back up in his ship with Dib, Gir and Minimoose, sans Pak and one hell of a hangover. At the time, Gir was attempting to catch a space fish with Improbability technology, causing a flux in the serial-dimensional quantum point of existence(also called the Chelogs continuum), causing Zim's existence as a mass of biocurrent to slightly switch in position to a mass of meat with some fabric hitching a ride. For the less scientifically minded, this was the equivalent of falling off a very large cliff, having enough time to gain some proper perspective while you fall and suddenly landing on a trampoline some idiot pulled over the abyss to catch flying fish that flings you into your living room with a big book called _Welcome to Your New Life, You Big Idiot_.

He had been slightly, in a matter of speaking, reformatted. Looking through eyes that were finally clear, he observed that without his former Pak's corrupted software, his usual personality traits weren't being blown out of proportion. For the first time since...okay, for the first time ever he was finally himself. And all the emotional baggage that came with true self-awareness.

He felt an emotion that he had never felt before, and didn't have the words to describe it, not being familiar with certain human texts. That didn't mean that it wasn't the most searingly intense, nerve-wracking and painful emotion he had ever felt. He had never felt the need for redemption before.

He eventually found the Armada, starting to build the slightly vague suspicion that the Tallest wanted to avoid seeing him slightly less than they wanted to avoid total galactic annihilation, convincing them what he'd found out after hacking into the enemy's information network.

Six weeks later, the war was over, specifically after Gaz broke into the Major Domo Central Command Center and disabled the power switch to the Ultimate Weapon Defense Grid due to the quantum disconnecter matrice ruining her game quality, completely unaware that she single-handedly won the Battle of the Planets. Nor did she care when she _did_ become aware of it.

The Alliance dissolved, leaving the victors free to return home. Well, except for the ones who no longer had a home, like Zim; shortly after the final battle, the Tallest held a multiplanetary party on Conventia, where they announced the official dissolution of the Irken Empire. Red and Purple then proceeded to get 'Griffin-Simpson' drunk. To say that Zim was shocked would have massively understated the situation; all his life, all that he had done, everything, was gone with a single speech.

It would have been more appropriate to say that he ran around the place screaming for a few hours until he lost his voice, drunk himself stupid, and cried until he remembered that he forgot to remember to lock the door when the people who liked him at least a little broke the door down.

His life was gone, like a really big hot dog choked down by a marauding seagull.

He was prepared to simply go off on a pilgrimage to find a new uninhabited planet to reside on when his only real friend he'd ever had told him something that marked him as having the baritone tone of unpleasant truth.

"Zim, for better or worse, Earth is your home now."

Dib had noticed that Zim started to act markedly different since his little excursion into the world of creative sentencing; he was a little more cautious when he spoke, he was less cruel and obnoxious, and he actually seemed to act...well, human. But, Dib had decided in light of his recent adventures, human had become a very nebulous quality indeed.

So after taking his sidekicks and Dib to drown his sorrows by drinking space sodas and riding giant alien bunnies, Zim returned to the only home he had left; his base back on Earth, where he proceeded to dispense with the parent robots, among other boring things, taking time to think about what he had done, what he should have done, and what he was going to do.

Much of his thinking amounted to the Irken equivalent of _My life sucks._ He didn't make much in the way of progressive thinking.

The next two years were interesting ones. First, he had to contend with bouts of depression, followed by incredible boredom. With the dissolution of the Empire, he had absolutely no purpose in life anymore. Whenever he had felt like this in the past, he threw himself into his work, but now he had no work.

This problem was partially resolved when a secret group of planetary guardians recruited him for an operative, but demolition in the name of good wasn't exactly a frequent occurrence.

At the very least, he had an actual friend now; Minimoose was more of a helper than anything, and Gir was...well, stupid. Not to mention too innocent to really understand Zim's problems. Occasionally he would pop out and attempt to serve him Earth food; Zim was starting to like some Earth food, not to mention he had developed an immunity to the pollutants in the water and meat; such things didn't bother him now that he had fully adapted to Earth. But comfort food only helped when you ate, and he had a low tolerance for gluttony of the culinary variety. He had found an appreciation for the planet itself, if not always for it's individual people. It's art was something else he understood now; understanding the thought placed upon print and canvas(and occasionally skin tissue) is always key to understanding a people, he'd learned on Devastasis in the academy, a lesson that had only taken hold relatively recently.

He had eventually come to think about how, in a way, Dib was actually vindicated; now that everyone knew about aliens, he wasn't seen as a lunatic as much anymore, whereas Zim was perceived as a reformed villain, which wasn't that far from that true; but in their eyes, a corrected villain was still a former enemy, someone to be respected but held at arm's length for fear of a relapse. Dib had done better, but for the most part, almost everyone still saw him as that paranoid crazy guy who kept saying that Bigfoot was in his garage and coincidentally helped save the world.

True, they had found good people when they fought in the war, and later when they came home their exploits became common knowledge among those who cared to look; The ghost boy had needed Dib's expertise on more than one occasion, Gir kept pestering a wallaby named Rocko, and recently, an aspiring director looked for their...unique outlook. Zim looked into the worlds of self beyond his own, and he found it interesting.

They'd had many interesting adventures over the last two years, and yet he still found himself wanting something...else. Something harder to pinpoint.

Clear perception, perhaps. A few months after they got back home, he set off on a pilgrimage with his sidekicks to learn what he could, traveling his strange home. He returned a changed Irken, the contrast evident to anyone who had known him before closely(admittingly, this meant that very, very, very, _very _few people noticed.). He was still the overbearing, loud-mouthed, and self-involved alien he'd always been, but he was different, changed in a fundamental way that hadn't been forced upon him. It was a quieter change. He had not spoken of the events of his journey to anyone, and advice from his companions wasn't forthcoming; Minimoose was strangely uncommunicative on the matter, and Gir inevitably changed the subject whenever it came up.

He occasionally felt the need to venture forth once more, but he also felt the need to remain where he was, though he didn't know why.

He inevitably looked into the sky when this feeling overtook him, but he didn't know why. He still had the Voot Cruiser, but he normally used it as a simple transport; he didn't have much reason to fly through the alleys and corridors of space anymore; whenever he did so, he invariably became depressed and starting thinking of the old days. He was unaware of the schizophrenic behavior he exhibited; half the time, he was relieved that his old life was over and he didn't have to make with that old pretense, but the other half was spent with slight longing for the role of a soldier mixed with nostalgia for the simpler days of moral innocence.

He didn't know why the stars fascinated him so these days. But that was the thing about instinctive gut feelings; there were some things you just couldn't quantify. That much the human poets understood.

It nagged at Zim's mind, and he frequently felt like threatening it with a punch that would launch it straight to the moon.

His train of thought was sharply derailed when a screeching presence popped out and yelled, "_Twinkle twinkle little cat, what I wonder is BRAAAAAAAAAAAAP!" _the presence's belch flooded the area with the aroma of roasted anchovies.

Zim rolled his eyes; pretty much the only way you'd notice was if you so the shift of the shoeshine's position. "What is it, Gir?"

"Aw, how'd you know it was me?"

"Next time you sneak on some one, don't try imitating the theme from _Mission: Improbable_. Or falling down after them and yodeling."

"Oh."

He turned around to look at the robot; he wasn't very tall, only coming up to Zim's waist with most of his height centered on his head, most of his body smaller in proportion. His body was shaped a little like a capsule with squarish chest and back panels, flattened at the tops. His shoulders were little balls, his jointless grooved arms swinging freely. His wrists were also little balls, his hands simplistic clamplike things. His legs looked like slightly pointed crescents that floated right where his legs would be, supported by some sort of innate anti gravity device. His head was odd; his optical sensors were two huge round platelike things, his mouth oddly organic in it's flexibility, as was all his face. His head was shaped a bit like an an outline of an upside down construction helmet, the upper part flattened with a flexible antennae ending in a small ball directly in the middle. Most of his body was an lighter gray, notably dented and worn in several places despite Zim's efforts to keep the rambunctious robot in good repair; perhaps the fact that he was made of components from a garbage can had something to do with it. His shoulders, body plates, wrists, eyes and antennae ball were a cyan blue at the moment, designating 'normal' status. Normal for Gir, that was.

"So..._what is it?"_

"I have gingivitis. Not many people know it tastes like Stimpy's hairball collection."

Zim said nothing. That was business as usual with Gir.

"Want some gasopagaie?"

"Eh?"

"I made snacks! The 'a' is silent! _EAT 'EM! THE SILENCE TASTES LIKE BACON!_ They'll make you feel happy!"

"Eh, no, Gir."

", Maaaaaster! I'll go boom if you don't! Boom like a sock monkekekey with dinner mints! They don't make 'em anymore 'cause child labor's illegal in the island nation of Tonga. I think. I THOUGHT! AHHHHHHHHH! I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT!"

Zim's left eye started twitching, than he grimaced, eyes narrowed. Even if he didn't want to admit it, he was grateful for the robot's attention. Even if he'd probably be up a few hours digesting what Gir just said. Not that he slept much anyway "Alright. Gimme! Gimme _now!"_

He ate one, if just to please Gir, who was watching anxiously. It tasted a little like peanut butter cookies, if you used chips of bacon and waffle mix into the mixture. The fact that they hadn't burned at all was a minor miracle in itself.

"D'you like 'em?" The question was a bit odd, coming from Gir. It was a surprise that he wanted Zim's opinion. Most of Gir's behavior originated from his hedonism innate to his nature, causing him to do pretty much any crazy thing if left to his own devices, so it was a little strange for him to not automatically assume that the world rejoiced over his cooking. For that matter, it was strange for him to be aware of the world besides what he saw.

Instead of answering the question, Zim sat up straight, his Pak morphing slightly, four odd large knobs rotating out of the center of the Pak in a pattern of the four in between directions; the knobs unfolded and elongated into four long spindly mechanical legs vaguely remniscient of spider legs as least three times Zim's height. They were slightly curved bars of a gray metal, connected to a rotating ball that functioned in the same way as a joint, and ended in a sharp looking blade-like appendage similar to the rest of it but slightly shorter than the rest. The ball joints were designed in a way so that the legs could turn in almost any way Zim desired. The lower ones were slightly thicker, as they were used to support him, while the upper one's ends had circuitlike grooves on them, as if they could unfold into other things.

It was thanks to the morphic qualities of the Pak's nanotechnology that he could manifast these immensely useful limbs, unique to him. Unique was a word that easily applied to him; to other Irkens, he was a defective; since the Trial where they had convicted him of that status, he had carried it as a badge of honor. After all, uniqueness used to be a very rare commodity among his people; another Irken named Tak was the only other unique Irken he'd known, and she hated him for some reason he could never remember. Something to do with a radioactive snake-monkey or something.

He'd originally built them into his original Pak, where they unfolded out; his new one simply morphed them as he wished. His Pak's ability to morph things was very limited; it couldn't actually make stuff up, only manifesting out of systems held within his Pak's pocket dimension. And that was for the nonessential stuff, such as the object replacement device or the scanners, not the memory drive. _That _always stayed.

His spider-leglike appendages cleared the ground, crawling up the wall and carrying him with them, resting down where he was before he fell; Gir flew up after him, landing neatly besides him.

The limbs retracted and they stood there for a few moments. Gir waited for his master to do something, while Zim waited for a thought to come to him. Or possibly an explanatory hallucination; he didn't feel like being picky.

A feeling of importance had crept over Zim, making him feel something completely new. It wasn't an emotion _per se_, nor anything as prosaic as a gut feeling; it was more primal than that, reaching to a level of thought deeper than mere instinct. It was an almost prescient feeling, a vague awareness of precognition: it wasn't quite the feeling of spiritual overwhelming called awe, but it was something close. It was indefinable, but not so much that he couldn't feel it just looming into his perspective, so close that he could almost grasp it, were it not for it jumping just out of his reach when he tried to focus on it. Perhaps this was what the spiritual felt when they sensed that events were preordained by a Divine Will.

Everything seemed full of meaning, from his frosty plume of breath to the exploding gasbags in the distant horizon. Well, maybe not the second thing. Something stranger than usual was going on, and he knew it.

Gir followed his Master's behavior, staring out to the distance with an appreciation for all existence as it was and might be, exulting in the mere _being _that was life. Zim wasn't doing that, but that was besides the point.

Then Gir got bored with that, seeing as that was his usual state of existence and was therefore incapable of perceiving it and started running around quadrupedal-style, chasing the Nonexistent Milkman of Firey Toes, an ancient tradition he had made up in the last five seconds. It had something to do with the ketchup writing on the wall, best not to go into it.

It wasn't exactly easy to sustain a spirit of serious thought in the face of the robot's play, and so Zim gave it up, fell down into a sitting position and watched Gir play, and ate the weird pastries the robot made. At least he hoped they were pastries.

He yawned, supporting his slumping head with his free hand. The cookies didn't make him retch so far. That was a good sign.

A few moments passed with that pleasantly interesting scenario going on. Zim ate and watched a mindless scene like a self-declared loser that stopped caring about his idiocy except in hindsight as Gir ran around like an insane moron that was too innocent to understand why his master was so despondent. Both observations fit.

Zim yawned again in boredom, wondering vaguely what Dib was up to. Lately, he'd been spending a lot of time elsewhere and showing up looking annoyed at Zim for some reason, yelling at him whenever the Irken brought the subject up. He started to think about that when he noticed a slight change in the scenery at the periphery of his vision.

He wildly scanned the neighborhood, looking for some evidence of change. This persisted for five more minutes. Feeling defeated, he looked down by his crossed feet and realized he'd been afflicted by a form of the dreaded Glasses On The Forehead Syndrome. That's a real pain in the _pattila_, I tell you what.

The cookie he was holding in his hand, as well as the ones on the plate, appeared to be rimmed with a thin prismatic glow. That seemed to be a sign of something, possibly hallucinogenics.

When he looked around at the one place he didn't, the rooftop, he observed that Gir appeared to be limned in that same aura. So, for that matter, was the house.

Interesting.

He saw odd things in the flickers; he couldn't quite understand them. Some appeared threatening, but only in the retroactive sense.

He stood up, feeling strange. He felt as though he wasn't in complete control of his limbs for some reason; they were spasmodically twitching and moving around. Weird.

He hadn't intended to stand up, but he had. Looking to the horizon, he saw that the scene had blurred.

He blinked excessively slowly, as if he were in the middle of a dramatic scene in a cheesy movie. "What'd you put in those cookies?"

The world wavered out of focus, like a picture taken by Gir during a junk food bender. This was accompanied by a sudden loss of control of his legs.

His feet suddenly slipped off the slates of the roof, but he wasn't aware enough to notice much due to the scant noise of the world fading to a whispered hush.

He barely heard Gir's cry of surprise and hurried rush to reach him as he fell, and he didn't see of the incoming earth.

Zim's mind was suddenly somewhere else.

_Meanwhile..._

The principal city of the primary continent of Earth is called Nicktown.

It's not known why exactly, though it's probably because the original foundations were made when the site that would one day became Nicktown was made when it was hit by a glancing orbital strike. Hence, it was a town built on a nick.

And almost on the opposite side of it(from Zim's perspective, that is), was a large laboratory complex.

It was blocklike in shape, and a plain gray color; it was so mind-bogglingly boring to look at, the eyes swerved away in order to avoid looking at it, as was the original intention. It's owner had no desire to announce his workplace yet, as he wasn't in the mood to have flaming mailboxes launched into his desk again.

It was nominally a division of Membrane Labs., but it was in reality a small privately funded experimentation facility.

More to the point, it was a way for Professor Membrane Vael to keep his son from being a public nuisance and embarrassment.

Within it's non-cavernous chambers, Dib Vael was at work. Well, _he _thought of it as work.

He sat at a small work bench in front of a laptop, scrolling through a number of case files and projects in the works. Considering the nature of the lab and his work as a licensed paranormal investigator, the two subject matters frequently crossed paths.

"Hmmm, let's see here. Alien implantation scenarios; that movie got us all concerned, didn't it? I'll have to update it. Specter Detector; nearly finalized. Got to think of a better name. Ghost anchors, bit harder to track down, even with the Specter Detector. Maybe I'll take a look at those new neighbors. They'd did seem kind of transparent. even for accountants. _Genius territorialus_ event horizons, Bigfoot, Bigfoot's wrestling career under the name , Promethean physiology, alien civilizations, personalized supernatural assault armor suit, my dearest and most personal thoughts _which Zim's appeared to have hacked into and written commentary and grammar corrections..._" he muttered that last part with an annoyed hiss.

About six months ago, Membrane felt that the zombie demon chicken invasion was the last straw with Dib's experiment's with parascience. This coincided with Dib deciding that he was tired of developing supernatural combat devices in his garage and being laughed at whenever they literally blew up in his face.

So they made a compromise; Dib would get his own funded private laboratory complex to create his supernatural defenses, and Membrane's inventions wouldn't be constantly appropriated for some insane purpose. They got to put different wording in the audial contract that took place over five and a half minutes.

So, in theory, he and Zim, as well as anyone who was remotely interested and hadn't insulted him lately, had a private lab. In reality, it was almost always just him, unless Gir wandered in, Gaz was bored, or if one of their 'acquaintances' needed help.

People would say what they would about Dib, but there was no denying his expertise in paranormal matters.

He was pretty certain that Zim wasn't even aware of the lab's existence. For his 180 turn two years ago, he was still faintly oblivious to mostly everything around him.

He was currently in the process of refining a technology he'd thought of relatively recently with the help of another intellectual luminary to finalize the blueprints and schematics. All he needed was an isolated area to finish construction.

And he already had that.

Besides that, something considerably significant was bothering him.

Zim's moods had been swinging so frequently and extremely lately that Dib suspected that alcohol made him borderline bipolar. In more serious thought, he had decided that a change of pace would probably make Zim stop being so moody, as that was starting to annoy everyone in their small circle.

Still, he had business to attend to, and that was key to his plot to make the Irken less mopey. There were a few laws of the universe that were never meant to be broken, and Zim being relentlessly...Zim was one of them.

The technology he was working on was similar to the one that his father had used to look into alternate realities, but considerably different. After all, this kind was used to create a spacial rift to open a portal to another world.

Making some sort of weird smacking noise, Dib scrolled down the computer screen, looking it over. Everything _seemed _right, but as with everything else, you could never tell with revolutionary technology with seemingly harmless application.

Neutron was the one taking care of the building on one of the islands on an isolated isle chain 37 miles off the coast of Nicktown; considering his world's land-masses consisted primarily of archipelagos, they weren't hard to find. Nicktown rested on one of the few true continents, which corresponded roughly to North and South America. In any event, construction wasn't his problem.

He paused in his musings to look around at the area around him. Lab No. 08 was a sterile and gray chamber, due to the fact that it wasn't used for much more than his reports; it was quiet and free of distraction. The more active labs were still gray and sterile, but they at least had burn marks, dents caused by incendiary explosions, and the occasional escaped subject. But the ones like this were off somehow. It was almost empty except for this desk and computer; it was _too _sterile and silent.

He hated sterility and stillness. In a large part, he disliked the science his dad loved so much because of the pragmatism and coldness that was necessary to explore it to the ultimate degree. That and it was boring.

His dad believed that science was a means to help humanity, but Dib was becoming increasingly convinced that science was hardly the key to much besides knowing the way things worked. Science was the mechanics of the universe, and nothing more. His dad found the same dynamism and reality in the gears of the world that he found in the study of the _things _that defied logic and credulity, that lurked in nightmares and dreams since civilization was a fond dream of those who found love and compassion in a fire's warmth. He found his reality in protecting those who refused to give the night's true denizens serious thought, even when it was right behind them and hungering for their heart's blood.

He knew himself best when he shined the light into the darkness that others denied.

Dib shook his limp hair back into shape, looking casually at the clock. "It's still morning? Huh. Guess what they say about time and fun is wrong."

Trading his black lab coat for his regular duster, he reminded himself to stop by Zim's house.

He had something else on the agenda.

_He fell without falling._

_And he was somewhere else than his new home._

_He was..._

_on the beach at noon?_

_Yep, that's were he was. Sand, surf, palm trees, the little dock; he was at that one island he owned. _

_He took in the beach smell, watching the sand blow in the wind. It was a nice postcard kind of place._

_He looked at the beach front. It was still beautiful, with the sun sparkling of the sea. But then again, so was a sparkling bottle of sulfuric acid. He had developed an immunity to water, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with the ocean. _

_Not too far off from where he was standing, someone was standing waist-deep in the water. After a brief moment, Zim realized that there was only one person it could be._

_Yup. There was no mistaking that black coat, swept back hair or freakishly large head. Dib was standing out in the water, looking at the horizon._

_He just standing there, the lower portion of his coat flapping in the wind. Considering it's shape, the water should have weighed it down, but it didn't._

_Zim blinked, something he generally only did to express surprise. This was one of those occasions._

_He looked at the sand. Grabbing a handful, he watched it pool down into a little pile by his right foot. Strangely, he saw it in minute detail, able to count every individual grain of sand forming vague shapes. It was too surreal to be anything but a dream, but if anything it was the most real thing he had ever experienced._

_If that was the case, it didn't make any sense. Either Dib had suddenly found waterproof clothes completely identical to his usual ones, or had gone insane. Like last Tuesday._

_Dib seemed about as unemotional as the water. That seemed extremely strange. It was more normal for Dib to go off on a random tangent in a conversation and subsequently forgetting what he was originally talking about then to be this quiet._

_Then something bad happened with the water._

_The water was normally placid on this side, but it was being unusually violent. Then, unexpectedly, a twenty-foot wave rose out of the water, straight at them._

_Dib didn't seemed particularly perturbed at that possibility. In fact, he seemed expectant at the sight. He turned around, seeing Zim; a strange look came into his eyes as he saw him._

_He extended his slightly spread hand, as though inviting Zim into the water. Sunlight glinted off his glasses, giving him the appearance of someone whose mind had left the building and gone on a permanent vacation._

_Zim had a dilemma on his hands. Dib clearly had no true conception of the danger he was in, but Zim sure as hell wasn't going to drown with him. He could either stay here on dry land, safe from the wave, or he could try to reach Dib and get him on the beach before the wave hit._

_Wrestling with his hydrophobia, Zim's clunky sandals sank seemingly of their own accord into the wet sand. He was afraid of the water. He didn't like to think about it, but he was._

_But Dib wasn't a very good swimmer, especially with that jacket on. If he stayed where it was safe, Zim would most likely watch Dib get swallowed by the dark wave, and be responsible for his death. Like with the pig-thing a few years back. _

_To hell with it. _

_Zim jumped into the water, not burning due to the lack of pollutants that burned him, and he swam._

_He stumbled once or twice, tripping on cluttered debris and sand. Nonetheless, he forced himself to the surface, coughing loudly. Rushing through the silt-clouded water, he took a big flying jump and launched himself at Dib, slowed down by his coat._

_Then the wave hit._

_About a half-ton of water hit him, smashing Zim to the shallow sea bed and raising the water height by a few feet, to be precise._

_Quickly regaining coordination, he saw that Dib was unmoved, though underwater. He still had that creepy look and that same position._

_Ignoring that, he tried to swim over to the P.I., as a current pulled him away, and he saw Dib disappearing in the clouded sea silt._

_Zim blinked, sputtering water. He was back at the shore, and Gir was standing right there, seeming giddy as usual._

_Gir laughed at something, and Zim shook the water out of his clothes, emoticons making more annoying noises than your standard radio show._

_As he walked onto the shore, Gir stopped laughing, and with what passed for astonishment, pointed at something, bouncing in animated excitement, looking from something in the sky to Zim rapidly._

_Zim turned to see what Gir was pointing at, and the scene changed._

_He fell through the sky, dreamily watching himself watching himself fall. _

_He sank through the water and through the strangely dark surface saw Gir freak out over his disappearance and scramble to the edge, unable to follow him._

_And the world he knew faded away as he fell through the darkness._

_How long he sank he did not know. He dropped through a endless vault of water untouched by any star, seeing nothing his eyes could see and sensing nothing either._

_He was alone in a ocean of shadow, no longer in the sea he knew._

_Eventually the bubbles stopped flowing from his mouth, and he breathed thick air._

_He fell into an enormous edifice, and he slowly flipped up._

_His feet touched solid ground that was seemingly indivisible from the rest of the unseen darkness. Then, lit by an unseen light, the ground exploded upwards, the bubbles of darkness changing into white-feathered birds, frenziedly flying away from their cells._

_As they did, the ground came sharp relief; a stained glass mural lit by a strange light apparently emanating from within._

_The shroud of tranquility lifted from his mind, and he truly looked around as feathers fell around him._

_He was definitely not in Nicktown anymore._

Zim groaned, feeling the potential strains of a headache on.

Deciding that it would be safest for his sanity to disregard falling through the ocean and land on a single platform surrounded by an endless sea of shadow, he walked around his landing spot, getting his bearings and not being aware of the irritating clicking sounds his sandals were making.

_So much to do, so little time._

"Eh?" He looked to see who had spoken. He looked around, seeing no one. Putting it aside, wandered to the periphery of where he was.

He looked out. As far as he could see, there was nothing but darkness only slightly touched by the light of the platform.

He walked to the edge, ignoring the small voice in his head that wondered whether or not walking to the edge of a gravity defying platform in the middle of a world of darkness was a bright idea.

Peering over it, he saw more of the same: nothing. He bent down to get a better look.

His head bumped into an invisible wall, his impact making it's shape appear momentarily;large octagonal plates connected together, reminding him of a turtle's armor. They disappeared quickly as Zim decided that was a dead end.

He turned around, turning his attention to the only interesting thing he could see: the platform.

At first he had assumed he had just landed on a standard issue floating platform, but he decided it was clearly more complex than that; the entire platform was made of the semi-reflective material he'd noticed.

He had no idea what it was, besides strong enough to support someone walking around on it without structural damage. Zim decided it was probably some sort of metal.

He walked around, testing it's sturdiness. His steps made a small sort of clicking sound on it, but that was it. It could obviously support a lot more than it looked. He paused a moment to wipe some sand off his sandals, rubbing the toe against a bright colored metallic plate.

It was an interesting plate, he thought. Octagonal in shape, it continually shifted it's coloration randomly but slowly, in a prismatic display that could probably induce hypnosis.

He noticed something strange about the plates. He ran around, looking at the other ones.

They weren't just shiny plates. Every single one had a completely unique shape, and fit along another like a jigsaw puzzle designed by a colorblind moron with no sense of symmetrical design. One that had been hit by a Buick after it was assembled.

Near him, three pedestals flashed out of the ground in a triangular, peculiar objects floating just above them. They hadn't been below the surface. There was no trace of the plates where they had rose up from.

Odd.

_The true power lies dormant within you. If you give it form, it will give you strength._

Ignoring the voice, he walked to a pedestal and investigated the objects.

The closest one to him looked like a sword. A big silvery sword. The hilt was about the length of his fists, made of the same silver metal as the rest of it. The guard appeared to be a slightly rippled part of the blade itself. The double-edged blade was about three-and-a-half feet long and three inches thick. It looked a lot like a cleaver blade, angled at the end and composed of an odd-looking silver metal. The light obscured it enough to make a casual observation difficult, but it looked like steel and something like silver but wasn't. Whatever it was, it seemed stronger than any metal he had ever seen.

The sword looked like solidified moonlight. He liked it. He liked it a lot.

He wondered why it seemed vaguely familiar to him. He thought it looked a lot like the traditional Irken weapon in the days before they discovered the joy of guns. Thing was, it was smaller and quicker looking than the old blades he'd seen in museums, more of a serviceable weapon than the bigger cleavers. Curiously, it appeared to have been grown rather than built.

He walked around it, admiring from every possible angle. It was a beautifully deadly weapon, a fascinating blend of a practical weapon and a work of art. The light of the platform shone across it like moonlight on water, giving it the slightly organic look of a true Irken artifact.

The mysterious voice arose again, seemingly in relation to the sword as he reached into it's lifting light and pulled it out, testing it's weight and feel.

_The power of the Warrior._

_The invincible courage of the heart._

_A sword of terrible destruction._

He swung it a few times; it swung with only a modicum of effort on his part. It was so perfectly weighted, it felt like an extension of his own arm.

Placing it back on the pedestal, he turned his attention to the two remaining objects.

Curiously, the one to his right was a slender cylindrical rod of sorts, flat at both ends. It was blue and white in various places, and appeared to be constructed almost entirely from a lot of junk welded together to make the surface of it; a cast-iron ring there for a base, tubing trailing along it here just below where the grip seemed to be, the forearm guard of prosthetic armor forming the bulge on the tip of it and other oddities.

It rotated slowly in the light, so he could look it over without having to move. The top of it looked a little like the cap of a weapon, partially due to it's actual design and Zim's own artistic intuition. It slimmed slightly in the middle, widening at the foot. All in all, it was about as tall as Zim's shoulder, and it's thickest portion was as wide as his forearm.

Judging from it's look, he thought it was probably either one heck of an unconventional prosthetic arm, or a staff of some kind. He decided staff because it sounded better.

It's appearance seemed to involve some kind of hidden truth. There was clearly more to the staff than a first glance suggested.

Then he realized the parts on it were slowly moving.

The stuff of it, which he'd taken to just be there to make a workable staff from whatever was available to it's maker, were drifting along the object at a rate that was slow but too obvious to notice. As he watched, they swapped places, criss-crossed and formed odd shapes and continually moved around. As they did, new shapes rose out of the staff and disappeared back into it.

That was weird. Not to mention slightly unnerving; Zim found himself wishing it would stop.

And it did.

They just froze, stopping into their microsimic continental drift and looking like nothing more fantastic then the things Zim had initially taken them for.

"Whaaa?"

He wondered what made them start drifting. As if as though that was the key, they started moving again.

Clearly, there was much more to it than Zim had originally thought. He wondered why it was doing all that when he realized the obvious reason, fantastic as it was. The staff was _responding to his thoughts_.

Weird. In the interesting and neat sense, he felt. He had a hunch it could morph for some reason.

He lifted it out to look at it better. The voice spoke as he did.

_The power of the Mage._

_The inner power of an unbreakable will._

_A staff of great and terrible might._

Putting it back and walking away, he looked at the last object; a large shield.

It was, without a doubt, the most impressive aegis he'd ever seen, not that he had seen many. It was primarily gold and white, with various other colors. It was a kind of disc, with wide leather belts on the back to hold it, and it had a sharp beveled edge. The front of it was elaborately decorated, with such precision as though someone had inscribed the shapes with some sort of laser and electron microscope. The rim was covered with feathery shapes forming a perfect circle, and the sides actually had been formed into white folded winglike shapes. It had a green symbol in the circle on the front, and as Zim leaned in to examine it, he nearly jumped in shock when he realized what it was.

It was a modified form of the insignia of the Irken Empire, a pointed triangular head with two eyes and rather hornlike antennae, with spaces to emphasize the features. But this was a bit softer looking, with longer antennae that looked a bit like the points of a crown.

It was a sigil he'd developed as his personal symbol; it wasn't the first one, not that that counted.

And he'd just realized that he'd seen it very recently; on the pommel of the sword and on the cap of the staff.

This hit him a little two close to home.

The shield appeared to be a masterwork of defense, and from the look of it, it could also be a serviceable weapon itself; the 'wings' appeared to be sharp, and it's solidity was almost tangible.

If he hit someone with this thing, it wouldn't dent like soft gold. He couldn't think of _anything_ that could dent this shield; it looked almost supernaturally strong and resilient.

He lifted it off the pedestal. And the voice spoke again.

_The power of the Guardian._

_Compassion to protect friends._

_A shield to repel all evil._

Returning it to the platform, he tapped his forehead, thinking on this new bit of insanity.

"Find anything interesting?" A calm voice asked.

Nearly jumping twelve feet off the ground in surprise, Zim fell down to see someone gently smiling at him as he stood back up.

That someone was an Irken a littler taller than Zim, looking like he had his build. His eyes were a more luminous shade of red, and his teeth weren't zipperlike, but gentle curves. His antennae were a little shorter than Zim's, with less of an obvious joint between them. He was wearing white robelike clothing; a shirt with long bilious sleeves, a large poncholike piece of clothing on his shoulders, a vertical green stripe on the front of his shirt, large pants with a large piece of cloth around his waist that opened in front, and big boots. His hands, presently folded demurely behind his back, were encased in white gloves with greenish stones over the knuckles. Judging by the extension lines on the sides of his shirt, he had a lump corresponding to Zim's Pak. Weirdly, a pair of feathery wings with feathers slightly reminiscent of fuzzy flower pedals floated just by that lump. For some reason, he appeared to be radiating light of some kind, shedding it the brightest from the area of his skull from the top of his eyeridges to the back of his skull; that last part reminded him of a halo, but less open to interpretation on it's origins.

His eyes had a strange look to them; a mixture of ironic humor and just general good humor. He had the vague look of someone who knew the world well and decided to make do with it at the moment.

He thought this guy looked slightly familiar. Then he realized that this guy looked a lot like him. In fact, if such ties existed among Irkens, he could've been his brother.

Maybe even a twin.

His features were smoother, less harsh. In a strange way, he had a 'perfected Zim' look.

It was odd the way that phrase lept so easily to his mind. He didn't use to think of himself less than perfect, and here he was thinking of someone else as perfected.

"Where am I?" he sputtered in shock and anger. "Who are you? What's going on? What's the capital of Prague?"

In that same slightly melodious tone of voice, similar to the strange voice he repeatedly heard here, the stranger said "That's not for me to say, the part of you that you've held back for quite a while, you'll find out soon enough, and how in the name of Toronto should I know?" he grinned broadly as Zim did, with less of an threat behind it. It was a crazy grin, but not the scary kind of crazy.

Zim's left eyelid twitched. And twitched. And just for a little change of pace, twitched some more. His reeling mind digested all that, resisted the urge to experience violent hematosis, and focused on the only answer that seemed relevant. "You're a mysterious winged glowy guy in a place of infinitely spooktacular darkness at the bottom of sea water that's about as high as my knees! Why shouldn't you know!"

The being started laughing. "Zim, Zim, Zim. Try focusing at the _real_ issue, hmmm? Might be a bit of a change for you, Mr. I-Couldn't-Prioritize-To-Save-My-Life-And-Here-That-May-Well-Be-The-Case but-"

"What issue?" Zim snapped. "That's the only clear answer you've given this entire time. And no clever nicknames!"

"We haven't even spoken for five minutes."

"Tha..well...uh...er...your clothes aren't appropriate to this time and socio-political climate!"

"Stick to the subject. Trying to distract everyone else with nonsensical babble isn't going to help. Not now, anyway."

"I what-what a who-buh with the hey-huh?" Things didn't ordinarily go over his head, but that one didn't even come close to winging him.

"Trying to distract. Everyone. Nonsensical babble. And put another way, I'm the manifestation of the part of you that actually listens to your conscience."

"Wait. So you're my good side?"

The visitor airily waved his hand as though waving away a troublesome fly. "Not exactly. Here, things aren't so easy to define. I'm the way you could be, much like the light inside. The light you've been blinded to for far too long. And as long as we're into anthropomorphism here, call me Caritas."

"That's Latin for charity." Zim remarked.

Caritas smiled. "Not bad. Not bad at all."

Zim's snappy comeback was cut short before it could be uttered when he noticed that Caritas wasn't walking; he was actually floating three inches off the ground, apparently trodding on mid-air.

Apparently not aware of his unusual method of movement, the being pointed at the ground.

"Look, life is in some senses a series of choices. History is the observation of the end effect of thousands of choices. The big picture is made of thousands of tiny threads; no threads, no picture. The problem is that big picture people see the bark for the tree, let alone the forest. But without the trees, a forest isn't a forest; it's nothing at all.

He hovered in front of Zim.

"You have before you a choice. If you keep moving forward, you face terror, horror, soul-clenching evil, and quite possibly gruesome death and dismemberment."

"And, your point is...?"

Caritas shrugged. "Nothing. Just giving you fair warning."

Zim walked past Caritas, oblivious to the being's delighted grin.

As he reached the center, the pedestals disappeared in a flash of multicolored light and the objects suspended in them reappeared on him; the sword in his right hand, the staff in his left hand, and the shield strapped to his right forearm.

Zim looked momentarily surprised, but than a pleased expression alight on his face like a destructive firebird finding it's way into a dynamite storage shed.

Their weight felt good in his hands. Like a laser, but more visceral.

Turning around to say something snide, he saw to his confusion that the guy had disappeared.

Grunting his annoyance with the insanity here, he turned around, wondering exactly what he was to do now.

That question was resolved for him when the place shattered.

And he fell again, down into the darkness around him.

An intensely bright light illuminated around him, blasting the darkness into obscurity; he felt a softness below him. As the light faded, he found himself lying on a psychiatrist's reclining chair.

Which, from the looks of it, was in an office of some sort. The walls were framed by pictures of various people with oddly shaped heads and questionable dress senses. There were several bookshelves around the room, filled with what appeared to be thick comic book volumes and thick books that seemed to be appropriate for Dib; big books with rambling titles that seemed to focus on mental problems and psychic phenomenon. The carpet, which Zim initially thought to be a bright green shag left to bad seed, was actually a bed of grass. There was a large desk near where he was laying, with a number of small momento's on them; a clawlike trophy, some purple arrowheads bound up in a straitjacket, and a scale model of a camp. The big chair was turned away from him, preventing him from seeing who was in it. Behind the chair was some scattered things that looked like small diplomas, but looked more like excerpts from Dib's occasional treatises on psionics; for some reason, the name 'Ford Cruller' was coming up a lot. Directly behind the chair was a small board with a large number of inverted metal squares with odd images on them.

"If this is Limbo," Zim thought out loud, "it's got nice furniture."

_Not really,_ said a strange voice that sounded like it was spoken in a deserted hall with great acoustics; it had an uncanny resemblance to his own.

"Huh? Who said that?"

_Me._ The chair swiveled around to reveal a strange looking child sitting in it.

Even thought he wasn't standing up, Zim judged him to be the same height as himself. He had strange green eyes, dark red hair spilling out from under a helmet similar to an aviator's, with big red goggles on a big puffy strap. Both his hands were encased in large gloves, the right one presently tapping on a large notepad. His big shoes, almost out of sight, were quietly tapping against the base of the swivel chair. He had a flight jacket on over a green jumpsuit, both looking considerably careworn. Judging from his appearance and weird clothing style, Zim thought he looked like a modern gypsy.

"Hi," the guy said in a voice that was almost identical to the weird voice he'd heard just now, without the slight reverberant and weightless quality he noticed. It sounded almost exactly like his own, but with a different sort of tone and sound. "Does the telepathy bother you? Some people don't like hearing voices in their heads. That's what people like me are for."

"People like you?"

"Psychonauts." The strange word was spoken with unmistakable pride and satisfaction.

"You mean you use illegal substances to expand your consciousness?" Zim had heard of people like that. Although he felt it had all the sense of poking little holes in your brain to let out repressed memories.

"No!" he snapped, sounding highly offended. "I'm a psychic soldier!"

"Oh, heh heh." Zim said in a tone approaching embarrassment. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Razputin. They call me Raz."

"'They'? Who is they?"

"You know, they. Them. Everybody."

"Ah. Wait. No."

"Never mind."

"Anyway, what is this place? What is all this? And why am I in a comfy couch?"

"It's a psychiatrist's office, all this stuff is the stuff I got on my adventure to become a Psychonaut at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, and because that's what you do when you're at a psychiatrist's office."

"Wait, wait, wait." Zim raised an eyeridge. "You're my psychiatrist?"

"I guess in a few ways." A big transparent orange hand appeared out of thin air and picked up the note pad. As that happened, he rolled in, the base of his chair proving to be a big iridescent orange bubble surrounded by green rings. He looked at the notepad and the hand dropped it; as it fell into the trash can, Zim saw thin red-orange flickers of heat flicker around it. There was a loud _clunk_ as it hit the bottom of the trash can, accompanied by a small fire suddenly lighting from within the trash can, dousing itself in short order. "So let's talk. Normally, I'd just jump into your head, exorcise your demons and help out your mental denizens, but that's not really option here. Not as fun, but on the other hand, you wouldn't believe the trouble I've had getting inside non-human minds. The last time I did that, I ended up as Godzilla in a city populated by semi-intelligent lungfish. And that was before the circus of meat."

The Irken raised an eyeridge, skeptically looking at the Psychonaut. "Okaaay. First tell me how you're doing that."

"I told you, I'm a psychic. If you want more information, you could always ask Vernon-no, that's just too cruel. Enough about me. Now let's talk about your mental problems and brain problems."

Raz stared at Zim. Weirdly enough, Zim felt his brain start to itch.

"That should be fast." Raz added as an afternote.

Zim sat up and pointed an accusing finger at Raz. "Hey! Are you defaming my character?"

Raz looked surprised and upset. "No, of course not! I'm making an insulting observation."

Zim leaned back. "Oh, okay then." A moment later..."Hey! Wait a minute!"

Raz laughed to himself. "Man, that was just too easy. Hey, watch this!"

Pulling a green question mark from behind his back, Raz pulled the dot from off it and threw the smoking mark at Zim.

At the instant it hit the ground, it shone and exploded into a green gas, which was sort of weird for a psychic power.

It blasted right past Zim, and as it touch him, he felt...weird.

As it faded away, Zim was revealed to be sitting in the Indian position, swaying slightly and muttering nonsense. "Fey. Say. I got none of that here. Hey. Hey! Hay is a grain. Grain rhymes with brain. I lost my brain. It went south for winter! Winter, hinter, pinter bean. What else have I seen? Oh my god! Dog is God spelled backwards! Does that mean Gir's in the Vatican? Answer me, you expellant muffinbutt spewing gassy dough!"

He jumped off the couch and landed on the desk in a surprisingly quick movement. Raz leaned back involuntarily; inwardly, he cursed being in such a small space. He'd been raised in a circus and been trained as an acrobat; he didn't sit well with confined spaces.

He stared at Raz's green eyes. Raz started to sweat. Those reflective red eyes were a bit creepy.

The Irken just sat there, staring at him with such motionlessness that Raz wondered briefly if his mind had left the building, so to speak.

On a whim, he softly rapped his knuckles on the alien's forehead. He didn't give any sign of being aware of that.

Raz raised an eyebrow, frowning slightly. _And I thought Boyd was weird. Okay, a paranoiac with conspiracy theories and a schizophrenic pyromania was weirder, but this is still pretty bad._

As if that was an 'on' switch, Zim suddenly lunged out and grabbed Raz's collar. "_Do not offend the dog deity. He will unleash screaming dramatic doom upon your toenails, unto your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild and his male parental unit and all the rest as previously listed. BE KIND TO FROZEN MACKERAL, SOCK EATER!"_

Raz start to quietly back away as best he could. "Erm..."

"_**SILENCE, BRINGER OF FUNGAL RASHES!**_ _**I HAVE RINGWORM! SEE WHAT YOUR FOUL BAKED GOODS HAVE DONE TO MY MUFFINS! I APPRECIATED THEIR GENERAL PRESENCE GREATLY! NOW THEY ARE NAUGHT BUT BASKET REEDS COVERED IN BACON GREASE! IT'S ALMOST AS DISGUSTING AS WHAT I'M COMTEMPLATING DOING TO YOUR PEACE OF MIND! LISTEN HOW LOUD I HAVE TO YELL IN THIS HELMET! OOOOOOOOH, RAAAANAAAA!**_"

"ZIM!" Raz yelled. "STOP!"

Under the slightly hypnotic influence of the confusion grenade, Zim's fingers went totally limp and he sat down, overbalanced, and fell off the desk.

Peering over the desk's edge, Raz looked at his 'patient'.

Zim was clearly not dealing with the effects of the confusion grenade very well; he had taken Raz's command a bit too literally, and had completely ceased all voluntary movement. He remained in the same position he had ended up when he fell down; back lying against the front of the desk, legs so slack they were slightly curled in the air, and from what he could see of Zim's face, his segmented tongue was hanging out the side of his mouth.

He sighed loudly. "Zim, stand up."

The Irken stood up with a shocking alacrity; his antennae were waving from the speed. He didn't say anything; Raz's command had apparently jarred him from the mild insanity typical of being confused to a more obedient status.

Raz thought carefully about his next move. These sort of situations were always very...difficult to plot out.

"Zim," Raz said slowly. "Are you listening?"

"Yes," Zim said. He spoke clearly, but sounded like he was speaking through a sheep stuck in a drainer.

"Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who I am?"

"Yes."

"When were you born?"

Zim rattled off a date in another language entirely. The world's youngest Psychonaut didn't understand it at all, but he inferred it was quite a while ago.

"When was I born?"

"'Bout ten years ago, give or take why the hell should I care."

"What is the correct shape of the Ark?"

"A really big box."

"Didn't think you'd get that one. Okay, raise your left hand and stand only on your right foot."

Zim obeyed.

"Nice, now jump up and down while singing The_ Battle Hymn of the Republic_."

Zim obeyed, but his baritone section was a bit off.

Raz tapped his chin. Now it was time for the tricky part.

"Zim. When the confusion fades, you will forget everything you thought you knew about life insurance. And everything from when I insulted you."

"I understand." For some reason, he had removed his left sandal and was trying to put it on his head, settling with allowing the string to dangle from his antennae wearing it as a hat.

"You will not remember your period of confusion."

"I understand."

"Put that shoe back on your foot."

Zim pulled it off and tugged it onto his foot, lazily coupling the straps.

"And for the next thirty five minutes, whenever I say 'sit boy', you'll immediately fall flat on your face."

"Wait, what?"

"_Do you understand? Work with me here._"

"Yes."

Despite his tone, Raz was impressed. Very few people were capable of doing much more than simply being idiots under the influence of his confusion grenades. Yet this guy was actually questioning orders and resisting them to an extent, and he was completely under.

Clearly, he was no ordinary person.

"When I snap my fingers, you will wake up. I hope, anyway."

"Okay."

Raz snapped his fingers, but due to his thick gloves, made no noise.

He tried it again, and a few times after that, his expression becoming more frustrated.

"Okay, maybe I didn't think this through. This might explain why I could never pull off that 'oh, snap' joke. What that mean, anyway?"

"I don't know."

"_Sit boy!"_

There was a loud crashing sound.

Raz sighed. "Okay, when I say 'wake up, you friggin' idiot,' wake up."

"Fine, whatever." a muffled voice in the floor said. There came the sound of crunching noises from the floor. He was starting to come out of it. A little, anyway.

"_Wake up, you friggin' idiot!"_

"_WHAT?"_

"Oh, nothing. Just uh, a variation of Tourette's Syndrome!"

"Oh, okay then."

Zim pulled his face out of the floor, his expression slightly puzzled. He spit large clusters of soil out of his mouth, plucking dirt grains out of his tongue.

"How did I get over here and why is there grass on my face? And ew, in my mouth!"

"You have a rare form of garden acne?"

"Oh, well, that makes perfect sense."

Going by his tone, Raz couldn't tell if Zim was being sarcastic or not. With him, it was hard to tell.

Zim sat back down on the couch.

"You know, Zim, a lot of people believe that we're defined by what we really want most, our ideal of a goal."

"Why's that?"

"I suppose for the same reason that they say that the sin we hate most in others is the worst sin in ourselves."

"I guess so."

"So, to get to the point, what do you want? In a larger cosmic sense, that is."

Zim thought about it.

"I don't know anymore."

"What do you mean, 'anymore'?

"I always wanted to be the best there is. Now I don't care about that anymore."

"Why? Did you have a life-altering experience?"

Zim raised an eyeridge knowingly. "You could say that."

Raz's telekinetic hand thingy scratched his head thoughtfully. "Well, the first step to knowing yourself is to take a look at yourself. yourself. Let's start at the beginning. What's the first thing you remember?"

"Being born."

Raz raised an eyebrow, though it was hard to tell with that helmet. "Really? That's odd. Most people don't remember their births."

Zim smirked arrogantly. "I'm not like most people."

"Hey, who is?" Raz pointed out. "So, about your old achievement compulsion. Did your mom or dad give you an inferiority complex and as a result you were compelled to over-compensate?"

"Yes and no. I was gestated in a big tube and born when the cold unfeeling robot arm let me out. I don't have parents as humans claim them."

"Okay," Raz said as if Zim had said nothing particularly noteworthy. "So tell me about your life."

"Okay, let's go back to the beginning..."

Thirty minutes later, Zim had told Raz about his birth, knowledge downloading, subsequent training and his frequent problems with accidentally knocking out the power to the planet.

"So you were insane for a while?"

"Hardly. For a while I was a self-centered dumbass and couldn't focus my priorities."

"That makes sense. Sort of. So you...what?"

"I went into military training. After a while, I got a job as a research and development scientist on planet Vort, home of the universe's most comfortable couch. Come to think of it, that was right after an oatmeal packet I tinkered with turned into a tiny supernova and wiped out half the planet's sugar supply."

"Yeah, that happened to me too! Except it was a big top tent and an accidental firing up of Pyrokinesis."

Zim stared at him. And started laughing. "Ahhahahhhaahhhahahahahahaah!"

And laughing.

And laughing. It was creepy. Not me creepy, but it was still pretty dang unnerving.

"Okay...that's okay..." Raz said, looking uncomfortable. "It's not really that funny...I really do need to work on my snappy one-liners."

Zim was still laughing.

Raz slapped his head. "Sit boy!"

"Heewahaa-ow!"

Zim raised his head off the ground, spitting out some more dirt clods. "Ooooh..."

Raz scanned his memory of the last half-hour quickly. "Wow. You've gotten so much dirt in your mouth you should start an arboretum! Heh heh, now _that _was funny."

Zim got back on the couch, rubbing his teeth. "No it wasn't."

"What's the matter? Jealous you can't read people's minds and come up with perfect pithy comebacks."

"Ha! Zim needs not television to deduce witty remarks, badly dressed psychopath!" _And since when am I gelatinous?_

"One, that's 'telepathy', and two, I don't even know where that came from. Three, true, but it helps to be able to scan brain's with the power of your mind."

Zim snorted haughtily. "If you have a big enough probe, you can scan _anything._"

Raz dropped the notepad and stared at him.

The Irken raised an eyeridge. "That's a _joke_. It's funny! Laugh at the funny!"

Raz started chuckled nervously.

"That's not laughing!" Zim leaped off the couch and in front of the desk, glowering at the young psychic. "Laugh, curse you, _laugh!" _he screaming, pointing a finger at him.

Raz's eye twitched. The bubble his chair was resting on showed an image of him running like hell.

Zim's expression went from fearsome to merely annoyed. "That was also a joke. Lighten up."

He sat down at the couch, mentally recalculating where they had been before he wandered off-track.

_Humans, _he thought.

_Aliens,_ Raz thought.

"Anyway, we were talking about your researcher career. Didn't you like it?"

"It was a job where I could get paid for blowing stuff up for the Empire; what do you _think?_ Then I decided to become one of the military elite."

"Why? You don't seem like a soldier type."

"You'd be surprised."

"My point is...why?"

"I dunno. Prestige? Amusement? Those neat little berets they handed out to senior officers? How I love the berets! And those cool little jackets they give you to wear on Graduation Day-"

"Hold on; you're so far off-track you almost hit Bigfoot. That's not all it, is it Zim?"

"Huh?"

"There's more to the story, isn't there?"

Zim thought for a moment. All of his being rallied against what he was about to say, and he sighed.

"I...I think I just wanted people to like me a little."

Raz nodded, jotting notes down.

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

"A few years ago, the Tallest initiated Operation Impending Doom, a divide and conquer plan to conquer the galaxy. So, I was assigned the prototype Frontline Battle Mech to use against the Ectonurite people of Anur Phaetos."

"And something went wrong."

"I always had a little bad luck; the Tallest before Red and Purple were eaten by a giant energy absorbing monster I accidentally set loose on different occasions, I blew out the power of Devastasis because I freaked out and blew up a snack machine with a Maim Bot, and there was that time I blew out the power to Irk five minutes after I was born.

"So the Tallest wanted to make sure I didn't destroy Irk and wanted to put my anhillation talents to good use at the same time; hence my assignment."

"And...?"

"I forgot I was still on Irk and activated the Mech before I got off the planet and destroyed most of the city before I ran into a bride abutment and knocked the robot's power out. But I fell into an outhouse."

Raz couldn't really think of something to say to that. It was one of those things you couldn't reply snappily to.

"The Control Brain Judgehead Oblongciary tried me and decided I was insane, not evil. So to get me out of the way, he had me banished to Foodcourtia, the fast food industry planet. I even inspired a catch phrase! When people say 'I pulled a Zim', people pay attention."

"Uh huh."

"To be blunt, I hated it. I kinda like the cooking part, but I hated the cleaning assignments. _I HATED THEM SO MUCH! _So when I heard of Operation Impending Doom 2, I quit being banished and convinced them to give me an assignment. It was a while before I picked up on the fact that it was just something else to get me out of the way, but I didn't really care, not even when another Irken told me. I thought I could prove myself to the Tallest, and I didn't have anything else to do.

"And that was the start of my assignment on Earth."

Then he told Raz about his life on Earth; his 'bonding' with Gir, his rivalry with Dib, his attempts to alternately destroy the Earth and save it, and his realization that he was much better at the latter, his growing feelings that maybe humans weren't so worthless, his increasing uneasiness about his mission, the unpleasant connitions of what his victory would entail...

"And then the war broke out."

He told Raz that long and painful story, not leaving out the bit with the O.O.P.S. and his subsequent realization.

"Oh, I get it!" Raz said.

"You get what?"

"I know exactly what happened to you. What you had is an epiphany, my friend."

Raz smiled as he went over what Zim had described as the descripcies between his crazy behavior and his insane behavior, as Raz counted. From he could tell, the only real difference was that Zim's current behavior was simply more moderated than it used to be, more calm and slightly more controlled. The Pak just exaggerated those behavior patterns to a inflexible and harmful degree. For whatever reason, he had been unaware of his short-comings.

"Atrocious, isn't it? To really be able to see the mess you've gotten yourself into, and the mess you've made of yourself."

Zim scowled, but he couldn't protest what Raz was saying; it was precisely what he'd been telling himself.

"And more to the point, it's given you something."

"'Given me?' Everything I ever knew was torn away and destroyed in that damn war! What did it possibly give me!"

"You already answered that. A new perspective. A less insane outlook on like. And most important, a second chance."

"Which brings me to another question. Do you care about this...Gir?"

"Huh?"

"You heard me."

Zim shifted uncomfortably. "Well, uh...that is...er..."

Raz smiled. "That answers the question. If you truly didn't care, you would have been easily able to say so."

Zim leaned back against the couch. He hated losing, but even he had to concede defeat in this manner.

He had to admit, Gir had grown on him. At first, he would have gladly traded him in for a working SIR, as it was fairly obvious that it was pointless to try making work properly. Then, he slowly began to cease considering him as a slave, and to think of him as...well, he didn't know what. He did know that Gir loved him; it wasn't just programming, it was an actual emotion, and the anchor one in Gir's considerably anchor chain of thought, even greater than his hedonistic persuit of pleasure.

Raz realized something. Throughout the entire interview, Zim had said things multiple times that lead to a realization.

"From anyone's point of view, you have it okay, Zim. A few friends, a home, and something to occupy your time. What's missing in your life to make you so miserable?"

That required little thought. "A purpose. A reason to exist."

"And that's brings us back to the matter at hand. What's most important to you?"

Zim looked at the ceiling, then at his hands, thinking about the question.

"I'm not sure. Maybe strength, or...or my friends.

Raz smiled oddly, leaving Zim to wonder if his mind was secure in it's moorings, and the light envoluoped everything once more, white-washing all in it's blinding embrace.

"Are friends that important?" the psychic's voice said, more resounding and final than any last telepathic communication could be, dying to a whisper and cutting off a reply from Zim.

The world faded away again, and he found himself elsewhere.

He was sitting down on the shotgun seat in a car.

The car in question was in pretty bad shape; for one thing, it was a convertible only because the owner had apparently cut the top off it with some sort of weapon, presumably a really, really, _really _big axe. Although, it did give an authentic sort of feel. It was a faded sort of gray from what Zim could see of the front of it through what remained of the windshield, and appeared to recently have escaped from a life as target practice for hoodlums with a penchant for small cannons.

The inside was the opposite of the outside, presenting a comfortable seat and modest air-conditioning that wasn't necessary with the wind racing over his head.

At the moment, the car was racing over a paved dirt road running through a smooth path in a beautifully quiet hilly landscape reminiscent of New England. It was utterly devoid of any people he could see.

It was peaceful. And for some reason, it resonated with his heart in a way few things ever had. It gave him a sort of quiet pleasure that was different in character but otherwise like the feeling he got when he was blowing stuff up. But at the same time, something here was wrong; he wondered momentarily why there were no people.

Zim sat back, letting the wind race over his head for a few minutes.

"Ahem."

Startled, he rapidly looked around and noticed the driver.

He looked tall. That was an illusion fostered by his gangly appearance and thinness; he was probably only of average height. For some reason, his stringy hair was a blue color so dark it was almost black. He had a pair of rabbit-ear bangs hanging by his eyes, which resembled chips of gray metal that had been so hopelessly dented the blacksmith gave it up and threw them away. His skin was a weird color best described as beige, which didn't help his look, which Zim thought was mildly Gothic in the classical sense. His shirt was black with overhanging flaps at the bottom, with black and white striped sleeves that tattered at the elbow, revealing a black undershirt with longer sleeves. His pants were gray with vertical lines, and covered the tops of his shin-high boots, which had metal toes shaped slightly like the hooves of a sheep or other grazing animal.

His hands were long and tapered slightly to pointed nails, giving them a clawlike appearance. The way he was gripping the steering wheel didn't hurt that impression.

He looked slightly bored, and the character of his thin-looking face gave him an odd combination of hard as a boulder and as vulnerable as a newborn kitten.

He did seem mildly pleased when he realized that someone had taken notice of his existence and wasn't immediately compelled to make him miserable for that simple fact.

"What're you doing?" he said casually.

That question struck Zim as odd. Most people might've said _Who are you_, or given his lack of a disguise, _what are you_. But this guy was curious about what he was doing.

Another strange thing was that the quality that Zim had initially taken for casualness was actually a kind of peace with himself; this guy was clearly was weird and knew and didn't care who else knew it.

"I don't know," Zim said slowly.

The stranger made a noise that might have been assent. "Been there, done that."

"And what are you doing?" As long as he was here, he might as well ask.

"Me? I'm on a journey of self-discovery."

Another strange thing. Few people could say something like that with a straight face. Either this guy was some kind of intellectual, a stranger to the world of ordinary conversation, or just plain strange.

The guy looked at Zim sideways.

"From the looks of it, you are too."

It immediately occurred to Zim to contest his point of view, to deride his intelligence and insult his taste in clothes. Old habits were hard to break.

Instead, he simply decided to just go with it.

"Eh, I suppose so," he grumbled.

"Welcome to my world."

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Johnny, Nny for short."

"As in kneecap?"

Johnny nodded. "But not spelled the same way. And you are...who?"

"My enemies call me Zim. And so do my friends, and they generally seem to be one and the same these days."

Johnny raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn't seem bothered by that statement. He didn't seem imperturbable at all. His calmness was due to some other elusive quality. Zim noticing an odd...coldness to his temperament. _This is a dangerous human,_ he thought momentarily. _Very, very, very dangerous indeed._

"You're an alien."

It was a statement, not a question.

"Yes."

Johnny murmured agreement and continued driving.

"You know," Zim observed, "People don't ordinarily react this way to the sudden discovery of alien life."

"True, but then most people weren't the victim of a parasitic force of pure aggression."

There is really only one way to respond to that sort of reply.

"And you were?"

"Much as I can figure."

Zim looked around again. This place was...well, he had no idea where he was. "Hey, where are we?"

"I don't have the slightest idea!" Johnny replied in as close a tone to cheerfulness as he'd come yet. It was a strange outburst.

"Oh. Right."

"Yeah."

"So, why are we here?"

"I suspect because you need to realize something."

"And why don't you just tell me?"

"One, I don't know. Two, that's not my place. Three, that'd be rude, and four, this is your mystery play, not mine."

"'Mystery play'?"

Johnny smirked smugly. "Oh, _you'll _find out."

Zim frowned worryingly. "Why does that give me a bad feeling?"

"I don't know. The sense of steadily encroaching doom?"

"And where's that going to come from?"

"The demonic founders of the FBI from 1492?"

"_I KNEW IT!"_

"Why are you yelling?"

"Uh...uh...look!" Zim thought quickly of something to distract Johnny. He pointed dramatically at something behind Johnny. "A flying Bigfoot!"

Johnny looked up to see a humanoid simian with a huge pair of furry wings, apparently flying on the updraft provided by the car, land neatly on the trunk of the vehicle. He scratched his head unself-consciously, peered intently at something on his finger, and ate whatever it was.

Noticing their attention, it shook a huge finger at them. "Nuh uh uh. This isn't about _me_. This is about _you_."

Johnny and Zim looked at each other. "He's right, you know." Johnny noted.

The flying Bigfoot smiled toothily, which for some reason came off as sagely. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to find a belt sander. I'm late for my interview at the library."

It flew off.

They stared at each other for a few minutes. "Well, that was weird," Johnny concluded.

"Shouldn't you be paying attention to the road?"

Their eyes gradually shifted to the cliff that they were quickly driving over.

"AAAAAAAAAHHHH! CLIFF! CLIFF!"

"I'M GETTING HIGH SCHOOL FLASHBACKS!" Johnny covered his eyes with his hands, trying to block the horrific visions. "WEST SIDE BAD! WEST SIDE BAD!"

Zim grabbed the steering wheel while trying to stay in his seat. "LEFT! LEFT!"

"I KNOW HOW TO DRIVE!" Johnny snapped, pushing him back into his seat.

"THEN WHY ARE WE TWO WHEEL DRIVING!" Zim yelled, making the obvious observation.

"CAR GREMLINS, THAT'S WHY!" Johnny yelled back, forced the motorized vehicle back on the road.

A gremlin popped out of the dashboard. "Stop blaming us for everything!" it scolded shrilly, waving a green scaly hand. Noticing their stares, it realized it was holding a wrench in it's hand labeled _Idol of the Sleaze Gods_ in lovingly engraved curly script . Yelping, it threw the wrench away, clasping it's hands together and trying to look innocent. Considering it's piggish nose, huge bat ears and yellow-rimmed red eyes, that was doomed from the outset.

The homicidal maniac and former Invader gave it equally dry looks, apparently ignoring the onset of certain doom rushing at them again.

"Do you really expect that to work?" Zim said.

"Not, not really." it admitted.

Johnny was about do something grotesque to the gremlin like he would have done to jerks on the football team if he had been more violent back then when they ran right over a cliff.

"Hmm." Johnny said thoughtfully as the law of gravity took it's sweet time to assert itself. "That's cause for alarm."

As the car plummeted, the three of them shrieked in terror, holding each other out of some instinctual comedy fulfillment instinct in their bones and screaming. They flung the gremlin into the back seat and continued screaming.

They fell down, and down, and down.

And then they hit the ground. The car bounced off and landed on the ground perfectly fine.

They stared blankly out at the scenery, which for some reason had become the Mahavan Desert.

A desert wind blew by, carrying a tumbleweed with it. It bounded along the ground as their eye followed it, coming to a stop against the car door. It stood up with brambly legs, turned a thistle face with a wide mouth and tightly clenched eyes to them, bowing briefly. "_Hola, senors _and..whatever you are" It walked around them as they watched it opened the trunk and pull out a comically oversized sombrero, placing it on it's head.

It walked about five feet away and placed the hat on the ground, brim facing up. It reached into the hat and pulled out a pair of maracas, hopping back a few steps. It rose a leg around it's other, shaking it's instruments dramatically. "Now, _mi amigos...LE FIESTA!"_

Three brightly colored characters with traditional South American musical instruments made of paper mache with confetti glued to them jumped out of the hat, arranging themselves around the sombrero in a circle.

"_Uno,"_ said the talking tumbleweed.

"_Dos," _spoke a bright blue unicorn with castanets.

"_Tres," _added a dinosaurlike thing with a violin.

"_Quatro!" _yelled a froglike one with a pair of bongos.

They suddenly started dancing around the hat, playing their instruments in a frenzied karaoke version of _La Vida Loca_. They danced counterclockwise, then clockwise, bending in and out to their tune.

The three beings in the car watched wordlessly.

They all suddenly bowed to the hat; it flipped over, and a large green fur creature with a small duckbill and almost vestigial limbs emerged from under it. The Ludicolo flipped over in the air, joining in the song.

As the song finished, they rose their instruments to the sky and flew into the air, exploding in a shower of sparkling lights and candy accompanying their yell. "_VIVA PINATA!_"

The shower of candy swamped the car, disappearing in a puff of gas. "_You suck, McLaine!" _a disembodied voice yelled.

"That was...weird." Zim thought.

"I thought I was going to die. Again." Johnny noted.

"I'm hungry," the gremlin said. "You guys hungry?"

"Oh yeah, really." Zim agreed.

"Nothing like the thought of your impending demise to put the hunger in your belly," Johnny observed.

"I saw an Outback Jack's a while back. Why don't one of you guys-"

"Shut. Up." Johnny lifted the gremlin by it's scrawny tail. "You almost got us killed, and you get us lunch."

"I didn't almost get you killed, your bad driving almost got you killed!"

"My lousy driving saved our lives!"

"Oh really? All you guys did was scream like a bunch of prepubescent girls at a boy band concert!"

As if in reply, the hood of Johnny's car popped off, a Acme Wrecker Co. boxing glove popping out behind it. Zim reached in, pulling it out along with the small square box it protruded from, and threw behind him. It exploded before it even hit the ground.

The gremlin chuckled weakly.

"You have no say in this." Johnny said darkly. "You try to kill us, you get the food." He shook it a few times.

"Oh yeah? Gimme one reason why I should do that!"

Johnny held up a large dagger with a smiley face for a pommel and an noticeable red tint along the edge.

"Your lower internal organs get acquainted with Eviscerate Macstabson. Assuming I can't castrate you first."

The gremlin yelped and ran off as fast as it's legs could carry it, growling impolite things unfit for the unstable of mind. Considering who it was yelling at, it was wise they didn't hear it.

"And no special sauces!" Zim yelled after it. It shook it's fist, making some kind of rude gesture. It scrabbled out of the way as the carberator flew out of the car, nearly flattening the small monster.

They leaned against the car, looking a bit uncomfortable.

"So," Zim said, thinking of something to talk about. _What do humans like to talk about? Pork, fork, Mindy and Mork? I know! Work!_ "What do you normally do? For, uh, work?"

"I used to be an artist, then I was possessed by a thing composed of raw aggression(or so I was told)that sucked away my painting talent in order to manifest. So now I kill people that irritate me. And draw comic strips."

"I know the feeling. Why do you do it?"

"Because the comic is popular with the-"

"Not the comics, the other thing!"

"Huh? Oh, I don't know. I guess it probably doesn't go back to my school years. Too _cliche _and easy. Wasn't that bad. Everyone always called me Noodle Boy, stupid crap like that. I think."

"And _that's_ when you became a killer."

Johnny looked like him like he was the idiot of the universe. "What, are you crazier than I am? I was eleven!"

"Oh."

"Exactly. But one thing I really hate is dodgeball. I tried to go back in time and kill whoever came up with it, but I got bored. And then I started to hate all games that ended with 'ball'. Like basketball. I used to send insulting letters to the NBA. So they made my address public knowledge and people do horrible things."

Zim snorted, which was interesting considering he didn't have any apparent nostrils. "Oh, come on. No one takes the game _that _seriously."

There was a loud noise like a cannon. A flaming mailbox flew out off the sky, landing next to them. It had two charred words on it, _Johnny _was clearly visible, but only the first letter of the second part of his name, _C., _was clear. A note taped was taped to it, saying _YOU SUCK! -Foul Larry_ in badly printed letters.

"Is that your mailbox?"

"_NOT AGAIN!"_ Johnny wailed miserably.

A little later, the gremlin arrived at the car, with several bags much larger then it, and it set the bags heavily on the ground.

"There! Are you _happy now!"_

Zim nodded. "Fairly much, yeah. Now go away."

"Make me!"

Johnny pulled out a ridiculously large rusty scythe as Zim took his lead and pulled out his staff, which morphed into a equally big bazooka.

"Flee now, _or suffer MY WRATH!"_

Johnny blanched, than looked annoyed. "And me."

"And that guy!"

"Going now!" the gremlin said quickly and smally, rushing off and yelping in surprise when Zim snapped a few pictures of it's retreat.

As they pointed and laughed at it, Johnny said ""Didn't you say something about modifying dispensing machines to turn into assault robots at the approach of evil?"

"Yup!"

"And how well did that go?"

"Let me put it this way: they interpreted 'evil' a bit too broadly."

Johnny nodded in assent. "Yes, I see that. The problem is, well, the paintings all wrong."

"Painting?"

"Yeah. I used to be an artist, so that's how I see the world."

Almost quizzically, Zim said, "Sooo, what your saying is that the worlds like a big picture?"

Johnny nodded. "Yeah. Picture everyone as a single thread in a tapestry; they're all such small threads, it's hard to miss them for the big picture. But disregard them, and the picture can't hold itself together. And the painting itself has a big coffee stain on it."

"Right."

"So back to what I was saying earlier. you used to want to just please your rulers, right?"

"Yeah."

"Now, what do you think it is that you want out of life?"

The Irken looked up, watching the sky was one side-effect of the accident that he had told no one. One that was a secret from Dib and Minimoose, a untold truth that even Gir did not know. The O.O.P.S. had forced him into another life, one perhaps something that had been meant for him, but he had been forcibly ousted from everything he knew, leaving his old life to die a prolonged and brutal demise. His grasp of the world had been worse than shaken; it had been torn apart at the seams and thrown in his face, cutting it up and leaving him to nearly choke on the blood.

"I need to prove...that I exist. That there is a purpose for my existence, a reason for still being alive."

Johnny nodded. "'A purpose', huh?" and his words were distinctly faded. As if he were speaking from across a great distance.

_Not again,_ Zim thought in irritation. These blank-out were starting to make his sqeedily-splootch warp.

The world whited out.

And as the world faded away, he covered his eyes, shutting them so tight it almost hurt.

He felt the light fade, and he opened his eyes, observing that he had appeared on a platform, not unlike where he had first appeared. It's mural showed many things, the center portraying an immense tower made of black stone stretching to the top of the image, standing in a field of wild roses. The other pictures were displayed around it in sections, as if it was the central thing here, rose plants forming the borders on the mural; here, a small band of children confronted a horrible _thing_; there, a lone gunfighter with a disturbing intensity walking past a series of graves, resolutely walking towards the tower from what seemed like an incomparable distance, and there, a twelve-year-old boy staring at a multicolored sphere, a malevolent looking house overlooking a cliff, a deserted town; he didn't understand what they meant, but that was undoubtedly due to the lack of reference he had for this.

He sighed. If this was anything like the other platforms, there was nowhere to go but forward.

But, he mused momentarily, that was his way. It always had been. Since his birth, he had always moved forward. Always moving the route capricious fate had provided; to turn away would be worse than madness. It would be giving up.

Zim never gave up. It wasn't merely not in his vocabulary, it was utterly unthinkable.

But he wasn't an Invader anymore. Nobody was; they simply did not exist anymore.

Perhaps things would have turned out differently if he had learned another way. Maybe his life have been completely different, less of a failure if he'd somehow learned to do something besides run ahead, heedless of the consequences. If only he learned to stand aside and _let _things happen-

He shook his head, dispelling the troubled thoughts like a misplaced wig. There was probably a place for these musings, but this wasn't it.

Unclenching his fists, he breathed in and exhaled forcefully.

As always, there was a choice.

But he now followed a path far harder than he might have ever suspected. A path not unlike a giant rolling gear; it was almost impossible to keep running atop it and never stumble or falter, and mightier beings than him had been crushed underneath it.

But he was Zim.

And Zim did not falter.

Not now, not never.

His sandals clicked against the hard ground, and he walked forward.

Looking around, he saw that a short distance away, there was a much higher platform with what appeared to be a bright light shining from high above. He turned his attention back to where he was standing.

Something seemed different about this place, he thought. Almost an entirely different sort of character.

It was the darkness, he realized. In the other places, it was all-around and oppressive, but there they had been held at bay by the light. Here, it was choking the light, swarming everywhere.

That was an odd thought. Darkness was not a concrete thing, not a thing of substance or material form; it was dictated by the quantity of light. Where there was a lot of light, there was little or no darkness. Where light was absent, darkness ruled.

Zim realized to his chagrin that he was unconsciously paraphrasing Earth philosophy. Then again, it was a point of view that made much sense.

But that was besides the point. Darkness could not simply rise up and choke a source of light. It was a scientific impossibility.

As his foot stepped against what might have been a balcony upon the dark tower, he sensed a presence.

Antennae twitching in alarm, he looked around the room. No one was there.

He wondered if he'd been unhinged by the admittingly insane events of the past thirty-five minutes.

Scratching his sides absently, he thought that it was actually darker than he first thought. Not something you could point to, but it was certainly noticeable.

Then he saw something that threw all his conceptions of the universe out the window and into a strangely placed shredder.

His initial impression of it being darker then he'd first thought was wrong. What he'd mistook for shadows were small patches of darkness, roughly around the size of a dinner plate and dispersed in a close-knit pattern that was completely impossible;there was nothing that could cast a shadow in those shapes.

And they were moving.

They were slightly pulsating, and on closer inspection, didn't appear to be natural shadows; they looked a little like small pools of extremely dark purple and blue, swirling with black in a chaotic mix guaranteed to make one feel ill.

Zim knew his instincts well. He might not have been as well in touch with a few of the more essential ones as he would have liked, but he spent his life relying on them, honing them as a soldier, more specifically the ones relating to life-or-death situations.

And right now, at the sight of those shadows, all of them were blaring.

There were only three of them, but they were still horrifying in a odd way, reaching into a primal pit of fear within his mind that he wasn't aware even existed.

As if in response to his unease, his weapons flashed onto their places, trailing light.

The pools morphed into several small things that twitchily stumbled onto the ground. They were hunched over, composed of some dark substance like shadow given substance. Their bodies were rounded, as were their heads. Their hands and feet were small clawed shapes, attached to the body by thin sticklike limbs. Their heads were adorned by long thick jointed antennae on the top of their heads, and except for the ghostly yellow lights on their faces that corresponded to eyes, their smooth heads didn't appear to have any facial features at all. No mouths or anything approaching sensory organs; just those rudimentary eyes and antennae.

They moved in a scampering way, something between quickly crawling and small hops, constantly twitching as if their bodily portions weren't quite in synch with each other.

Oddly, their eyes appeared to be entirely for show, as they appeared to be more or less oblivious to their surroundings; they kept stumbling over the gaps in the shining plates that were too small for Zim's sandals, but obviously big enough to get their claws stuck. The only thing they seemed aware of was Zim's presence. They were staring at him with something much like hunger not at all like a hunger for simple food. This was another hunger entirely, one that defied comprehension. Dispute their slightly synonymous movements, they seemed to possess a bizarre sort of hive mind; from the looks of it, they appeared to be operating on of instinct and something else less definable.. Beyond that, there was nothing to them; just a horrible and sick all-encompassing _need _that had no end.

He could feel that dark desire smoldering off them like the smell of sewage at a processing plant. Just being near these things was making him feel sick.

They were small, only coming up to Gir's height and not much wider; they looked swollen, their bodies slightly pulsating from within.

But it was more than their grotesqueness that bothered him. There was something innately _wrong _about them.

From his occasional entries, born of boredom and a curiosity innate to his nature, into the world of the occult and theology, Zim knew that there was a rough hierarchy to those things. There were demons and there were angels, and there were beings that defied sanity, that mortal minds were simply not able to truly comprehend. They simply weren't capable of functioning that way.

But, these things...

They weren't any of those things. They weren't damned spirits. They weren't negative emotions given life and need.

He had no idea what they were, except for one possibility.

It had been wondered what would happen if shadows, if the _concept_ of darkness itself, was given flesh. What would happen if it was given the ability to act on desire, however alien. What monstrous hungers would drive such a thing? And what the _hell _would it be?

Zim had the distinct feeling he was looking at the answer.

These things weren't in any occult hierarchy he'd ever seen visualized by even the most annoyingly morbid philosopher. Whatever they were, they didn't belong here.

They didn't belong anywhere at all. They were something that wasn't supposed to exist.

They were so innately wrong that just looking at them filled Zim with a strange combination of disgust, horror...

And rage.

A familiar sort of anger flood his mind, filling him with a vital energizing feeling that he remembered from his days as an Invader.

These things were wrong. And the mere thought of what they might do were they given the opportunity to indulge in their mysterious hunger made him feel that old fury again.

He pulled his sword, previously hung at his side and loosely scratching the ground, across his chest in a defensive position, planting the staff on the ground. He scowled ferociously at the repulsive things.

As if that was an open invitation, one of the twitching things suddenly jumped at him.

Empowered by a preternatural knowledge of these weapons he formerly did not possess, he side-stepped to the left, tricking the thing into flying right into his staff, an action he complemented by smashing it into the ground in a spray of dark-looking stuff, making a squished sort of _thud _as it hit the ground.

In the academy he'd learned that your instincts are one of the most useful tools you can have, but they can get you or someone else killed. Therefore, it was advisable to wed instinct and split-second planning as best as possible.

He done that fairly well, and he knew from years of instinctual combat that it wasn't dead.

An important thing was that in the moment before he reacted again he saw the shadowy thing perfectly well. It looked like a blob of clay someone had hit with a Brockiant bat; there was a big hollow area where he had hit it, and most of it was flattened against the ground, as though it was made of some roughly molded substance. Complementing this image was a swollen look to it in the parts of it that weren't smashed; it's legs wiggled pointlessly as it tried to reach the ground it's distended back was too warped to reach.

He was starting to think that perhaps these things didn't actually have an internal skeletal structure. Frankly, these things looked like animate balloons from a party where ill-advised adventures in diabolism had gotten out of hand.

He had barely registered this when it 'exploded', bursting into inky smoke that quickly disappeared. Unfortunately, this attracted the attention of the other things.

_Okay,_ he thought hurriedly, watching the other things rushing at him. _Fight scene._

One jumped up at him as it's former comrade had, and the other tripped itself and rolled at him.

He stepped a half-step away, the momentum of his speed causing the stray bits of...stuff on his clothes to slip off, holding the sword completely straight; he suddenly slapped the jumper away with the flat of his blade, lunging forward as he did so.

He started running at it to finish the job when the rolling one he'd forgotten about unfurled and latched onto his leg, the force of it's impact tripping him up and making him drop his weapons. He hit the ground with his hands, sparing him unnecessary injury as he grunted Irken curses and tried to pull himself up, when his left leg suddenly flattened out, making him fall again. He looked back, and cursed again; the thing that tripped him was holding onto his leg.

"Annoying shadow thing! Get off my leg!" He furiously shook his leg, unsuccessfully trying to dislodge the creature that was digging into his heel and staring up at him in an way that could beat Dib in an creepy intensity contest, unaware that the other one had recovered by this time; it jumped onto his head, clawing and scratching deeply.

"Ow! Off! NOW!" Futilely trying to slap it off and pound the leg-holder by slamming it onto the ground, he only succeeded in hitting his head and really hurting his leg on the plates on the ground as the things moved around on their respective places to avoid getting hit. Considering this humiliation, he decided his that his more lethal weaponry could be used to that end for a better and more satisfying effect.

That, and he was really, really ticked off.

"Screw this! DIE NOW!"

Rolling over to surprise the one on his head, and not incidentally try to flatten the persistent one on his leg, he slapped his leg on the ground. The thing, dazed, fell off.

Quickly getting up, he brushed the head-clawer off. Pulling his shield to his hand, he smashed the rim onto the offending thing, cutting it cleanly in half almost as it dissipated.

Seeing the other one get back up, he threw the shield at it, making a strange whistling noise as it flew, trailing what passed for it's first enemy's innards. Apparently sensing the approach of it, it dissolved into a puddle of insubstantial shadow, avoiding the discus perfectly and reforming as it passed by.

The shield flew around, embedding itself in the ground by Zim's foot as he suddenly ran to the dazed looking thing. He grabbed his sword as he ran, trying to go for a big dramatic attack. Unfortunately, it was a stuck a little too deeply and as he grabbed it, expecting the momentum of his running to pull it from the ground, he was thrown to the ground.

"Ow!"

Pulling himself up, he tried to pull the sword out again and saw to his dismay that the creature was running at him again.

"What did I do to deserve a day like this! Oh, yeah. That."

Taking advantage of his apparent distraction, it jumped at him as he swung the cleaverlike weapon free of it's prison, connecting with the part of the thing's body attached to it's makeshift head, slicing through it's 'neck' like a electron knife through warm butter. The thing's body immediately dissipated while it's head flew away, crumbling into thin shadows as it smashed against the glass. His antennae flung off a stray bit of inert matter.

Zim breathed in relief, wiping the sooty stuff off his sword. Gathering together his weapons, he thought that attack was actually kind of neat.

Just as he picked up his staff, twirling it dramatically, he heard a sound that set his antennae atwitch.

"Not again," he growled tiredly.

His staff sprouted a flame-emitting head shaped like a dragon's jaws at his mental command, and he pointed it at mid-air.

The shadow being that was jumping at him was disintegrated in the ensuing gout of flame.

He reflexively blew the smoke from the dragon head as it returned to normal. Or at least as normal as it got. _Shadows. That's a good name for these things._

Turning to the four new ones, he placed his staff near his Pak, the biomechanical pod altering in shape to serve as a holster for the shapeshifting tool; it bent inwards in the same precise diameter as the staff, and a pair of clamps popped out, securing the staff in place.

He held the sword up, glaring at the creatures.

He suddenly rushed with the sword held down at an angle, swiping up through one so quickly it didn't have time to react as he followed up with another slash, and committed a _coup-de-grace _with a heavy downward slash-smash. On instinct, he threw the shield up to his left just as a shadow-being lept at him, bounding right into his shield and falling to the ground. The impact pushed him back by a few feet, but he jumped into the air, angling the sword downwards as he landed to impale it, carving it in half.

Breathing heavily, he spun around, swordtip the defining rim of his circle. The Shadow nimbly jumped out of his way and scooted backwards, clumsily avoiding his flurry of sword swipes through a combination of dumb luck and that irritating phasing ability; the creature struggled up out of it's phasing puddle, and Zim fell down on it, landing on his shield and squashing it, noticing for the first time that their explosions smelled a bit like burnt matches and new car smell.

Rolling onto his back and pulling his feet up to get himself up, Zim saw to his dismay a Shadow leaped straight at his vulnerable belly.

War instinct taking over, his feet kicked it in the face, sending it flying. Before it landed, he rolled to his feet and swapped the sword and staff. Zim held the staff at his shoulder as it expanded, sprouted a handle and trigger, created openings at the front and back, and generally morphed into a large explosive weapon.

The Shadow hit the floor and reformed into a standing position mere instants before Zim blasted it into sooty smoke. Using the weapon as a support, he started laughing insanely.

"! TAKE _THAT, _STUPID PEONS OF DOOM! FACE THE INCREDIBLY MIGHTY FURY OF _ZIIIIM!"_

The staff slipped and he fell down, laughing uninterrupted.

After a few minutes, he got over his fit, feeling better than he had in a long time.

"Ah," he said nostalgically, "Nothing like the feel of mass destruction to warm your soul."

The staff returned to normal, and he placed it alongside it's brother sword, the Pak morphing to accommodate both.

Exhaling contently, he saw something weird happen at the northside of the platform, a direction he estimated as being in the direction that the dark tower seemed to be pointing at.

What looked like stairs made of stained glass appeared in a slow flash of light just at the rim of the platform, making no recognizable shape. More appeared in a wavy shape, slowly at first but steadily much faster, leading to the taller platform he'd noticed earlier.

He looked left. He looked right. Seeing no other alternative, he placed a foot on the step; it felt solid enough, if not very safe. For something that was floating in midair with no visible means of support, it seemed unusually stable. Feeling a trace of his old confidence, he walked up the steps.

As he ascended, he had the definite feeling of being watched. Once or twice, he could have sworn he saw _something _in the dark abyss beyond move. He paused momentarily, passing off those feelings as beings the results of his uneasiness despite his desperate need to keep moving.

His footsteps made no sound as he traversed the steps. This was odd in itself, never minding the fact that he walking to a floating platform via mysterious stained-glass steps.

As he reached the platform, he realized that this place had the feel of some kind of cathedral, if a great deal harsher than a traditional one. This one reminded him more of a place where trials of ordeal were endured.

That thought had an uncanny feel to it; he wondered why. Stepping onto the platform, he looked around.

There was a bright light shining from somewhere above. He would have looked up, but the source was too bright to examine closely.

The mural at his feet seemed slightly...familiar. He didn't know why, but it did. He looked around at it.

There were various scenes on it, depicted in slices. On it's borders were four immense dragons, each touching the next one's tail. The first one was a light blue color, scales remnisciant of solidified wind, had a more pointed head then the others, horns and crest more flamboyant than the others. It was more streamlined, like a creature that spent it's life in the air. It's forelimbs elongated into immense wings, larger than the other dragon's were. It's tail trailed along behind it like a banner. It's eyes were a white swirl like a whirling storm, and within it was a young human; a Brazilian youth with brown messy hair and green eyes, wearing monk robes; the shirt of it was black with red trim and bands round the wrists, and a stylized tiger was on the left arm. His pants were also red, loose and flowing to enable easy movement, and he wore close fitting sandels wrapped around his feet. He was making some kind of pose; arms raised back and an exulted grin on his face, as if he was calling the wind around him.

The second dragon was a blue-white color, slightly stockier and more compact than the others. It's rounder head, It's thinner horns, large finlike ears, webbed feet and wings that were more like flippers than wings brought to mind an aquatic creature. It's wings weren't traditionallike; they lacked arm joints and were thicker than the other's. It's tail was slightly serrated and ended in a diamond-shaped flipper. It's eyes contained a roiling tsunami, holding another young monk of Chinese descent. He was bald, had unusually long and thin eyebrows, and appeared short for his eye, his round head large compared to his body. For some reason there were nine glowing dots on his forehead in a pattern of three by three, making a kind of square. He wore robes similar to the Brazilian, with a reversed color scheme; primarily red with black pants. He was leaping into the air, as if riding the waves.

The third dragon, colored orange-red, was the most serpentine of all of them, having a closer resemblance to the _long _dragons of Asiatic lore. It's slightly curled horns were more flowing, it's slender and smaller wings the most seemingly delicate. And yet it seemed to be the most ferocious of all in a strange way. It's limbs were more delicate looking than the other's were, it's claws coal black. It's scales were slightly flowing and overlapping. It's head was the most snakelike, small spikes appearing around the back of it's necked and continuing to the tip of it's tail. It's eyes appeared to contain an immense swirling inferno, and at the epicenter of the flames were a young Japanese girl, her black hair done up in pig-tails. Her robes were slightly similar to the Chinese boy's were, except for the slightly different styles; her robe didn't have sleeves, the lower part of her shirt was split up the sides, and her pants were white instead of black. She was standing on one foot, balancing on the point of a sandal, her hands touching above her hand.

The fourth dragon was the largest, slightly dwarfing the others through sheer size. It was a green color, it's bulky scales overlapping each other like huge boulders. It's large head, short horns, smaller wings, and overall appearance made it resemble a classical Western dragon, with more of a kindly aspect to it. It was broad, with huge muscles all over it's body. It's strong sinous tail ended in a spadelike shape, blades emerging from the side of the spade. It generally looked like something that spent it's days living among the plains and mountains, burrowing from time to time. It's eyes were a brown maelstrom of whirling rock, plummeting mountain ranges, and earthquake; within that chaos was a human like the others, seemingly unbothered by it all. He was of Texan extraction, proving it by wearing a broad cowboy hat. His straw-yellow hair poked out underneath it, covering one of his blue eyes. His facial structure was soft and gentle, at contrast with his large size; though he was the same age as the others, he was easily the tallest and broadest among them. His robes were like the others; red robe thing, white loose pants, sandals, you get it. He was crouched against the ground, driving a foot into the earth, a determined look on his face.

Zim noticed that in each in the dragon eyes, there was the same small gecko-sized green dragon hiding somewhere. He didn't have legs, but he had a pair of arms, two horns that resembled crests, and a pleasant demeanor. He also looked like a coward; in each little picture, he was hiding somewhere same with the monks; his tail poked out the cowboy's hat, his head checked out fearfully from behind the short kid's big head, he was wrapped around one of the girls arms, and he clung to the leg of the Brazillian kid's pants.

Zim looked at it curiously examining the other scenes.

Within the mural, the slices displayed odd scenes:

A brown haired ten year old boy, dressed in green khakis and a white shirt with a black stripe running up the front and across the shoulders was examining a strangely organic looking watch of some kind on his wrist that emanated greenish silhouettes of thousands of alien forms; he recognized several alien species from far off; a diamondoid Petrosapien, an animalistic Vulpimancer, a Pyronite composed of living flame, a ferocious Piscces Volunn, a frightning Ectonurite, a reptillian-elfin Kinecelleran, a bioorganic Galvanic Mechomorph, a four-armed Tetramand...and those were just of the few of the ones he recognized. The watch was lit with a green light, a dial-like structure rising from it; the kid was about to slam his palm down on it. Standing by him, looking annoyed, were two other humans that looked a bit like him; a ten year old girl with a blue shirt, white shorts, red hair tied with a clip and a sleeve decorated with five off-gray discs with odd symbols on them. She was glaring at him for some reason, while a sixty year old man stood behind them with a hand on both their shoulders, looking oddly calm. He had short graying hair, the same green eyes the other two had, a Hawaiian shirt over a pullover shirt and simple jeans. In the background was an odd bright green diamond shape.

On another image, there was naught but white space, except for an immense gray door on it; it had a strange emblem on it, resembling a stylistic upside down tree with names written at the branches; he recognized it as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The door was huge and split down the middle; standing in front of it were two humans, teenagers from the look of them. He wasn't sure how old they were, but he was certain that the shorter one was older. They were both blond-haired, with rather distinctive golden eyes. The short one wore black clothes and a red coat with a symbol on it; it resembled a cross with a snake strewn about it, with a crown flanked by feathered wings floating above it. He had hair with large overhanging bangs and a ponytail done up with braids. From the space inbetween his gloves, sleeves, pants and shoes, one could see he had a mechanical left leg and right arm. The other boy wore a blue jacket with a similar symbol; he was taller and slightly broader, with a more cropped haircut. For some reason, there was a thin outline of ancient armor surronding him. They looked somewhat apprehensive in front of the door, but also determined.

On another image, there was an indescribably stupid looking human boy with a huge pink nose, a red hair poking out from beneath a baseball cap, blue pants and little sneakers. There was also a perpetually scowling girl with blonde hair in the shape of a crab's claw and an odd pink dress with a single flower thing on the front. Standing next to them, looking vexed, was a tall figure dressed in a black robe, the back of his head obscured by a hood. Only his hands, feet and narrow face were visible, and they were nothing but living bone. For some reason, the stupid looking kid had taken his scythe and was randomly swiping at imaginary things.

Another thing he saw was several teenage beings in a large room, sitting on a couch; there was a human in a leathery looking costume that mind have been a kind of body armor; his gloves and boots were green, and he wore a mask of some kind that obscured his face as well as a yellow cape; he was reading a book called _Criminal Psychology._ Next to him was a cyborg that appeared to be mostly mechanical; the only organic parts of him he could see was all of his head except for the right side of his head and his upper arms, skin a brownish color. His forearms, the back of his head, and shoulders all appeared to be a light blue with a bright blue circuit lines on them. The rest of his machinery varied between gray and white. He was watching a TV the mural did not show while eating vast amounts of popcorn. There was a female alien that appeared human except for the light orange cast of her skin and spots of hair directly above her inhuman green eyes. Her clothes were mostly purple and made of the same material as the human; a sleeveless shirt with a metal collar, shorts that led to thigh-high boots, gray bracers extending from her elbows to the back of her hands. She was watching the unseen TV with a rapt fascination one expected of an anthropologist observing the actions of a strange alien culture. Standing next to her was a humanlike creature that appeared to be slightly younger than the others; he was a olive green color, had dark green hair, pointed ears, exaggerated incisors, and green eyes. His costume was light purple, with a black line running down the fron; his pants were black, his shoes large and purple. He wore white gloves that had a black bar running across the knuckles. He was telling somekind of stupid joke to a scowled girl a year or two older than he was; sitting away from the rest of them(but not far enough from the green guy with the bad jokes), was a girl with gray skin, violet eyes and purple hair, a few locks of which protruded under her hair. She wore a black full-length outfit, made of the same material as the others. She wore a dark blue cloak, blue boots of some sort, and gloves with a large gem on them. She looked mildly annoyed for some reason.

There there was the slice that seemed to depict a living room of some kind, made entirely of wood; even the machines were made of wood. Clouds were plainly visible through the various windows around the room. Sitting around another TV on various homemade chairs were the five human children, all of them around ten; a serious looking English bald boy with sunglasses, red shirt, and shorts; he seemed occupied organizing files on a cabinet that seemed to be coming out of the wall. Sitting on the floor, playing some kind of game with a wooden controller(Zim wondered off-handedly if splinters were a problem for these people)was a short Australian kid wearing an orange jacket with a hood on it and blue jeans, his straw-colored hair looking like that of the old British rock group, the Roaches or something; Zim noticed that he seemed extremely fustrated about something. Reclining on a couch of some kind, sipping from a soda, was a roundish boy in a blue short and khakis, wearing an aviator helemt and yellow goggles rather like Raz's. He seemed amused at the short guy's distress, seemingly in the middle of making some kind of bad joke. Sitting on the floor on the couch in front of the TV was a Japanese girl with unusually long hair, a baggy sweater and black pants. She was also playing the same game as the short kid and judging by the look on her face, she was winning. The last human was a black girl, possibly French in origin; she wore a red cap of some kind, that obscured her eyes, had an absurdly long ponytail reaching to her waist. She wore a blue shirt that made Zim think of baseball uniforms and black shorts. She seemed somewhat aloof from it all.

And then there was the huge old house, populated by such bizarre and unusual things that they could have only sprung forth from human imagination. There were too many for him to look at, but there were a few he could see in detail; a eight-year-olf human boy with brown hair and a squarish head, a green back pack, red shirt and tan pants. Standing next to him was a two foot tall rounded blue blob creature, with big eyes and a prankish grin. He had produced an arm of his substance and was sticking two fingers up behind the kid's head, making a 'y' shape and possibly causing the kid's annoyed look. Behind them was an extremely tall red creature that had a small body, a wide head with an equally wide smile, one arm almost as long as he was tall ending in a hand with long fingers that had suction cups on them, and an operational eye on a stalk. His other arm had apparently been broken off, the end of it sewed up. His other eye stalk was crooked, the actual eye wonky and off-center. For some reason, there appeared to be a number '1' on his body.

A thought of what these murals actually meant was starting to dawn upon him. The thought of it being like a cathedral struck him again.

Cathedrals had stained glass to depict the images of saints and martyrs. Those who had fallen unjustly for a greater purpose.

"Are these murals memorials?" Zim said to himself.

Thinking on that disturbing possibility, he walked right into the light.

He abruptly noticed the incredibly bright surface; his attention was drawn to the illumination overlooking it.

It was as if it was a spotlight, trying to tell him something.

Entranced by it, he walked into the center of the platform, limbs slightly slack.

_The closer you get to light, the greater your shadow grows._

"What?" he said, jarred out of his reverie. He knew that voice. "Caritas? Is that you? What game are you playing now!"

He got no answer, and he turned around expecting to find the irritating other behind him.

He saw nothing except, except for his shadow.

Truth be told, it was unusually large; the intensity of the light had undoubtedly made it larger.

Then it turned around.

Zim gaped wordlessly. Good thing he was alone; he was starting to feel like an idiot.

His shadow looked at him. Even without eyes or a body, it looked at him.

Where it was, smoke smelling of charcoal welled out of the ground; it rose out of the ground, welling in a much more smooth manner than the Shadows Zim'd fought had; it's torso rose out, carrying it's head with it. It lifted it's arms out, standing on nothing as it's paper thing legs still connected with Zim. Then it took a step out of the ground and another, standing in front of him.

He stared at it and it stared at him.

It suddenly changed, like it was being molded by unseen hands, shadows leaping across it like barely perceptible hawks of darkness gyring about it; it quickly settled and looked precisely like him, like a silhouette given third dimensionality.

Then the sheath of darkness fell away from it in thorned streams, revealing a stranger countenance.

This form was similar to Zim, but much more vicious looking; it's skin was a bruised green color, clearly not smooth like his own, but appeared to be covered with something like rough shark-skin. It's eyes were compound windows into something frigid and appropriately colored a uniform icy blue. It's antennae seemed more like demonic horns, utterly inflexible though useless as weapons. It's fingers were true claws, lethally pointed and a little too long for Irken digits. It's clothes were a faded maroon with other colors poking through, and had a punkish look to them; a sleeveless shirt with an dizzying eighteen pointed star on it, patchy looking pants, fingerless gloves with knuckledusters and big heavy-duty boots with spiked toes. It's left arm was decorated with an intricate spiral design that looked somehow repulsive.

As much as Caritas had exuded an aura of calmness and idealism, this thing made Zim think of long-abandoned factory basements; rooms filled with a thousand repulsive things, teeming with disgusting vermin that fed upon the refuse of a thousand monsters.

As much as those things from earlier were wrong, this was so much more horrifying in a more personal manner.

It smiled, revealing a mouth full of savage broad needle teeth reminiscent of a shark's grin; cold, cruel and immoral.

Zim started circling the thing, and it mirrored his motion, grinning that sickly humored mockery of a smile all the while.

"And...what are _you _supposed to be?" he said darkly.

"Me? Real question is, what are you?" By the sound of it's voice, crawling with a slightly rasping and oddly accentless tone to it's words, it appeared to be male.

"I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss that with you, putrid thing."

"How typically self-aggrandizing of you."

"Shut up, evil doppelganger."

"Hey, hey, hey. No name calling."

Zim glared at him. He matched the Irken's glare with a strange mixture of venom and jocularity.

"What? Can't take a joke?" the thing said.

"Than what _are_ you?" Zim hissed.

"Hey, _I'm _the one asking the questions here. Here's one for starters: how's it feel to spend your entire life believing you're the most wonderful and bright being in the universe, and finding out just the opposite?"

"Shut up."

"What's it like to find out just what it's like to be at the end of your carelessness, to be the one at the painful side of the gun? In short, what's it like to find out what a little monster you are?"

"_Shut up._" Zim stopped edging around, his fists shaking with barely suppressed rage.

"What, really, is it like to really _feel_ every single act of evil you've done throughout your pathetic life? What is it like, I wonder, is it like to know what kind of person you really are?" The corner of his lip turned up, lending him a crooked smile.

_"SHUT UP, YOU SLARKING SAUCUL!"_ Zim lunged at him, the sword in his hand serving as a condient to his rage, the thought of the metal burying itself in this thing's ribcage an extremely pleasing idea.

The thing dodged his attack with a supernatural ease, and weaved around Zim's furious blows and frenzied swipes, and as Zim missed him with a downward swing, he suddenly and brutally kicked him in the stomach.

His gasp of shocked pain cut short by the agonizing pain of having several toe spikes drove into his stomach, he fell to the ground, small dark purple spots forming on his shirt.

His sight raked across where he was lying, and he realized with a shock that he had no shadow.

He kneeled by Zim, cooing his hateful observations. "You may have not meant to be such a malevolent little bastard, but that doesn't change anything. Just because you weren't trying to be evil didn't mean anything. Man, if you didn't regret it all, you would've made one great villain. Pity ya had to turn soft on me."

"Up-shut!" he punched him in the face with his free hand.

The monster reeled back, clutching his near-broken jaw. "Call that a punch, you little _troq_?" The being taunted, snapping his jaw back into place.

He sweep-kicked Zim, who rolled to this feet sideways. He jumped blindly at Zim, getting a shield-smash in his face for his troubles.

"That's not me! Not anymore!" Zim hissed.

He laughed, a strangely hollow sound that sounded like something from the infamous well that led to Hell. "Yeah, but you _liked _it. And one way or the other, no one ever mattered to you. Practically everyone you've ever known has been just a tool for your goals. Didn't matter to you if they died or not."

Zim savagely kicked the prone thing in the face. "Shut up! You know nothing!"

He knew what that quality was in the thing's cold cruel smile. He had fought it, he had seen it, and in his worst moments, been it.

This thing was evil.

And his reaction to it, and those Shadows from before, was nothing less than burning righteous fury.

He _hated _this thing. He hated it more than anything he ever had before.

And perhaps his rage was due for it's speaking the truth.

"Oh, don't I?" The enemy said knowingly.

"No." Zim said curtly, punctuating his reply by grinding his foot into the other's stomach.

"Stop lying to yourself, freak." the other advised from where it was. "Believing your own lies is what as gotten you into this mess in the first place."

Zim scowled, even though in this case it was speaking the truth. He had told himself as much.

"You know," he said evenly, hand behind his back. "I don't like talking to you."

He held the staff out, transmogrified it into a machine gun, and shot him with enough bullets manifested from ambient energy to kill five hardy humans.

The evil thing took them without flinching, the bullets pounding into it's body and leaving large entry wounds shaped like gory dimes; the impact pushed it backwards by a few feet, but it otherwise didn't seem bothered by it. Zim was disturbed by the slightly pleasured look on it's face.

He closed his eyes, and opened them; the crumpled bullets popped out like maggots from a heavily shaken corpse, the darkly glowing wounds they left sealing up with small puffs of smoke.

He spread his arms wide, grinning broadly, showcasing his healing holes.

"You see?" He whispered. "It'll take more than bullets to make me die. Look at you; you don't have the guts to kill me, not matter how hard you try," he cracked his neck reflexively. "I'll never die. There'll always be a bit up me to crawl back up."

Light glinted off the slightly metallic red stains on his pointed teeth; apparently reminded about something, he drew a ragged tear of unidentifiable meat from his jaws, heedless of the tears they left in his fingers. Inspecting it curiously, he snapped it up again. Looking back at Zim, he waved his bloody fingers, cuts healing even as they bled.

"The darkness in you is stronger than you know, defective."

Zim looked at it. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It's what you are. That's all you are: a failure. That's all you've ever been, all you've ever could have and all you ever will be.

"You've failed at everything you've ever attempted to in your entire pathetic existence: you've failed at meeting the minimum expectations of being an Irken.

You've failed at being a soldier.

You've failed about being a half-assed scientist.

You've failed at conquering a planet populated by vacant-skulled morons.

You're less than a failure; you're nothing at all."

The former Invader hit his legs with the telescoping staff; it knocked him down, but he was up almost as soon as he fell.

He laughed and pointed at him. "You know, you used to always think big a lot. Get back at someone for throwing water balloons at you, you dropped one big as a meteorite at their city. But not anymore. Most of what you do is watch TV and invent crap no one cares about."

Zim's eyes narrowed.

"You're afraid, Zim. But what is it you're afraid of, I wonder?"

"Hah! I fear _nothing!_"

"I'll bet. That's why you're standing here talking to me."

Zim said nothing to that.

"You asked me who I was." the other said ominously, standing up and tracing his claws over his palm.

Zim raised an eyebrow.

Rising to his feet, the thing continued, advancing on Zim. "I am every evil thought you've ever acted upon in your entire existence."

His hand relaxed, green talons ceasing movement. They curled into fists, and for the first time Zim realized the barely suppressed rage lurking within this creature, evident in the whiteness of the knuckles and the fury of a simple footstep.

"I am the specter of hatred dwelling in your soul."

His arms tensed, looking like the wiry muscles of a savage beast caring only of the thrill of the hunt.

"I am the roaring monster in every dark corner of your mind, telling you to obliterate everything in your path."

The strange tattoo on his arm burst, trailing a smoky fluid that was neither blood nor shadow, but something cold in between.

"I am what you see when you remember what you did wrong."

His teeth changed, melting together into larger, more functional crushing sharp molars.

"I am the horror that lurks within your broken soul."

His entire aspect changed: the ichor spewing from that laberythean wound evoluped his form, seeping into and suffusing it as he became fearsomely predatory in a way that was antithetical to nature and all things carnivorous.

"I am everything in you that is inherently wrong."

He slowly grew taller and wider, muscles standing out against his skin.

"I live on your hatred, thrive on your malice, and was born from your senseless selfishness."

Zim started to back away. His sandal's slates slid against the slick plates, friction almost gluing him against the ground. This..._thing _was evil. Not a theoretical value assigned to politically unpopular actions or the results of a flawed psyche, but the real thing; pure maliciousness born of inclination and the immorality of freedom unbound by anything. Something in him, something primal, rebelled at the thought of that thing existing at all, let alone standing there. Zim's retreat was cut off as his heel bumped against a invisible barrier at the perimeter of the platform.

"I am the shadow of what you are, and the truth behind what you pretend to be."

As he spoke in his increasingly vehement voice, his rough skin rippled and his entire body altered, growing what looked like spiked armor of living bone; large obsidian-black protrusions grew on his body, shredding his shirt, and destroying most of his pant legs and shoes. His mouth warped, teeth and lips becoming one. His entire body altered, growing what looked like spiked armor of living bone black as this thing's heart. His face grew armor that resembled a skull mixed with a helm face growing reptilian, bulging slightly outwards. His claws elongated, covered with small spines grooved as to let blood flow onto his skin easier. He grew at least two feet taller and about as wide, looking something like a demon the Xenomorphs would worship if they possessed the faculties to consider the universe. The peculiar diagram on his shirt was mirrored on a keloid scar that rested where his heart would be, formed of crimson lines of knotted flesh. His eye suddenly burst into baleful yellow light, as if his brain was on fire.

"I am the personification of your evil, your sins made flesh. I am the ultimate you."

He suddenly lunged at Zim, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him into the air with a strangely pulsating arm that had grown impossibly long.

"_I am Wrath incarnate." _

He threw Zim across the stain-glassed structure, bouncing off a few times and coming to a brutal stop against the wall, sliding to the ground squeakily.

_But don't be afraid and don't forget..._

Feeling as if he'd just been punched in the face by a Tetramand, Zim shakily rose to his feet. Without skipping a beat, the grotesquely altered thing rushed to him, punching his jaw with a fist that felt like a spiked gauntlet. As he fell, a spider-leg flashed out at Wrath, who didn't bother moving; the sharp limb bounced off harmlessly.

He hit the ground so hard, he thought there should've been a minor shockwave or something.

Nope. His skull might've been cracked, but the floor was unmarked.

As he stood up waveringly, he clapped a hand to his face, realizing the spiked fist had made a few wounds in his check. Not very deep, but they were bleeding profusely.

Wrath smiled; it was hard to tell with that fixed toothy grin. Zim realized with disgust that there was a wet royal purple stain flowing through the monster's inky fist-plates, bright as a searchlight on a lightless night. Opening his cavernous jaws to the widest extent possible, a whiplike tongue snaked out of his mouth, hungrily licking up Zim's split blood, smacking his tongue with a relish like it was the ambrosia of Mt. Olympus.

Zim's skin color lightened by a few degrees. "That's disgusting!" he snarled, ending it with a peculiar guttural sound reminiscent of a cricket chirping inside an empty acoustics chamber.

"Maybe so," Wrath allowed, "but it's _fun_."

Zim disagreed, swinging the sword at Wrath; slowed down by his bulk, the shadow-being wasn't quick enough to dodge it entirely. The sword sliced through a spike, reducing it to dust.

The freak looked surprised and clutched at the stump, futilely attempting to stem the flow of ichor flowing through fingers ill-suited to _stop _bleeding(in his denfense, he had the other thing covered). The fluid suddenly stopped in mid-air and congealed into a completed spine.

He glared at the silvery blade; though healed, the spine looked somewhat crumpled.

Zim smirked, pointing the offending weapon at him. "You _do _have a weakness after all, sharp-headed minion!"

"I'm no one's minion!" Wrath snarled. Several spines unfurled into ribbons of darkness that struck at Zim, warping into edged shapes; they harmlessly bounced off his proffered shield. Zim rose into the air on his mecharchnical appendages and jumped at him, slamming shield-first into him.

Quickly standing up, Zim slammed his foot onto the shield. "Don't lie to yourself."

"Look at you!" Wrath screamed under the shield. "You let yourself believe Red and Purple's lies!"

"I figured it out. I just didn't care."

"You and your stupid missions. Then tell me this: a few months before everything went to hell, you stopped trying to conquer the Earth. Why?"

"I didn't feel like it! I don't need to justify myself to you!"

"Oh, I get it! The mighty Zim, unstoppable death machine, quits the Invading business because he feels sympathetic! 'Cause he starts to 'see the beauty of the human race'! You pathetic little soft meathead!"

Zim stomped on the shield, accidentally hitting the edge, knocking himself fall over.

The armored beast gave him a once over, shaking his head slowly. "Sad. Just fa-reacking sa-"

"I tire of your babble! _It annoys me!_" Zim's foot shot out, catching Wrath in the exposed area between his ankle and leg plates.

"Hey!" He fell down.

At once, ribbons of shadow unraveled from a spike, planting themselves in the ground; they dissolved into small pools of darkness, each forming into a Shadow.

They jumped at Zim, who effortlessly 'killed' one with a single swipe. He backed away from another leaper, squashing it easily underfoot.

One bounded at him; if it had a mind, it probably would have surprised at being caught on the flat part of the sword.

Wrath was surprised at how easily Zim dispatched the shadows, and was understandably more surprised when he threw it onto his face.

"Getoff getoff GET OFF!" he shrieked, carving up his face as he slapped at his face.

In that moment of distraction, Zim took his chance; he jumped at him, plunging his sword deep into the thing.

Wrath pulled the annoying Shadow off his face, crushing it within his claws, when a dark-splattered thing appeared in his chest.

He screamed, futily trying to push it back.

"Getting better at this," Zim hissed on his back, stabbing him as best he could without a decent amount to swing.

"Don't get too confident, Irken," Wrath growled, falling onto his back.

He got up, leaving Zim embedded in the ground; to his surprise, the tenacious Irken's death grip on his weapon had pulled the sword out.

Wrath pulled his arm up, intending to bring it through the irritants heart.

As he brought it down, Zim rolled to his feet, holding the sword up and maneuvering too quickly to give Wrath a chance to react; the sword sliced through his arm at the elbow joint.

Wrath fell down, clutching the gushing stump and roaring in agony and anger.

Zim held the sword out, tip balanced on the ground, grinning maniacally.

Wrath turned to him, his glowing eyes suddenly brightening brightly. He yelled something with no grammatical equivalent and threw himself at Zim, who merely turned aside.

Wrath suddenly tumbled, crashing to the ground hard and skidding to a stop; h turned to Zim, a huge cut leaking black fluid onto his cadaverous face armor. That inflexible armor could betray no emotion, but the mere glow of his eyes expressed indefinible rage.

Zim brandished his weapon, a trail of fluid upon it.

The spiked shadow being crouched to the ground like an oversized novelty paperweight for unusually morbid horror fans; expecting an attack, Zim mimicked the gesture, brandishing sword and shield.

They stared at each momentarily, waiting for the other to make a move.

Zim's antennae twitched.

Small pods formed on Wrath's back, like carnivorous flower petals. They contracted, launching balls of darkness into the sky even as they were reabsorbed.

Both fighters looked up at the dark blobs in the sky; they formed into more Shadows that fell through the air and landed at Wrath's side, flanking him.

He said nothing, allowing his dark minions and perpetually grinning maw to speak for him. He felt he didn't have to; he knew full well that Zim's was already analyzing the scene.

A Shadow cutting off a direct attack. A Shadow preventing a quick run to his left or right, and Wrath himself was bound to notice a repeat performance of a previous strategy.

_Perhaps it is time to do what I do best; improvise._

Zim switched the staff and sword, twirled the hodge-podge stick of junk like a baton and stamped it on the ground.

Wrath blinked. "What are you pretending to be? Head cheerleader for the Junkyard Heaps?"

"Clever," Zim grunted, hoisting the metamorphic tool over his shoulder. "but not as clever as-_this!"_

The lower half of the staff 'inflated' into a complicated structure reminiscent of a pogo stick inspired by a hydraulic press and built for the children of a race of elephant people. He pressed it to the ground, tilted it at his confused foe, and let go.

It propelled him into the air shockingly fast and reducing him to a barely visible blur.

Wrath looked up. "Hur?"

A red-green-black blur flew out of above him, slamming into his back; Wrath's breath got knocked out of him, and he crashed to the ground, carving gouges into the ground with Zim perched on his back.

The pogo stick thing folded into itself as the armguard at the staff's apex folded up and a huge concealed crescent blade easily a yard across slid out, causing the staff to elongate in order to support itself properly. Zim pulled the scythe back and sliced through the Shadows just as Wrath's dimmed eyes flashed into full effulgence again.

He roared, rising up to swat the Irken even as the alien in question jumped off, plunging his new blade into Wrath's meaty arm. Eyes glowing painfully bright at the sight of a whitish black-stained blade protruding from his bicep, Wrath shook it violently, Zim swinging; he controlled the momentum so that he turned around in a complete circle, slicing the arm off cleanly; he landed on his feet neatly, scythe returning to normal as he scurried away.

As his arm reformed clumsily, Wrath uttered the vilest curses he could come up with. How could that defective think of that so quickly!

Holding his new arm firmly, he glared at Zim, who was twirling his staff jauntily, singing a song to himself; Wrath could swear that it was nothing more than the word 'doom' being endlessly repeated with a few occasional variations on that one word.

Snarling, the shadow being launched himself at Zim; the Irken was caught off-guard, and they were propelled across the platform, smashing into a wall.

Too dizzied by the attack to react, Zim blurrily saw Wrath pick him up by the scruff of his neck.

"You clever little _bastard,_" he growled.

"Wrong choice of words," Zim pointed out pedantically. "I can't be a bastard if I'm not the product of two beings, marriage or not, so that _particular _epithet doesn't apply to me."

Wrath roared, rearing his arm up, smashing him into the ground again and again and again.

It felt like a hundred times, but Zim counted it at five.

"That all you got?" Zim taunted. Wrath threw him to the ground, the sheer impact knocking one of the sandels off.

He pounded his plated fists into Zim repeatedly, each powerful blow a means to exorcise his nearly bottomless font of rage.

He hit him in the face, cutting up his face.

He punched him in the stomach, ripping up his raincoat and rending his flesh.

He savagely kicked him, stomping on his midsection.

He raised both limbs up high, bringing them down onto Zim's body.

He kept beating him as brutally as he could, pouring his rage into insanely vicious blows upon Zim's body. He grabbed him by the leg, sharp plates ripping up the Irkens skin, and threw him across the platform. Wrath kneeled down, breathing heavily.

He looked up, and saw Zim sitting on the floor where he'd landed. His face was cut up, leaking purplish blood into his eyes and shirt, and his spittle was a distinctly lavender color, right eye half-shut by a large cut going through it. His shirt was torn up, his raincoat mostly gone, the little buttons on it making constant broken noises, both looking like stitched-together rags that covered a being made of contusions and freshly dripping wounds. His remaining shoe was cracked, the slates at the bottom mostly broken off and dangling by a few stray splinters. His pant legs were ragged and his legs were twitching slightly. He was breathing slowly and heavily, as if an immense weight was squatting on him. His right antannae had been broken off entirely just at the joint; weirdly enough, his hat was exactly where it had been.

His breathing suddenly became erratic; he started breathing rapidly and shallowly, looking like he was choking. He fell over, supported by his arms, and spat up a large glob of blood. He stopped twitching, purple fluid dripping out of his mouth more copiously than it had before and he fell backwards, breathing normally.

"Aren't you dead yet?" Wrath asked disdainfully.

Zim quaked uncontrollably, spitting out blood that had gathering in his mouth. His right eye opened fully, opening the wound a bit more, the area around his eye raw and royal purple. He shifted his weight onto his feet, slowly and painfully rising upright. He grunted wetly, coughing up another glob of blood. His hand clutched his staff with a grip that Death couldn't loosen, and glared at Wrath venomously. He wiped the blood away from his face with his free hand, brushing it off on his pants. He suddenly grinned defiantly, holding the staff with both hands as it transformed in a weird kind gun similar to a blaster, but with a capsule on the area where a sight would have been, filled with a red-orange fluid.

"You just can't please some people," Zim said shortly, a viscious grin forming on his face.

He pointed the gun-thing at Wrath, pulling the trigger; a huge gout of flame exploded out of the barrel, enshrouding Wrath in a shower of napalm, melting his armor and blistering his skin.

Wrath fell down, armor reforming even as he fell. He clumsily stood up and blew out a stray flame out on his shoulder, almost as an afterthought.

"Ah, _now _it gets fun."

Wrath ran at Zim, the Irken slamming the razor-rim of his shield into Wrath's elbow joint, throwing him down. The makeshift flamethrower became a mallet, and was promptly smashed on the prone foe's face. "Not for _you!" _Zim yelled cheerfully.

Wrath turned aside quickly, knocking Zim away. He swung his fists at him, large blades elongating from his forearms as he did; Zim backed away, not fast enough to avoid getting his leg cut.

Wrath laughed. "You're getting sloppy, Zim. I wonder if that's _fear _slowing you down?"

Zim clenched his teeth. "Not a chance, spike head!"

The well-named shadow being scampered at him, a boxing glove tipped staff telescoping into his face, followed by another blow.

Wrath rolled to his feet, slamming his armblades to the ground. He circled around and stood up, holding one of the ground-plates. Savagely laughing, he hurled it at Zim, who quickly pulled out his sword and sliced through the ballistic projectile.

Taking advantage of his opponent's distraction, Wrath charged at Zim, knocking him to the ground and sinking his teeth into Zim's exposed leg.

"ARRRRRRGH!" The former Invader shrieked, and swung his sword at the pain-bringer in question, pain and panic making it miss and hit a cheek spine.

Wrath clamped down harder, throwing him to the perimeter. Zim hit it hard, sliding down slowly.

He tried to get up, but a black flash slammed into him; Wrath's armblades criss-crossed in front of his throat scissors-style.

"Your fear is what holds you back," Wrath whispered. "You're afraid. And it's going to pull you down and tear you apart."

"You lie-"

"_**SHUT UP!**_" He roared, showering Zim with spittle, a knee spike piercing Zim's stomach as he leaned forward. "You're an blithering idiot too afraid to even look in the mirror! You can't even deal with your own nature, you stupid defective!"

Zim tried to speak, but Wrath's ranting interrupted him.

"And you don't even know what that is! What the hell is it that you're so afraid of?"

"You...really want to know?" Zim whispered.

Wrath leaned in, expectantly. Zim had to fight the urge to recoil and decapitate himself on the armblades; his breath was bad enough without having to wonder on what sort of meat was between those teeth.

Occupied by Zim's apparent confession, Wrath didn't see the staff flow around the hilt and guard of the staff, stretching out slightly and attaching itself to the shield in likewise manner, forming a handle under the shield.

"What I'm really afraid of...is..."

"Yeah?" Wrath leaned in, so close their face almost touched. Every moral fiber in the tapestry of his mind rebelled at being so close to something so obviously and inherently evil.

Zim abruptly and suddenly twisted his arm, thrusting the makeshift combination of his three weapons directly between Wrath's eyes.

The brutal things arms fell, gasping wordlessly. Zim stood up, twisting the spear slightly, pleased at the agonized grunts of his victim.

"What I'm afraid of is not being smart enough to see things like you, being too cruel to not care about things like you, and not being strong enough to _kill things like you!_"

He thrust it deeper into Wrath's brain, a silver blade protruding through the back of his head. Strangely, there was little resistance, as if there was nearly nothing to block it's path. It circled upwards, profusely dripping dark blood and splattering it on the ground.

Wrath tried to speak, in too much pain to do much more than squeal in pain, blood spilling down from his open jaws.

Zim thrust it deeper and twisted more, a prismatic light emanating from his weapon; at it's touch, his foe's armor dissolved into the smoke it had been, sucking back into the open wound that sealed back into a tattoo.

"You...can't...not-"

"Shut your noise-orifice." Zim snapped. "Double negatives. And people say _I _abuse the English langauge."

He shoved the spear sideways, leaving a massive exit wound; the tendons snapped and Wrath's head spewed blood as he toppled sideways.

Wrath's eyes dulled and he ceased movement.

Zim set his weapon upright, blood seeping down the blade, droplets dripping off onto the ground.

He turned around, muttering to himself. "That was...educational."

A sharp pain in his leg and sides suddenly forced him to his knees, and he grabbed his spear to prevent falling down. Grunting in pain, he pulled himself up.

Looking down, he saw that his side and leg were somewhat bulged out of shape. He snarled inarticulately. At least a few of his ribs and leg bones were broken.

"_Wrath..._"he said angrily. That abomination's impossible strength had nearly shattered his body! Too bad it was already dead; he could have done something truly vengeful.

Tearing a few strips from his shirt, he wrapped them around his sides to keep his ribs from getting any worse. Realizing that the broken shoe was only hobbling him, he tossed it away, wondering why he hadn't done it sooner, remembering how it had happened too fast to do that. Awkwardly hopping on his undamaged leg, he started to walk away.

"At least he's dead," he told himself.

"_Not going to be...that easy."_

Zim snapped around.

Wrath had halfway risen off the floor, wavering slightly. He was somehow talking dispute half his face being partially severed, only a few dark strands and solid shadow keeping it from falling off completely. Weirdly, he didn't see anything remotely resembling organs or anything that made up a living being; only blackness beyond that. It was like he had been created by an good artist with little knowledge of anatomy. Both halves of his face appeared to be functioning equally well despite the utter impossibility of that, never mind his voice; rasping and hollow as it was now, he never should have been able to speak without vocal chords or some means of manipulating sounds.

He rose off the ground, staring at Zim with what must have been a gaze lacking in peripheral vision. One of his arms twitched, large cracks oozing dark blue smoke spreading through it similarly to pressure shifting under tectonic plates. The arm suddenly exploded from the cracks outward, spewing bloodlike ooze that stained the ground, dark goo still dripping from the stump. The goop stretched out, elongating into a featureless and rubbery limb ending in three huge claws with a single joint apiece.

His remaining arm hung useless at his side, swinging loosely as he slowly advanced upon the hapless and nearly helpless alien. The nearly severed side of his face shimmered, and apparently spurred by his relentless movement, it shook roughly as if it were a ill-fitting mask. It suddenly sloughed off, distengrating as it hit the ground. In it's place there might have been it's true face, except it was no face at all; it was an amorphous and dark head, devoid of any features other than a single unflickering light the color of a baleful moon of ill omen. It sat unsteadily next to what remained of Wrath's original face, tendrillike cracks spreading from it's exposed face downwards.

"What in the hell...?" Zim had been too entranced by the spectacle, and quickly regaining his senses, started backing away and as before, he hit a wall.

"_Not that easy...to destroy the darkness." _Wrath continued advancing, not slowing down even as his other arm swelled and mutated grotesquely, as if a large mass of huge tumors had suddenly grown inside it. One of the large bumps on his arm popped, a large smokey tendril extending; near it's top, an unblinking slitted eye swiveled around to see it's prey.

"Heeey, didn't I just kill you?" Unnerved by what he was seeing, he leaned against the glimmering wall for support, pointing his spear at it. Implements of death sprang out along it's edge, shining threateningly at Wrath.

Wrath didn't appear to be at all aware of the potential for his demise; this seriously disturbed Zim. He preferred the ranting and abusive Wrath to this emotionless zombie thing. Okay, maybe not when he was beating the crap out of him. "_You can't just destroy...the darkness."_

Zim's weapon elongated, spearing through Wrath's organic arm; as it retracted, the arm dissembled into a mass of Shadows.

He prepared to sweep it through them when the spear disappeared in a flash of prismatic light.

This was disheartening, to make an understatement. "Not good. Very, very not good!"

The Shadows swarmed Wrath, covering him like a living and really bulgy blanket. His remaining arm suddenly stretched and expanded grotesquely as it slammed into Zim, claws puncturing his sides and filling him with something cold and violating.

"_No matter how many times you destroy it...no matter how many times you deny it...you can never escape the darkness inside...and out."_

Tendrils of darkness melted around Zim, dissolving into a pool of darkness.

His feet abruptly sank into the swirling black-purple-blue, his knees disappearing into somewhere frigidly cold and with _things _there; thousands of what felt like hands covered his legs as unknowable things drew their numerous claws across him, hungrily exploring their new 'visitor'.

Long claw-handed limbs rose out of the pool, spinning around Zim's body and fastening around his shoulders. More rose and encased his broken arm, and even more simply sank into his neck and head. Their touch was impossibly, monstrously cold; it was a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature. Hands pried his eyes wide open, forcing him to see Wrath's slowly sloughing skin reveal the true darkness within him. Several swung around his mouth and shut it, preventing his ability to speak out or breath.

Thicker black vines rose out of the much, wrapping around that part of his body that was above the pool; his legs and waist. Where they constricted themselves, vinelike plants grew, tightening and cutting off any hope of resistance.

Wrath's last mask of shadows slid away, and Zim saw Wrath's true shape, what that _thing _really was. The shadows melted away, disappearing.

Zim's breath escaped in a gasp as Wrath's internals disappeared as Wrath's face slid over it again, hiding that hollow emptiness. Wrath was nothing at all, Zim realized; he was a hollow mockery, whatever else he might claim. He was nothing more than a peversion.

The limbs started to pull him down. Down into the dark muck.

He attempted to fight and strain, but they tightened against his movements, cutting off his ability to resist at all.

They pulled him down all too slowly, forcing him to feel the inevitability of it all. Forcing him to know the horror being pulled down into somewhere unknowable and dark, where hope would soon be a forgotten myth. Making him know the misery of knowing that even this grim place was better than the dark hell he was being drawn into.

And he knew despair.

His body below the waist had already been swallowed, and his torso and arms slid into the mire and muck; the darkness stirred at the feel of him, and suddenly swarmed over him, tangled vines formed over him and pulling him under.

His neck disappeared under the pool and Wrath's gaze started to die, as did everything else. Zim suddenly realized why; the entire world was going even darker than it had been, the hands of the dark retreating as his head was pulled into where ever the rest of him had gone. His forehead and eyes were underneath the surface of the dark pool.

Dark. It was so dark it defied the mind, challenged it and utterly humiliated it.

And in this place, the voice spoke again one last time.

_Know that you hold the mightiest weapon of all._

Even under the grip of the limbs, his eyes under the Zim yelled through their bonds.

He yelled with no words, but with sheer rage. Rage that this realm of darkness existed at all, that this blantant perversion existed at all, that he had allowed himself to be drawn into it. He knew what true darkness was as it caressed him and drew it into it's foul embrace...and he felt righteous fury that he could do nothing about it. He hated this dark place, and his rage filled him with strength as he struggled against it.

"Let...me..._GO!"_ he screamed, vocalising at last his inarticulate fury.

The painfully bright light above roared into skin-scarring radiance; the darkness recoiled at it's touch, the hands disintegrated into quickly absent smoke, Wrath boiled away with a final shriek of eternal dismay, and the cold reminder of sorrow and despair everything was burned away in it's light...

"Master! _Master!_"

"Zim, wake up!"

"Squeak!"

Zim opened his eyes, groaning softly, and abruptly sat up so fast his spine might've snapped from friction burn.

No Shadows. No darkness. He wasn't drowning in an oily pool of darkness. He wasn't being menaced by a doppelganger. He patted himself frantically, trying to sense that this was real. His clothes were normal again, proven by the honking noise a little horn emoticon made.

He was sitting among the flamingos and security gnomes on his front lawn. Gir, Dib and Minimoose were looking at him with concern. Gir and Minimoose did, anyway. Dib seemed to be between curiosity and confusion, judging by his quizzical look.

Zim shook his head wearily, looking at his house. Home. He was home.

Dib sighed, shaking his head in bewilderment. The human's skin was a pale tan sort of color, like he spent a _lot _of time away from the sun. His hair was a black color that had slight blue highlights in direct light, and happened to be constantly slicked back. Lately, he'd taken to shaving the sides and back of his head, which helped to make his head slightly less emphasized. He had a large lock of hair that stood up at an angle away from the rest of his hair, bringing to mind the blade of a scythe. He had big spectacles on at all times, at least as big as Zim's eyes but rounder, his brown-yellow eyes slightly magnified by the glasses. He had a thin and lanky sort of body type; considering all the running he did, that was no surprise. He almost always wore a sleeveless navy blue shirt that was darker blue at the sides with a neutral looking round gray face on it, simple lines for a mouth and eyes. Over this, he wore his trademark leather duster; no one knew why he wore it. Possibly it was for the same reason Zim tended to wear clothes from what had been voted The Most Annoying Wardrobe In Nicktown. He wore black jeans and simple sneakers.

Seeing Zim's movement, Gir wailed and jumped at Zim, knocking him over again as he started frantically hugging him and babbling incoherently.

"Master! Master! You ate the snackies and then and then you went _blargh! _and fell down! I thought the dancing hotdogs of doom got you!"

He started crying loudly.

Zim pulled a squeaky pig toy out of his Pak and squeezed it a few times in front of Gir's face; the robot grabbed the pig and started running around the yard, giggling loudly.

Zim rubbed his head. It hurt a little, but he otherwise had no trace of the injuries he'd just undergone.

The flying moose android hovered around Zim's face, squeaking worriedly.

"No, no, no." Zim said, waving his hand as if warding off a fly. "I'm fine, but test Gir's snacks for hallucinogenics."

"Hallucinogenics?" Dib and Minimoose said at the same time, in different ways.

"Just do it." Zim stood up unsteadily, feeling his antennae. No breaks there.

He held his hand out, trying to summon the weapons. Far back in his mind, he felt a strange flicker, but nothing happened.

He frowned, looking inwardly. _Was it a dream? Or something else?_

He shrugged to himself and dismissed the dream as nothing more than that.

"Something wrong?" Dib inquired.

"No, no."

"Em hem," The paranormal investigator muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

Minimoose was still hovering silently.

"Squeek! Squeak squeek, squeeeak!"

"I didn't fall that hard! All I had was a really weird dream!"

"Dream?"

"I'll tell you later, and I'm perfectly fine!"

"Squeak."

Zim looked back to where he had fallen; there was a impression of his body where he'd fallen that was at least two feet deep. He walked over to it; his hat had become dislodged and had fallen in. He reached in, pulling the beret out. He dusted it off, blowing on it. He placed it back on his head, patting it as if it were a beloved old friend. Minimoose hovered by his head, squeaking inquiringly like.

"My head hurts a little, that's it. Lemme alone."

Minimoose squeaked resignedly, and floated off to the roof.

Dib continued watching him, and something occurred to Zim.

"Hey, when did you get here?"

"I was at my lab working on some stuff and was going to track down some _nosferatu_ when Gir called me after you fell."

"You mean Gir actually had the presence of mind to call you and tell you I just fell off my roof twice in a row? _Gir?_"

"No, actually. He was calling for some pizza. I saw you in the background of the communicator. I pointed you out and he freaked out for five and a half seconds, than when back to the pizza call. He was still trying to order when I got here and disabled it."

"Oh."

Dib suddenly slapped his forehead. "Oh, _now _I remember! I need your help on a...project of mine."

"A project where?"

"On one of those islands we go to."

Zim knew those islands well; they'd landed on them when they came back from space. "And why do you need _my _help? Aren't there at least a dozen other people for this sort of thing that we know?"

"I already have. It's a big project and I need your particular 'expertise' for this sort of thing."

"What kind of 'thing'?" the alien asked suspiciously.

"It's better if you wait until we get there." Clicking a button on what appeared to be a wristwatch, a blue-gray ship flew out of the general direction of Dib's house, coming to a stop just above the driveway Zim had put in.

"Hey!" Zim said. "That looks like Tak's ship! You reverse-engineered this from Tak's ship, didn't you?"

Dib crossed his arms proudly. "Why, yes I-"

"Didn't you?"

Dib grimaced. "I already said I-"

"_Didn't you!"_

"I already said I did! Pay attention already!"

"I DON'T HAVE AN ATTENTION PROBLEM!"

"I...didn't say anything about a attention problem."

"You didn't? You were supposed to. Where did you build it?"

Only Zim could handle those kind of 360-degree conversation turns. Dib rubbed his big forehead and said, "In the lab complex we own."

Zim's jaw dropped out of sheer surprise. "_We _own a lab? Why didn't you tell me!"

Dib slapped his face. "I told you six months ago when it was first operational! And at least five times since then!"

Clicking another button on his wristwatch, his ship hovered by them; it was about the size of Tak's modified Spittle Runner, but considerably different. It was constructed of a mishmash of different technologies, human and otherwise. There was probably supernatural components in there; judging by it's construction and what Dib said, it had to have built fairly recently. It's cockpit and body was the shape of a bullet, the flat portion of which was connected to the rest of it by tubelike connectors. The actual cockpit was built similarly to Zim's Voot Runner, except for a look reminiscent of Earth fighter jet cockpits. There didn't appear to be any weapons; there was just two oblong pods slung almost directly on the bottom. The flight mechanisms were similar pods along the back with large openings centered on them. The main body was slightly raised away from the others, and all in all it looked almost cute, like a large robot pet.

Dib pressed another button and the cockpit opened; a screen extended out of the controls on a prehensile limb of sorts.

"Dibship, display video records and prepare for specific dates." He told the ship.

"Yes, O Great Paranormal Investigator With A Not At All Abnormally Sized Cranium." It said in a cheerful sounding digitized version of Dib's own voice.

"O Great Paranormal Investigator With A Not At All Abnormally Sized Cranium'?" Zim asked, eyeridge raised.

"I'm not overcompensating for my big head!" Dib yelled. "I can't be overcompensating for my big head if I don't have a big head and I do not have a big head so I can't be overcompensating for my big head and so I'm not compensating _BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE A BIG HEAD!"_

He breathed in and out heavily, gasping a little.

"I...didn't say anything about your head." Zim said, confused.

"You didn't? Oh, uh..." Dib scratched the back of his big head sheepishly. "Well, this is a little embarrassing. At least no one else saw that."

A reporter popped out behind a bush, holding a camcorder. "What a scoop!"

The bush he had been hiding behind popped out of the ground, also holding a camcorder. "You can't have this scoop, it's mine!"

Above Zim and Dib, several squirrels ran along a tree branch, trailing a complicated system of very small cameras and sound equipment. "Hey, we got dibs on the Dib stories!"

The tree they were standing on morphed into a very small green-haired human like being with a small pair of wings and a little crowny thing with a digital camera stuck in it floating above his head. "No fair, faeries got first call on clever alliteration! Hey, I didn't know I knew what that means! Five points for me! I'm finally winning the game!"

His pink haired wife popped out of nowhere. "What game are you talking about!"

"There's a game?" he said blankly. "No one tells me anything!"

A koala popped out of a cleverly designed knothole, a wallaby jumped out of a chiminy and an eagle flew out a tree. "We were here first!"

"Thirteen against one?" A magic talking pinata said, falling from the tree. "That be cheatery!"

A sasquatch wandered out of the direction of Dib's street, fitting a freshly sanded belt and a really big digital recorder. "Uh, thirteen? I counted twenty."

Three crocodile reporters popped out of a manhole. "Us too!"

Gir flew by, filming a flying super-snail. "Stop following me, you freak!"

"I'm filled with love! Eat it! It tastes like earwig honey and worm meal!"

"Well, it's obvious that it's impossible to establish credit!" A squirrel pointed out.

"Maybe the telebloids will cut a deal with us." The sasquatch suggested.

A guy with spiky blue hair, one with red hair and glasses and two twins ran out behind the sasquatch. "We know some studio people!"

A human with white hair and green eyes, wearing some sort of black jumpsuit with a stylized 'D' on the front, also wearing with white boots and gloves, shimmered into view about six feet up, hovering in the air. And yes, he also had video/sound recording equipment, this one marked _The Specter Hector_. "And there's this really great guy a few blocks from here! Pays big money for clips on Dib!" He yelled an address.

"Isn't that your house?" Zim said as they ran off there.

"_I HATE THIS TOWN!"_ Dib yelled. "Hey! What are you doing with that audio-visual device?"

Zim vainly tried to hide it behind his back, attempting to look innocent. "Eh, recording the moment for posterity?" He formed a smile which he obviously thought looked winning, looking more like an alien Jeffrey Dahmer in a movie directed by Wess Craven.

Gaz wandered by, holding another camcorder.

A stark look of terror lightened Dib's face by enough degrees to earn him a place as an extra on the quadquel on Tommy Pickles' famous multimovie comedy epic, _Yawn of the Dead: The Telemarketing Scam._

"No," he said, voice like that of the damned when they're suddenly aware of their ultimate destination in Hell's Irony District. "No...not you too..."

"Eeh," Gaz said as the the camcorder burst into flames and became naught but ashes. "I was going to use as blackmail against food thievery, but I guess that's pointless now. Whatever."

She walked off into the sunset(which was odd, as it was in the middle of the morning), and all small furry creatures trembled in her wake.

Dib scowled, clicking another button on his wrist-mounted control device.

The monitor turned on, showing a recording from the date, unknown to Zim, that Dib's lab was finished. Zim's masterfully brilliant mind sensed this because it said so at the bottom, along with the words _Hey, Moron! It's_ preceding the date.

"I really should fix that bug," Dib thought aloud. "Duly noted! Awesome job, Hero Of All Mankind Past And/Or Present!" Dibship added.

Dib sagged. "I really should do something about the yesman and seventies lingo module. I knew I shouldn't let Dad tinker with it."

"Absolutely, Almightily Awesome Master of All Greatness!"

On the screen, Zim was sitting at a desk at the Libario Publico in Chinatown's Inuit District, playing with a Rubix Quadrangle; at the moment, every color was present on every side, including a few that had just been discovered on the cube.

He continually toyed with it, twisting it around, periodically looking close to utter loss of sanity when he twisted it too far and it would momentarily vanish into hyper space and return with more sides and potential color combinations. Judging by the scorch marks around the walls and desktop, this wasn't an infrequent occurrence.

Dib came on screen, and watched Zim toy with the quadrangle momentarily.

It was after Zim threw it in frustration and it bounced back off his face and into his hands that Dib chose the time to speak.

"Hey Zim, I got something to tell you."

Zim continued playing with his puzzle, showing no sign of being aware that Dib had spoken.

"Hey, Zim! I just-"

Zim raised his hand, signaling Dib to remain quiet. He looked the thing over, still trying to solve it.

"Uh, Zim?"

Zim held it by one corner, making it spin around and around, causing the space-time continuum to bend until Dib angrily placed his finger on it, making it stop. "ZIM!"

"Huh? Hey? What?" He spoke real quickly, looked around rapidly to see who had spoken, and noticed Dib. "What?" he said more normally.

"I have something to tell you."

"Oh."

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, are you going to listen?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"Like I was _trying _to tell you, I broke a deal with my Dad, so I now have my own fully-funded private laboratory. Since your closest-okay, my _only _friend(which is the most pathetic thing I've ever heard of), I was wondering if you'd like to use the laboratory's facilities. Interested in becoming co-founder and fellow user?"

"Yeah sure whatever," Zim said quickly, still playing with the quadrangle and obviously paying no attention to what Dib was saying. The monitor went dark.

"And oh yeah, there's more!" Dib said.

The screen lit up, showing the Skool lunchroom at an overhead angle. Zim was eating his own prepared lunch, and Dib walked by, wearing his new lab-coat. From the date, this was only a week later.

"Hey, Zim! Want to come to the lab later?"

"What lab?"

"You know, the one I mentioned last Tuesday!"

"_Oh,_" Zim said, speaking in the tone of voice reserved for speaking to those referred to as special-in-the-oh-so-sensitive-and-not-all-offensive-way-at-least-no-one-that's-ever-been-on-it's-receiving-end. "_That _lab. Yeeah, suuuure I'll see you there, wink wink."

Dib stared at him in an annoyed way. "You..do realize you just said 'wink wink' out loud."

"No I didn't, slap Dib's back friendly-like while sticking a _kick-me _sign on his back."

Dib sighed loudly, looking down at the floor. "No, I mean an actual lab my Dad gave me. That's the one I'm-" He looked up to see that Zim was already across the cafeteria at a snack machine. "Never mind." Someone snuck up behind him and kicked him. "Ow!"

The screen went blank again, and Zim was scratching the back of his head nervously. "Okaay, so maybe I haven't been paying attention, oh, once or twice..."

Dib looked at him with his eyes half-closed, frowning faintly. "'Once or twice', huh?"

He hit a number of buttons in succession. The screen lit up again, showing Zim's laboratory. He was at work in it, pointing some kind of laser at a sheet of metal secured in midair by a clamp rising from the ground. The safety goggles he was wearing lit by the light flashing off the sheet of metal. Dib fell in from the top of the monitor, presumably one of Gir's little entry hatches secreted throughout the building.

He bent over, dusting himself off. Noticing that Zim appeared to be in an alert status, he crept behind him. Dib noticed that a nearby screen displayed readouts that had something to do with explosive compressed mineral.

He pulled out a recorder and clicked a play button. The recorder made a good imitation of an explosion.

Screaming in sheer terror, Zim fell over and ran to an escape hatch, momentarily noticing that Dib was rolling on the floor, laughing. "Very funny, Dib," he said sarcastically.

"Oh, it was. It was." Wiping something from his eye, Dib stood up.

Shaking his head slowly, Zim sat back on the chair, slipping the goggles back over his eyes and resuming laser shooting.

Dib watched him for a few minutes, and sensing that absolutely nothing about this was going to change, he decided to try again.

"Whatever you're doing could probably done at the lab. We've got resources and this could be done a lot more efficiently."

"Uh huh."

"You're not listening to a word I'm saying, are you?"

"No, the mini-PEG hasn't spontaneously developed sentient consciousness again. Personally, I blame the whole robot rebellion on talk-shows. And the advent of bad rap music."

Dib blanched as the screen went blank. It lit up again, showing Zim at the park sitting at a little stone desk on a little floating chair.

He was reading a book entitled _Sneaky Traps For Dummies, _taking occasional bites from a snack. He looked around quickly, checking that no one was looking. He jumped up and sneaked over behind a nearby snack machine; his Pak opened up a compartment, from which he pulled out a small bag. Setting it on the ground softly, he opened it and pulled out a weird device like a bulky pistol that ended in a disclike shape, pointing it at the machine and pulling the trigger; all; the screws on the back of it forcibly ejected themselves. He pulled off the back off the machine as several spider-legs with hand attachments sprouted from his Pak and grabbed some more devices from the bag. He looked from both sides of the machine, checking again. Seeing no one, he ducked inside the machine, loud noises coming from within.

Dib walked on-screen, noticed what Zim was doing, and slammed a scale model of the laboratory complex on the desk. He ran off, out of sight as Zim came back on-screen.

Zim sat back down, yawned loudly, and suddenly noticed the model.

"It's the Helmacrons again!" he screamed, and blasted it with a really big laser he pulled out of his pod, reducing it to a smoking wreck. He laughed and abruptly stopped. "I must prepare against any further incursions of _tiny eeeevil! TO THE FOODCOURT!"_

He ran off, going "Da, da da da da!" like a trumpet doing the bugle, not noticed the little declaratory signs that popped out of the wreckage. The screen went black and lit up once more.

It appeared to be a foodcourt. The walls, for some reason, were covered nearly head to foot in an orange wallpaper that was just a lot of banners overlaying each other; words were written on them in Irken, drawings that roughly translated to sentences like _Come to Dib's New Lab! In The East District! That Zim and Dib jointly own! And Is Vastly Funded! And Doom-proof! This Means You, Zim! _

Zim walked in, looking around at the banners, more or less heedless of the way everyone else was looking at him.

He scratched the side of his face. "I sense that someone's trying to tell me something, but what? _What could it be!"_

Every single other person in the building slapped their faces simultaneously. "Oh, you've got to be _kidding!" _They all said.

"Are you really that dense?" Danny Fenton yelled.

"Ha! Zim's molecular configuration is at precisely the correct density!"

Everyone face-faulted as the screen went blank, and Dib looked at Zim, eyes half-closed sardonically.

"Why would you tape that?" Zim said quickly, trying to get off the subject of himself.

"For _posterity,_" Dib hissed.

Admitting defeat, Zim sighed. "Fine, fine. I wasn't paying attention, blah blah, so very sorry, will never do it again, yadda yadda yadda, dooby dang bang. You came about something?"

Dib smiled. "Actually, I did. Interested in helping with my project?"

Zim shrugged half-heartedly. "Sure, why not. What is it?"

Dib held out his hand. "Wait. I want you to see it first before you decide anything."

"Alright. Who else is there?"

"Most of the people we know and a few we don't."

"Oh, a little short on staff, are we?"

"Shut up."

"Squeak!" Minimoose flew in.

Zim turned to his other robot sidekick. "Already finished? Give me the report!"

"Squeeek!" A long piece of diagnostic paper slid out of Minimoose's mouth; Zim ripped out the report, looking it over. "Eeeh? _Negative!"_

A hot blast of air knocked Zim to the floor; Dib was already in the Dibship, ready to fly off. "We're wasting time here!" Dib yelled, flying off.

"GIR!" Gir popped out of the ground, a large gopher kicking him out. Gir saluted, his eyes turning red. "Yes, my master!" Minimoose landed on Gir's head and sat there.

"Ready the Voot Cruiser, and be quick! I haven't a moment to lose!"

"Sir!" Gir's eyes turned blue again, and he ran off to the house, laughing madly. He ran into the door and fell down, still laughing. The sidewalk slab he was standing on flipped inwards and Gir fell down.

Moments later, the Voot Cruiser rose out of the roof, landing right by Zim; Gir and Minimoose were both in it, singing a variation of the Doom Song, this one replacing the words with 'doom' to 'moose'; Minimoose appeared to be singing along, in his own way.

The cockpit opened and Zim jumped into the pilot's seat. Almost immediately, it rose into the air as it flew after Dib, both of them trading the insults and taunts that marked people as friends, however odd, Zim's odd dream already fading to a dim memory.

_Meanwhile, on another world entirely..._

The principal world of the Nickelodeon system was insane in it's own way; laws of physics that frequently corresponded to cartoonish ones, a frequent lack of regard to the laws of conservation of matter, and odder things.

Another distant world, inhabited what was for the moment a single nation called the Comic Kingdom for various reasons by it's inhabitants, was insane in it's own ways.

One of those ways involved a frequent lack of regard for the law of gravity.

The castle that was home for it's ruler and his assistants was one such example; it was almost ludicrously tall, it's towers and spires looking like rolled up newspapers topped by funnel caps that were emitting a many-colored spray. It looked a lot like a typical castle, though much bigger, grander, and with a lot of magitech and plenty of odd emblems that resembled an orange cat's paw print.

It's size was almost uncountable, and there were hundreds of pathways in it; some said it had existed since the beginning of the world. Others said that it had been around for a long time, but not _that _long. However long that had been was hard to say, as no records existed from before it's construction, but there was no contesting it's extremely magical nature.

It's labyrinthine corridors hadn't all been mapped, nor did were the maps necessarily consistent from ruler to ruler; they changed as often as a change of throne, and sometimes just on what might've been the collective whims of those who were there.

Traveling it's hallways and many, many, _many _rooms based more on intuition and instinct was much smarter than using anything as pedestrian as a map.

This was something Calvin Nocker was forced to bear in mind on a daily basis.

It was extremely important that he knew about as much of Comic Castle as possible; as the Head Technomancer of The Royal Magi, it was his responsibility to ensure that all the technomagical devices in the place were operational, lest it blow up in a organ-frying Paradox backlash. It was a responsibility he took seriously, even if he didn't take anything else seriously.

At least, that's what he told people. It was better then telling them that he kept getting lost three times a day at best.

Frankly, his duties didn't actually amount to much; mostly he invented stuff for the king, kept a few devices in repair out of boredom and tinkered with his inventions while competing with peer reviewers. Still, he wasn't the best there was here for nothing.

At the moment, he was trying to find the king's courtroom, having headed up from the cafeteria with the king's breakfast on a heavy foodcart. Given the king's food habits, the two rooms were as close as possible, but...well, he was starting to become convinced that the castle was alive and obsessed with driving lost people insane.

"I HATE THIS STUPID CASTLE! IT'S COMPLETELY INSANE!" He yelled. A huge blob rose out of the ground by him.

"Tell me about it. I used to be a little blonde girl named Antonnete Wilkens." It disappeared under a trapdoor; Calvin hid a remote control back in his pocket, laughing scarily under his breath.

He looked around the big hall, annoyed. It was a _big _hall; saurians fit comfortably in here. To tell the truth, it's sheer size was daunting and the emptiness gave him the heebie-jeebies. The way the engravings on his shoes left loud clicks on the hall didn't help at all.

Calvin was a young boy that wasn't _quite _a teenager, perhaps twelve or thirteen but practically boiling with a manic brilliance that shamed a man twice his age. He was small for his age and scrawny besides, dressed in an outfit loosely based on the Adeptus Mechanus of long ago (their philosophy of machine power and transhumanism long since absorbed into mainstream culture, though their secrets remained); a long red coat set over a complicated but lightweight mechanical apparatus set over his body, the hood set high over his wild and slightly long blonde hair (so light it was nearly white in places) and a set of brass multi-faceted goggles over his brown eyes (red, with the specialized contacts he habitually wore) and a mechanical thing over his face that resembled a gasmask. On his hands and feet were oversized machine-gauntlets bristling with vents and gauges and lenses and small metal tendrils extending from slots that probably did weird and disturbing things to creep people out.

(The ominous effect was somewhat spoiled by a gray-blue wide-brimmed and pointed wizard's hat set right on top of his hooded head and rather clashed with the rest of his outfit. Opinions differed on why he felt the need to wear one for official meetings; some said it was really a magic device for increasing his intelligence. Others believed that it was a symbol of office; nobody really knew what that office _was_, but they agreed it was important and anyway the other previous officials had instituted their own odd symbols, so why not? And still others solemnly claimed that it was a Wonder of mad science that channeled the mysterious power of Inspiration that fueled his miraculous super-science. They were all wrong; he just thought it looked cool. He was gravely mistaken.)

He was Calvin (and he had no last name, though he often went by 'Nocker', a kind of mechanic fae-thing he dealt with often or 'Catach', since his ancestors had come from Catachan), a mad scientist that specialized in engineering sciences and had been mainly concerned with transformation and mobility-based Wonders before he'd started branching out, well-known for his enthusiasm to study virtually any branch of reality-bending magical arts (as well as study the effects of experimenting on himself), a dedicated alchemist of the 'drawing-circles-and-transmuting-stuff' variety and also a walking disaster area who had the dubious pleasure of holding a number of official responsibilities and titles including his own department (he changed the name of it every so often just to screw with people: currently he was sticking with the 'Bereau of Tellos Research and Develoupment and Also Defense', and if they didn't say the whole thing each time they had to wear ugly hats while playing Bloodbowl), a great deal of professional leeway for his personal projects and the freedom to interfere in the official research teams. This wasn't precisely a good thing; his inability to really think things through had resulted in sixty-six incidents of mass destruction this year alone and had earned him a lot of rightly deserved dislike from a lot of very important people. Fortunately, the King kept him around precisely because he had an uncanny talent for pissing people off, a fact he abused with malicious glee.

He _was_, after all, a mad scientist. He felt it expected of him.

At the moment, he was pushing a cart loaded with breakfast foods; at the very least, he didn't have to prepare it. That was Jon's job. He pitied him, in the "but for the grace of God go I" sense.

Say what you would about King Garfield, but the cat was nothing if not a glutton.

Some occasionally how Calvin and a few other key members of Garfield's inner circle had made it there at all. In a few cases it was a thing of merit, but they were often the sort of people who had the knack of always being under the radar all the time.

He was the King, though, and did what he would. As for the other appointments, Calvin and Hobbes...well, neither of them quite knew just how they got their jobs. That was the thing about things going by real fast. And the King liked to keep some people close.

Some might protest appointing a teddy bear the Secretary of State, but other rulers had made more insane rulings, like the time Mhooeny The Loony had declared all executions to be performed by beating the condemned to death with salmon.

He liked his job; once you got past the falsities, it was enormously easy and at the very least he now had a budget that could keep up with his ideas.

That didn't make the stupid food cart any less heavier, though.

He idlely considered transmuting the food and cart to make it all less heavy, but the last time he tried that it blew up in his face. Literally.

Muttering long and pointlessly about how unfair his life was and why it was so much to ask that the King just go on an actual diet again, he ran right into a stone post.

Actually, it wasn't a post. It was the base of a statue he had transmutated from the crumbled bits of the old statue of the King of Od when he had been dethroned and made the statue of King Garfield.

Turning around, leaving the cart, he saw a huge pair of blue double doors. And that wasn't exaggeration; it looked as it had been built for the Titans of yore, and the golden doorknob was at least ten feet above his head. The doors loomed over him, inspiring thoughts of an ancient reptilian beast waiting within to bore all with stories of his time.

Undeterred, he knocked on the door sharply, the noise resounding several times in the huge deserted hallway.

Three feet and ten inches of the door he was standing in front of folded away like the page of a book. Stepping back behind the foodcart, he wheeled it into the vast room.

It was a big rounded antechamber, and mostly empty most of the time. The only noticeable features were the two giant statues of himself and Hobbes alongside the throne, the long red carpet trailing from the entrance to the throne and the throne itself.

The throne was about four feet tall, which was a little superfluous since the King was only two and a half feet tall when he was standing up. It was a little wider than King Garfield was, so there was some proportion. It's metal was made of a magical metal called perfected silver, better known as lunargent, and the cushioning on it was silk filled with adjusted stuffing, both made of unstable molecules for maximum comfort. The upper part of it was engraved in a flowed design that melded together in the romantized form of a heart. Considering that he'd been on the throne for at least a few years, he'd made quite an impression on it.

"Hey, Your Majesty!" He yelled, slowly rolling the cart in. "You wouldn't believe how weird everything's been today! First I couldn't find my hat because a little gremlin stole it and then it just got worse when it mutated into a horrific thing and then-"

He looked around. Something was wrong. By now King Garfield should had interjected with some kind of remark or rude observation, but he was being uncharacteristically quiet.

Odd.

Looking over the foodcart, he realized what was wrong; King Garfield wasn't in the throne or anywhere in the room. Looking up, he saw the TV that was hidden in the ceiling and could lower down in front of the throne was concealed in the ceiling and showed no sign of having lowering itself since last night; he noticed a dopey looking anthropomorphic sandy beagle Garfield's height crept out from behind the throne, and on that throne a note sealed with a familiar orange wax paw print.

Grand High Deputy Odie, walking on all fours, grabbed the note in his mouth and walked over to Calvin, depositing it on the ground. He sat down, staring blankly into space and panting heavily. Shrugging, Calvin picked up the letter and opened it. Unfolding it, he saw that it was written in a computer font as usual. That signified it was the King's writing as he couldn't write intelligibly. He read the letter, thinking it was probably just another leave of absence again for a few weeks.

Then he froze, taking in what it said. An eyebrow twitched. Fifteen seconds later, he exploded out of the room screaming as Odie followed him, yipping loudly.

"HOBBES! _HOOOOOBBESSSS!"_

There were a few basic reactions to Calvin's mind, and one of them was to freak out and get Hobbes.

_Fifteen minutes later..._

In the garden of the Comic Castle , Hobbes Pooka was catnapping.

He was an anthropomorphic tiger (humanoid animals being quite common in the Kingdom) and probably in his mid-teens, tall by human standards but slightly short by tiger standards, his powerfully built martial artist's body covered by pale orange fur fading to creamy white around his front and boyish muzzle, the erratic black stripes mixing with stylized tribal tattoo-like markings that went all over his entire body with a small degree of obsessive decoration. It should have made him look a little intimidating but his face, boyishly handsome by his people's standards and sweetly kittenish by most other's, gave him the impression of a curious young warrior on a pilgrammage from the reservation. Crouching over like one of his most distant feline ancestors, animatedly explaining some point or another to his audience, he gave the impression that he was romancing all of them without being aware of it. This was an accurate impression. Another impression, based on his markings, fur color and facial features, was that he was a member of a tribe that primarily occupied the planet formerly known as the homelands of the long-gone Space Wolves (only recently reclaimed by the Kingdom); more specifically, the Kotirrim, a loose organization of cat-themed humanoids with a grudge against humanity, and even more specifically a subset that descended from Siberian tigers. (Or, more likely, Fenris tigers.) This impression was _technically _true, but not in a particular pleasant way. It certainly wasn't something he was comfortable discussing, and so most people assumed that he had nothing to do with him and just didn't like being associated with them for whatever reason. _This _impression was very mistaken indeed.

His uniform was...odd. Unlike Calvin, who had a number of departments to operate in dictatorial cheerfulness, Hobbes took a more democratic approach to things and instead wandered in and out of various military organizations within the Kingdom, holding fairly high positions in all of them and able to exercise authority in all of them and prone to going to taking charge of different positions when the mood struck him, generally just in the nick of time for one dangerous misison or another; the general concensus was that he was like a lucky penny that turned up just when his skills were needed, his rambunctious personality and carefree attitude constantly putting him at odds with the more stern top brass that regarded him as a monkey wrench in the most carefully laid-up plans. (For his part, Hobbes thought he had the worst luck in the world; just when he took up a different position to get away from the action, he wound up in a different problem. And to top it off, his superiors thought he was a pain in the neck. Granted, that was _fun_, but he prefered to avoid conflict unless it was more fun to start some.) Accordingly, he had a tendency to mix-up uniforms when he wasn't strictly attached to a particular regiment; right now, he wore the armored longcoat of a Battle-Sister (an all-women organization of religious women warriors going back to the Imperium; he shouldn't have been part of them due to being male, but it was astonishing what sheer dumb luck can cause), the layered vestments of the Disorganized Latter-Day Chaplains, the combat leathers of the Interplanetary Marines, a pair of steel-toed combat boots that were probably part of the Planetary Defense Legion's uniform, and other odds and ends.

Just about the only things on him that wasn't mix-and-match uniform were his markings, a massively oversized and floppy sombrero (which he'd tried, without much success, to be instated as the uniform hat of over a dozen different regiments), and a number of necklaces made with the same care and artistic turn of mind that had led to the garden's current incarnations; most of the necklaces were collections of teeth strung on shiny beads and pretty stones he'd found (each tooth taken from a single monster he'd killed, and there were a _lot _of teeth on those necklaces, including ones from an cannibal shark-man that made the misfortune of going after Calvin in Hobbes' proximity), but one was a small plate on a chain that read _WWAD? _(_What Would Aslan Do?_). The end result was that the average mind couldn't be sure if he was a heroic warrior, a childlike joker, or a mixture of the two. The answer was more complicated than that.

He was using his arms as a pillow and snoring softly. Anyone who saw him at the moment would not have thought him to be the Captain of the Royal Order of Crusaders; once you got past the fact that he was a tiger covered almost head to foot in tribal tattoos and wore armor constructed from the most fearsome of beasts in the world(he believed in making the most of one's prey, considering it a basic courtesy), he took on an overwhelming resemblence to something cuddly and adorable, like an oversized plush toy.

A mechanical hoverpod crashed into the ground five feet from him, covering him in dust; he stretched lazily, he turned aside, muttering sleepily.

Calvin and Odie popped out of a concealed hatch in it, the former wildly looking for his best friend, the latter panting with a tongue the size of a zucchini.

"Hobbes!" Calvin yelled, catching sight of the tiger. "Hobbes, wake up!" He ran up to the tiger's side, panting shallowly. "Wake up, we've got a problem even worse than that time I accidentally made twenty evil duplicates and they conquered the world for five and a half days but then spontaneously imploded for reasons I have yet to establish!"

Hobbes rolled over, still snoring. His tail uncurled and twitched from side to side.

"Arrrgh!" Calvin laid his arms on his elbows, touching similar circles on each side that had odd symbols that looked like four lightning bolts touching each other in the middle. They suddenly emitted a bright purple light that met between his arms and formed a small ball of lightning that striked out in a concentrated bolt; Hobbes rolled onto his feet suddenly, holding up a shield; the bolt jumped off the shield and hit Calvin, knocking him into a tree and snagging his shoulder flap on a branch.

He kicked himself off the tree, yelping when he hit the ground.. He glared at Hobbes, who had rolled onto his back laughing. "Very funny."

"You had it coming. Good morning, by the way."

"Yeah yeah-wait! Hobbes, we got a problem!" Calvin ran up to his friend, lowering his voice. "But we have to keep it quiet, so don't tell _anyone_!"

Hobbes frowned thoughtfully. "Queen Arlene?"

"_Not even_ the Queen!" He snapped.

Hobbes cocked his head, looking surprised. "Susie?"

Calvin grabbed his hair, on the verge of making himself prematurely bald. "No, no, no! It's top secret, you idiot!"

Hobbes cocked an, looking at something behind Calvin. He wagged his index finger in a _come hither _gesture.

Calvin broke off his ranting, staring at Hobbes with his brand of bewilderment.

He pointed at Calvin's head and twirled that same finger around in the same manner as a ring on a solar system diagram.

"Wha..?" Calvin said as he slowly turned around, seeing two females behind him; a human girl his age, with neatly trimmed brown hair, wearing yellow robes similar to his and a small mechanical rabbit on her shoulder. Next to her was a pink anthropomorphic cat about two feet and a half tall, wearing a red dress and a surprised expression.

Susie Derkins crossed her arms and looked annoyed, while Queen Arlene looked at the two boys curiously.

"Heh heh heh," Calvin said weakly, while Hobbes snickered behind him.


	2. Of Machines, Missings Kings, And Lunacy

Hi everyone! I'm back again, with what I hope is a more flowing chapter. Those of you who've paid attention may have noticed that I tend to deviate from the KH storyline a bit; I can promist you that's it's only going to get weirder from here.

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, Invader Zim, Calvin and Hobbes, or anything copyrighted inf this chapter. I do own the concept of the Portal Generator.

_I've a lot of work to do._

_I'm not sure exactly why, but that's besides the point._

_Sometimes though, I wonder why I ever listen to you,_

_it always leads to me getting hurt. Then again, who else are they going to appoint?_

_I hate being the only one that knows how to do this sort of thing at all_

_and always having to be the one that ends up doing something stupid_

_and takes the big fall._

_And of course, there is the one question that does remain._

_What exactly is it that I'm trying to attain?_

_Yep, we've got a lot of work to do._

_We aren't sure precisely what we're attempting,_

_or where where we're going to,_

_but that doesn't actually matter. We do have a clue what it is we're hunting._

_We've gone off with less that that!_

_We got a job to do, and we like to think that our word means something._

_So we're off to get another adventure under our collective hat._

_We don't have a adventurous song to sing,_

_but that don't matter, we've got a job to do!  
Let's go! -You Don't Want To Know. Actually, You Probably Do. But I'm Not Going To Tell You. Or Am I? No. No I'm Not. The Actual Truth of The Matter Is That I Don't Feel Like Telling You And I'm Just That Lazy. Blame It On Shoddy Last-Second Editing. Or The YMCA. They're Good For Everything!_

The Western Sea glowed orange, reflective spots glistening upon the water.

Schools of lesser-then-anthropomorphic fish swam just under the surface, above the sea creature community of Bikini Bottom, continuing a centuries-old tradition of putting themselves in a perfect place to get killed.

No one knew just why they did this; presumably, like the lemmings that annually threw themselves over the cliffs in the winter of the more northern areas in a similar manner to the unintelligent and rarely seen though often heard Easily Alarmed Stockbroker, there was a reason. No one cared, except maybe the fishermen, rodent eaters and bookies.

Despite this glaring omission in judgment, they weren't complete idiots, merely half-degenerated ones. Which was why the school suddenly dissolved and separated, it's component fish scattering into silver flakes, their trails discernible by the sunlight glinting off their scales.

Moments after they did so, an enormous sea serpent broke through the water's surface, craning up and towering over all it surveyed. The serpent suddenly twitched, and immediately starting smashing around in the water like a three-year old throwing a tantrum. Immense coils that could crush steel hulls bucked through the water with the distinct qualities of a horse at a rodeo. It dove into the water, swimming as deep as possible, and then abruptly burst out of the water, smashing back into it.

It roared hoarsely, sounding like a badly cast bugle played by a owl with a throat disease. The water around it pulsed, small waves rippling away from it.

Water streaming off it's long face, it shook itself like a dog trying to cast off an irritating flea; and behind the last of it's four crest-spines, two relatively tiny spots yelled, "_Yee-HA!"_

Unnoticed by it, two personal craft flew by it; a purplish round one and a blue-gray one. They flew through it's roiling coils, turning around and pausing momentarily, as if the ships were staring at it.

"Did you just see a yellow sponge in square pants and a squirrel in a space suit riding that sea serpent?" Dib's voice said over Zim's intercom.

"Isn't that the sea serpent thing Aang told us about?" The Irken wondered.

"This place gets weirder everyday." Dib's ship suddenly veered away.

"Hey! Distraction with sightseeing is _cheatery!"_ The ports of the Voot Runner's engines glowed a bright magenta color, shooting off incredibly fast.

The Dibship subjectively slowed down as Zim caught up to it. They came closer to the surface, ship bottoms touching the water and creating neat little waves.

They veered around each other, criss-crossing in patterns that were happenstance. They continually flew around each other, each waiting for a moment of weakness.

They rapidly approached one of several small islands enclosed within a large collapsed stone wall; it was altogether roughly the size of half of the Hawaiian Archipelago. There was a large dead tree, long since hollowed out by by Zim to serve as another base near a rudimentary dock with several boats, hovercars, spaceships and one submarine currently docked. It was dominated by a sandy beach, the exception being the greenery around the tree. Scattered through it were ruins of some sorts, from a culture that seemed similar to the pyramid building civilizations, but altogether different, more advanced.

It was the largest island on an archipelago called the Destiny Islands, for no reason other than Zim thought it sounded cool. They had been dredged up in a minor seaquake after Zim returned from the war, and he claimed it as his personal property, announcing himself as a nation. Seeing as there was only _one _other nation now, that didn't mean much.

There was a small crowd milling around a beach on the island in beach, slowly moving towards a large edifice of some sort that was standing on an outcropping just off the coast to the northeast, connected to the island by a bridge.

The Voot Runner flew over Dib's ship and stopped moving in front of it; the Dibship ran right into the Voot, crashing into the shallow water.

It hovered out unsteadily, coming to a sudden stop as it crashed against the beach. Dib stumbled out of it, shaking his head queasily as he realized that Zim had already beaten him to the beach, his ship sitting by a palm tree like a small kitten attempting to pin down it's home; Minimoose was gathering coconuts for some reasons, putting them together in a trapezoid pattern. He circled around the makeshift pyramid, squeaking to himself. He settled onto the top of it with a small inquisitive squeak.

"Yes, carry on, Minimoose." Zim said. "Come, Gir!"

Gir saluted, eyes now red. "Yes, master!" he hopped onto Zim's shoulder. His eyes went blue. "It smells like roast toast on the coast!"

A fried piece of bread with bright green eyes and a tiny crown floating just above his head popped up. "He's right! It does...wait, that's me!" it gasped. "I just made a logical connection from two seemingly unrelated elements! Someone call the media! TIMMY, HELP!" It jumped on a familiar head.

Danny Fenton looked up. "Get off my head!" He flicked the transmogrified faerie off his head.

The toast landed in the sand. "Geez, Timmy's got a popular hair style!"

Unaware of this, Zim turned around and noticed Dib glaring at him. "_AHAHHAHAHAHAHHAAAAH!_ Dib, Dib, Dib. When will you learn that you cannot defeat _ZIM!"_

"What about all those times I stopped your nefarious plans when you were trying to conquer the Earth?" Dib said snidely.

Zim looked like he was having some kind of apocalyptic seizure. "Buh...muh...gah...WE HAD A PEACE TREATY! NOW YOU WILL SUFFER THE WRATH OF ZIM!"

Zim stood there, holding a dramatic pose.

"Well?" Dib said, crossing his arms.

Zim looked at him with one open eye. "Do not rush me!"

Dib tapped his foot. "I'm waiting."

A tumbleweed bounced by them. They watched it go by.

A sea wind breezed by, carrying sand along the air.

"It's coming to me! In a minute!"

_One minute later..._

"Well?"

"...Shut up! _I HAVE SPOKEN!_"

Dib snorted, deciding to leave the matter at that. The tumbleweed from earlier flew out from behind him, landing right by his feet. Picking it up, he looked over it curiously. Looking up, he saw that for some reason Zim was quickly moving away, looking amused for some reason.

He heard a rumbling sound.

Exactly five and a half seconds later, Gir slammed into him, riding him through the sand like a sled. As the sand-dust cleared away, the only evidence of this was a lump in the sand. Gir popped out of it, holding the tumbleweed aloft victoriously. He threw it again, chasing after it happily.

Dib's head appeared from under the sand, moaning. He stood up, brushing off sand.

The tumbleweed bounced off his prominent forehead onto his open hand. "Oh no," he said slowly, the coming events dawning upon him like the nuclear death wave of a supernova that was too close for comfort.

And Gir ploughed into him, propelling him into the sand. Gir popped off the pile of sand again, juggling the tumbleweed and humming the Moose Song, Minimoose squeaking along.

Dib crawled out, mumbling inchoherently.

"Why would there be Russian thistle on a island?" he said to himself.

Shaking his head to clear away sand residue, he saw Zim walked around aimlessly, watching the readout screen on a small device he was holding intently.

Not paying attention to where he was going, the Irken walked right into a boy with an even bigger head than Dib's, topped with hair that looked like the rear end of a duck; they both sprawled into the ground, Zim's knee lodged in the other guy's back.

The big-headed victim of Zim's obliviousness stood up, dropping Zim to the ground. He turned around angrily as Zim got up. "Hey! Why don't you watch..where you're..go..ing..." his indignated yell faltered as he realized who he was talking to. "Zim."

"Neutron."

Dib walked up to them, looking back and forth from Jimmy Neutron's neutral expression to Zim's cold look of dislike. "Uh, did something happen between you too?"

_Zim toyed with a roundish sort of object. It was black, with several green diamond shaped spots around it._

_It was secured into place by four clamps similar to his spider-leg attachments. He pushed one of the spots on it, opening one of it's sides. He put something into it, mindful of the glowing green orb connected to a spider's webs of wires._

_He was in a laboratory, clicking away at his new bomb. Jimmy Neutron watched him for a few minutes, saying things to himself, clucking diapprovingly, and muttering about Zim's approach._

_Zim gritted his teeth, forcing himself to ignore what the self-proclaimed boy genius was saying._

_"You're doing it all wrong," Jimmy opined. "You should put a quantum deconstruction module around the explosion compression field. That way it'll be more effective."_

_Zim snapped. "Silence! I didn't come here for you to order me around, human! Shut up or you'll be the first one I test this on."_

_Jimmy shoved Zim aside, fiddling with the internals with an all-purpose wrench. "You just need to do this...and this..."_

_"NO!" Zim yelled, stretching a hand out from down on the ground. "Don't do tha-"_

_The spots on it lit up._

_There was an enormous flash, and a sound that could have been a single heartbeat of the world._

_When the flash faded away, the lab was gone, an sprawlng wreckage in it's place. Jimmy and Zim were standing stock-still, covered in soot._

_Zim glared at Jimmy, who looked notably sheepish._

_"You idiot."_

"Something." Zim growled.

"Why are you still mad about the bomb thing? That was over three monthes ago!" Jimmy protested.

"I hate being out of the loop," Dib said grumpily. "I never know what's going on."

"Bomb? What bo-oh, that. I was talking about when you took my favorite hat! My Devastasis Academy of Military Learning beret! It was given to me personally by Major General Splook when I graduated, and you _stole _it!"

Jimmy blinked. "What?"

"It was _my _hat!" Zim yelled, ignoring Jimmy's attempts to get a word in as he continued to rant. "You asked me for it. I _politely _told you no with a bazooka in the face like I always do. And you crept into my room in the middle of the night-"

"Seriously, I have no idea-"

"-And then you **_lost _**it! You lost my beret! And now you got the nerve to wonder why I can't stand your presence!"

"I didn't say anything about that."

"I wasn't being literal! And you call yourself a genius!"

"You mean the hat you're wearing?" Dib said, pointing at Zim's head.

Zim patted his head slowly, realizing with a shock that Dib was right. He turned to Jimmy, who was tapping his foot impatiently.

"Well?" Jimmy said.

"Well what?"

"You were wrongfully accusing me! I think I deserve an apology."

Twitching, Zim forcefully exhaled. "Fine! You were right and I was..was...garwe...agam...agaee...wrong. Happy now?"

"Yes." He walked off.

Zim scuffed the sand with his boot heel.

He noticed something; the crowd of people, mostly people he and Dib knew, was moving to the strange building he'd seen earlier; it was about twenty feet tall, terminating into a square flat top, which had four pincerlike towers next to it, each making the majority of the thing's height. It was obviously a complicated machine, which was evident from it's structure and the devices built into it.

"What is that? he said to Dib, pointing at the weird machine.

"That? It's...well...a means to travel to other worlds."

"It's what?"

"A machine to open a portal in the space-time continum and trasport anyone that steps in it to another world."

"And...why would you do that?"

"Because I'm tired of being here."

Zim stopped yelling, and he stopped moving. "What?"

Dib looked like he was about to start ranting, and then it looked like he just gave up. "I'm just tired of all of this. All my nights out, all those mornings I spend keeping paranormal events from killing people, all the things I prove and disprove, all my work...it doesn't mean anything to most people. I'm tired of constantly being insulted by people who don't understand what I do. I'm tired of having my theories used by my dad as proof I was institutionalized before. I'm tired of always waking up and knowing that nothing's going to improve. I want to find the other worlds. I want to stop being the butt of everyone's jokes. I just want to get away from this. I'm tired of it all."

Zim didn't know what to say to that.

Dib looked at Zim. "Exactly. Now, what do you say? Want to help?"

He held out his hand.

Zim grasped it, and they shook firmly, the deal sealed.

"It's not like there's anything life-altering going on," Zim said, grabbing the tumbleweed as it flew at him, throwing it at the head of an obnoxious chihuahua.

The libary of the castle wasn't very big, but it was sufficient to house the four there.

It had wobbly looking shelves for the many books there, most of them never read by the King. Well, far as anyone knew anyway. It was a clean room, both due to the general lack of use(until recently, anyway) and the fact that the castle was perfectly capable of keeping itself clean. It didn't always do it, but the possibility was there. The room was lined with painting of the King's various ancestors, all who, dispite running the gamut from the frontier cat Danny Femur who sought out the Weird West in search of tuna cans to the islander chief Gottaeatalotta who introduced the family's obsession with kicking random victims into unpleasant places out of boredom, looked almost exactly like Garfield himself, allowing for differences of ethnicity and small things like that. Except for his great-uncle Wilburt, who had been a wild boar and of course his grandpa Leon, who'd been a lion with bad taste in names.

Under their watchful gaze(which was probably quite literal. This was the Castle of the Comic Kingdom, after all.) Queen Arlene looked over the King's note critically.

"Well?" Susie said, her rabbit helper Mechanized Rabbit Befriendly UNit hopping around her, catalouging the events.

Arlene licked her claws, clicking them together. "Garfield needs to find a better font than Comic Sans GF."

Susie rubbed her temples. "I mean, what does it _say?"_

Arlene rolled her big orange eyes. "I was getting to that."

The mechinacal rabbit, code-named Mr. Bun, hopped to Arlene's feet, looking up at her with it's digital eyes, green dots in the simplified shapes of a questioning look.

Calvin and Hobbes leaned back against the tall and warped bookshelf, the tiger's tail flicking periodically.

_He's more stressed than he's letting on,_ Calvin thought to himself. He wasn't the only one. The desk where the King did his computer stuff had an unusual emptiness. That wasn't odd in itself; he didn't come here often. But his absence had a notable effect on everything here; the castle itself seemed to cry out it's master's absence. Or possibly just the lack of the kitchen being used.

The pink cat cleared her throat a few times and read the letter aloud.

"Calvin and Hobbes,

Sorry for running off so quickly, but this is something that threatens our very existence. My research over the past few months since my trip a few years ago have confirmed my fears; there's a one-sided war going on, and we've been completely oblivious and we ain't the only ones. We've all seen it; the stars have been disappearing from the night sky, and that's only one part of this. Something even worse is behind this, and something must be done to stop it at all costs..I've had to leave to conduct my own investigation into this situation.

As your King I have a mission for you; somewhere out there, among the worlds, there is someone who has a 'key'. I need you to find him and stay with him, no matter what. That key is vitally important; without it, all hope is lost.

My advice to you is this; go to the town called Traverse Town. Find a guy there named Spike; he'll help you out. -King Garfield.

P.S.:When Arlene finds out, tell her I'm sorry. Or she'll beat me again."

It was signed with the orange pawprint that served as the King's seal.

Susie rubbed Mr. Bun's head absently. "What does it mean?"

Arlene sighed. "It means...we'll just have to trust the King's judgement. Stupid as it sounds." she added in a mutter.

Everyone in the room agreed, vocalizing assent.

"What could make him think that this could be a good idea?" Hobbes said. "I hope he's not in danger."

Calvin thoughtfully rubbed his chin. He stood up from the bookshelf and saluted. "Not to worry, Arlene! Me and Hobbes will find the King and this 'key'."

Hobbes also saluted. "Yeah! You can count on us!"

Arlene exhaled, relaxing. "Thanks, you two.

She frowned. "You do realize it'll probably be dangerous."

Hobbes thumped his armor. "Nothing we don't deal with on a daily basis, Your Highness."

Susie crossed her arms, smiling.

Calvin suddenly remembered something. "Susie! Can you take care of my projects while I'm gone?"

She inclined her head slightly. "Of course. Try not to get yourselves killed; it's hard to find interestingly weird friends."

"Thanks. I think."

While he was looking away, Arlene tossed a book at him; it was a small brown book, a little too small for him. "Huh? What's this for?"

Arlene gestured at the desk. "To chronicle your travels. It'll be his journal."

"Whose?" Calvin looked at the desk; there wasn't anyone there.

"Right here, smart guy."

Calvin looked at the desk and his jaw dropped as he saw the speaker.

A considerably care-worn bone-white skull with white marbles for eye, similar to a Hamlet stage prop, turned to him. It's marbel eyes rolled down, revealing that they were eyes, ones with bluish pupils. Somehow, dispite no means of doing so, he floated off the desk and through the room, bobbing periodically and stopping in front of Calvin's face.

"Huh? Who..whuh...buh?"

"Name's Morte. And I'm assuming you're the guy that taught historians the meaning of 'inarticulate'."

Hobbes tapped his cheek curiously. "And what are you?"

Morte's eyes made a weird expression that might've been the equivilant of a raised sardonic eyebrow for a being with only eyes and speech to express itself. "I'm the mascot for the Headless Horseman club band! I'm a talking floating skull; what did you think I was?"

"Incapable of shutting up?" Calvin surmised.

"Ooh, good one." He hoved by Arlene's ears. "I like this kid."

Floating back to Calvin, he stopped and turned back to Arlene. "So who are these jokers?"

"The human's the Head Wizard of the Royal Magi, and the tiger's the Captain of the Royal Order of the Crusaders. I told you about them."

"Really." Morte clicked his teeth rythematically, which struck Calvin as being similar to someone twiddling their thumbs to bide time. "Don't see what they've got going for them."

"For one thing, skin." Calvin retorted.

"Lot of good that's done you."

"Hey! Boneheaded dolt!"

"Bigheaded munchkin!"

"What, jealous I can make expressions?"

"No, but I can play poker without people guessing my cards!"

"How're you supposed to play cards without hands?"

"Enough already!" Hobbes yelled, grabbing Calvin by the collar and the back of Morte, banging the two irritants together. As Morte and Calvin moaned, the tiger picked up the skull off the ground, staring at him intently.

"Uh..." Morte's eyes went back and forth. "What large teeth you have?"

Hobbes hummed to himself, looking the skull over. A few cracks here and there, but it seemed very well preserved. He flicked him up on his thumb, catching and spining him like a basketball on the other thumbclaw.

Morte forced the spinning to stop, and Hobbes grabbed him, holding him close to his face.

"Uh, I know I'm a looker, but I don't think I like you _that _way, Cap-"

Hobbes' eyes narrowed as his nostrils flared and his lips curled into a snarl, shutting up Morte. He sniffed deeply, working out the skull's scent. He sneezed. Humming to himself again, he grimaced at Morte and breathed in.

"Hey, I don't smell that bad! It's just a little formalahyde-"

"No, you twit," Calvin said from the floor. "It's called a Flehmen reaction. He breathing in your scent so it reaches the Flehmen gland on the roof of his mouth."

"Oh."

He had a strange scent, in that he almost didn't have one at all besides what he picked up in various places. There was this one really strange one that he couldn't quite place. The closest he could come to was burnt match tips mixed with greased metal. It was considerably faded and extremely old, but to his animal senses, it rang out in a way that he couldn't ignore.

He tossed Morte in the air. "He's clean. More or less."

"Hmmph! I just got manhandled by an overgrown housecat, how clean d'ya think I am?"

Hobbes cracked his knuckles and showed his big claws in a single gesture. "Care to repeat that?"

"Didn't say anything! So, we going or what?"

"We going." Calvin said. He, Hobbes and Morte turned to Arlene and saluted; well, Calvin and Hobbes did. Morte drummed out bugle taps on his teeth, but the idea was the same.

"Your Highness!" they said simultaneously.

She saluted them back. "Good luck!"

Susie also saluted. "Take care!"

The Captain and Head dropped their salutes, nodding. They left the room.

Arlene and Susie realised that Morte was still floating there.

Hobbes rushed up and grabbed the skull, pulling him away. "You're coming too!"

Zim and Dib walked by a few people, most of them glad to avoid Zim's attention, as Dib explained the 'project' to Zim.

It was mostly completed, the only thing remaining was to install a few key components in the internals of the ship.

"Constructions was Jimmy's job, and that's almost done; from what I can tell, that is."

"Shouldn't you have a complete record of everyone's jobs?"

"Ever try to get a lot of people doing one thing at the same time and have a comprehensive report?"

"Good point."

"I just need everyone's report and we'll be able to finish by nightfall."

Dib started yelling, getting discouraged when everyone either didn't hear him over the commotion or just ignored him. "Hey, you-sorry, hey, Rocko-dang it, hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! Aw, forget it."

Zim smirked. "Having some problems getting everyone's attention?"

Dib glared at him. "Oh, and you could do better?"

Zim waved his hand as if shooing a troublesome breeze. "Leave it to me, Dib. Leave it to me."

He placed a finger on what might have been a chin, looking into the sky. He tapped his finger.

His eyes wandered onto a nearby craggy pillar of rock, sticking out of the ground like a subterranean chiminy.

A plan clicked together in his mind.

His Pak beeped, and Gir popped out of the sand, Minimoose resting comfortably on his head.

"Sir!" "Squeak!"

"Gir, Minimoose! Listen well, _for I have a plan!"_

They disappeared behind a nearby outcropping, muttering low enough that Dib had to struggle to hear them; he couldn't discern much besides Gir's loud babbling, which served as an effective sound-screen.

"Okay, good. GO!" He heard Zim say.

There was some kind of sound behind the rock; he heard vinyl rubbing against cloth, metal, and whatever Minimoose was made of. Then he heard a definite scuffling sound and jets firing.

A moment later, Zim, Gir and Minimoose appeared at the top of the rock pillar, looking weirder than usual, and that was saying something. Zim was wearing a grape suit, with holes for his limbs and head. Minimoose was wearing a little peanut suit, his face, antlers and little feet exposed. Gir was wearing the cat suit Zim made for him after the whole Tak thing. It had nothing to do with what was going on, but it looked adorable. For some reason, they were all carrying maracas.

"HIIIIIIIIIIIIII, E'VYBODY!" Gir shrieked with his perpetual cheer.

Some people turned away from their jobs and saw them on the rock. Several nudged others and pointed at Zim, Gir and Minimoose.

There was a definite change in the atmosphere of the mob; their previously unfocused attitude changed to one that was intently focused on the trio atop the rock.

"Squeak!"

"Aha, well said, Minimoose!"

"Awwwwwwww!" Several people down below said,.

Zim pointed at the crowd. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?"

The crowd stood still. Someone coughed. For some reason, a giant flying mole rat flew out of the sky and carried him to the mythical land of Shambala.

Zim's eyes darted back and forth. "I said, DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?"

"Uhhh, advanced shop class time?" A pink star fish in bathing trunks suggested.

"No. Noo, my poor simple...whatever you are. Iiiiit's-"Gir joined in here. "-PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!"

Minimoose's antlers sprouted neon signs that said _It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!_ He also sprouted little stereos that started playing an energetic tune.

And thus, Gir and Zim sang, while Minimoose floated happily to the song's rhythm.

"_It's peanut butter jelly time-a!_

_Peanut butter jelly time!_

_Peanut butter jelly time!_

_Whey-up! Whey-up!_

_There you go! There you go!_

The tone of the song changed; Zim and Gir's more relaxed danced suddenly became faster and more frenzied, their posed more frentic. Gir kept doing split-rise-splits, and Zim looked a little like he was shadow-bonking.

_Peanut butter jell-ley!_

_Peanut butter jell-ley!_

_Peanut butter jell-ley!_

The tune sped up to match Zim and Gir's pace. Minimoose started dancing too, bobbing sideways rapidly. By this time, everyone in a position to do so was watching them.

_Peanut butter jelly!_

_Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat!_

_Peanut butter jelly!_

_Peanut butter jelly!_

_Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat!"_

The song stopped, and they made their final poses; Zim crossing his maracas in a kind of X-shape, Gir standing on his head and making a cresent shape, and Minimoose floating to his side.

Minimoose righted himself, retracting his sign and stereos.

In a sudden roar, the audiance started applauding; Zim and Minimoose bowed. Gir tried, but overbalanced and fell off; on his plummet down, he yelled, "I'm okaaaaay-"

There was a loud smash, and a silence.

"I'm still okay!"

Gir flew off the ground, undamaged, and returned to the rock top.

"Sqeeeek!"

"Yes, he should work on his balance too."

Gir sat to the ground and started morosely scratching out a complicated algorithim that conclusively proved the existence of bacon; Zim was unaware of that and rubbed Gir's head. "What? You got your dance number!"

"Yeah..."Gir sniffled, but I wanted to do the robot!"

Zim stared at him. "Gir, you _are _a robot."

"Then why can't I _do it?_" Gir started sobbing incolsolably.

"Tacos!" A guy pushed a food cart said from the ground. "Tacos for sale!"

Gir yipped vocalized happiness and jumped off the cliff, running to the guy.

"Are you following my robot around?" Zim yelled indignantly as Gir ordered enough tacos to kill a powerwalker.

"Buddy, he just put my kids through college!"

At this adorable display, people started throwing things admid cooing and the 'awwwing'. Zim caught one and looked over it. "A complete and up-to-date report on the machine's construction from when I started singing? That's convienent."

Jumping down from the rock, the zipper snagged on a twig and he fell out of his suit, landing by Dib. "Got the report!"

Dib was giving him a look that made him look like he just saw an orca jump on land and start tap-dancing to the tune of Sunkist Tuna.

"What?" the Irken said.

"What was _that _about? Since when do you do dance routines?"

Zim crossed his arms and turned away huffily. "What? Invaders aren't allowed to pursue interests in the liberal arts?"

"Technically, you weren't an Invader after Operation Impending Doom One."

Zim snorted. "Bah! You speak of bygones, man."

"Not so bygone it doesn't sting."

"Shaddup!"

Dib consulted the list. "According to this, constructions almost complete. We just need the power core to be properly regulated and aligned, and some materials to finish the exterior. I'll do that last part."

"What about me?"

Dib 'hmmm'ed to himself. "Well, I originally had evisioned a bigger part for you, but that was before it was almost finished. So I think you could do the power core thing."

Zim thumped a fist against his chest in a declartory gesture. "Of course I can! Never doubt me!"

"Yes," Dib said dryly. "Of course." He went back to the list. "But first I have to complete my part. Otherwise-"

"Otherwise?"

"We could spontaeneously teleport a miniture supernova into Nicktown's power center, killing everyone and everything within eight light-years almost instantly."

"That's a distinct possibility? No one told me that was a distinct possibility. Why did no one tell me that was a distinct possibility?"

"The point is, I gotta go get those parts activated."

"So where are they?" Zim said.

Dib laughed. "Right over there."

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte walked and in one case floated down a slanted tunnel, flickering shadows dancing across their face and shed by the floating torchlights that illuminated their way.

Calvin fidgeted; he hated uncomfortable silences. Judging from Morte's looks, he felt the same way.

Hobbes didn't particularily care; being an cat, he disliked noisey things in general, which was odd considering who his best and only real friend was. Silence was a rare and gratefully accepted commodity in his life.

Placing his hands behind his head in a carefree and relaxed way, Calvin cleared his throat. "So, Morte. Who were you before you..y'know, the skull thing."

"I'm the head of Vecna."

Calvin stopped walking, staring at him blankly as his arms slumped. "The head of what-now? Ancev spelled backwards? What kind of anagram is that?"

"Never mind. I used to be a sage of some kind in my old life."

"And the skull business?"

"I, uh, don't really like to talk about it. Painful stuff from back home."

Hobbes' ears twitched back and forth. Morte was being evasive. "So where _are _you from?"

Morte's voice waxed nostalgic. "Me? I'm from the Planes."

Calvin blinked. "'The Planes'? Never heard of that world."

Morte rolled his eyes. "That's because it's not a world like you know 'em. The Planes are, well, it's hard to descripe. First thing you should know is that world's like this one is what we call a Prime. As in one of the Prime Worlds. Where I've lived most of my life is Sigil, the City of Doors."

"'Doors'? Why? A lot of carpenters or something?"

Morte snorted, which was interesting since he didn't have lungs. "It's called the City of Doors because there's portals everywhere, in any space enclosed on all sides. To paraphrase everything, they're swirly blue vortexes that lead to other portals all over the planes. They're opened up with keys. These keys, see, can be anything. Memories, objects, feelings, thoughts...you get the picture."

"...Ah." The skull had an interesting manner of telling, grabbing the tiger and the child's attention dispite their notoriously short attention; that was a heroic feat in and out of itself.

"Yeah. And Sigil itself is a big, _big _city on a rotating disc enclosed by a big wall at the top of an infinitely tall spire in the center of the Outlands. Which is stupid."

"Why?"

"Well, what I wanna know is how the hell can there be _anything _at the top of anything infinite, right? And you can't be at the center of the Outlands anyway. Anyway, the Outlands got a bunch of towns on them, aligned to one of the Outer Planes. When the alignment of the town goes to it's Plane too much, it slips into it."

"Explain that again. The slipping and Outer Plane thing."

"They just slip into it. Disappear and reappear in the Plane. And the Outer Planes, from what I understand, are formed from belief. When a Planer dies, they wind up as petioners on the Plane their alignment was closest to."

"So these Planes are made of belief? Of who?"

"Everyone. From the Planes people to you guys on the Primes. The Factions say all kinds of stuff about the nature of the multiverse, the way things are and they're all about what they claim is true. Which is bunk."

"Why?" Hobbes asked.

Morte looked at him askance. "Because the Planes _are _belief. You get enough people to believe in something, it becomes true. If it's going to change, why bother about it. And besides, what's the point in arguing about them? The Planes are what they are. I say let people believe what they want. Not a whole lot of point in arguing about it."

Hobbes cocked his head questioningly. "Not exactly the most idealistic talking head around, I see."

"Hey, I'm plenty idealistic! There's just no point in aruging about it. The Planes are what they are and there's no point in going nuts over it."

Hobbes laughed a little. "Maybe so. What happened to your friends when your world disappeared?"

Morte looked startled for a minute, then a little confused. Evidently, he hadn't thought about it too much. "I don't know. It happened a few weeks ago, and we were all scattered. As far as I know, I'm the only one who made it to this castle."

Calvin's eyes lit up. "Hey, that reminds me. Hobbes, we-"

Hobbes waved his hand arily, as if shooing away a fly. "I know, I know. We can't let on the existence of other worlds while we're on our mission. Protect the world border and all."

"_Order."_

"Yeah yeah. Border sounds better."

"These clothes are a bit too conspicuous, don't you think?"

"Yeah, we'll have to change into something better." _And without the heat this thing traps._

Calvin smacked his forehead in a cheerful way. "I got just the idea! What about those new clothes you thought of?"

Hobbes shrugged indifferently.

The light quality of the place changed abruptly as they came to the end of the tunnel; they walked through an oblong opening, coming into a large chamber.

It was mostly white, and looked distinctly like a futuristic hanger. A strange ship hung in midair in front of a blast-door, hovering without any visible means of support.

In a far corner, there was a control center, enclosed on all side by walls except for a single sliding door. Inside, Marcus, dark-skinned with frizzy black hair, and Jason, light-skinned with blonde hair almost growing over his thick glasses, were busily fiddling with the controls.

Calvin pressed a button on a nearby communications moniter. It lit up showing the two technicians, dressed in clothes that looked like the crossbreeds of astronauts and air pilots. They looked momentarily surprised.

Calvin spoke into a microphone. "Calvin to Jason and Marcus! Ready to depart whenever you're ready!"

They smiled broadly, saluting him. "Just a few more minutes, Calvin!"

Calvin and Hobbes looked at each other and nodded. They seperated, walking into two locker room; ones with the traditional male sign, and the other with a generic animal sign.

A few minutes passed, the two technicians working on the ship, adding parts, moving others and removing a few, and Calvin and Hobbes presumably changing in their respective locker rooms.

They came out wearing different clothes, these looking really weird to Morte. _Different world, different fashion,_ he thought. Of course, these two probably didn't have any real conception of fashion.

The technicians looked up from their work to Calvin and Hobbes. Seeing their new look, they waved their hands indifferently.

"The ship's ready, Calvin! Prepare to board!" Marcus said, intentionally interrupting Jason's snappy comeback.

The odd ship moved onto the ground by them. It looked a bit like a classical rocketship; it appeared to be made of blocks of alternating stripe of red and yellow, had a triangular nose, two angular wings to the sides, small semi-circular engines, near the back was a round dome housing the cockpit which itself had seats for three, and two guns under it's nose; a three-barreled cannon and a laser blaster.

It opened up and Hobbes grabbed both of them and jumped in, the cockpit closing moments afterward.

Jason hit a few buttons and pushed a springlike thing; the ship raised up and faced the blastdoor again, it's engines starting to fire up; the door had a big orange paw print on it, which was the King's mark.

"I wanna drive!" Calvin yelled.

"What! Are you insane?" Hobbes demanded.

"No! But I want to be the pilot!" Sensing danger, Jason shut down the firing sequence; the engines died down, unnoticed by the ship's occupants.

"No way! Everytime you drive _anything_, something horrible happens!"

"I do not!"

"Remember when we went back in time and almost got eaten by a dinosaur? Or when we went to Mars and ran into Martians? Or when you tried to drive the Time Machine to the begining of time and almost got destroyed by marauding space pirates?"

"So I've had some bad luck-"

"'Bad luck'? 'BAD LUCK'? _'BAD LUCK'?"_

"Sure, blame everything on me!"

"Well if it wasn't always your fault, I wouldn't have to!"

"Say that to my face!"

"What? Your forehead's so big sound can't reach your ears?"

"Hey, guys-" Morte interjected.

"SHUT UP!" They both said, whirling around at Morte.

"Besides," Calvin yelled. "I helped build this ship! I know it inside and out!"

"The same way you knew that spaghetti recipe?"

"Ooh, you _had _to bring up the Noodle Incident, didn't you?"

"How long do you think they'll keep yelling at each other?" Jason asked Marcus. loosely toying with a screw and reclining on his hoverchair, resting his feet on a table.

"Well, they're still in the coherence stage. They still have at least five minutes before they get into the random insults and fist-fighting stages. So I give it about fifteen minutes."

Jason pulled some money from his pocket. "Five bucks says you're wrong."

"Deal!"

There was a sudden crashing sound from the ship, as a dust cloud of whirling fur and fist rolled around the pilots seat amid the bonks of a hapless skull repeatedly getting pulled into the fight and thrown into the window, only to richochet back.

"Dang it!" Marcus yelled, slamming his fist onto the control panel.

"Heh heh. You win some, you lose some," Jason said, shuffling his ten dollars. "And I just won some!"

"No gloating. You remember article twenty of the Aero Technician's Charter. 'No excessive boastery upon victory in a game."

Jason held up his index finger, shaking it sternly. "You're forgetting Provision 8-1-7. 'If a pilot should win a betting competition in an interesting manner-"

"'Then bragging rights are secured for the next three weeks'." Marcus said tiredly. "I know, I know."

They looked back at the ship; they were still doing that weird dustcloud fight.

Then all the lights flashed green. The blast door slammed open, revealing a enormous series of doors opening in a flight tunnel at least twenty miles long.

The Gummi Ship's engines glowed a gas flame blue.

The two technician's argument was interrupted when they noticed this. They stood up as stock still as military cadets at an inspection.

"Marcus," Jason said slowly. "which button did you hit just now?"

Marcus' eyes wandered over to the control panel; a large red button was pressed deep into the panel.

"The big red one?" he said haltingly.

"Oh. No."

The Gummi Ship's engines suddenly ceased operation, and it fell down through the hole it had been hovering over.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte were flung into the roof of the cockpit, breaking up the fight.

They looked out the window and screamed.

"Okay, you're the pilot now!" Hobbes yelled, throwing Calvin into the frontmost seat.

Calvin slammed a few buttons as he hit the desk, and heard a blast from the cannon. Yelping in surprise, he said, "Time for some quick thinking!" He raised his hands and slammed them on the desk repeatedly.

"You call that quick thinking!" Morte yelled as Hobbes pulled him off the ceiling and clung to the ground.

Calvin's eyes raced between the blurred wall, the on-coming light from below, and the controls. _Come on,_ he thought desperately, hands clawing the inoperative ship controller. _What do I do, what do I do?_

He punched the Start Button on the controller, and the lights in the Gummi came on just as they literally fell off the world, blasting through a hollow mountain and past the outer most reaches of the atmosphere in a matter of moments.

In a onrushing flurry of blackness and blinking lights, the Gummi Ship wavered and came to a stop, hovering in the vastness of space.

Hobbes and Morte fell to the ground from the impact. Moaning to themselves, they pulled themselves back up into the other two chairs. "Don't ever do that again," Morte advised.

"Hold on, I think I found the seat belts," Calvin said, pressing a likely looking button.

He heard a wooshing sound, a locking click, and something like vinyl sucking into itself.

He turned around and saw that Hobbes and Morte were pinned to their seats by unnessacarily huge leather straps; Morte was completely obscured by a shoulder strap, and Hobbes was being pushed deeply into his seat.

"'S a little too tight," Hobbes said through his seat belt.

Calvin pushed it again and the belts retracted, leaving them to gasp and breath heavily. He pushed another button, and the engines of the Gummi Ship activated. "Blast off!" he cried.

The Gummi Ship literally blasted it off towards their next adventure, fading to a smaller speck in the eyes of the universe.

"So that's everything," Dib said, looking over his stuff.

He looked back at the Portal Generator. Once it was finished, it would be able to generate spacial tunnels-portals-to almost anywhere in the known universe. Of course, it needed a considerable amount of power to do much more than anything much more basic than move someone across a few miles, as he had explained to Zim.

"So the portal appears between the spires?" Zim asked, pointing at the spires in question.

"Yes! Basically, energy is channeled and harnessed with it, and the spires use that energy to create a portal to somewhere else. The portals stays open as long as there's power, so there's no worries about getting stuck."

"And what will I do?" Zim asked, curious.

"Hold on a moment. I've got to install these." Dib pressed a button on his watch thing, and his ship flew over to him, cockpit open. He climbed in, pushing some buttons on the control panel. Several blocky cannonlike things flipped out from the pods under it, firing blue beams that enclosed the objects.

The Dibship flew away, carrying the things with it. It stopped by the spires, and the metal sheets flew away, expanding open to cover the exposed areas of the spires, clicking onto unseen connectors. The rod flew down to the plate at the bottom, clicking into an octangonal hollow. It disappeared into it, a plate sliding over it.

The weird orb floated into the levitation pods and the pods folded up, the Dibship flying back to where Zim was standing.

Dib jumped out, dusting the sand his landing had thrown up, and pointed back to the Portal Generator. "Anyway, you can do your job now."

"Which is...what? _Tell me now!_"

"You need to set up the power regulators in the Generation Axis in the base of the Portal Generator. Basically, you need to find the regulators and place them in the Axis. You should be able to reach it through an opening in a pipe."

"What do they look like, these..regulators?"

Dib scratched the back of his head self-consioucssly. "Trust me. You'll know them when you see them."

"Feh," Zim said, walking away and annoyed that he wouldn't be able to do this the easy way.

He moved around the people in his way, not in a mood to cause a potential confrontation. This method was potentially derailed when the crowd became to thick to just push through. Getting an idea, he activated his spider-legs.

The mechanical apendages touched the ground and fully extended, lifting him up high enough to be a victim of the 'how's the weather up there?' joke. He easily moved past everyone, the points of his 'legs' stepping in gaps in the crowd.

He got past the crowd quickly enough, and scittered across the bridge, not wanting anyone to notice his movement. Of course, considering the stunt he just pulled, it was a moot issue, but Zim wasn't exactly the most perceptive individual around.

He stepped down, retracting his mechanical appendages. Zim looked up at the Portal Generator. And up. And up.

It was hard to really judge the scale of the thing from far away, but now that he was in front of it, he found it difficult to believe that he hadn't heard of it until thirty minutes ago, espicially considering that he was planning on moving here.

At the moment, he was standing in front of a big door that even the largest of aliens could pass through, let alone pretty much anyone that lived on this world. He looked around it, observing the curiously organic-looking pipes that extended from the main building into the ground and presumably the understructure like a root system.

One of the nearby pipes had an odd plate on it, like part of a turtle shell.

"Aha!" Zim ran to it and placed a foot on it. It swung inward lightning fast, revealing a stepladder that led down a dark shaft made of the material as the rest of the Portal Generator.

"This must be it. Eeh, looks like the inside of Gaz's mind. AHAHAHHAAHA! Why am I always so funny when no one's around?"

"Oh, _I'm _around." An ironic feminine voice said from directly behind him.

Zim screamed and fell forward out of shock and terror, plummeting through the shaft as it faded to a grey-black-organish-hey-look-a-stepladder-step-I-bet-I-could-grab-it-ow-that-didn't-work-this-is-going-to-hurt blur for about five seconds before he hit the dimly lit bottom with a dull _thud_.

He grunted something inchoherent about sneaky humans and blinked. The light quality was a bit odd. Dim electric lights were to be expected in a place rarely frequented, but not this flickering thing. It was almost as if something was in front of him, blocking the light between him and it's source.

He pused himself off the ground and looked up, seeing Gaz.

The human's skin was the same color as Dib's, which was odd considering they both spent a lot of time indoors. Her hair was a slightly muted purple and arranged in large three large curls covering her forehead, with two odd large hooklike shapes under her ears, fairly long and ending just past her cheeks. For some reason, her eyes were nearly closed, making it odd that she could see. Her face had an odd look, more stern than pretty, and her overall body structure brought to mind a waif-type of girl, which belied her true nature. She wore a small necklace that ended with a flat brass object shaped like a stylized skull, which rested on her black short-sleeved shirt. Her arms were thicker than that of the sterotypical younger sister, ending in fingerless gloves. She wore two vinyl purple front-and-back skirt halves, connected by a belt over a pair of loose gray pants ending past the knee. She wore shoes that appeared to be a combination of flip-flops and those shoes you slip on, I forget what they're called. Overall, she appeared to be dressed for the tropics, which seem appropiate.

He quickly scooted back, bumping into the ladder from fright before he gained some control over himself. "_GAZ!_ Hi! Uh, no hard feelings about what I said just-wait, huh?"

She retained the same placid cold look of indifference that she almost always had, but Zim had learned not to be lulled into arrogance by that. He'd also learned that she had a mean left hook and was willing to use it as a reaction to the most seemingly innocent queries.

Her left eye became slightly less squinty, revealing a bit of her yellow-brown pupils as she looked down on Zim, looking more passive than angry.

That was a good sign. She showed no sign of intending impending vengence.

Gaz looked up at the machine they were currently enclosed in as Zim carefully got to his feet. She muttered something in a low voice that sounded negative in tone.

Zim cocked his head and looked at her. "What was that?"

She rolled her eyes and shook her head in annoyance. "Shut up, Zim. If I were you, I'd stop this and just go home."

Zim laughed, pointing a finger at him. "Hah! It is a good thing you are not me, _because Zim never quits!"_

"You say that like it's a good thing." She turned her attention past Zim.

Zim suddenly turned his sight to the side of the wall, his eyes narrowed in thought. "Wait a minute. How did you get here before I...did?"

She was gone.

He scratched his head in confusion. "That was odd. Ah well. ONWARD TO VICTORY!" he yelled, stepping forward with big strides.

He ran down the only opening he saw, rushing through what looked a little like what people pictured of when they thought of abandoned sewers useful for getting around town.

He came into a large circular chamber that was about twenty-five feet wide or so and had an odd look of trying to replicate a natural scene with artifical means; it looked a bit like a place on the island he'd converted into a place for Gir to play in. He was currently standing on a raised plateau; there was a broken down bridge connected to another plateau; on it was a raised tower with a swing cable-line. Distantly, he saw it ending almost directily above a final plateau, upon which sat a trapezoid machine.

Weirdly, there was a blue liquid pooling around the room; right under the bridge among the broken planks of the bridge and all around the room. It was too thick and clear to be water, but Zim knew one thing; he didn't like it.

He didn't like it at all. It had the vaugely ominous look one normally attributed to a being of living sulfuric acid that wanted to give you a big hug.

Zim thought about what to do momentarily, then jumped on the bridge.

The moment he landed on it, the bridge gave way and he crashed onto a floating platform on the blue liquid. "Ow!"

He stood up, and tried to balance on it as it threatened to completely upend itself. He jumped up as it did, trying to land on the flipped bottom; unfortunately, the edge of the platform caught one of the slates of his sandels and threw him backwards onto something hard, sliding to the ground just as the platform came to a stop. He dazedly opened his eyes to see the few globs bits of liquid settle onto the platform's surface, burning through it like embers through paper.

"_Shazbot_."

Getting up, he looked around. He was just under the bridge, standing on a small area he'd over looked. It reminded him of a very small beach front. Turning around, he obseved that he had hit a wall.

Something struck as odd about the part of the wall he'd hit. Tapping his fist against the wall, he heard the usaul metallic sound.

He walked back to where he'd landed. There was a slight depression that matched his midsection. He knelt down, tracing his hand along it. There was a very slight drag across it in the center.

His brow furrowed as his finger tapped a barely perceptible small gap. Clearly, there was more to this wall than he'd thought; Zim pushed his hand against the wall on the depression, and sharply moved it sideways.

The wall slid away almost automatically, revealing a small chamber inside.

Zim smirked. "Aha, the old 'hidden sliding door' trick! But why in a basement? It's so stupid." Brushing the thought aside like he did the hidden door, he carefully walked in. Considering the breaking bridge, flipping platforms and acidic liquid, he wouldn't have been surprised by any other insane traps.

It was mostly empty except for a single small object at the center. He walked over to it and picked it up, examining it.

The closest analouge to it was a bolt shaped like a screw. It had the same basic shape, but there were small blinking lights on it's head and the pointed part had bumps resembling binary code.

"This is either the first regulator thing, or a variation toy for rote memorization." Zim joked, placing it in the storage part of his pod.

Thinking about his next move, he looked at the viscous liquid, the unstable platforms, and the fact that the only way to avoid humiliation was to risk dissolving.

His eye twitched involuntarily. "YAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"

Steeling himself, he jumped off the platform and landed on the next, using the momementum of it's bucking to propel him onto the second platform. Balancing unsteadily, he jumped to the third one. His foot slipped and he swung his arms wildly, tottering just above the liquid. He suddenly fell forward.

The spider-legs sprang out and stopped his fall, just as his face came within a few inches of the liquid.

He exhaled loudly, the breath stirring up the liquid.

The spider-legs lifted him up, and his feet landed on the plateau. The mechanical limbs retracted into his Pak and he climbed up a nearby ladder in a way remnisicant of a monkey. With a really annoying outfit.

He pulled himself up off the ladder and looked around; there was that tower thing he'd seen earlier on a ridge above where he was standing, and a cave above a stepladder of rocks. Curious, he ran past the tower and to the rocks; he jumped up the first one, climbing up the rest with the aid of his spider-legs. Thinking to himself about how great he was, he jumped inside the cave and retracted the legs, wondering what a cave was doing in a basement.

To his disappointment, there wasn't anything immediately interesting. Muttering under his breath, he started to walk out of it when he tripped over a small treasure chest he'd overlooked. Rubbing his bruised leg, he lost his temper and kicked the chest with footwear that wasn't designed for combat. Predictably, the pain made him jump into the air, holding his foot and yelling in pained fury.

He scuffed his foot on the ground, wincing at the scraping noise. Fuming, he looked at the chest and was surprised to see he'd kicked it open; he bent over and looked inside.

Inside the velveted chest was a bracelets of sorts, four slightly arcing brass plates decorated by a curling script and connected to each other by short chains with three cornered links. Thinking it might be an interesting thing to add to his collection of curios and oddities, Zim stored it in his Pak.

Thinking momentarily on why anyone would keep a treasure chest in a small cave, Zim shrugged and dismissed the thought, leaving the encove, hopped off the rocks and walking down the walkway.

Thinking about his next move, Zim saw a shine from behind one of the legs of the tower from the corner of his eye. "What does that look familiar? And why am I talking to myself in a loud and unnatural manner? And why does _that _sound familiar?"

He kneeled down, brushing aside some junk. His finger brushed a familiar metal object; he grabbed it and stood up, bumbing his head on a metal beam. "Oof!" He fell down backwards and got back up, massaging his sore head. He looked at the object in his hand, breathing a sigh of relief as he placed the second bolt thing in his Pak.

Zim looked at the plateau, examined the pool of acidic liquid, noticed the lack of platforms to jump across, and leaned against the tower, thinking about ways to get across without bodily injury.

"Hrmmm, I let the flying laser weasels go last Tuesday. I don't have the means to build a cannon right now, the Voot Cruiser won't fit in here, a bear that flies via gas expulsion is too blue collar...maybe I could jury-rig my shoes to be nuclear powered gravity-defying...nah, I don't have any paper clips." He looked around the room aimlessly, searching for something he could use. "And that sky pulley is-" He froze. Zim looked back up at the pulley at the top of the tower that terminated right on the pleateau he was trying to get to. "THE SKY PULLEY!"

He ran to the ladder and nearly flew up it. He grabbed the handles of the sky pulley and jumped off.

It was a bit like flying with the windows open, albeit without Gir sticking his head out the window. Zim laughed happily in the breeze until the line snapped.

"Oh that's not-" the rest of his sentance was interrupted when he crashed into the wall. He fell down, crashing onto the plateau.

"Oooh, this had been a very painful day," Zim groaned, dusting himself off. He looked around, saw some big blocks, climbed up them, and saw a strange device.

It was shaped a little like a cone, twirling slightly and silently. It was made of the same off-gray metal as everything here, and had several slots on it; three round ones and a single tetragon on the top.

Zim crossed his arms and laughed, the sound amplified in the empty basement. "That was easy! Waaait a second...three? I only have two. Something is rotten in..in...what do I call this island again?"

He suddenly realized he was in a precarious situation. A small ball popped out of his Pak and floated in front of him, unfurling into a communcations screen, Gir on the display and busily rolling in a mud puddle with his pig friend.

"Gir! GIR! Your master NEEEEDS YOU!"

"I need to eat cereal!"

"Gir! Be serious! I need you to come to my location underneath the Portal Generator!"

Gir scratched the back of his head with his foot and slapped some mud out. He then barked like a monkey.

"GIR!"

"Okay, okay." The robot said unhappily. "You don't gotta yell at me." He flew off-screen and Zim tapped his foot against the ground impatiently. "Wait a minute!" He suddenly said. "If Gir was sitting there the whole time, then where was the screen recording from?"

_Above ground.._

"Hey!" Dib yelled, seeing a camera disappear under the sand. "Who hijacked my hidden camera!"

"Uh," Danny asked hesistatingly, "Why do you have robot cameras hidden on a desert island?"

Dib crossed his arms and stared back at him, unfazed. "Oh, I don't know, how'd you get over here so fast after recording me in an embarrasing moment?"

Danny's eyes went back and forth, suddenly turning a ghostly green. "Uh...that's...um...gotta go!" he disappeared into thin air.

_Back underground..._

Zim was still tapping his foot against the ground.

He saw a smoke cloud suddenly appear in the entrance, and Gir flew in, looking around for him. "GIR! OVER HERE!"

Gir went Duty Mode and flew over to him, landing on the ground neatly and saluting. He reverted to normal and pulled a rubber pig out of his head and smiled dopily, squeaking it.

"Gir! You must listen to me very very very very-" he took a deep breath. "-very _very _carefully! Do you understand me?"

Gir's head rotated a few dozen degrees, stopping as he stared down his own back. He tried running backwards from his perspective, tripping over himself and giggling.

Zim slapped his face. "Maybe I better rephrase that. Gir, you must listen to me _right now! _I need you to fly me over to the entrance!"

"Whhhhyyyyyyyyyyy?" the android droned.

"Because I can't walk over there,"

"Whhhyyyyyyyyyyy?"

"Because there is highly corrosive liquid in the way, and I don't want to step in it."

"Whhyyyyyyyyyyyy?"

Zim gritted his teeth, a tension mark visbily pusing on his forehead. "Because it will melt the flesh from my bones, and I don't want that!"

"Whhhyyyyyyyyyyyy?"

"Because it'll hurt, that's why! Are you going to be helpful for once or not?" Zim yelled, Gir's little antannae being pushed back by his yelling. Zim started hyperventilating.

Gir smiled sweetly. "Aw, I know what'll cheer you up!" He started tap-dancing around Zim, his feet little grey blurs that were kicking up dust, circling around Zim as the robot clicking his fingers like castanets. "It would 'cheer me up' if you would cooperate once in a while!" Zim said, looking exasperated as Gir danced around him, ending it with a little snap of his mechanical fingers.

"Uuuuuuuuuuuummmm, OKAY!" Gir grabbed Zim's wrist and activated his feet jets, flying into the air admist a swirl of smoke. Gir flew right through the sky tower, his small body going right through the gaps as Zim narrowly avoided getting hit by then, tucking up into a ball and swerving as best he could. They passed over the broken bridge without incident, and Gir suddenly swerved into the entrance tunnel, leaving Zim's body to catch up moments later. They zoomed up past the ladder, Zim's sandals clicking against the steps.

They suddenly broke into the bright light("Ow! It burns!" Zim yelled), Gir flying over the portal generator.

Gir dropped Zim on the little platform between the four spires. "Hey, wait a minute-" Zim started to say before Gir flew away, dropping under Zim's field of vision.

"GIR!" he yelled, looking over the edge of the platform as a pair of hi-tech binoculars slid out from his Pak and over his eyes. The little targeting thing randomly bounced around the binoculars vision screen, settling on a small gray dot below. The target turned green and magnified, the rest of the screen blurring as it zoomed on Gir, who was sitting near the bottom of the machine trying to play a pipeline like the bongos.

"Hey! Get me down from here!" Zim yelled from his position.

Gir looked up from where he was, looking at the little speck way up high, smiling stupidly. "Saaaaay PLEASE!"

"What?" Zim yelled. "I can't hear you!"

"I said, say PLEASE!"

"Come up here and say that again!"

"Thems fightin' words!" Gir rocketed off from the ground and landed by Zim, in a kind of pugilistic stance. "SAY PLEEEEASE!"

"_Please _get me down from here."

"_NOOOOOOOOOOOOO_kay!" Gir grabbed Zim's leg and flew off, dragging him behind him.

_I've nearly been submersed in acid, had to go running around for useless junk, slammed into a wall, nearly broke my foot and had to reason with Gir; my day can only improve from here,_ Zim thought. A seagull slammed into his face. _Maybe not._

Gir's flight jets suddenly spurted out. Zim and Gir hung in the air for a few moments to consider this.

"This is gonna hurt." Zim and Gir said simultaneous. Gir said "Yay!", whereas Zim yelled "NOO!"

They fell down to the beach, and Zim's blurry view of the world disappeared in a rushing blast of sand that grated against Zim's skin that was abrupt cut off when his head connected with something painful.

He sat up out off the sand pile, brushing sand off his head and spitting sand out of his mouth while Gir popped out like a weremole and started trying to build sand castles. "Could this day get any worse!" he complained, putting a hand against the palm tree he'd crashed into. A coconut fell out of it and bounced off his head. "OW! I had to say it, I JUST HAD TO SAY IT, DIDN'T I?"

Gir sat up out of the sand, yelled "WOOOOOOOOO!", and started pressing random emoticons on Zim's raincoat, smiling moronically at all the irritating radio-DJ style noises.

"Stop that!" Zim slapped Gir's hands away, trying to ignore the robot's dejected look and subsequecent sniffles.

"Merry Fishmas!" said Daggert the Angry Beaver as he threw fish guts out off a bucket and onto Zim's head.

The corner of Zim's mouth twitched involuntarily as a small part of his mind quietly said that he probably deserved that. The part of his brain that was obsessive about cleanliness and the avoidance of filth informed the rest of him that there was a steaming pile of rotting fish meat on his head and dripping into his clothes.

He lept out of the sand tunnel, slapping at his head and running around screaming as people noticed him and ran to a safe distance. "AUUUGH! FISH! AUUUGH! FISH!"

Dag, who'd avoided Zim's awareness, snuck up behind Chuckie. "He's your problem now, monkey-boy!" He yelled, forcing the bucket into the unfortunate coward's hands and running off.

"Huh?" Chuckie said, holding up the bucket and looking at it, recoiling at the sight of it's inside being coated with old fish meat. "Ew, fish."

"Eh?" Zim paused in mid-spin, looking at Chuckie with one crazed eye. "Did...he say..._**FISH**!"_

Chuckie looked up from the bucket, holding it carefully so his hands didn't touch the insides, and saw a dust cloud coming from a nearby palm tree. "Why am I getting a bad feeling?" He said aloud.

"Why are you talking out loud?" A passing starfish in swim shorts said. "You sound like that creepy big-headed kid."

_"My head's not big!" _a distant voice yelled.

"I was talking about Jimmy Neutron," corrected Patrick.

"_Oh, sorry!" _

"Hey! It's not that big!" Jimmy yelled as he swatted several small rocks that were orbiting around his head.

The starfish suddenly clasped his 'hands' to his throat and ran back into the ocean.

Chuckie suddenly remembered the dust cloud from before; it was right in front of him now and before he could react, it collapsed as Zim leapt out of it and smashed into Chuckie, the two of them rolling along the ground.

Zim landed on his feet and held the redhead up by the collar at arms length dispite the preteen's superior height, looking like he would like nothing more than to remove the human's head and use it as the subject of the Mexican Hat Dance.

"_I DEMAND THAT YOU_ _REMOVE YOUR GUTS **RIGHT NOW**!" _the psychotic-looking alien shrieked.

"What kind of a sick person are you?" Chuckie yelped dispite his obvious terror.

Zim's eye twitched as if restraint was a thin cord holding back a rock throwing catapult and Chuckie's words were badly aimed throwing knives; any second, it might snap and knock someone's head uncleanly off. "Get..the..guts..off..my..HEAD!"

"But I didn't do that!" He tried to move away from the mass of browninsh gore on the Irken's head. "Why can't you get it off?"

"Because you glued it to my head!"

"But I didn't-"

"Then explain the bucket!"

"A little brown beaver pushed it into my hands and ran off!"

"Huh?" Zim said, looking bewildered and surprised at the same time. He dropped the human, muttering something vaugely apologetic and looked angry.

"DAGGERT! VENGENCE WILL BE MINE!" He yelled. Gir jumped on his head, knocking him to the ground.

"WAAAAH!" Gir sobbed. "I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!"

"Gir." Zim said flatly. "You're talking to a pile of fish innards glued to my head."

"_FORTY TWO!" _Gir swallowed the fish guts in a single gulp. Giggling and waving his arms, he jumped off Zim's head and rolled around on the sand. "Eighty five and twenty one makes the toenails grow!"

"And that takes care of that." Zim said, brushing his hands together in the universal symbol of 'job well done'.

"...Wasn't that glued to your head?" Chuckie said after a moment.

"I repeat." He wiped his hands together again, crossed his arms, closed his eyes and smiled arrogantly to himself. One of his antannae quivered and his eyes opened, mouth in a weird slight curvy expression.

"GIR!" He ran off to the robot, who looked up and waved loosely at him. Zim swept a leg out and came to a stop, dusting the sand pile-up off his foot. "Giiiiir," he said, crossing his arms and tapping his shoe against the ground. "why did your fuel supply run out so quickly?"

"Oh that. I got rid of it."

"_Why _would you do that?" Zim yelled, his voice suddenly dropping to an annoyed hiss. "To make room for the tuna? Or for the cupcake? Or something else abombinably stupid!"

"Noooo," Gir said impatiently as he got. "so I can do this!" The hatch on top of his head slid open and a parachute popped out, covering them both momentarily before Gir sucked it into his head again.

"You took the excess jet fuel out so you could hide a parachute?"

Gir rolled his eyes. I think. "If I didn't, then I wouldn't 'ave been able to use it!"

"Then why didn't you!"

Gir shrugged. "I dunno!"

A vein started pulsing on Zim's forehead as he looked dangerously close to blowing something up, then he sagged, sitting down on the ground and sighing. "Why can't I stay mad at you?"

"'Cause 'o me wit and candor!"

"_No_, that's not it."

He sat up straight, narrowing his eyes in thought. "Why do I get the feeling I got off-track somewhere?" Gir jumped up, waving his hand energetically. "Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know!"

Gir's head hatch opened again as a screen popped out of it on a extension limb and played a really fast and slightly blurred record of the past fifteen minutes, rewinded several times, fast-forwarded, rewinded, fast-fowarded again, and stopped to show a dramatic angle of an angry looking monkey in a nice blue suit pointing a finger at the upright corner of the screen.

It panned to show the set of a game show and the monkey pointing at the neon banner of it from behind one of the game show host things that resemble pulpits.

"Yes," the monkey said cheerfully, looking happy now, "You're on-"

He, two of the three contestants poised on comfy chairs and the audiance read the title on the banner all at once. "_BLOCK THAT KICK!" _The monkey moved out from the pulpit-like thing to reveal that he had a huge steel-toed boot on his right leg.

"All right, all right. Contestant Number One, be prepared to...BLOCK THAT KICK!" he yelled at the contestant in the middle.

"Huh?" the guy in question said daydreamily.

The monkey jumped into the air, landing a kick directly in the man's groin. "AUUUUUUUUUGH!" he yelled as the audiance roared amusement, falling to the ground as the monkey pointed at the guy to his left. "Contestant Number Two, get ready to...BLOCK THAT KICK!"

He went into another running kick...only to pass right through the man. "Huh?" the game show host said in surprise. "Fooled you, didn't I? You can't kick me like that, 'CAUSE I'M A GHOST! BOOOO!"

"Huh. Really?" The monkey said, looking interested.

"Uh huh. Really. I died many years ago at that hands of your father in a similar show called Block The Rock! It took many years, but I finally wrestled my way to this unlife to take my revenge upon you for my tragic demise!" the ghost yelled.

"Really." The monkey said blandly.

"Yes, really! BOOOOOOOO!" the ghost yelled, floating over the monkey and waving his arms around dramatically.

The monkey watched the display, looking bored. "Is that it?"

"No, I can also do...this! BEHOLD THE FACE OF ULTIMATE TERROR!" The ghost ripped his face off, revealing the visage of a nerd with a huge nose, crooked oversized teeth, and an L shaped indentation on his forehead.

"That..that's not really that scary." The monkey pointed out.

The ghost tore the face off, revealing his old one. "Huh? You think so?"

"Uh huh." "Oh, yeah, definitely," the audiance added. The remaining contestant had fallen asleep from boredom, whereas the failed contestant was still writhing in pain, weeping for his lost children.

Looking uncomfortable, the ghost said, "Well, I am a ghost! Look, see!" He thrust a hand right through the monkey's head, waving it around. "That's pretty scary, right?"

The monkey slapped the hand away. "Sorry, not really. I mean, maybe if you were a disembodied voice, but um, no. In fact, I find you rather pleasant."

"Da-wait, can I say damn on TV?"

The monkey looked at an off-screen camera man, who nodded. "Think so, yeah."

"Okay then." The ghost went to the floor on his knees, yelling melodramatically. "DAMN IT ALL! I wish I were dead!"

The monkey managed to look sympathetic and valiantly attempted to pat the ghost's shoulder. "I'm not sure exactly how to break this to you."

The screen went blank, retracting into Gir's head. "And that's how they proved there was no such thing as good regional access cable shows!" the robot said, spreading his arms.

"Of course, of course!" Zim said, slapping his forehead lightly. "It seems so obvious now! Waaaiit a minute...now I remember! DIIIIIIIIIIIIB!" That last part he yelled as he ran off into the distance waving his arms agitatedly.

Gir held his hands together by his left shoulder, craning his head towards his clasped hands, sniffling. "They grow up so fast...G'bye Melville!"

A nearby whale in a bodybuilder outfit waved to him. "Seeya next migration!" The whale walked underwater, a small stream of bubbles following it's descent.

Zim climbed up a palm tree, his binoculars flipping over his eyes. "Dib-Dib-Dib...no, not him-wait!" He jumped off the tree, hovering to the ground via his hoverpods. He rushed to a random spot, people running to get out of his way.

"DIB!"

The paranormal investigator turned aside, backing away a little as Zim ran to him, tried to scoot to a stop, slipped and hit a tree. Backing away before the coconut fell on his head, he stood up and brushed himself off.

Zim suddenly remembered why he was running and pointed a finger dramatically at Dib. "YOU!" He said angrily. "What's with the basement! And where's the last bolt thingy?"

"I don't know what you talking about." Dib said, looking confused. "Neutron was in charge of the construction plans."

"Neutron." Zim hissed, looking for the big-headed boy genius.

He ran off again, a small dust cloud following him.

A large sweat drop formed on Dib's head. "What has he been drinking?"

Zim hid behind a tree, wondering briefly why there were so many of them here. He poked his head out the side and saw a skinny human nearby, of teen-age. He was of average height, had forward facing black hair and black eyes. He was currently wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. Zim took a moment to catogorize this human, and realized it was Danny Fenton.

"Danny!" he yelled. The ghost-boy looked at him, not very startled. "What?"

Zim slumped, disappointed at a lack of a more interesting reaction. Picking himself up, he said, "Have you seen where Neutron hid one of those bolt things?"

Danny considered the question. "Hmm, a bolt. A bolt-Oh, right! I think I saw Jimmy hide it in the secret place your robot goes to."

"Huh? What secret place?"

Danny pointed with his thumb at a waterfall behind him; the outlines barely visible behind the waterfall.

"Oh. _That_." Zim said blandly. _First, I deal with Neutron. _he thought angrily.

"Waiiit a second," he said slowly. "How'd you know about that place?"

Danny shrugged. "Me and Tommy are going to investigate later. The readings on that place are off the charts; might be why Gir's always there when you're here." He frowned for a moment. "You know, a lot people wonder...are you and Dib really friends?"

Zim blinked. "Why do you ask?"

"You two are so competetive it's hard to tell."

Zim snorted. "We are _not _that competetive."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Sure. And that giant robot fight last Tuesday had nothing to do with you guys trying to outdo the outher with a giant fighting robot."

Zim looked a little uncomfortable. "Well.."

"Or the other hundred and a half things that for some reasons always seem to involve mass destruction. And the near-end of the world."

Zim's eyes shifted back and forth. "Well..uh..that is too say..me and Dib have a very..interesting friendship and look at the time, gottagobye!" Zim ran off, foolishly thinking he'd won the argument.

Danny rolled his eyes. "And people say my life's weird," said the human who was half-ghost and routinely transformed into his spectral side to beat up phantasms and return them to the etheral dimension from whence they came.

Zim, currently occupied in finding Neutron, stopped running when he saw a fat human boy and a skinny slight insane looking Hispanic boy guarding what appeared to be a simple rock. "Could this get any easier!" Zim said to himself quietly.

He proudly walked out from behind the tree, tapping the llama fanatic first. "Ahem."

The human in question yelped in sheer terror, running behind the rock.

"Wait! Wait!" Sheen yelled, pointing at Zim excitedly. "I know you, I know you!"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "You do?"

"Yeah, yeah! Jimmy told me all about you! You're Mork, right? Look, Jimmy said he was sorry about the whole thing with the hot pants ray gun and your pants-"

"I'm not Mork."

Sheen stopped mid-rant. "Really? You're not?"

"No."

"Of course you're not. You kinda look more like a Mataua!"

Zim blanched. "What?"

"Yeah, you know, Mataua! It sounds like a guy with a bad complexion and eye problem!" Sheen 'explained'.

"How many times am I going to have to tell you this? I'm an alien, and you know it!"

Sheen waved his hand arily. "I know, I know-Hey, that skin problem looks really really bad. Hey, I know what's wrong with you! You got a case of Nectocugs!"

"Nectocugs." Zim said blankly.

"Yeah, them! They're these little bugs from your home planet that lay eggs in your brain and possess you until they hatch and then they pop out like your head a spaghetti grater but it's grating worms and not spaghetti and it's totally gross and stuff."

Zim slapped his forehead. "First of all, those are from Zorbar. I'm not an Zorbarite, I'm an Irken. And two, those are from a comic book. That _you _wrote."

Sheen rolled his eyes. "Way to kill the mood; I was just trying to help the conversation along."

"Um, Sheen?" Carl said from behind the rock. "I get the feeling we're forgetting something."

"I know! Your name! It's Mike, isn't it?"

"No."

"Tommy?"

"Uh uh."

"Zorro?"

"Ne-gative."

"Tyson? Splook? Naz?"

"No, no, no."

"Miz? Zib? Diz? Mib?"

"_Hell_ no!"

"I give up! This is too hard."

"I'm wearing a name-tag!" Zim yelled, tugging on a pocket on his raincoat and producing a loud _Duuuuh! _noise.

"Way to spoil the game!"

Zim slapped his forehead again, noticed the rock, and pushed Sheen aside.

"Well, well, well. Your pathetic disguise has been pierced! Now you will repay for your attempt on my life!" Zim placed some gloves onto his hands, where they morphed into sparking power gauntlets; he jumped at the rock, pounding on it.

Carl and Sheen stared at him beat the rock up and yell excessively loud. Flecks of rocks flew off admist nonsenscical jabber, and they continued to watch him roll around them, wrestling with the rock and appearing to be on the losing side.

"And you wanted to go to the movies." Sheen said to Carl accusingly.

"In the movies, crazy aliens don't try to shoot you." Carl said defensively.

"Didn't that happen about three days ago?"

"Yeah, but they didn't yell so much. This alien scares me."

"Aren't you scared of opossums?"

"They're crosses between rats and kangaroos! They're scary!"

A part of the rocky cliff-side shimmered and disappeared, revealing Jimmy Neutron. He pocketed a strange looking remote and walked inbetween Carl and Sheen. He looked at Carl, then at Sheen, and stared at Zim too.

"So what do we've got here?" he asked.

"I think Zim's mad at you, and for some reason he thinks you're that rock."

"Ah."

Zim and the rock rolled by them, and he threw it, his triumpht laughter fading away as he gradually noticed Jimmy. "AHAHAHAHAHHAA-ha hah...hah."

Jimmy crossed his arms. "And what reason do you have for wanting to beat me up now?"

Zim snorted. "Care to explain why you filled the basement with _acid?"_

Jimmy blinked cluelessly. "Acid?"

"Yes! Blue thick liquid, burns a lot, ring a bell?"

"That wasn't acid. It was-"

Zim didn't care what it was. "Then why did it burn the platform?"

"The platforms are constructed of a material that sizzles on contact with the liquid. It was a joke."

"A joke."

Jimmy shrugged. "Yeah, a joke."

"Oh, that's really funny!" Zim said, laughing sarcastically. "So funny I think I'll beat the crap out of you later!"

Jimmy started to sweat. "Wait-"

"Shut up." Zim snapped, already walking away.

He ignored people's glares as he walked back to the secret entrance; Zim walked through the waterfall obscuring it, wondering why it wasn't worse.

For a while, he walked down a winding tunnel that reminded him of the internal structure of a snake, though the smooth and well-worn surface of it reminded him of the warrens used by the now mostly-extinct Pelarota people. Admittingly, a true Arburian tunnel would be a lot wider and the surface would show the sanding done by their bony armorplates and not the curving shapes, but the essence was there.

As he walked down it, he wondered briefly what sort of Earthian geological processes would create those shapes on the wall. They were interestingly similar to what Earth authors frequently used as magical looking writing, making him wonder if ancient abrigiones had seen these and been inspired by them.

Being an Invader, in human terms, was a bit like a combination of being an anthropologist, spy, and explosives fanatic. Zim was good at all three aspects-okay, maybe not the first one and definitely not the second one, but it counted all the same.

As he walked down, Zim noticed the increasing repetition of some designs was decidedly unnatural; you might see something like this on the nanotechnological planet Galvan B, but not on a tunnel in the middle of a cliff on Earth.

"That's...not usual." he said aloud.

He kept walking, thinking about the designs when he realized he'd walked right into an open chamber. Two small pods slid out of his Pak and lit, illuminating the place.

It wasn't very big, maybe about sixteen feet all around. It was round, and the designs were more prolific and were genuine pictures. He lacked the cultural reference to understand most of them: some of them reminded him of the Biblical account of the fall of the tower of Babel. One's swirling designs, jarring lack of paint and up-wards pointing marks made him thing of an immense structure rising among the stars. The only other old ones could comprehend were some of the oldest; the walls were covered in carved writing from a dozen different langauges. He looked them over, and realized they were all names. Hundreds of names overlapping each other made them incredibly thick in some places, in others mostly covered by pictures yet still legible. He had no idea what they meant, nor what tool carved those names into the wall.

So many names. He wondered what it meant. For some reason, the names reminded him of the old ruins scattered throughout the island.

Several of the drawings he recognized; they were such things as a cariciture of himself frying sausages with a dopey smile(complete with his toungue hanging out of his mouth)wearing an apron. Another showed Dib standing on top of the world with a sign hanging around his next saying _Dib #1!_, and he looked enormously happy for a change. A third one displayed Gaz, playing her games while walking down a completely deserted street. Another showcased a tiny cute Zim sitting atop a giant question mark. Then there was a picture of Gir sitting on top of Zim's head; by the looks of the creases of Zim's head, he'd been there for a while. The images had a slightly blurry dreamlike surrealist quality mixed with a much sharper definition in general details. That struck him as extremely strange.

It was strange because he knew who'd drawn these pictures. He knew Gir's handiwork. And from the looks of it, it was only Gir who'd come up here. Evidently, he was a better artist then he let on.

It was then that he noticed the door.

It was at the back of the chamber, untouched by the artwork marking the rest of the place. It wasn't strictly a door, but it suggested one; a bulging portion of the wall, with subtle division lines along it's perimiters and through what could have been it's middle. Everything in the room seemed to subtlely point to it, as if it was central to this place in a way he didn't understand.

He placed a hand on it, looking for a way to open it, but there didn't seem evidence for it being anything other than an interesting accident of geography other than gut instinct.

His foot brushed something metal; he picked it up and saw to his relief that it was the final bolt.

Behind him, the shadows in the dimly lit room shifted.

Zim suddenly stiffened, his antannae twitching sporadically. His breath hitched, and he felt..._cold._ He looked down at the shifting shadows and felt the chilled whisper of something familiar.

On instinct, he turned around and saw something that made him wonder why he didn't run away at the first sight of it.

It was a figure standing in front of the tunnel's entrance, smokey shadows slowly and silent swirling around it, undisturbed by the light of his lamplike extensions. It was several times taller than him, perhaps six feet tall. He had no idea what it was, human or otherwise; it wore a black leather coat that had a hood completely obscuring it's face. It's hands were concealed under it's voluminous sleeves, arms crossed together and sleeves overwrapping each other, and the cloak itself appeared to be a single piece, wrapping around it's wearer's body and feet. He couldn't discern if the coat had any real detail on it; it was _that_ dark.

It raised it's head, light shining directly into it's face and illuminating nothing but more darkness. It shuddered momentarily, as if direct contact with light disturbed it. It looked past Zim, as if it barely registered his presence, and stared intently at the door behind him.

It shifted it's view and looked directly at Zim, apparently registering him for the first time. It regarded his curious look, and he felt a sense of vauge interet from it's otherwise impenetrible emotional shield.

It spoke, it's voice elicting a barely controlled shudder from Zim; it was calm and _old_. It had the oddest sense of sibiliece, reminding him of the hiss of a reptile. There was an arrogant self-assurance in the voice that seemed to be the by-product of countless years of being better than everyone. And weirdly enough, it was, well, charming. This was a voice that had been built up by charisma and had retained that quality, however corroded it had become since since then.

_"I have come to see the door to this world."_

The swirls of darkness emanating from the stranger swarmed over the chamber, as if longing to envolup it. They encircled the perimater of Zim's light as best they could, wary to venture further.

Dispite it's words, it didn't seem to him like the sight-seeing type; he'd heard of murderers who investigated their victims lives, savoring the sight of the loss they caused, reveling in the pain. Perhaps this thing was similar.

"Go away." Zim advised, glaring at it. He had little tolerance for paranormal monsters and less for sadists.

"_It has been_ _connected...tied to the darkness. Soon to be totally eclipsed."_ it said, apparently feeling as if it was clarifying something.

"What_ are_ you?" Zim said in frustration. "You're not from around here at all." It sounded like the paranoid ravings of a bigoted redneck, but it was true; it was so..._alien _to everything Zim understood, down to his bones.

It stared unwaveringly at him. "_You do not understand what lies behind the door. You do not know of the truth behind all truths. Soon, that will change."_

"What?" Zim said, sounding surprised and annoyed.

"_There is so very much to learn, sparkling." _It said smugly. "_You understand so very little. Your light illuminates only that which you perceive, and then only that in front of you."_

"We'll see about that!" Zim challenged. Dispite his bold words, his uneasiness about this being was almost inexpressible. It was fundamentally wrong. It's very existence was a fallacy; this he knew, in a place far deeper than his rational mind could persue.

The shadows swirled around it threateningly. It didn't have to move to let Zim knew it believed that in personal combat with itself, the Irken would be severely outclassed.

_"A effort almost as meaningless as your worthless existence. One who knows nothing can understand nothing."_

The shadows veered threateningly at him, swirling with a strange force that he recognized as hunger.

"_And you are less than nothing."_ It said coldly._ "Little green fool; you always try so hard...and fail each and every time._"

It diverted it's attention from Zim to the door. Zim followed it's example, trembling with rage. It's words sounded familiar, but he couldn't quite remember from where.

The door was gone, replaced by a smooth expanse of rocky wall. And when he turned around again, so was the strange being and it's entourage.

Shaking his feeling of coldness away, Zim ran out of the tunnel, content that the stupid running around thing was almost done.

His steps echoed in the empty chamber, and faded into nothing as he left the tunnel into the welcomingly bright sunlight.

In the chamber, something stirred.

It looked around the room, retreating back into where it had come, sensing it was not yet time.

Their hold was not completely solidified. But it would be soon.

Yes, it would be very soon.

Oblivious to this, Zim paused at the waterfall, hoping that it might wash away some of the self-doubt the creature's words had inflicted upon him.

All it did was irritate him a little and aggrivate his mild hydrophobia

He focused his mind on the job at hand, trying to forget what had happened with the stranger, but the coldness stubbornly refused to leave him.

Shaking it off, he resolutely walked forward. Seeing Gir near him, he grabbed the robot's arm without stopping, Gir waving cheerfully to a yellow sponge wearing a water-filled space-helmet, white shirt, brown pants and little shoes, all molded to his specific body shape and a squirrel in a spacesuit of some sort.

"Bye Spongebob! Bye Sandy!"

"Bye-bye, little robot friend!" "Seeya Gir!" A sea serpent poked it's head out cautiously. "Oops, there's our ride!" Hearing Sandy's voice, the aquatic mystical reptile screeched in terror, trying to swim away before they could catch it.

Gir squeaked in pleasure and looked at Zim, smiling and squinting his eyes. "Where we going?"

"Back to the basement. Are your jets refilled?"

"Uh huh!"

"Very good. _To THE..._basement..thing." Zim grimaced. "So much for my big dramatic call."

Gir took him at his word, activating his jets dispite his protests and flying into the pipe entrance, through the tunnel, over the pleateaus, and landed on the third pleateau.

He dropped Zim and started rolling around on the floor, yelling "WOOOOOOOOOO!"

Zim stared into space blankly, dazed by the incredibly fast journey. "I don't think I can do the exam, General Magnigaran; I got the brain worms again."

He shook his dizziness away, and turned to the pedastal. He cracked his knuckles, muttering, "I hate this part," and pulled the bolts out. Looking them over, he didn't see any notable differences between them.

Sighing to himself, he put the bolts on the ground preparing to put them in.

"Master!" Gir yelled, running up to him and pulling at his shirt, jumping up and down. "Master! Master! Master! Master! Maaaaaaster!"

"WHAAAT?"

"Whazzat?" Gir pointed innocently at the pyramid-shaped thing.

"It's an edifice."

"Oh. Can I eat it?" He'd appearantly picked up on the first three letters.

"No. This be serious work that we do!"

"Awwwwww."

"You can eat when we get home! Now, I suspect that these bolts are conductors of enviromentally based energies that will be channeled through the power supply and used to power the Portal Generator in order to successfully transplant us into another world system! However, I fear that it will result in a electromagnetic backlash that may be dangerous to your internal nanocircuits."

Gir nodded. "Uh huh! Uh huh!"

"You have no idea what I just said, do you?" Zim said flatly.

"Nope!"

"Stand back, lest the lightshow fry your guts!"

"That happens when I drink Pop Rocks and soda!" Gir commented.

Zim looked at him, surprised. Gir had devoluped a talent for comebacks lately, making him wonder if Gir's mind was starting to evolve...no, grow like a living creature's would. He'd always suspected Gir had more in common with a lifeform than a machine.

He picked up one of the bolts, holding it expirimentally above one of the slots. The air between bolt and slot shimmered and vibrated, and Zim felt like he was holding a piece of iron right in front of a giant magnet.

He pushed it into the slot.

The bolt rotated, the lights on it changing to a bright blue. A rounded light on top of the pedastal turned blue, and it suddenly rotated extremely quickly, electricity flaring out from it and sparking blindingly.

It stopped almost too fast to completely register it, and the light went back to it's usual red.

Zim put the second bolt in.

It spun fast again, but in a more prolonged manner; it didn't spit electricity out but made a loud humming sound. The light blinked again momentarily.

"That was it?" Zim said disappointedly. "I was expecting more of a light show." He tapped the third bolt in.

It spun incredibly fast, shedding random flares of electricity with such abandon he jumped back to the perimeter of the pleateau; the electricity stored within i poured out of it and circled around it, suddenly shooting upwards in a concentrated bolt. It suddenly dropped down again, zapping through the power supply thing and spreading throughout the complex, evident by the lights brightning by a painful intensity until the lightbulbs exploded. A hologram appeared over it, saying _Power charge complete. Insert Binding Band._ The pyramid thing slowed to a stop, a final spark of electricity popping up around it like a _coup de grace_.

"Binding band?" Zim repeated. He rummuged around in his Pak for something, pulling out the odd bracelet from before. Examining it briefly, he placed on the four-sided indentation at the top; the walls of the basement turned bright green momentarily, than it faded away, leaving the walls looking free of cracks and other imperfections, leaving the portal generator stronger. The pedastal sank into the ground, leaving only the round disc-light at the top exposed. The hologram changed to an emotigram of a grinning smiley face with a floating thumbs-up hand. _Operations Complete!_ it boasted.

"That was it?" Zim said disbelivingly. "_Booooring!_ I was expecting something a little more dramatic that _that!_"

"Awwwww!" Gir said sympathetically, patting Zim on the leg, since that was about as high as he could reach.

Zim's rebuttal was interrupted by another hologram popping up, replacing the stupidly cheerful one; it was a little talking emotigram that resembled Dib's head, albeit considerably simplified; it looked like geometric shapes with a bare minimum of complex design. For some reason, it also seemed cheerful, with little upside down brown v's for eyes.

"Hi!" it said in a digitized version of Dib's voice. "If you're hearing this, then you've completed the first stage of the power-up process! Well, that's just super!"

"That...doesn't sound like Dib." Zim said slowly, "Em hem!" Gir added in agreement.

It paused, reverted to Dib's tone of voice. "Wait, would I actually say that?" it twitched spazmodically, the message taking place again and reasserted control. "Well, without anymore power-uppin' to do, this room will soon cease to exist. I hope you a remote control robot to do all the work; if not, you'll be crushed into a ball in the next fifteen seconds. Here's hoping you die before one of your ribs pierces your lungs! Ta!"

"Oh, that's just not right!" Zim yelled. "Yay! We're doomed!" "No, Gir, that's bad." "Oh. Yay!"

The emotigram spazzed again, retaining Dib's usual voice. "Now I _know _I wouldn't say that. And-hey!" the emotigram shut off to an immense rumbling from deep within.

"Gir." Zim said.

"Yeeeah?"

"What do you say that we run for our lives?"

"Uuuuuuuuuum...okie-dokie!"

"I concur. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Zim jumped over the fence, clearing it moments before it folded away.

"WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Gir followed his master down.

"Gir! Fly us out of here!"

"Okay!" Zim gave a huge sigh of relief that Gir was going to work with him for a change. "Right after I do this!" He started dancing a little shuffle dance, saying "Doo, doo doo doo doo!" to establish rhythm.

"Gir!" Zim yelled. "Zee-zee-Alpha-plural-Zee-nine!"

Gir's eyes, shoulders, chest panel and ball thing flashed red as he saluted. "Sir!"

"Get us OUT OF HERE! _NOW!"_

"Yes, sir!" He grabbed Zim's forearm and jetted off as the plateau sank into the ground and the liquid drained away.

They soaring into the air, Gir taking a moment to decide where to fly, and moved just as the wall slammed behind them.

Gir performed a series of aerial acrobatics, ducking and weaving inbetween the pillars and blocks that appeared as the rooms sealed into itself.

Gir cleared the last(techniqually first)plateau and ducked into the entrance as the walls slid into place.

Gir deactivated his jets and threw Zim at the ladder as it folded away and he crashed into it. The room compacted and started shooting upwards; as Duty Mode Gir looked worried, Zim grabbed him, held him close as Gir reverted to normal and the both of them squatted.

The swiftly ascending platform stopped with a ding at the opening in the pipe. Zim stepped out and dropped Gir and fell on his posterior, starting to hyperventilate.

Gir looked at Zim and said, "Awwwwww."

Zim looked at Gir. "That was not a hug."

"Yeah it waaaas!"

"No, it was not a hug! I was saving your life!"

"It was too a hug! You like me!"

"You promised to never speak of our personal relationship in public!"

"Someone needs a hug!" The robot jumped onto Zim's head, tightly hugging it.

Zim put up with it for about five minutes. "Gir. I know someone who's asking for the overide code again."

"Who!" Gir yelled, squeezing Zim's face. "Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! Wait. I don't wanna! It makes me feel _DIRTY! DIRTY LIKE SOAP!"_

"Well, if someone could have just done what I asked them to-"

"I was gettin' to it!"

"In case you forgot, WE WERE ABOUT TO GET KILLED!"

"Aaaaaaaand?"

"Aaaaaaaand I wouldn't have to use the override code if you could just _grasp the concept of your own mortality!"_

"Does it come with fries and a sixty-four ounce?"

"_You see what I have to live with?" _Zim shrieked at the heavens. The clouds above him changed into words in his native Irken, reading _We apologize for the inconvience. Even when it's funny. Which this is._

"Welcome to my world," a nearby squid grumbled.

Zim facefaulted. "DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE PAYING ATTENTION TO WHAT I'M DOING?" he screamed before pushing Squidward back into the water.

"It's not like there's anything else on," Sandy the squirrel said, sitting on the bridge post and eating a bag of popcorn. For some reason, she also had a camcorder.

Zim glared at the world. "And why was the basement lethal?" he wondered aloud.

A green single-celled organism fondling a large wallet wandered past. "Best assination attempt ever! Talk about a great assignment!"

Zim pulled out a laser gun and shot him. "OW!" He ran by and took the wallet. "HEY!" Zim threw the wallet at him. "Thank you. HEY! I had money in here!" Zim threw an eight-hundred pound chariot wheel at him. "...Not the kind from Booga-booga."

"Are you sure that's ethical?"

Zim looked up from his pilfered money to see Dib looking at him suspiciously.

"Hey, the money is mine!"

"How do you figure that?"

"Simple! Plankton got money to end my life, so this money belongs to me! It's my life!"

Dib raised an eyebrow. "Uh...huh. Still doesn't make it ethical."

Zim snorted.

Dib rolled his eyes, sighed, and walked away as his device sank into the ground up to the spires, construction completed. "You better hurry up, everyone's waiting."

"Uh-huh." Zim said nonchalantly.

He became aware of someone looking up at him. He lowered the money to see Gir looking up at him expectantly.

"What?"

Gir said nothing and continued staring.

"Hey, it's my money! He tried to kill me for it, so it's mine!"

Gir kept staring.

"Uh, uh, uh, stoppit!"

Gir kept staring.

"Fine! I'll doing something nice with it! Happy now?"

Gir nodded and walked away, grinning happily. Zim put it in his Pak moments before he was nearly trampled by a huge rush of people running up to the device. "Huh? Oh yeah!"

Zim ran up through the crowd, muttering various apologies and excuses, making his way to the front. He saw Dib in front of the crowd, playing up his role as leader and grandstander. _He's really enjoying this,_ Zim thought, feeling a little pity for the human. Minimoose floated out of nowhere and landed on Zim's head. Zim made no objection to this, making Gir go "Awwwww!"

"Okay, everyone!" Dib yelled through a megaphone. "It'll all begin in-four!"

"Three!" Everyone in the crowd joined in. It was pretty impressive, seeing all those different people doing one thing.

"Two!" The crowd's yell increased to a roar, frightening off a prehistoric sea reptile.

The ground shoke on the island, everyone turning around to look. A dessicated human corpse pulled his way out of the ground and lurched over to them.

It shook it's decaying fist angrily. "Do you freakin' mind! Some of us are trying to rest in eternal sleep down here!"

"Sorry!" Almost everyone said. "I'm not!" said an obnoxius chihuhua named Ren.

Dib, Zim and everyone else looked at him. "Does anyone care what this guy is saying?" A kid in a pink hat said through a green megaphone that had a face no one seemed to notice. "NO!" everyone yelled. "Down with rudeness! Up with...Hey, Timmy," Timmy Turner's megaphone yelled. "Can you give me a polite cheer?" "Um, up with customary politeness?" "Hey! You know the charter rules! Don't do anything remotely intelligent!" "What charter?" Timmy's faerie godmother interrupted. "The one on this neat picture?" he said, holding up an X-Ray of his skull, showing a cobwebby space with a sign saying _This Space For Rent._ "You moron." "Yeah, I love you too!"

The zombie wandered back into his grave, grumbling about respect and the young, young, _young _people you got today.

"A-HEM." Dib said.

"Oh, right." Everyone else said.

"What number were we on?" a kid from Skool said.

"I think it was eight." said a Martian.

"No, three!" yelled an Irken.

Meanwhile, the two faeries argued. "And that's why I shoot out of a cannon without a helmet!" Cosmo declared proudly "Moron!" Wanda yelled. "And I love you! Again! How many declarations of love do you need before you stop! What do you need, a ceremony where we exchange vows and promise to never love anyone else!" "We already did a thousand years ago!" "We did? And no one told me? How long have I had that hanging over my head? What other secrets are you hiding, huh? Huh!" Wanda sighed. "See? That's why I love you." Cosmo cringed, mistaking what she said as the opposite. "How can you say something like that! I don't wanna go back to marriage consuling!" "How many times am I going to have to say this! When a woman says something, it doesn't mean the opposite!" "See? You just proved yourself wrong! You said that when a woman says something, it doesn't the opposite, so it means the opposite! But..wait.."

"Yeah? _Yeah?" _Wanda said with baited breath.

The green-haired faerie grimaced as if he was passing a shruiken through his digestive tract. A vauge creaking came from the vicinity of his head.

He started to sweat with effort, making an eye-popping, teeth-creaking expression.

"It..means.."

"Yeah?"

The expression stopped. "Supernatural tennis season starts soon! Go Pooka U.!" Wanda slapped her head.

"Hey, guys!" Timmy yelled at them quietly. "Over here." They flew to him.

"Look," Dib yelled, unaware that he was missing an argument he would have given his eyeteeth to use on Mysterious Mysteries. "We were on two! It's not that hard!"

"Oh, okay." "Sounds right." "Sure, that works." "Hey, he's got the remote." "I'M COVERED IN TOOTHPASTE! TAKE ME TO THE TEETH!"

Ignoring that slightly insane outburst from the end results of the faerie marital arguement, everyone took a deep breath.

"Two..."

"ONE!"

"Happy New Year!" Tucker Foley yelled. Everyone stared at him. "What? See, Danny? This is why I hate coming in late."

"It's your own fault for stopping at the Krusty Krab, _which you can't fit in with your submarine!"_

"How I'm supposed to breath underwater? Not all of us can turn intangible."

"Is that why you broke the stupid thing?" a mildly gothic looking girl with black hair done in a front curling ponytail said dryly.

"Aw, you can afford it." She punched him in the shoulder. "Ow!"

"Enough distractions." Dib pushed the single button on his remote.

A deep rumble echoed from within the edifice, getting everyone's attention; all commotion ceased, everyone looking up at the machine.

Though the Portal Generator didn't appear to move at all, mysterious noises of operation and activation came up from within it, hidden from sight. Everyone stared in rapt fascination, waiting the promised big flashy moment.

The noises grew in intensity and variety, until the few mummurs and whispers around were eclipsed by the sound. Vast rumbles matched that of the expectatations of those there.

Zim looked curiously at the machine. He had no idea what was going to happen, not being privy to the operations of it. He suspected it was probably going to involve some kind of portal being generated, but aside from that, he didn't have anything in the way of an idea.

Minimoose sprouted a cam-corder to record this momentus occasion. Gir was more or less completely oblivious to what was going on and was chasing a rubber moose at the end of a pole thing extending from his head, laughing to himself.

The rumbles increased until they might seem to crack the islet in two when they suddenly ceased with a resounding sound that sounded like an electrical snap. Something incredibly dramatic, cool and mind-scramblingly visual in nature completely failed to occur.

Everyone stared at the Portal Generator wordlessly, the silence slightly intimidating. A seagull started to cry, then quickly hushed out of embarrasment. A teenager small in stature, with blue arrows tattooed onto his face, wearing some kind of orange robe, attempted to break the uncomfortable silence by make a minitornado in his palm. Several people standing next to him glared at him and Ren kicked him in the chin; given his small stature, the dog didn't particularily injure the boy but the Airbender got the hint; the tornado disappeared as another stronger blast of wind blew the dog into the sea.

Everyone stared at the building for a few moments. Nothing happened.

Dib smirked at those watching, calmly stepping off the platform and assimilating into the crowd flawlessly; he'd gotten good at blending into the crowd. Some people started to mutter mutinously.

The slightly rusty gears in Zim's head started to turn furiously; he knew Dib well, and he knew that the amateur cryptozoologist was up to something. Granted, Dib's sense of drama stunk like the corpse of a Lepidopterran, but he thought something was up. Dib, after all, always kept his promises.

The possibly literal gears in Minimoose's head quietly spun slowly; he floated onto Dib's head, resting there comfortably to get a vantage point. Apparently realizing something, the robot(or whatever the heck Minimoose is)floated off Dib's head and onto Jimmy Neutron's head.

Norbert the Beaver looked up, noticing the toylike automation. "Hey, Jim," he said casually, as was his way. "You realize that weird alien's robot's on your head?"

Jimmy looked up frantically, unable to see over his ridiculous pompadour; he had bad, _bad _memories of the last time Gir got on his head. It took a month of psychotherapy to cure his phobia of explosive chocolate rabbits, and even now the nightmares kept coming...

"The _other _robot," Norbert clarified, seeing the boy genius's distress.

"Oh," Jimmy said, looking relieved. Than confused. "Why is Minimoose on my head?"

Minimoose squeaked.

"Ah." Than to Norbert, "What did he just say?"

The surfer-styled beaver shrugged. He didn't speak Squeaken.

"Maybe to get a better vantage point," Daggert said snidely.

Minimoose squeaked in affirmation.

"Hey!"

The extremely rusty monkey in Gir's head that was a metaphor for his mind weakly tried to clap it's cymbals together. It's arms fell off, and after a moment, the rest of it collapsed into ruin. Gir stuck his toungue out and started jumping around on his head until he bounced by Zim and the Irken grabbed the robot's leg. Thinking it was some kind of game, Gir started spinning his head slowly, making a low-key chugging sound.

Gir suddenly stopped, and pointed ahead. "Master, d'you hear bees?"

Zim frowned. "Bees? What bees? I hear no be-"

He was interrupted when an humming sound cracked again from the Generator like a whip cracking, several panels along the sides of the base of the machine itself burst into a bright blue radiance. Deep within the machine, connectors clicked in to place as they had been doing when everyone was standing around waiting for something interesting to happen, but with greater frequency. Everyone heard a loud snap, and the panels on the spires glowed an intensely bright blue, and started spinning slowly.

"Told you," Dib told Jimmy smugly. The self-proclaimed boy genius grumbled, handing Dib a tightly wound ball of money.

Electricity streamed around the machine's spires as the air began to vibrate around it, subtlely distorting the area within the machine. The spires slowed down, stopping completely. The machine lowered, becoming smaller in height as the various pipes and other structures retreated into it, and the upper part of the spires raised themselves slightly, pointing at an angle. The lower halves of them retreated into the machine, locking into place as the conical tips of the spires glowed the same blue as everything else. It stopped shrinking as it's top reached ground level.

Swirls of energy suddenly crackled around the glowing cones, increasing in intensity as the raised part of the Generator's platform sank to the ground, creating a completely flat surface.

The swirls of energy shot out in bright blue streams that were the wrong color for electricity; this was too bright for electricity, and there was yellow and orange spread through it, flashing off like solar flares. The four beams in question met each other in the precise center, melding together in a big swirling ball. There was a small and steady humming coming from the machine.

"Ooh! Aah!" People said. Those who said that did so in such a horribly cliche that their names shall not be spoken. Artistic integrity and all that.

The big ball of energy fluctated as the beams feeding it increased in size and power, and those who were close enough to it saw _things _with in the prismatic sphere; they sped by too quickly to be identified clearly, but to say that they saw a small slice of all existence was only a bit of an exaggeration.

It was a beautifully mind-twitching display. Even the consistently jaded those there, such as Gaz, felt a faint glimmer of wonder and awe at everything there. It _was _everything, and the fact that their minds were incapable of comprehending it all only added to it's allure. Dib felt a moment of wonder that he had been able to form this machine in his mind, barely able to understand what he was now looking at.

No one saw the flash of darkness inbetween the views of all those different worlds.

Dib looked up and frowned inwardly. Something seemed...off-hand. Some stray trivia flittered at the edge of his mental pheriphery, but he forget his netapult.

He looked at the portal-ball, looking for anything out of place. Of course, having never seen this kind of thing before he had no idea what to expect, so he saw nothing odd. Except for the vortex of swirling Creation, that is. He gave it up, as staring at all of creation too intently causes nausua.

Electrical current moved down through tubing on the interiors of the spires, flowing to the octagonal part in the center. The octagon glowed the same radiant color as the ball, with less special effects.

The ball above suddenly lost it's cohesion and flowed downwards to the octagon as the four spires moved around slowly, hooking together and forming two spires that resembled an incomplete arch. The ball hit the platform, creating a prismatic waterfall like thing. The two spires started rotating quickly, causing the portal to curve around itself, creating the impression of a door.

And then the reletively quiet humming abruptly stopped, replaced by a loud electrical snap accompined by the bluish electrical current faded away.

The spinning spires suddenly stopped completely stopped, and the portal suddenly froze. For about five and a half seconds.

Then it expanded, shifting violently and completely unwound, ripping itself apart and exploding outwards in a huge shockwave.

At the buzzing crack moments ago, everyone had begun to feel uneasy, and when it reacted to the sudden lack of sufficiant power, they dispersed and scattered in a big screaming mob.

No one got very far; for one thing, everyone kept tripping over everyone else, some people tried to help those who'd fallen up, thus causing fleeing jerks to try and push others out of the way. It was considerably more organized than a typical mob scene, espicially since there were so many people of good quality present.

It was a moot issue, seeing as they were engulfed in a red-pink wave in short order.

The shockwave knocked them down, and many screamed as the dispersed portal washed over them, fluctating auras swimming into existence around them.

Zim braced himself, catching Minimoose and Gir as the two robots were haphazardly flung away, while Dib landed onto a nearby tree while Gaz simply stood where she was, seemingly unbothered by the wave.

As abruptly as it began, the wave faded, taking a few minor features of the landscape with it.

Everyone unfroze, looking around dazedly. "Are we dead?" Zim finally said to Dib.

The human shook his head. "No, I don't think so. If we were, than I think the surrondings would a bit more interesting than this."

"So what happened?" Zim asked, feeling slightly dizzy and unware of the electricity racing up between his antannae.

"How should I know?"

"It's your machine!"

"Hey, I just designed it! Neutron built it!"

"Leave me out of this!"

Gir looked at the area dreamily, vauge fantasies of surfing playing through his head. Then something clicked.

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" he yelled, jumping up and down to get their attention. "I know! I know! I know! I know! I know! I know!"

Dib and Zim stared at Gir. "Well?" Dib said after a few moments.

Gir stared blankly back at him. "Well what?"

"Well what do you know about it?"

The light of understanding brightened Gir's dim mind momentarily. "Oooooooooh! THAT! I know where you live."

"Dib slapped his forehead in fustration," Zim narrated for no apparent reason. Dib stared at him, straightening his glasses. "He meant about the machine."

"Oh." Gir said, nodding slowly. "I got nothing!"

Alien and human slumped wearily. "Why am I not surprised?" Zim grumbled.

"Waaait a minute," Dib said, straightening up. He placed a hand on his chin, tapping his cheekbone comtemplatively. Gir imitated him dispite the lack of a skeleton and produced a dull clanking sound; the robot removed his head and started playing it like a drum, his disembodied head yelling happily.

Dib frowned. Several images raced in his mind:..The portal undoing itself...the humming cracking...Gir yelling about bees...the minimum power basis in his designs...Plankton rigging the Generator to crush Zim...

He slammed a fist into an open hand decisively. "I got it! The machine must've ran below the minimum power rating, causing it to shut off. Without power to finish it, the portal dissapated in traditional dramatic fashion. Half of the power must've been eaten up by Plankton during his stupid assasination attempt, which didn't leave enough power to finish the rift."

_Rift? _Zim thought.

Dib continued. "And that caused the harmless shockwave. Hmmm...there's always a minimum supply of power; whenever the power gets so low that it starts tapping it, the operations automatically cease so it can recharge. But the spacial gate requires a certain amount of power to open it and keep it open, so it exploded."

_Spac-Wait a minute!_ "Hold it!" Zim yelled. "First you called it a portal, than a rift. Now you're calling it a..a..whatever it is you called it! _Which is it?"_

Dib shrugged. "I wax on and off."

"So now what do we do?" Zim grunted unhappily. He was in no mood to go find more stupid power bolt thingies.

"Nothing. We go home, let it recharge and come back in the morning. It'll be full by then."

Zim made several complex and pointless calculations in his head. "So...take about fourteen hours...add a postive value equal to the number of minutes the energy charges itself...multiply it by charges approximate to local energy flows...add the imaginary numbers...add a random number to represent the possibility of an exploding star squatting in the center of it..."

"Wait a second! You're just making stuff up, aren't you?"

"...Yes."

Dib clapped his hands in conclusion. "So, we just need to let it recharge, alright?" He directed that at the crowd, who was receiving a similar speech from Jimmy Neutron, with similar interruptions.

Zim snapped his fingers and handed a red flag to Dib. "What's this for?" the boy asked in confusion.

Zim grinned. "So it can charge!" Gir did a drumroll punctuating the Irken's remark.

Dib grimaced. "Ack. Puns." Gaz commented.

"What! You don't like wordplay?"

"That wasn't wordplay." Dib said. "That was terrible." Gir did another drumroll.

"Stop that!" Zim pulled Gir's head out of the robot's hands and stuck it back on his neck. "You're starting to make me wish I'd taken up postmodern art appreciation class."

_Zim was in a small classroom with a bunch of other people; all of them were wearing black clothes and little weird hats. For some reason, the room was dark._

_The teacher clapped his hand, causing the lights to turn on. "Now then," he said in the sort of voice that makes people want to turn you inside out, "we turn to the twentieth piece in the Hemosasus collection." He pulled the covering off a painting that seemed to consist entirely of random splotches of dark color that suggested cancerous tumors. It also suggested to the viewer's stomachs that it was time to void themselves._

Zim shuddered. "Okay, maybe not."

Dib raised an eyebrow. "What the heck was that?"

"What are you, an idiot? That was a mental clip that showed what being in a postmodern art class would be like."

"Wait. If that was a flashback in your mind, why did _we _see it!"

"One, you're wearing some kind of a telepathic headband thing," Zim said, pointing at everyone in turn. "Two, Gir has so little mind he shares the ones of people around him(I guess), and Gaz? I don't want to know. She scares me."

They looked at the creepy girl in question; a storm cloud gathered above her, darkening the sky and throwing lightning bolts haphazardly.

Dib and Zim backed away from the scary sister, while Gir, having no concept of mortality, hugged her head.

One of her perpetually squinty eyes opened, showing a dark brown eye glaring at the world with the intensity of a targeting laser.

Luckily for the witless robot, certain doom for him was forestalled by the Last Airbender popping up from the beach, possibly literally.

"Hey, everybody's leaving!" Aang yelled at them, standing atop a pillar of sand that hadn't been there before; it was shifting slightly, small whirls of it's components drifting around it. Interested by this, Gir dropped off Gaz's head, dancing around it in a kind of swing dance. "Aren't you coming?"

"Not yet/squeak," Gaz, Zim, Minimoose and Dib said all at once. They looked at each other, surprised.

Aang shrugged cheerfully. "See you later!" The sand pillar contracted and launched him away as if it were a cannon as it fell apart; he landed semi-gracefully on a large white furred six-legged beast that looked vaugely like an oversized bison, with blue arrows on it's head much like the one's on Aang's head. It rose into the air without any apparent means of transport and flew off, a small gust of wind stirring up the sand it had been standing on.

Gaz looked up from her Game Slave Supreme, looking at the mystical flying beast. "Is it me," she said, "or have our lives gotten weirder since that whole stupid space thing?"

"Nah," said the paranormal investigator who owed his existence to being the end result of a failed expirament and spent his days as a junior operative for a super-secret society that sounded like a Ben Stein commercial.

"Not that I've noticed," added the tan green reformed alien invader who was currently occupied with keeping his insanely stupid and stupidly insane robot from eating the sand while his miniture moose sidekick floated around and squeaked a lot.

She mumbled something inchoherent, somehow jumping onto the rickety bridge's robe and crossing it while paying complete attention to her game, jumped down and walked across the beach and heading into the semi-tropical jungles of the Destiny Isle Zim had claimed as his personal nation for about five and a half hours before he got bored a year and a half ago. For some reason, a breeze stirred the sand behind her as if for dramatic effect.

Zim looked at Dib. "I have the distinct feeling I was just zinged several times."

Dib raised an eyebrow. "'Zinged'? Where do you come up with this stuff?"

"This from the guy who coined the expression 'things he do'?"

Dib clapped sarcastically. "That's why you're better off sticking to irony and letting the puns die in peace." He walked away from Zim and started strolling across the bridge when an unusually heavy crosswind blew the bridge apart, throwing him off into the ocean where a riptide carried him around the island, leaving him on a piece of driftwood and staring uncomprehendingly.

Zim wasn't really paying attention to that spectacle and was watching Gir make sandcastles before reenacting old and bad Kojera movie scenes. By the time he looked up, he saw Dib floating on a plank around the island, leaving him to wonder if he'd just missed something.

He extended his spider-legs, delicately stepping over the gap between the machine's islet and the main island. Noticing his master's sudden absence, Gir flew after him as a new bridge slid out from an unseen panel.

Gir landed on Zim's shoulder. The Irken started to walk back to his ship, reconsidered it, and decided to stay here for a while. He walked off into the forest, intent on finding one of the old ruins. Maybe there was some ancient sculpture he could take as a trophy or something. He paused, looking at the people walking back to their ships.

"Gir! Attack the Ren!"

"Whyyyyyyy?" Gir drawled annoyingly.

"Because his head has a center of haggis!"

"HAGGGIS!" The robot flew off his shoulder as Zim closed his eyes and grinned at the ensuing yelps of pain. He pulled out his digital recorder as to record the event for posterity.

A few minutes later, Gir left the bruised form of the obnoxious chihuahua behind, flying back to Zim as the cackling Irken went into the jungle as he'd planned.

_Hours later..._

On another smaller islet platform, Dib, Gaz, Gir, Minimoose and Zim watched the fading sunset.

It was smaller than the machine's one, being merely a mostly sunken small peninsula. A crooked tree grew near the edge, providing a seat for Dib and Minimoose. The islet itself had been reinforced with wooden barricades, which had somehow survived years since being placed up by their original builders, whoever they were.

Sometimes, Zim thought this might've been the upper most tower of a primitive fortress. After all, the rest of the various islands on this archepelago seemed to be the tops of mountains that had sunk, so it wasn't that far-fetched.

Zim sat under the tree, residing half in the shade while feeling the comforting heat of the retreating sun. Gir sat on his head, and Zim allowed him to stay there for reasons only the Irken knew. Dib reclined along the tree's crooked trunk, taking advantage of the naturally formed seat while Minimoose floated near him, resting on the tree's 'top'. Gaz sat cross-legged on the edge of it, near the barricades.

They had sat there for a while now, engaging in idle chatter, as was their way. Somehow, the subject had come to one of a rather existential nature.

Dib, being the most philosophical of them, spearheaded the conversation. "If you think about, it doesn't make much sense. If the Portal Generator works, it proves that there are other worlds out there. And if there are, why did we end up on this one of all possible worlds?"

Zim, being who he was, shrugged. "If there are other worlds out there(besides the one we know, that is), than it stands to reason that there is a reason we don't see, a chain of casuality we can't find the anchor to. Besides, does it really matter?"

Dib snorted. "Of course it matters! Think how different it would have been for all of us; Zim might have been born into a society that integrates human and alien paradigms, me and Gaz would have been born with a semi-decent parent-"Gaz grunted at this, but said nothing else,"-and that's just us."

Minimoose squeaked once. Gir jumped off Zim's head and started rolling around in the sand.

"You've got a point," Zim noted. "What about Minimoose and Gir?" he directed at Dib.

Dib thought about it. "I don't know. The reasons for building them would be massively different, if they were ever built at all." Gir, totally unaware that his existence or potential lack there of was being discussed, scooped up sand to built a sand castle. Of course, it wouldn't clump together without getting wet, but he didn't care at all.

"And that's just the world we know." Gaz said. "Technically speaking, any world we could think of probably exists somewhere out there."

"If they're there." Zim pointed out. A tentaclelike apparatus shot out of his Pak and snagged a fruit from the tree's branch. He started eating it, deciding that the pollution that plauged the city he'd originally ended up on probably wouldn't effect an island all the way over here. He took a bite into the fruit, which due to either some turn in evolution or the whim of a Creator(or quite possibly both)reason was shaped like a star; it tasted like a sweet and juicy orange.

"Yeah," Dib said, looking past the sunset and towards the infinite sky. Infinity on it's own was boring, as the mind tended to disregard things it couldn't comprehend, either as a self-defense mechanism or just because mankind is stupid. He considered all that was.

"And think of this: our world is only a small fragment of a greater world." Dib's fingernail scraped across the bark, making Zim flinch; the Irken _hated _noises like that. "One part of something we care barely even imagine."

The purple haired girl looked at her brother, perpetually squinty eyes raising a bit. "You've been thinking about this a lot." It was a statement, not a question.

Zim looked up at the boy. "You've kept your mind off supernormal matters for more than six minutes? This _is _serious."

"Almost unnatural," Gaz said.

"Squeak!"

"I like your hat!" Gir added, trying to get in the conversation in his own way.

Dib cracked a wry smile. "Knock it off!"

They all laughed, in their own ways: Zim roared maniacally, Gaz gave a rare smirk, Gir giggled while rocking up and down, clutching his feet, and Minimoose squeaked rapidly, his sounds making less inflection then usual.

They had changed since the days in which Zim and Dib were in a daily struggle to make the other fail miserably: Zim was still crazy, but in a good way, with a notable lack of intentional evil. Dib had become somewhat more rational, Gaz had started to come out of her shell somehow, and it was difficult to discern Gir and Minimoose's changes. Dib and Zim's rivalry had evolved into a friendship, though one that retained it's competetiveness. Neither of them were willing to give ground to the other in this matter, putting the truth in the old adage _the more things change, the more they stay the same._

After a moment, the laughter died down, at least for Zim and his sidekicks; after all, they were the only ones who were really laughing. They leaned back, relaxing and taking in the sights.

"You know," Gaz said, "It doesn't matter what anyone does. This place never really changes."

"Yeah," Zim agreed. He looked out towards the east, at the mainland. "Too bad for us," he said with the mark of a frown begining to crest his face.

Dib thought of everything they went through almost on a daily basis and smiled, letting his arm dangle below the tree loosely. "Trust me on this. By noon tomorrow, everything's going to be different."

What passed for content on Gaz's face faded suddenly, replaced by her nearly permanent frown. "What makes you say that?" she said sharply to Dib.

Dib sat up, taking note of that look on Gaz's face. Her moods were difficult to understand, ranging from the reason several easily frightened and fundamentalistic neighbors believed her to be the walking Wrath of God, to the more calm and restrained one she had been in. He knew his sister's mood pretty well, if not the actual sister, so he knew to tread carefully without backing away, oh, about eight-hundred or so meters.

"Just a feeling I have."

Gaz frown deepened. She wondered if Dib was sharing her feelings about the Portal Generator, than discounted the thought; her feeling was vaugely pessimistic, while Dib sounded almost gleeful. Then again, she thought, he probably wouldn't consider it a big loss if Nicktown was wiped from the face of the planet.

She knew her brother was nuts. So was his best friend. Exactly what kind of crazy that was seemed to change on an almost daily basis.

They were worlds apart. She knew that and it didn't bother her. Where he threw himself into paranormal persuits, she prefered the electronically rendered world of video games. They both liked black, but where he liked blue, she prefered purple in varying shades. Where he had his hair in spikes, she had hers in hooks(a psychologist might well conclude that that showed the difference in their defensive personality shells). The biggest issue of all was their dad. Between Membrane and Dib was an almost unbreachable gulf, traversed only occasionally by a shared interest in science fiction and a talent for invention. Gaz and her father shared a marginally better relationship, ameliorated by the fact that being the younger sibling and a girl at that, he didn't see her as a work-in-progress as he did Dib. Most of her emotional life went into keeping her relationship with her father alive, much like a withering garden, which was why Gaz was always so determined to spend time with him whenever possible. She vaugely understood Dib's blaise attitude towards him, if not why. But then, she wasn't a people person. Gaz's perview was the operation of things. She understood how things worked, not people.

Neither sibling knew quite why Membrane had raised them as his children, which they technically were. They were the results of a failed expiriment, not a relationship with a wife or significant other. The only mother they had was a random laboratory. Membrane was annoyingly practical, and admittingly incompetent at raising children, almost never remembering their names half the time and speaking to them in an oddly formal way. Nonetheless, he treated them as his own children and not random freaks of science gone amok who owed their lineage to his DNA and little else.

Gaz accepted this with her usual detachment towards most things; Dib had not attained her grasp of equimity and had not come to terms with it. She suspected that might be at the core of their problems, besides the fact that obsessive-compulsion was probably at the root of their problems.

Zim, for his part, was only having serious thought in his particular brand of seriousness. He was using his forefinger to draw out complicated equations in the sand to prove the notion in a movie Zim saw once, where the protaganist had accidentally discovered the secret name of God in a mathamatical equation, attracting the attention of conspiracy theorists. Intriged by the notion, he'd sporadically attempted to duplicate the feat by himself in a manner; he had no interest in the name, merely the proof. His household computer refused to help on the basis that if Zim wanted to prove that, he'd ought to do it by himself the traditional way; there were certain things the computer refused to do(besides being useful)and telling him something he really should work out for himself was one of them(besides, doing something like that was just _asking _for trouble). The mechanical brain on Zim's back wasn't quite advanced enough to perform such a complicated equation, and Zim frequently got bored with it halfway, anyway.

Case in point: Zim's equation to prove the Truth Behind All Truths(as he'd put in unconscious poetry)had gone off-track and degenerated into a comic strip drawing of himself as a cat-alien blowing up Philadelphia with a super-bazooka formed from a banana-peel and a hermit crab shell Zim found lying around. Gir had noticed his master's 'art' and made his own contribution to it: a giant version of himself smashing buildings.

Zim's train of thought started to board at the same station where his computer had gotten it's reasons for not helping Zim, and he decided that trying to prove a conspiracy theory-type book right was stupid.

He brushed the equation away with the palm of his hand and immediately began drawing a complicated schematic of how to rig the city electrical system to spawn living electric currents to literally shock the living hell out of burglars and make them model citizens. At least, after they were properly prepared and infested with the appropiate nanontechnology.

Gir took out an elaborate masterpiece of Zim and drew exaggerated eyebrows, sideburns, a Fu Manchu mustache and a oversized clown wig on him with a red crayon in a childish scrawl. Keef had more where that came from.

Minimoose shook his head sadly at the antics of his creator and 'brother'.

A gopher popped out of a knothole in the tree. "Generalissimo Magnifico Ungulta Minimoose-apologies for cutting the introduction short-, the Cabaret needs your counsel as Supreme Ruler of the wor-"

Minimoose waved his feet-nubs frantically, desperatately trying to shush the gopher.

The rodent got the hint and saluted. "Another time then." He retreated into the knothole, completely unobserved by the others present.

"Squeek." It wasn't easy ruling the world. Zim knew that; that's why he had the intention of leaving it in charge of robots when he was plotting to conquer it. Minimoose even suspected he had _automaphobia;_ fear of rulership.

"What was that, Minimoose?" Zim said idlely, not really paying attention to what was going on.

"Squeak squeak squeeeek."

"Oh. Why would you have Tourette's Syndrome? I didn't program you for that."

"Squeak."

"Really? Good thing I have my laboratory functional again! First thing we do when we get home is..._fix you." _Zim laughed in a low mad voice.

The miniture moose robot squeaked in a nearly inadible voice.

Zim laughed evilly as Dib looked up. The sun had almost faded from view entirely. Strange how a lot could happen in so little time.

"I'm going home. You guys coming?"

"Sure, why not, squeak, I gonna eat your feet-meats!" came the reply in varying tones, voices, and mental stability.

They all got off where they were, walking to the ships that were parked by a tree. In theory; the Voot Cruiser was propping up the Dibship, halfway covered in dirt and sand with a trench following it a few feet past a tree that had been broken in half.

Draw your own conclusions.

Zim had opened the Voot's windshield-slash-cockpit door when Dib yelled at him from behind. "Hey ZIM!"

"What?" The Irken said warily.

"'Lest I forget, I got that thing you commisioned from the metalworkers a few weeks ago. Apparently, they didn't know where you lived, so they sent it to me. Catch." He threw a small metallic something at Zim.

Zim, with reflexes honed by being both an Irken soldier and a research scientist specializing in Madness, caught it easily. Of course, with Dib's throwing arm, that didn't mean much.

Zim held the something in his fist, a fine chain protruding from it. He gently unwound it from his hand, holding the loop of the chain in one hand as he admired it.

Dib observed it with interest. Since he'd recieved it by accident, he wondered what it meant. After all, jewlery of a sort wasn't exactly Zim's style.

The chain it was attached to wasn't very long, just long enough to wrap around Zim's neck, small and functional, with a small trinket attached to it resembling the modified Irken insignia he had taken for his own. Zim slipped it over his neck, displaying it proudly over his shirt.

"What's it mean?" Dib said, who knew his friend fairly well.

"A reminder." Zim explained, explaining nothing. Zim picked up his sidekicks and deposited them unceremoniously into the cockpit, pausing to consider the trinket.

It was meaningful in a specific way. The crownlike part symbolized the ruler. The other part of it represented the soul; he was determined to never repeat the mistakes of the past, to never be so foolish again. The trinket was a reminder of who he was now; he'd once dreamed of conquering all in the universe. Now he was content with simply ruling the kingdom no dark desire would claim again: his own sacred soul. Never again would he be willing to kill out of vain ambition. He had better plans now, more upright ones. And he planned to keep them.

Besides, he thought, it looked cool.

Dib raised his hand in an odd gesture that resembled the surfer _shaka_. He knew the _shaka _represented a wealth of things, all benevolent, so he took it as that.

"Here's to destiny," Dib said, walking to his ship as Gaz starting rapping on the window impatiently.

"...Okaay," Zim said, feeling throughly confused.

He climbed into the ship; a few moments later, both ships took off, heading for their respective homes. Gir stuck his head out the window before his caretaker pulled him back in, wondering when the Voot Cruiser had a window put in.

"Hey kid. Call it an uneducated guess but-"

"Don't say it!"

"He's right. We are definitely-"

"I said _don't say it!_"

"We're lost." the skull and tiger said together.

The kid grumbled, but didn't say anything. "We are _not _lost. We just need to...re-orient ourselves in the appropiate direction."

Hobbes looked at Morte. "We're even more lost then we thought."

"I told you before, I don't get lost! As a technomancer, alchemist and general mystic, I have an innate sense of direction."

"'Yukon.'"

Though that word made no sense to Morte, it would have made Calvin's hackles rise if he had any. "You promised to never bring that up!"

"And you promised to never let my bathing habits become public knowledge! Fairs fair."

"A lot happens in a interview and I ran out of idle chit-chat! And they thought the dry-cleaning thing was funny."

"See how funny it is when you have to put conditioner and shampoo in a washing cycle."

"Entertaining as this is, shouldn't you fellas watch out for _that!_"

The Gummi Ship violently swerved out of the way of an immense mile-long beast; it had a grumpy draconian face, with several teeth jutting out like a crocodile's, serrated fins for ears and eyes that might belong to an organic binocular. It's actual body resembled that of a white-gray blimp, with small vestigial feet and wings. A flame ignited somewhere under it's tail and it flew off fairly quickly.

"You _see!" _Hobbes yelled, pointing at the creature as it disappeared. "I'd swear that's the fith time we've seen that space dragon! We are so lost we keep running into a fire-farting thing that looks like the love child of Fafnir and the Hindenburg!"

"That can't be fire," Calvin said in an absurdly reasonable voice. "There's no oxygen here to combust."

Hobbes threw his hands up in frustration. "Maybe it's emitting oxygen or something, I don't know or care! What I care about is getting back on track!"

Morte grinned. Of course, he was a skull so he was always grinning, but that was besides the fun. "And to think I was going to pretend to be a stage prop. Lothar'd bust a gut trying to see all this stuff.

Oblivious to the skull's observations, Calvin and Hobbes continued arguing. "You couldn't pilot if your life depended on it!"

"Speaking of which-"

"We are not going to die!"

"We have no idea where we're going, we nearly crashed into a few stars _twice_, and we have no real food! What makes you think we're not!"

"...Mutinator!"

"Blithering nitwit!"

"Whiner!"

"Arrogant brat!"

"Smelly furball!"

"Selfish egotist!"

"Walking rug!"

_"Human!"_

"...Casanova!"

"'Casanova'?" said Hobbes, looking utterly bewildered.

Calvin's eyes darted from side to side. "I had to think of something real quick or I'd mess up our group dynamic."

"What group dynamic? This is 'you and me and him makes three', not some rock group or weird team in some story. There aren't enough of us to qualify as a group."

"Says you. Where were we?"

"Stage three."

"Right. Pointless arguing followed by rule flaunting." Calvin pulled out a large guidebook out of a glove compartment in the control panel that had G.R.O.S.S written on it in big shiny letters. "According to our General Rules Of Sound actionS charter , the primary technician has piloting rights!"

"But you're not this ships technician. Marcus and Jason are."

"THAT DOES IT!" Calvin launched off his seat and into Hobbes; the two of them rolled around the ship, leaving Morte to steer it.

The ship wobbily flew into the deeper parts of space, argumentive and senseless sounds coming from it.

I hope that flowed better than the Dreamer; certainly took me less time to write, that's for sure.

As a challenge, try to note all the hidden references to other things, excluding characters. Let's see how deeply you can delve into my mind without going as mad as me this side of the autistic spectrum!

Reviews are always appreciated, but bear this in mind; I like advice and interesting observations. Glowing praise is nice and lights up my day, but seriously people: I'm trying to do stuff no one else has done yet. Help me out here!

As a final note, I leave you with HVK's Wise Words of Wisdom.

_Those who claim words can never hurt clearly have never been hit in the face by a dictionary._

Okay, maybe I could do better than that.

_The Path of Good is ardous and long, those who walk it bear a heavy burden. But those who walk on the Path of Evil must take care, lest they fall onto the righteous path._


	3. Death of A World

Hi, y'all, once again! I sincerely hope you like this chapter, and I beg of you, please leave signed reviews so I can reply to reviews! PLEEEEASE! Everytime someone leaves an unsigned review, I do something CRAZY! Don't let my psychiatrists go insane again! Even though it's funny...

Disclaimer:I do not own anything except for my unique spin on Kingdom Hearts, or the following poem. Even though it _sucks._

_This is the way the world ends._

_This is the way the world ends._

_This is the way the world ends._

_Not with a bang, but with a whimper._

_-T.S. Eliot_

_The shadows come._

_From nowhere and everywhere they have originated,_

_every wound they leave stays bleeding and numb._

_Everyone they touch fades, their light blown out as the dark hunger is sated;_

_The earth quakes at the approach of such unnatural beasts_

_And everything their tainted claws touch crumbles_

_their marks are nothing, leaving it a sorrowful salve at the least_

_And to grasp at their simple fact, the heart stumbles._

_Their monstrous visage defies logic and reason,_

_their absence of such easily shown._

_And they feed upon nothing brought by the turn of the seasons._

_But hunger carving them hollow is all they have known,_

_and mercy a concept they know naught_

_From the dark skies they descend, _

_Upon us, until the last battle with us has been fought._

_They desire to cease hungering, and there is they will feed_

_Within each mortal there is a light, and it is this that they so desperately need._

_But within the fading confines of a dying world,_

_there is one last soul whose light calls._

_Another fate has yet to be fully unfurled,_

_And he has no desires to take that most dark of eternal falls._

_They come for him, and flee from him,_

_As he lies unaware of the world's demise_

_they feast on the burning lights within the unknown. He awakens, going to the world's rim_

_Thus, a journey begins as so many others fade into nothing, and the darkness grows in greater size_

_And the world falls and is rent within Oblivion's dark maw, and one hears the light's call._

For the most part, the night was quiet. Even at Zim's house.

Gir got it into his head to watch a movie, which was why he had been relatively quiet.

Zim wasn't aware of this at the moment, being in his basement and operating on his Pak. He had a vauge idea of installing a holographic map in it, for reasons he forgot about five minutes into the installation process. It had something to do with keeping track of things and not getting lost in Mexico again.

He'd finished the new installation about the time Gir was the middle of the third viewing of the film.

Zim cracked his neck and rubbed his wrists; his joints always got sore after a while of doing this sort of thing. He leaned back against the chair, groaning contently. Zim wasn't exactly sure why he did this until it hurt; it was just one of the characteristics about him that he just accepted and went with. Granted, this ambivilant attitude of his was part of the root of his problems, but that was something he was working on.

He grunted and stood up, turning around as the light from the lights in the room glinted off the two vertically postioned metallic ports in his back; they were shaped a bit like the three 'spots' on his Pak, but those were much wider, whereas these were narrow and hollow.

Apparently reacting to some kind of signal, the Pak floated up in the air, hovering to the appropiate location; magnetic clamps secured them on as thin cable slid out of the ports on the Pak and into Zim's body, connecting into the cybernetic bases within Zim's spinal column. The dull spots on Zim's Pak turned a red coloration as the biocurrent in his body flooded into the Pak, activating it; he felt a brief rush as his two minds connected, becoming a smaller louder and better one.

He clicked a button on a nearby computer console; a port opened up in it, the controls moving away from it. One of the spots on Zim's Pak opened up, and a thick tentacle ending in a clamplike thing slid out; plugging into the port.

Zim closed his eyes as a screen lit up, a thoughtful expression on his face as a blue cursor sped down a selection of dates, ending at today. The screen flashed bright magenta, revealing an empty computer document as the light flash disappered.

A crease appeared between Zim's eyeridges as words rapidly appeared on the screen, scrolling down as they appeared in a rapid speed most writers would give their eyeteeth to be able to perform.

A few minutes later, he abruptly stopped, disconnecting the Pak-arm from the console. The port in the console disappeared, and Zim overlooked the document a few times, deciding it was satisfactory.

After his pilgramage, he'd decided to start a journal to record his thoughts on the day; he believed that doing so might aid his already formiddable discipline(unfortunately, his ephininy only seemed to open his eyes to the abombinable way he regarded the world and everything in it, and not his other flaws). That, and for the sheer nostalgic joy of looking back on one's own past thoughts.

As to why he did it on a computer, that was a simpler question. Doing it electronically was much easier and less of a hassle than doing it by hand, and besides; it was cool. And it was true he could simply record his thought literally on his Pak and up-load them later, but what was the fun in _that?!_

Deciding that today's entry was good enough shortly after completing it was a little odd, but he had a strange compulsion to hurry up and get upstairs for some reason.

Then he remembered; it was Gir's Movie Night. Of course, with Gir, every five and a half seconds spent in front of the TV was his Movie Night when the robot was so inclined, but this was a Zimandate, and as such, deserved his complete and total attention.

On a sudden impulse, he turned around and looked at the room.

It wasn't large, big enough to serve as a private workspace for his more theoretical works. He kept his record computer station here, and a few hologram projecters for his thinking sessions, but that was it.

He had plenty of work to do. Work that could make them rich! And famous!

On the other hand, Gir loved spending time with him, no matter what the occasion. He rarely noticed when Zim wasn't there, or if he'd sent a robot double to fool Gir, but it was the principle of the thing.

"Ooh, what a quandary!" Zim moaned. Work or Gir? Work or Gir?

And, as things often did for Zim, the situation resolved itself. In a manner.

Admist a short and energetic guitar riff, a small sunburst cloud appeared by Zim's shoulder, gradually dissapiting to reveal a small tiny version of Zim, about a foot tall, with brighter versions of his clothes popped up by his shoulder floating in midair through a pair of disembodied feather-furry wings with a bit of a dragonfly-ish look to them, sitting right by the little guy's Pak. He had a small aura of light emanating from his skull, and his eyes were light red. His hands were folded demurely behind his back, below a yellow-gray electric guitar slung over his back on a bandolier, possibly the one that was strung while prepicipating his arrival.

Initially mistaking the sound of it's arrival for an intruder with a penchant for noise, Zim wildly looked around the room, than saw the small cherubic entity that had popped out of mid-air and was currently watching him patiently. Seeing it, Zim visibly relaxed. "Oh, it's just my shoulder angel." The aformentioned shoulder angel gave a friendly salute.

"You should go upstairs and have fun with Gir," Zim's shoulder angel suggested in a higher pitched though more muscial voice than Zim's that for some reason had a bit of a South-western accent. "It's the right thing to do! And it'll definitely be interesting, if not outright fun."

"Don't listen to that guy!" An equally high-pitched though Nevadean voice said from mid-air before the Irken could reply to the cherub's suggestion. Another small figure appeared, popping into existence from a smokey cloud that made Zim start hacking. His clothes resembled Zim's and might have been dully darker versions of his clothes under all the filth, dust and soot caked over them. And that was disregarding their horribly frayed condition. His eyes were so dark red they were almost black, his hands terminated in sharp claws, and a pair of ragged leathery wings with ragged fur coupled with beetle wings poking out of the apex's of the wing's 'finger bones' through the fur. A big spear with three angled blades was sheathed on his back, with a whole lotta notches on it. If Zim had the sort of mind that made random trivial connections, he might have noticed that the darkling had a slight resemblence to the psychotic being that had evidently gotten it's name from the medieval list of The Seven Deadly Sins from his dream a while ago. Actually, Zim _did _have the sort of mind, but he barely remembered the dream anyway, so the connection went several feet over his head.

The dark apparation pointed at Zim's shoulder angel acuusingly. "That loser's trying to lead you down the path of righteousness; I wanna lead you down the path that's _fun!_"

Zim's shoulder angel snorted.

"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?" Zim's shoulder devil said angrily.

"Oh, you have to be kidding me. You basically say that the path of Justice is boring and stupid, and you ask mean why I disparage you? Here's your sign." The angel flew by the devil and laid a big _I'm Stupid _roadsign on the miniture sociopath's neck.

"Hey! You're a conscience! What the heck does this mean?!"

"Surely ye jest! It's a sign to warn people away from you! Don't you watch Bill Engval?"

"I know what it is! All I'm saying is that it's _rude!_"

"Oh, boo-freakin'-hoo. Good is about doing what's right. That doesn't mean you have to be _nice _about it." The angel said smugly, holding up a bumper sticker that read _I'm a righteous jerk and proud of it!_ There was a smaller typeface at the bottom of the sign, following an equally small asterick; _But not in the bad sense._

"You hypocrite!"

"Ooh, I haven't heard that one before, loser!"

The shoulder devil zipped up to the angel's face right in front of Zim's neck as the Irken watched the two glare at each other. "Wanna say that again?"

"What, you're so pathetic I need to enunciate, _loser?"_

"Say that again."

The angel grinned as he emphasized each syllable of the insult. "Lah-ooooh-za-_er!"_

The badly dressed devil sputtered inchoherently as the angel floated away, looking pleadingly at the Irken. "Come on Zim. Look at him. He can't even dress himself in clothes that don't look like there home to over twenty-thousand species of lethal germs and bacterium. How could you possibly listen to him?"

The devil scooted up. "Because my way is easier and more fun! And I have to dress this way; I'm evil!"

Zim waved his hand in front of his face. "You don't bathe much either."

The angel crossed his arms. "Hygiene. It always comes to that, you know. Spiritual cleanliness may or may not be Godliness, but it never hurt to take one measly shower."

"Shaddup! Listen to me, pal! You could go up there and waste the rest of the night with that dumbass robot, _oooor _you could spend on things that will make you a _legend!_"

"Hey!" Zim and his personal angel said at once, equally infuriated. "He might be a-okay, he _is _a dumbass, but he's my/his dumbass!"

They looked at each other. Zim's shoulder angel gave him a big thumbs-up.

The shoulder devil groaned in annoyance. "See what this guy gets you? Cheap sentimentality. Now if you'd listened to me, you'd be practically _ruling _this joint!"

Zim and his angel looked at him with mostly narrowed eyes and identical crossed arms; the effect was not an angry but a disparging one that pretty much translated to _What are you? Nuts?_

"Ookay, bad example. Look, all I'm saying is: riches and fame? No bad thing. Though I do love bad things."

"Which explains the mirror obsession," the angel muttered.

"Jerk."

"This is going nowhere," Zim sighed.

"Now listen here, big guy!" His angel pleaded. "If there's one thing I know, it's that excessive money brings only complication! Too much wealth will call the unscruplelus and money-hungry to you!"

"Sounds like you're advocating selfishness," the devil muttered.

"Am not! And if you're famous-"

"You'll have people practically worshiping you and at your beck and call!"

"And you'll have the tabloids and reporters hounding your every step, waiting for the slightest slip-up so they can report it and make ill-gotten money over your misfortunate lack of good judgement!"

"Hey!" The Irken said indignantly.

"Oh, come one, Zim," the angel said wearily. "You know it, I know it, he knows it, and Gir knows it, Okay not Gir, but _everyone _knows you have almost no ability to judge situations and act accordingly. So fame and riches: not all they're cracked up to be. Like evil."

They looked at the tiny mini-devil. He was scratching his armpit, oblivious to their attention. He suddenly plucking a tick-flea hybrid from regions best left unmentioned; he squeezed it momentarily, disappointed at it's inability to feel pain and stuffed in his mouth, chewing with his mouth open and scattering the contents of his mouth with his needless messy mastication. "What?" the devil said with his mouth hanging open and a leg sticking out of his mouth, noticing their looks of revulsion. Zim blanched and slapped him away, but carefully; he didn't want that thing's diet anywhere on him.

The angel fluttered to Zim's shoulder(which didn't make much sense, as he always seemed to be flying without the aid of his wings, which were always moving anyway), alighting on the raincoat and causing a high-pitched voice to squeal "Oh physically attractive female paaaramour!". Ignoring this, he looked at the misfortunate anti-conscience and laughed. "Stupid, stupid devil. You keep trying to sway Zim's heart to your side again, but this territory-" he took off again and landed on Zim's head gracefully-"is officially a no-smoking zone!" He pulled a bazooka out of mid-air and blasted the anti-conscience for no reason other than he happened to dislike him with intense venom, which was as close as the embodiment of Zim's good side could come to long-term hatred.

The devilish spirit lay in the tiny crater, his charred limbs twitching momentarily.

Shaking himself and somwhoe discarding all the damage incurred from the missle,, the devil flew up to the angel, realizing the angel's metaphor.

He stuck his face right into the angel's, who recoiled from both the invasion of his Me Space and the devil's atrocious odor. "Ugh, what have you been _eating?!"_

"I don't eat! Much."

"You don't sweat either, but you still manage to put off some serious B.O., brother!"

"I ain't your brother!" The devil protested as Zim lost interest in the argument.

"True," the angel aquicsed, "but we are related in a sense, as we are the hallicinatory manifastions of Zim's internal moral conflict, the externalized form of his internal discussion."

"Yeah, but that's besides the point!"

"You mean like how my insults are _way _better than yours dispite the fact that I'm the angel and you're the devil's advocate?"

The devil blinked. "Did you just call me a lawyer? That is _low,_ man. Even for you."

The angel looked shocked. "I-I didn't mean like that!"

"Well, that's what I heard."

"But I wasn's saying-"

"It's too late." The devil turned around huffily. "Now you hurt my feelings."

Zim's shoulder angel laid a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry."

The little sociopath's eyes turned to the hand slowly, seemed to consider it...

And grabbed it over his head, propped the surprised conciounse up with his head, and threw him across the room into a wall. Since they were hallucinations that Zim was no longer paying attention too, they no longer made any impact on the surrondings.

"You back-stabbing traitorus rapscallion!" The angel flew upwards, the light of his head turning into a plasmic flame not unlike what the sun threw off on an average basis. But, y'know, not _DEADLY._

The devil blinked. "Does this guy come with subtitles? You'd think you could afford a few lessons with a sissy harp." He drew his trident.

The angel rolled his eyes, the solar flames from his head casting shadows around his shoulders. "We've been over this: I play an electric guitar, and you know it!" He brandished the instrument in question like it was some sort of weapon; the broad part of it sprouted sharp blades like that of an axe.

The sociopath was not particularily impressed. "Simpering sissy!"

"False-confident moron!"

"Lunatic!"

The angel stared at him blankly.

Zim's shoulder devil quickly recalculated. "Lemme try that again. Misguided lunatic!"

"Moron!"

With a mutual roar, they threw themselves at each other, weapons flung back for the first strike in a long drawn out and really friggin' fraggin' cool epic battle between the respective sides of good and evil within a single person.

And smacked right into each other full-bodily, falling down to the floor and sliding away from each other.

The angel got up first, grabbing his guitar. He flew at the devil, who dazedly grabbed his trident.

Angel hit devil, and the two of the rolled around on the floor, madly kicking, hitting and senselessly attacking each other as they rolled around the room, trading insults.

One couldn't exactly call it a fair fight with a straight face; more like a basic battle of equal lunatics.

They bounced around the room with their fight obscured by a small dust cloud, theologically based weapons long since disgarded as their grand battle degenerated into a Three Stooges fracas.

Zim was unaware of the whole thing; he was walking around the room shutting things off, turning machines inactive and generally setting things into a inoperative status.

He stopped to observe that the room was fine and started to leave it for another day.

He paused as the small dust cloud of war rolled over his foot, leaving a trail of filth and glowiness. He followed the trail to it's begining, frowning at the aftermath of the pointless fight.

He reached down and bravely stuck his hand into the dust cloud, grabbed the first solid thing he felt, and pulled whatever it was out.

He pulled it up to eye level, holding his shoulder devil by the leg; the devil had a choke hold on the angel, who undeterred had his arms and legs wrapped around the devil's body. Zim's anti-conscience had taken advantage of his one free limb by repetively punching the conscience wherever he could reach. This was counterbalanced by the fact that the angel was manicially and extremely rapidly biting the devil's arm like a rapid-fire bear trap; from the look on the devil's face, he was finding this both extremely painful and irritating.

"Ah-hem," Zim coughed loudly. The devil stopped punching his eternal enemy and looked up, appearing embarrased and releasing the good advisor from his choke hold. The angel continued snapping away at the arm like a psychotic hyena, unaware that the fight was over. Seeing this, Zim laughed loudly, lightly slapping his forehead at 'his' own antics.

The Irken quickly moved his inner sociopath away from his maniacal inner hero, forcefully disentagling him from the angel's grip; it made no difference, as the otherwise limp angel kept snapping at thin air.

Zim shook him and dropped the both of them; they both ignored the obvious intent behind that and fluttered up to his shoulders, his consciences(or lack thereof) dusting themselves off. His more obnoxious advisor only managed to spread the mess around, but you had to give him points for effort. Seeing that Zim was in a stable mood, they nonetheless floated away to a nearby shelf.

Zim's consciunce started to inhale heavily, thought it was probably more for a realistic benefit; as a hallucination, he had no lungs and therefore no need to breath. Seeing an oppertunity, Zim's anti-conscience raised his voice. "Just so you know, it might be good if-hey, why's everything off?"

So it all was. All of the machines had been deactivated, considerably dimming the room.

Zim glanced back at him through the corner of his eye. "It's simple, my inner sociopath; I made up my mind. Soon as I deactivate the base's non-vital devices, I'm going up with Gir."

The devil slumped to the ground, clutching his head. "Damn aching head!" He suddenly winced, flinching away from the angel, who looked bewildered. "What?"

"Aren't you going to hit me for swearing or something? The union's probably going to beat me for admitting this, but that guitar thing _hurts."_

The angel put his hands together, interlacing his fingers and tapping them against the backs of their respective hands. "Well, damn is a swear word _per se._ It basically means that which is cursed within the sight of God, so considering your nature..." he let the sentence trail off, allowing all to put two and two together.

"I get it. Alter boy."

"Monster."

Ignoring his external internal bickering, Zim cracked his knuckles in preparation. "As soon as I hit this button," he declared loudly, gesturing grandly to an important looking button, "The unimportant aspects of the base will shut off and I will be free for my night!"

"Who's he talking to?" His inner devil whispered to his shoulder angel.

"Haven't a clue. Certainly not us." he whispered back.

Zim raised his foot in what he thought was a dramatic fashion, holding himself in that fashion for reasons relating to an ancient Irken martial arts that also stimulated energy flows as to strengthen the body and spirit as one. Considering his weightly sandals, that wasn't easy. It was also pointless because his Pak regulated certain chemicals in his body in order to stimulate a minimumly optimum physical condition.

He stood there in that position, eyes closed and breathing softly.

Then his eyes flew open and he slammed the slates of his sandal down on the button.

Unfortunately, he neglected to consider that one: he was a lot stronger than he often realized, and two: the sandals were heavier than normal sandals were.

The result of those unconsidered things were that he hit the button way too hard, causing the console to tear itself out of the ground and flip into the air; in surprise, Zim tried to scoot away until he tripped out of a sandal and fell on the ground as the console fell on him.

The two of them winced at the loud _whack!_

Zim dazedly crawled out from under the wreckage and put his sandal back on, walking uncertainly towards the shelf.

The two hallucinations raised up two placards: the evil one held up a sign saying 6.7. The good one held up one that said _It's A Boy! _in bright blue letters. He looked up, blanched as he realized his mistake and flipped it around, revealing a big 7.9.

Zim shook himself out of his dizziness, noticing that the consciences were still there; they hurredly whipped their signs away; whistling innocently.

Zim frowned. "I already dealt with the issue here. So..begone! How do I make you guys-"

"That'll work," They both said as one, disappearing in their respective flashes.

"Whoo," Zim said in a tone approaching relief. He wondered momentarily exactly why he was getting visted by those guys more and more lately; he shrugged it off and walked up into a nearby elevator, totally unaware of the fact that he had just witnessed a harbinger of sorts.

Gir was situated in front of the TV as he had for the past three hours, chewing on something he'd found on the floor. Luckily for the world, it was a meatloaf that had recently begun to achieve sentient life and spontaneously devoulp the ability to sever molecular bonds on a large scale as well as delusions of granduer and a desperate need to replace humans(and humanoids)with organic meat by-products as the Earth's dominant life form. And people say miracles don't happen.

As Gir sat watching the TV, a mobile sack of bacon walked in through the door; it's burlap eyes were rimmed with fatty crusts, it's toungue was a wad of pork, and it's eyes were...well, we really don't need to know what it's eyes were made of.

The sack straightened it's mass of bacon hair, looking off-handedly arrogant. It didn't actually have a face and so lacked the ability to form expressions, but the feeling was there.

"Sir!" It called loudly. "The troops have finished their preparations! The taco elite are in position to crush the mass consumer's under their shells, the soda Aerial Patrol is prepared to spray sugery napalm upon the unspecting fools, the churritos have finished their sea military training and the submarine construction, and the little twisty cinnamon things are ready to be pathetically crushed underneath to make way for the glory of the Fast Food Empire!"

One of the aforementioned little twisty cinnamon things ran up by it, wearing a little target on it's head. "Um, sir, we in the infantry are protesting against our unfair treatment. We're called-"

"You'll be called whatever I damn please! Now what is the status report?"

The thingie sighed. "We're all ready to die in the most ludicrously pathetic fashion possible,"

The sack of bacon laughed evil-like. "Ah ha hah hah ha! Excellent, excellent! The front line of the enemy will laugh themselves to death, paving the way for a brutal onslaught! The Empire will remember you...for the first three hours of it's existence, that is! Ah ha ha ha hah! Isn't it funny?"

"Hilarious, sir." The flat tone went so far over the sack's head it was comparable to when a airplane misses a Ludicolo. Wait, that made sense at all.

"Precisely-ah, why do I bother? You're duller than a sack of potatoes."

A bag of french fries waltzed in. "I see last weeks sensitivity seminar still hasn't taken hold yet," it said in that sterotypical tone of voice attributed to flamboyent alternative lifestyles. You know who you are.

"We've been over this, Frank! Not in the middle of a world-domination rant! Now where was I? Ah yes. Ah hah hah hah ha! Ah hah hah ha ha!"

The villain's irritating laugh was cut short by an afro with legs pushing the fries aside("Well, I never!" the affronted fries said). "Yo!" it said in an accent. You know the one. I hope. May the crusty toenails of Hoch Pah Tooei help you if you don't. "I have come to rain musical doom upon you for your sins as my duty as a card carrying member of the Too Bad Sucker Revenge Union! Now you'll regret kicking that bum's hat just 'cause it was in the way!"

A horrifyingly catchy tune started up as the afro started to sing...and the sack of bacon stepped up. "Excuse me, Frightening Hair Piece of Melodic Disaster. Did you say something about kicking a hat?"

"Uh, YES I DID!"

"Not anything about world domination!"

"Indeed, misfortunate being!"

"You'll want next door. They're the kickers of derelict hats."

"Ah!" the afro exlaimed, running out the door. From the next house, the lights came on and people wearily got up. "Wake up, ya ingrates!"

"Huh?"

The afro started singing as it's muscial powers as a Bringer of Ultimate Doom! kicked in, and the snacks shuddered.

"Huh. That was weird. Anyway," the sack went on. "we are ready to conquer, my master!" It bowed, than looked up. "Master?" It looked around the room rapidly. "Hey, where...are...you."

It saw the last scraps of it's master, boss and all-around crazy leader go down Gir's gullet.

It sweatdropped. "Oh, this is _so _not good."

"What is it?" Every single member of the army it had mentioned in passing popped in the doorway, all unaware they were on the List of Gir's Favorite Food. "Is something the matter?"

And apparently, 'is something the matter' is the sentence that get's a robot's attention.

Gir turned around, noticing the invaders for the first time. He looked back at the TV and whipped his head back to the worried looking snacks as he took their reality in. Their existence dawned upon the robot's mind.

Gir's jaw went slack as he stared at them, nanobrain marveling at his good fortune. For about three point five milliseconds.

Than he jumped into the air with a cry of "SWITZERLAND!" and flew at them; the snacks stared incomprehendingly as their doom came to them, his eyes morphed into upside down simplisitic triangles to express his joy.

And then there was a loud crashing sound followed by the screams of the damned.

_Five minutes later..._

"Whoo!" Zim exclaimed as the elevator door opened. "What a horrible battle with the mutanted pig monster from the MALL! At least I'm home and-eh?!"

He stepped out, incredulous; he saw before him a huge mess from the door which sharply terminated a few feet from the door; it was a horribly greasey disgusting disaster area that trailed onto Gir in a more-or-less straight line from the mess area to the robot himself, who was covered in all manner of repulsive by-products.

"YEEEK!" Zim screamed, backing away from the mess and accidentally hitting the closed elevator door. Hypochrondiac thoughts raced through his mind as he raced off into the kitchen; moments later, he returned, decked out in his 'Howard Hughes' garb; a hair net on his head, a pair of microscope goggles over his eyes, pink sanitation gloves on his hands, a safety apron covering much of his body, and a pair of boxes, their insides wadded with tissue paper to pad his feet.

His Pak morphed into a bizarre contraption; a large forward facing nozzle extending over his head grew from the top, the middle of it became a round container for a thick greenish liquid, and two levers equiped with bright blue grips extended from the sides and ended at his reach.

Zim rushed to the mess, pumping down on the levers methodically as he bent down, the nozzle pointing directly at the greasy disaster area; the liquid bubbled as it flowed into the round structure affixed between the nozzle and the container itself.

"Prepare yourself," he said to the stuff staining his carpet, "to meet the delicious cleansing _DOOM OF MY...THING I HAVE YET TO COMPOSE A NAME FOR!" _He pressed on the levers harder than he had before.

A greenish foam spewed out of the nozzle, covering nearly the entire room in front of Zim in a light green substance. There was a brief moment as the foam came into complete contact with the germs, bacterium and other such filthy things. Then it suddenly puffed up, dissolving into vapor; the carpet appeared pristinely clean, if slightly moist.

Zim breathed a loud sigh of relief, looking with pleasure at the cleanliness around him. He stuck his tongue out; he stuck his tongue back in, satisfied with it. "Ah, pine fresh victory is _mine."_

His antannae twitched; he looked back at Gir. He saw the horrid mess Gir was in, caked in a horrific amount of repulsive stuff.

About five seconds later, Gir found himself, the couch, and most of the room covered in the green foam, his blinking eyes the only things that could be seen in the otherwise indistinguishable mass.

It vaporized, taking the grime with it.

Eyes twitching with paranoia, Zim abruptly tore through the house, spraying every single square inch with enough cleaner foam to eradicate a derelict homeless shelter's worth of bacterium.

He zipped back to Gir, exhaling deeply on Gir's head; he wiped the area in question with a rag; Gir giggled to himself at the attention.

The spray solvent nozzle disappeared back into the pack as Zim tore off the 'cleaning uniform', revealing that he'd been wearing his clothes right underneath it the whole time; Gir jumped on his back, pressing as many emoticons as he could reach, rejoicing in the many annoying noises; it sounded like a radio talk show massacre.

Zim ignored what Gir was doing; occupying the robot with the noises was one of the reasons he'd made it in the first place. The second reason was that he liked the noises, and he took a pleasure in driving others insane with noises being made every single time he moved. To date, he was publically forbidden from six dozen public walkways, at least with a body-wide megaphone.

He looked at the TV, eye's opening wider with a start as he recognized the film. "Is that Pulp Fanfiction?" he said, sounding incredulous.

"Uh huh!"

"And...you've been watching this movie for the past three and half hours?"

"I guess so!"

"Dispite the fact that it's only forty-five minutes long?"

"Yup!"

Zim stared at the robot on his shoulder. "You never cease to amaze me."

"And it's all for ninty-ninety six!"

The Irken's twitched. "How can you _stand _to watch the same thing over and over and over and over again!" he demanded shrilly.

"I dunno!" The android said cheerfully.

Zim's antannae shot straight up as the movie started running again. "That's it, I'M TURNING IT OFF!"

Gir fell to the ground, staring at Zim with such horror it was funny. "No.." he whispered melodramatically. "No, you can't! YOU CAAAAAAN'T!"

"I can."

"Wow, really?"

"Yes. Really." Zim said in a tone that gave new meaning to _dead pan._

"Cooool. Wait. Oh yeeah: NOOOOOOOOOOO!" the robot shrieked, banging his legs against the ground.

"And!" Zim held up a forefinger to accentuate his remark. "I'll put on..." he paused to allow for dramatic build-up. "...A NEW MOVIE!"

Gir stopped crying instataeneously, holding his arms up and squealing for joy. "YAAAAAAAY!" he yelled, running into the couch on accident and falling down. He got up again, yelled "YAAAAAAAY!" and ran back into the couch, falling down. He repeated himself in thus manner as Zim went into the movie vault behind the living room.

It was the size of a secret vault for holding bootleg videos; it's walls seemed to be shelves housing video cassestes, DVDS, and more advanced formats lined up in obsessively alphebatized order.

Zim selected a more recent film, one he'd actually been in.

He looked at the aquisition, laughing madly. "AaaaHAHAHHAAHHAHAHA! BWAHAHAHAHHAHHAAAAAH!"

He suddenly broke off, coughing loudly. "Ah, that felt good."

He walked back into the living room and stared at it as the vault slammed shut behind him. It was covered in contained snacks in nearly every shape and form, all cluttered around the couch.

He raised an eyeridge. "Gir, where'd you get all these snacks so fast?"

The robot's head popped over the rim of the couch, smiling widely with upside-down triangle eyes. "It was an invasion! They were all like BWAHAHA! And you were like..." Gir was silent for a moment. "And the talking afro was like I GONNA YELL A LOT! And I was like SNACKIES! And the afro went away and I got the snackies with the DEATH RAY! And then, the squid man came back to tell us he was married to the mutant squid!"

Zim stared at Gir. "Uh...huh." he said.

"Do you think he'll come?" the man in a badly frayed police uniform said hopefully as he walked down the sewer tunnels.

A large gray cybernetic monster squid next to him roared loudly.

"Yeah, your father just _has _to give you away at the wedding!" the squid with a man's body said desperately. "I don't think we've should've told the robot."

The bigger squid roared again. Several robot zombies(supposedly, anyway; they didn't LOOK like zombies at all)rushed up and patted her sadly on the side of her head.

The squid grabbed the man with a tentacle, violently slamming him onto the ground.

"Ow! Honey-ow!-I know-ow!-you're ha-ow!-ppy but-ow!-not until-ow!-the-ow!-wedding!"

"Anyhow," Zim said, totally unaware of that interesting diversion. "You have forgotten the most important snacks of all: popcorn! WITH SALTED BUTTER!"

"Ooh yeah." Gir agreed. Then he screamed as if he was experianced a severe seizure. Then he stopped. "Where'd you get it?" the android asked curiously, pointing to the video.

"This?" Zim said, shaking it lightly. "Oh, that. Well, it's a long story."

Gir sat down on the couch.

Seeing an oppertunity to exercise what he saw as his flawless storytelling skills, Zim started pacing around the couch as he talked.

"First, a while back, I was approached by the human Thomas Pickles. He had found one of the mystery scripts-"

"What's that?" Gir asked innocently.

Zim looked back at him. "Interesting question. Ever hear of the Apportion Phenomonon?"

"Uh uh."

"Well, about a year or so ago, things started appearing. Images of ourselves as we are, might be or could be, video game conceptions, and scripts. Scripts that also came with stories. Stories of _us:_ many people around this world, though not all.

"When they first appeared, no one knew what to do with them. At first, we thought they were just some one fooling around with reality altering devices, but all those who had such capabilities professed ignorance. They stopped using them for a few weeks to prove it, and sure enough, the things kept coming.

"I still don't know where they come from, or why they keep appearing, but we have made use of them: the best one's we keep for ourselves, mass-producing them and keeping them among friends." Zim nodded his head towards a picture of himself and Gir, on a green background with the Irken Empire's insignia in white; Zim was grinning broadly and extending a thumbs-up towards the viewer. Gir, in his dog disguise, was simply smiling with his tongue out and his eyes closed, arms wide open and a bunch of hearts around him.

"The stories are another matter. The worst of them are forcibly used on prisioners, making them read them in their sleep and even more horrible things. The best we keep for ourselves, the scripts auctioned off to the most capable producers and movie-makers.

"Anyway, one of the people that makes a lot of them is Thomas. He came to me a while back about one he kind of liked; this one." he tapped the movie he held. "He asked me and a few other people in the movie to play the parts; not much later, we had a movie! And this is it!"

He liked this movie; it reminded himself of the way he was now, though Dib disliked his villanous role in it. As he once put it once...

_"Most of these movies make me look like a loser with delusions of grandeur!" Dib complained._

_Zim stared at him, struggling to keep himself from laughing._

_Dib glared at him. "Very funny."_

"So, prepare the popcorn!" he announced loudly.

Gir zipped away, to the kitchen as Zim followed him.

"Master!" Gir yelled. "Mommy and Other Mommy gave me a recipe! For you!"

The Irken looked at Gir, attempting to deduce exactly who Gir was talking about. _Gir would consider his parents the people who made him. So let's see, hmmm, that would be...ALMIGHTY TALLEST PURPLE AND RED?!_

Zim gaped at Gir, utterly speechless. "The...the..._the Tallest _gave you a recipe? FOR ME?!"

Gir shrugged. "I guess so!"

Zim started twitching, then he squealed happily, making wordless sounds of pure joy.

Gir started banging his head against an invisible wall.

"Where's me floaty frog? I WANTS ME FLOATY FROG!!"

"The _TALLEST! MEEEE!"_

The overexcited duo ran into the kitchen, both yelling madly.

"Okay, Gir!" Zim said, wearing an apron and a chef's hat; he'd gotten a LOT of Earth clothes since he first came to conquer it, for reasons only Zim could possibly comprehend. He was standing on top of a miniture stepladder so as to reach the table. "Preparing the popcorn and the waffles should only take about...fifteen minutes! Let us _begin!"_

_Fifteen minutes later!_

"Wow, that was fast!" Zim remarked, holding a large plate of waffles.

"MOVIE MOVIE MOVIE!" Gir screamed, holding a huge bowl of popcorn.

They ran into the room and landed on the couch squarely; both of them put on those little drinking hats, Zim's extending from their hats, Gir's from the top of his head. Both were filled with alien soda.

Zim inserted the disc into the organic looked player that protruded out of the TV, and by extension the wall, hungrily tearing into the snacks as Zim Fandango began.

They watched the film, unusually quiet.

Both Zim and Gir were not known for their ability to remain silent. There were only a very few things capable of making them silent; a good movie was one of those things.

Gir watched in complete silence save for the sounds of eating; it was a new movie and Gir liked new things.

Zim, on the other hand, had already seen the movie before, but that didn't lessen his love for it.

They quietly watched the movie, enjoying each other's company.

About twenty-five minutes into the movie, Zim felt a certain lightness in the lower regions of his mind. The kind of lightness that came from artifically induced conditions of being pushed to the bring of sleep. Realizing what that might have meant, he retained the presence of mind to retract the sippy things before they could spill.

Zim yawned prodigiously. His people slept only rarely, requiring much less sleep than humans did. So he wondered why he was suddenly so tired.

He thought in a vauge sort of way that he wasn't really tired, just extraordinarily drowzy.

He shifted slightly in his sleep, and the world faded away as he fell into blurry sleep, a last thought on his mind: _What was in those waffles?_

A few minutes later, Gir turned towards his master, sensing something had changed. Zim was reclining into the couch, head bent backwards against the cushion as he breathed softly.

An idea, or what passed for one, danced around in Gir's brain. He inclined his head, thinking.

Master had eaten the special waffles. The waffles were special because they had the special sauce on them. The sauce had been given to him by the Mommies to be cooked into it. They had been laughing about the 'Lepidopterran Liquid Sleep Pollen Sauce' when they gave it to Gir. Master had eaten it and fallen asleep. Gir had eaten them, and had not.

That line of thinking was interrupted when Gir realized _the waffles were gone_.

_Why are the waffles gone?_ Gir thought sadly. _I loveded them! I LOVEDED THEM SO MUCH!_

A thought occured to the insane robot.

Crouching down, he snuck down towards Zim dispite his complete and total lack of anything remotely resembling stealth; he kept falling over himself, laughing as he did so. He kept trying to sneak up on Zim like this for a moment or two, when he fell over and rolled onto Zim's side.

Initially surprised at gravity flexing it's collective muscle, Gir looked up at his Master. Zim was still snoring softly, sound asleep. This was strange to Gir, since in his experience, Zim always tried to push Gir away whenever he did something like this.

Gir giggled happily at this new turn of events. He remembered vaugely a long time ago when Zim tried to fix him by making stuck in Duty Mode; Zim had learned the hard way that a smart robot that wished to kill him was a bigger burden then a stupid robot that loved him and that in the end, he much prefered Gir when he was 'normal'. Normal for Gir, anyway.

Zim twitched momentarily from the feel of Gir's cold metal skin. In a way, he knew what Gir was. A unique thing on their world; a soul with no flesh to go with it. In some ways, Gir was a defect, something that was improbable and ought to have never been created at all; there was no purpose for such a creature. And yet, in many ways, he was just like Zim. Both defectives from their nature culture, born with an individualism banal to their 'parents'. Somehow, they had ended up together.

Gir had long ago decided to stay with Zim forever. No matter what. In his dim brain of garbage, Gir knew that such a promise was improbable and could never be permanent.

But the rest of him was too stupid to understand it, and so he lived it anyway.

Gir curled up against Zim's side; the Irken shifted in his sleep towards Gir, and probably would have fallen down were it not for the support Gir provided. Gir hummed happily, slightly more happy than he normally was.

After a moment, from Zim's crazed dreams, he echoed the robot's sentiment, in his own way.

Noticing this, Minimoose squeaked quietly to himself. He squeezed himself inbetween the two of them, nestling between Gir's head and Zim's shoulder, squeaking happily and dragging a blanket over Zim and Gir's bodies as he did so. A camera in the wall took a picture of them, downloading it into Minimoose's databanks.

And for a while, all of the three slept, dreaming dreams no one could guess at.

Gir kicked his feet rapidly, not unlike a dog that was dreaming.

He yawned loudly, opening his eyes. Seeing that the movie was over, he turned for a nearby a remote and turned it and the TV off; Master always yelled at him when he left the TV on.

Seeing movement from beyond the window, Gir grew curious and rolled off the couch as Zim fell off onto the floor; Zim curled into a little ball, still snoring.

Unaware of this, Gir waddled over to the window and peered out.

And sat back down, not liking what he saw. It was horrible doom. And not good doom. It was _baaaaad_ doom.

Turning around, he realized that his master had fallen down. "Awwww," he said sympathetically. Getting an idea, the crazed robot ran off into the kitchen.

He came back in with a large packet of syrup. He opened it and dumped the content's on the blissfully sleeping aliens feet so that he could dance, dance, dance like a flaming hedgehog!

Delving into Gir's mind is not a advisible proposition.

Sadly, his Master did not immediately wake up and perform The Dance of A Hundred Excessive Capital Letters. Gir felt himself drowning in an immense ocean of misery; disappointment clung to his leg like a trillion-ton weight, dragging him to the depths of the sea where his puny body would be reduced to nothing at all. For about three point six milliseconds.

Gir rolled around on the floor, collecting dust.

"Huh?" Zim muttered in his sleep. "What's that? Oh, yeah. I like cake, Rana. I deserve, 'cause I'm so amazing. I even got the Amazingly Amazible Award Of Amazing Amazingness; I'm just that good. What? No, GIR, NO! STAY AWAY FROM THE POWER AMPLIFIER! THE SPONGECAKES! THEY BUUUUUUURN!" He rolled over.

"Awwwwwwwww!" Gir said, clasping his hands together.

He saw something outside. He decided to go outside and ran into the wall, rebounding off the floor. He got up again, running into the wall with the same exact result. He repeated himself in this way several times, until he accidently ran out the door.

Feeling sad that he no longer had a wall to run into, Gir saw something else; it happened to be the creepy thing Zim had saw in his dream, but Gir didn't know that.

Gir smiled at it. "Friend!" He held his arms out.

Not understanding the gesture, the thing bared it's claws and without a sound, jumped at him...and bounced off his hard metal exterior, falling into his opened arms.

It looked up at the robot, dimly wondering as best it could how it had failed to harm him, Gir hugged it as hard as he could, which meant hard enough to make it flop out of his arms and landed a few feet away in the mud.

It stared at Gir blankly. In his deranged mind, Gir saw it as a little black rubber piggy with light-up eyes with a little sign on it that said _chase me_.

Sensing danger, the thing ran away; Gir immediately starting chasing it, accidentally kicking it away with his feet.

Gir kept running, scolding his feet. "Evil feet! Bad evil feet!" He caught up to the thing again, kicking it once more.

They continued on like that for a while, Gir continually kicking it away.

Gir finally jumped into the air and landed upon it with a loud crushing sound.

Gir stood up, feeling...sick. The smokey black stuff on him made him feel bad. Not sad bad, but...bad bad. He didn't like the stuff at all.

He yelled something incomprehensible wiped it off and looked up, suddenly smiling brightly.

"Hi Uncle Bighead and Scary Mama!" he said to a confused looking Dib and Gaz.

As the city burned behind them, the night was rent with one single cry.

"MY HEAD'S NOT BIG!"

Back in his house about fifteen minutes later, Zim was still sleeping.

Then he suddenly woke up, albiet with one heck of a nasty hangover.

He sat up, unable to discern many of the blurry shapes from the others. Grumbling to himself, he sat up and stood up, wobbling uncertainly.

Remembering vaugely that his dream had had something to do with Rana from Zim Fandago, he wailed, "No, NOOO! I WANNA GO BACK! Eh. Whatever."

He peered around the room; for some reason, he was finding it extremely difficult to concentrate. He starting walking around the room, trying to get his bearings. Then he bumped into a flesh-eating zombie.

"AAAAAAAAHH!" He yelled, pulling a gun out from his Pak and started shooting wildly.

His vision cleared up somewhat, revealing that what he thought to be a flesh-eating zombie was just Minimoose, and his spectacularily bad aim had luckily missed Minimoose, instead carving out a connect-the-dots life-size portrait of Almighty Tallest Purple.

"Wow, my aim stinks!" he said, much impressed with himself. "Wait, that doesn't sound right."

Minimoose shook his head-well, actually, his entire body-and sat on Zim's head, as he was in no condition to protest, though the added weight made him stumble slightly.

Zim sat down on the couch, blearily thinking about something. The something. It was important. It was something he should act on immediately. He stood up, as he prepared to do just that when he realized he had forgotten it almost instantly. He walked over to a wall and started pounding his head against it methodically, struggling mightily to remember whatever it was that he had remembered and forgot, hopefully without forgetting what he had forgotten to not forget what it was he had forgotten to remember. (Try saying that five times fast.)

Zim held his head up, sure about something. It was always a safe bet when something insane as this was going on, it always had something to do with Gir.

"Ooooh," Zim moaned angrily. "What it is eludes me like a brain worm clamping onto my brain; painfully, and with acid venom! Wait, that made no sense at all."

He groaned to himself again. The last time he'd had a hangover like this the morning after the Christmas party last year, when he'd drank too much punch, which, as it turned out, was alchoholic to his bodily functions. He punched out a lot of people, terroized everyone, and overturned a barrel of filberts and other nuts nobody really likes. Suspecting some sort of trick, he thought hard about who he knew that would do something like this: he stopped quickly, as thinking made his head feel like a snail in the grip of an slowly closing industrial vice, and making a list of enemies and people who just plain didn't like him would take several hours to compose.

He ignored it for now, walking to the bathroom.

He noticed a series of round indentations in the ground out the window ending in a small scorched area as he walked into the bathroom. He walked up to the sink, turning the faucet on and wiping his face as he looked out the window and saw a big whirling thing coming at him from quite a distance away. As he registered it, his Pak silently started tinkering with the chemical imbalance caused by the waffles, slowly correcting his physiological problem. Considering all it had to get through, it wasn't what you'd call a simple proposition.

"It must be a hover-disc," he mused. "No, a giant frisbee. No, wait! A kitten with an expanding stomach that ate the Massive! No, it's the banjo of the flying Dutchman!" Minimoose, tiring of the babble and fairly concerned with what was going outside, landing on Zim Pak, attaching several clamps onto the ports on it; it suddenly stimulated certain chemicals in Zim's mind, causing him to spontaenously. Also, the creator of reality TV spontaeneously combusted for no apparent reason except possibly as a random act of me, ranking among such other oddities as the decision to create the universe with a large degree of absurdity, the invention of the TV, and ancient caveman abruptly realizing that it was not a good thing to stick your head into a sabertooth's mouth on a dare, at least not without a really good helmet.

Zim shook his head, slightly dazed by his sudden sobriety. He looked out the window, some confusion still intact. Pleased that his job was done, Minimoose retracted the interface clamps and floated off.

An extremely large tree suddenly burst through the wall directly above him, plastering him in plaster and dust as it stopped. Zim's big eyes, the only part of him visible through the conical pillar he was in, blinked.

He shook himself, looking as clean as before, oddly enough. He scratched the back of his head lazily. "What's a tree doing in my bathroom? And for that matter, why is there a cloud of swirling doom that I had absolutely nothing to do with?"

Then the little gears in his head snapped into place. Several things had occured to him as he wandered back into the living room and looked more throughly outside.

_Gir had mysteriously disappeared._

_There's little round indentations outside that end in some exhaust marks._

_There is a storm outside. Which Gir is in somewhere._

"Shazbot."

Zim ran back into the bathroom; he came out a moment later, tore his raincoat off a hanger, and ran back in.

A few minutes later, Zim's small purple spaceship flew out the top of his house and zoomed off.

Looking over the landscapes quickly, referencing the on-board scanners and thinking quickly, Zim came to the conclusion that something really very bad was going on. He attempted to deal with this in a calm and mature manner.

The ship suddenly started flying around in circles around a random building, screaming in sheer terror loudly, incidentally ramming several evil things, not that he noticed.

The ship hit the building in a spray of sparks, sliding down to the ground with enough noise to make anyone wish they had no sense of hearing. It flew off again, as Zim applied his incredible powers of deductive reasoning to this difficulty.

The Voot Cruiser soared into the sky, hanging up like a weird mobile.

The sky was shrouded in shifting oilly black clouds, silently roiling across the landscape. They released no thunderbolts or anything like that. It was disturbing, and curiously frightening.

Zim's eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed as he realized something.

The storm, if that was what it was, was centered over his island.

Something was threatening his island, and by extension, the potential world-ending thing on it.

For once, he didn't rant about it. For one thing, there was no one to hear him. For another, he couldn't think of anything to adequately express his anger, his rage at this infraction. At least for the moment. Later, he would publish an addentum and mail it to the Nicktown Foghorn. They always bought the articles he wrote from time to time, though he had no idea why.

And then he was gone, only a purplish speck in the distance.

As he approached his island, Zim's earlier suspisions became more intense.

The storm clouds, thinner and more wide spread in the mainland, were thicker here, like an oil spill. They roiled ominously, making Zim involuntarily think of something drowning. But that didn't make any sense at all, didn't it?

And as he came to the dock, he realized he wasn't alone.

The Voot came over the dock, throwing sand over the Dibship. It clumsily crashed to the ground, it's cockpit flipping open and the sole occupant flopping out unceremoniously; Zim scuttled over to the Dibship, shocked that it was here of all places.

Starting to suspect something, he looked the ship over.

It was heavily damaged, though only on the surface; some of the sand he'd thrown over it when he flew down, marks from what might've been a crash landing, scars from Dib's usual life, and oddest of all, claw marks.

Zim traced his own fingers across it; the marks were slightly ragged and dragging, mostly in the center; it was smooth along the edges. The claw marks seemed more remnisciant of knives or another weapon; they didn't look natural at all.

Strangest of all was the severed limb of whatever had caused those marks, lying under the ship.

It had been detached from whatever it had been originally attached to; the stump, curiously enough, wasn't dripping anything at all. It simply terminated at the point that was probably just below the shoulder, assuming that whatever this belong to had a humanoid body structure; it almost looked like it had been formed that way.

Zim bent over to pick it up when it exploded in his face, disappearing in a burst of...smoke? No, it was thicker than that and much darker.

Weird.

Zim turned around, noticing some tracks in the sand behind him. He hurried over to them, realizing there were three sets; round little ones barely five inches apart, larger ones that looked like boot imprints, and the third were only slightly smaller than the boots, looking like oblong prints with almost no tread at all.

"Dib, Gaz and Gir are here too," Zim murmured, as his other sidekick floated out of the Voot, squeaking affirmatively.

Zim looked around the beach, his suspicions confirmed.

Something terribly _wrong _was going on.

Everything was...darker. More subdued. The sand around him was being propelled by a constant wind from the storm above, though a one that was much milder than one suspected from a storm of this caliber.

The trees quivered in a way that reminded him of...hands. Yes, that was it. Hands reaching up, but whether it was a gesture of despair or a plea for mercy, it made a good metaphor for what was going on around here. The sand at his feet was becoming more violent in it's movement, abruptly smashing against the obstacles around it, such as Zim and the trees, like waves against rocks in a turbulent sea. They did so with very little force, yet it disturbed Zim greatly.

As the wind blew by, he pricked up his antannae, realizing that the wind was nowhere near strong enough to make the waves do that. It was more like the sand had been invested with some strange form of life, and a despairing one at that.

He looked aside at the waves; they weren't behaving like the sand as he had expected, but seemed to be receding and drawing closer at the same time. He thought about what had caused such a bizarre sight, then decided it might have been the way they were growing thinner and thicker. He didn't know how or why, but he felt a deep relief that he hadn't traveled by sea. With that came another thought: what _was _going on beneath the waves?

As in in response to his thoughts, the tide came in again, carrying a strange object with it, washing it against the shore as the thick wave dragged sand away in their grasping pull.

Zim picked it up and looked it over, frowning. As far as he could tell, it looked like a tiny building shaped like a pineapple; it had a few windows and a little door at the base on one side. He muttered something unintelligible and threw it aside, not understanding the significance of it; the thing had felt vaugely familiar, but he couldn't recall ever hearing about anything like that. It had looked like a domicile, but who in their right minds would live in a pineapple under the sea?

It hit the water with a thick sound that didn't sound like a regular splash; it sounded like liquid quicksand. Zim's hydrophobia acted up as one of the voices inside him told him to _get the HELL away from the water._

Never being one to disagree with his head-voices, he hastily retreated, hitting one of the trees. He flinched, expecting to be hit with another coconut and made an expression of bewilderment mixed with slight relief when nothing happened.

He looked up, and saw small yellow light among that shadows, and movement.

He jumped away just as a blurry dark weight slammed into the ground where he had been standing, scattered sand everywhere.

Zim would ordinarily have started running for the higher ground and hopefully something very heavy he could drop on it, but he was currently occupied with staring in astonished recognition.

He knew what it was perfectly well; there was no forgetting it's yellow lamplike eyes from within it's round head, the simplistic body, the minute claws and jointed antannae.

"It's the monster from my vision!" he yelled at it, certain details coming back to him in an unpleasant flash.

Admittingly, it didn't look much like a monster; it looked almost cute and seemed vaugely perplexed, evidently surprised by it's fall.

Then it sat up, stretched up to it's not-particularily-impressive height, and looked at Zim, body stretching a little.

"Oh no." Zim said matter-of-factly.

It suddenly jumped at him, claws out stretched...and slid off his raincoat, unable to get a decent grip on the slick matarial.

Mind boggling at his good fortune, Zim took a large step and crushed it underfoot; it was initially resistent, then simply gave, dissolving into a familar smog.

_Just like that arm._

Considering all the things he'd seen, excluding the slaughter he was still oblivious of, he started walking around in an attempt to puzzle out what was going on.

And then he saw it, giving him a pretty good clue to his question.

It was above the skeletal remains of the Portal Generator, hovering high enough in the sky to qualify as the eye of the storm above him, then again, it probably was. It was a huge ball of darkness, with various reds, purples and blues swirling through it in a phantasmagoric display that made his stomach churn; random flares were flickering from it's sides into the storm around it, filtering through a massive field of shadow directly around it. In the center was...well, he didn't know what it was, but it looked a little bit like a galaxy of some kind.

A group of_ things _descended from the cloud above him, popped out of flashes of darkness and appeared from the shadows shed by the taller things around him. Several were almost identical to the one he'd just crushed, but others were obviously better suited to fighting; they were about the same size, except for a few that flew. He arbitarily decided to call the walking ones Soldiers and the fliers Air Soldiers.

Thinking quickly, Zim withdrew a gun from his Pak; it was a dark purple color, resembling a pistol in basic design. It had a barrel about as long as his forearms, with a scope half that length near the base of it right in front of the red disc that held it's ammunition. The gun itself had squarish sides, and the symbol of the Irken Empire rendered in black along the grip. He pointed it at the enemies in front of him, hoping that his weapon might dissaude them.

He looked into their identical yellow lamp eyes. What emotion he saw was as alien as it good, and he saw nothing remotely approaching fear. Hunger for certain, and maybe a little interest at the sight of unique prey, but no fear.

He cocked it, the little disk spinning rapidly; one of the fliers suddenly rushed at him, causing the smaller Shadows and Soldiers to follow it, the latter almost dancing as they moved, the former melting into shadows on the ground that moved at him fairly slowly.

In sheer surprise, he fell backwards, pulling on the trigger; the first Air Soldier stumbled as the red-blue beam that lanced out of the barrel of Zim's gun struck it's leg, vaporizing it's leg; thrown off-course by the impact, it fell to the ground, skidded across the ground and smashed into a random tree, collapsing into smoke.

At this, the various things paused for a moment, the Soldiers just stopping whereas the Shadows rose out of the ground, then the Soldiers twirled away backwards, dancing away from him while the smaller ones rushed at him shortly before being vaporized.

He heard a sound behind him.

Zim ducked as a Soldier spun at him, it's decidedly functional claws marking the circle of it's spin; only his lightning fast reflexes saved him from getting much more than a flesh wound on his shoulder.

He stumbled to the ground as several more things came running, the cowardly Soldiers emboldened by their comrade's success. Zim rolled to his feet, randomly shooting in all directions; he got a few, but what he was gambling on was the moment of confusion that commenced.

That done, he mentally debated what to do: stay here and die horribly, or run for his life?

The things stared as he ran off, a little cloud of sand following him.

He stopped behind a rock, panting from his run. He winced and tenderly grabbed his wound: it didn't _hurt _exactly, but neither had the being's attack. It had felt as if he'd been cut by a precise knife of some kind, one that wasn't sanitary. Zim grimaced: the would didn't feel infected, but he felt dirty all the same.

He looked up at what remained of the Portal Generator: on the edge of it, standing atop the platform's central area, was a single figure. Even this far away, he knew who it was.

"Dib?" He ran off as more Shadows manifasted from where he was standing; he made it across with surprisingly little trouble; he bounded across the bridge, landing on the platform with a small thump.

Dib continued staring outwards, looking about as aware as a rock.

"Di-" Zim stumbled in his haste to reach the human, running for a moment all four limbs before he righted himself. "Dib!" He came to a walking stop as the human remained standing there, his coat flapping in the breeze.

"Zim." Strangely, the human didn't move an inch.

"Dib, what-what is all this? What's going on here-WHAT IS THAT!?" Zim shrieked, pointing to the big spooky ball thing.

He heard the sound of Dib's coat rubbing against his neck; the human turned his head to look around at Zim, a wan smile on his face, his yellow-brown eyes strangely listless.

"It's ending." Dib said quietly, as if a decidedly less interesting Apocalypse was going on.

"What are-"

"Look at it." Dib swept an arm to the sea, and by extension, everything. "You didn't see the slaughter, did you?"

"What slaughter?"

"Those things...they keep killing people, and with everyone that dies, another one rises. You'd think I'd have prepared for this, but..." Dib let the sentance trail off with an undertone of 'ah well'.

He looked up from the ground. "You remember all those times we used to go around town, just plotting elaborate schemes to get back at our enemies, destroy evil, that sort of thing? We'd always end up talking about who we really were, why we were here, what our purpose for being was, if we really did exist."

Dib looked at Zim pointedly and then looked at the floating orb of darkness. Zim copied the gesture.

"I think we're looking at part of the answer." Dib said softly as they both looked at the dark ball, hovering silently and somehow radiating malevolence.

Zim stared at it for a moment, then looked at Dib's gazing at it. He shook his head quickly. "Dib, we have to do something, we have to kill all of those things before they-how did this happen?" Zim demanded.

Dib looked back at Zim harshly; the Irken flinched, to his displeasure. There was a strange look in the human's brown eyes, almost as if something important had gone out the window. "The door opened," he said simply.

"'The door'?" Zim said cluelessly.

"The door to the world. It opened, and they came in. And we never had a damn chance," the human said with a hint of anger. For one thing, he had swore. Which he didn't do very often at all.

The alien was about to say something when something extremely important occured to him. "Wait, where's GIR!? And Gaz?"

No flicker of concern crossed Dib's face. He was as impersonal as a hunk of rock, and not the personable kind you find in old craters either. This was the kind that people used in stoning executions. "They're coming with us."

Zim blinked at Dib's lack of emotion. "Are you out of your _mind!?_ Where exactly are we supposed to go?! Or anyone else for that matter?"

"Away. To the other worlds. There won't be anything left to return to...but I'm not afraid."

Dib grinned in a way that was not healthy for his mentality. "I'm not afraid of the darkness."

He turned to Zim. "And neither should you be."

He held his hand out, rain dripping off his hand and making the eyes behind his glasses blurred.

"_Trust me._"

"Dib..." Zim said uncertainly. Something was wrong. Very wrong indeed. For one thing, Dib Vael, of all people, was being _calm_. Calm was not something Dib did well. Crazy, yeah. Irrational, indubitably. But giving calm discources was not one of his strengths. That alone was a bad sign. A very bad sign indeed.

And his eyes...the little black part of the eyes humans had had been swallowed up by his brown pupils, which had became a few shades paler. He didn't understand it, but that was another bad sign.

Suddenly, the ground they stood on shifted ino a dark rift of shadow. Zim looked down at the shifting pool of dark-blue-purple-black and recoiled. This was _wrong._

The living shadows of the pools slowly rose, covering the paranormal investigator's legs and reaching higher, much like the bitterness that plauged his heart. Dib continued holding his hand out, staring at the world impassively.

_This was wrong._

Danny had wondered whether or not they were truly friends at all; even now, even in the calmest of moments, their friendship had a remarkably competitive edge to it. Rivals they had once been, and in many ways they still were. But that didn't matter now. He was not about to just stand here and let Dib fall into those thing's grasp.

He tried to run to him, but his feet were glued to the ground by tiny rootlike tentacles extruding from the ground. He gritted his teeth, tearing his sandals from the ground with all the strength in his legs. They stubbornly clung to the ground, tearing loose with a sound like a suction cup coming off; he repeated this process with the other one, taking one step after another after another. He seemed so far away, dispite being reletively close. Dib continued to stare at him, the shadows now creeping over his shoulders and evouluping most of his arms.

And then he tripped.

He stood up as fast as he could, but only his left foot; as he had fallen and the knee of his right leg had hit the ground, the darkness had reached up for him, securing itself around his ankle and knee, gluing him to the ground and spreading over him.

His breath jumped out in a shocked gasp, the hand he'd thrown out having been claimed by the living shadows. Dib's glasses started to dim as the shadows creeped over his jaw.

Growling in fury, he pulled forward with all his strength, throwing everything he had into a bid for freedom; the darkness held fast, their grip much looser on him than on the nearly cementlike form covering Dib. He lunged as best he could, stretching his arm out to grab the human's hand and pull him out of there.

His fingers came inches close of Dib's as the darkness swallowed the human completely; he saw the human disappear under the living mass of darkness just as his vision turned complete black and he fell.

And the one thing he knew as he plummeted was despair. And rage. Rage that this darkness was here at all, that it had swallowed Dib so easily, that he had fell to it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He saw light.

And there was a greater light than he had ever known, save perhaps in his dreams. A light that was right beside him as he realized there was a considerable weight in his hand, one that felt..._right._

With a shock he realized he was where he had stood before, on the platform, the darkness dispelled by the light. All his attention was on the thing in his hand as the light faded, revealing the weapon he bore in his right hand. He held it up and couldn't help staring in awe and shock.

It was about two and a half feet long, the grip he held it in was black and built precisely for his hands, feeling as though it covered a thick piece of metal. A strange hexagonal shape was around it, the grip going through the middle of it; at the base of it was a large round shape, culmanating in a sideways ring, from which hung a large simplistic silver keychain that ended in an silver object that was identical to his neckcharm. The hexagonal shape itself was a beautiful metal that was similar to gold, but superior in every possible way. The front part of it elongated into a strange bar extending from a shorter tube like the one the ring came from, but smaller in shape. The bar looked as if it was made from silver, but a silver that was as superior to the ordinary metal as the hexagonal's material was superior to gold. The bar was about as wide as the grip, in other words about half of Zim's arm diameter. It's end was flat, but on it's side were several odd shapes: The first one, nearest to the end, was a upwards-curving spike that curved back down in a smaller spike, terminating in a prominent shape that had a small spike curving backwards and a larger curved front that looked slightly like a wedge. The first shape curved into a flat spike with a small curving one that faced the first one's small spike; there was another curve shape like that one. The last shape was the simplest, almost just a straightened crescent.

Zim held it before him, wondering just what it was before he realized what it's singularally lethal weight meant. It was indesputably a weapon. He swung it in the air, noticing that it left a red trail in the air, following the 'blade' part of it. Oddly enough, it wasn't at all heavy for him to weild; it almost felt like an extension of his body than a weapon.

"It feels like a sword. But it looks a lot like a key..." Zim looked it over again. A word resonated in his mind, quietly rising out of one of the deeper parts of his mind he didn't understand and rarely questioned. "A 'Keyblade'? Yes..that sounds correct."

He balanced it's point on the ground, looking back over to the island. A small gang of Shadows were milling around the secret entrance to Gir's little place.

His eyes narrowed. "'The Door'..."

Without another word, he ran off to it; the Shadows leaped at him again, only to be met by the buisness end of his new weapon: he spun around on a foot, catching one on the crown as he used his momentum to smash another, killing both of them. Another was split in half by a quick blow, followed by another strike to an inattentive Shadow.

He carved a swath through them as they scattered, tentatively following them.

He ran through the short tunnel, ignoring or killing any of the invaders that literally dropped on him. Strangely, as he got closer and closer to the room, they became fewer to none-existent.

He burst into the room, to see a strange sight.

Gaz and Gir were standing in front of the door, looking almost utterly exhausted. Gaz was wavering slightly on her feet; Gir, held in the air by Gaz via his foot, was barely moving.

"...Hey, you guys?" Zim said uncertainly.

At his words, Gaz slowly turned around, making Zim start in surprise. She looked curiously distant, as if her mind was not here. Remarkably, she seemed almost completely unharmed. . Gir looked a little worse off; his body was heavily dented and even more worn down than usual, but from the looks if it, that was due to Gaz using him as a bludgeon. Considering his empty head and hard body, that was a role he served well at. His various lights were a little duller, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.

With an grunt, Gaz dropped Gir. The robot rolled to his feet with his usual energy, standing up with a slight wobble. He looked up at Zim, literally lighting up with a huge smile.

"MASTER!" He yelped happily. _Everythings going to be okay! _the innocent little robot thought excitedly. _I'll be with Master and nothin' scary will happen._ Gir started running to Zim, intent on jumping on his and not letting go, for he didn't know, a few years, give or take another mind-blowing disaster.

Behind them, the door suddenly swing open, releasing an immense gale that literally blasted them off their feet; Zim saw them smash into him and saw a sudden burst of purplish energy as he was propelled through the cavern, his eyes shut close.

He was blown all the way to the platform, landing on the hard metal unceremoniously, bouncing off the ground and smacking into a broken down spires. Zim groaned at all the chaos around him and slowly sat up,

Gaz was nowhere. And Gir was also gone.

Zim extended his spiderlegs to better look around. Maybe he'd just be blown past him.

The platfrom was devoid of all things except for him and Minimoose.

"Gir?" Zim said in a very small and quiet voice.

Okay, Zim rationalized, maybe he just fell into the water.

He peered over the platform and into the water. There was nothing there, and it looked so thick that anything falling into it would have undoubtedly left a trail of some sort.

_Maybe he just became spontaneously invisible! _ Zim rationalized crazily.

Gir couldn't be gone. This couldn't be happening. Not to Gir. The robot was the only one who'd ever stayed.

All the other friends he'd ever known had left. Kuuk had been a madman, the cadets at the Academy loathed him for being short, every single Irken despised him for being a defective, and even Dib was gone, lost to the darkness. Of all the 'friends' he'd ever had, Gir was the only one that had stayed true to him. The only one that didn't hang around him like a parasitic bat to torment him when he'd failed like everyone said he would. The only one who didn't hate him for being weak. The only one who never treated him as nothing more than a resource or study project. The only one who didn't start out as an enemy. Gir was the only one who'd willingly gone with him and the only one, the _only _one, who'd ever stayed with him. Gir was the only person Zim had ever known in his long life who'd ever truly just liked him.

And he was gone, to regions he knew not.

"Gir?" Zim said in a voice too small to really be his.

He looked down at the ground, quaking in silent terror. Not fear for his own life, but fear for never seeing Gir again. Never being exposed to his impossible foods. Never hearing one of those inane songs he heard or came up with. Never being attacked by a random flying hug. Never being surprised by Gir's surprise entrances. Never seeing Gir again.

"This is all wrong!" Zim yelled to no one. "I'm going to find out who did this, _and I'm going to destory their plans, destroy their base, destroy their evil, and then I'll DESTROY THEM!"_

He looked up at the floating dark ball and raised his fist.

"Wherever you are, I'm going to find you and get you back! NO MATTER WHAT!"

He stared resolutely out to sea, his coat flapping in the wind. He would have look cool and dramatic if he hadn't look so ridiculous, but that fact was lost upon him.

He had made a promise in this damned shore. And though Zim was a short-tempered, easily enraged, short-sighted freak with the inability to truly percieve all, he knew one admirable about himself.

Zim always kept his promises.

He was alone now. And it wasn't like he had any thing to hinder him.

"Squeak?"

Zim paused, turning around.

Minimoose stared at him, his electronic eyes somehow conveying sadness and worry?

_I'm alone? No, that's not completely true._ Zim thought.

_I've got Minimoose._

"Squeeeek!" Minimoose squeaked, huddling against Zim's head and finally allowing his fear to overtake him, sqeaking in sheer terror.

Zim sighed, allowing the robot to cry.

Any futher dramatic action and thought was interrupt by something big under the platform.

Minimoose paused, looking down. "Squeak?"

Zim looked down and backed away; something _huge _was casting an immense shadow, something he couldn't see.

Wait. That was wrong. He realized that the sand was passing through where it would have to be in order to cast such a great shadow, and it was utterly unobstructed.

He looked down again and saw it moving.

It flowed away from him, a huge shadow easily four times as big as he, and stopped at the edge of the platforom opposite him. The shadow flowed upwards, like the Shadows he had fought so recently, but this one was different. Much different.

It didn't struggle to form itself, apparently better at ease in the fluid form that was hard to mantain, but it smoothly rose upwards, forming hard muscle and bones under it's dark flesh. Bizarre organs beat under it's monstrous form, leaving an all-too imaginative mind to ponder what lay with it.

It's fluid flesh continued to form, raising it's incomplete arms with the air of someone fully rested and ready to exert themselves. It's massive claws flexed once or twice, leaving black trails in the air that faded away after a moment.

Behind it, in the ground, immense cracks ripped through the ground, tearing the trees from their roots and causing the sand to pour into them. The mountain behind them crumbled, flattening into a flat range as any secrets they had hidden since time immemorial faded into obscurity.

The platform they were standing on suddenly quaked, and Zim felt a huge shift from underneath them as something vital gave way. And the island suddenly moved further away, retreating into the ocean-

Zim realized that was just his perceptions changing, and the platform was flying into the sky, closer to the dark ball.

And it stopped, hanging in the air in open defiance of gravity.

The orb above them pulsed, looking like a dark sun that was slowly drawing all into it's grasp. It seemed larger than it had been.

Squeaking in terror, Minimoose hit a seqeuence on Zim's Pak, opening it up. The android moose flew inside, shutting the Pak behind him.

Zim growled, holding up the Keyblade. It didn't look anything at all like a weapon, more like a large toy, but he knew more than anyone that appearences could be very decieving.

The dark monstrosity's body suddenly ceased movement.

It was twenty feet tall, exactly, and nearly as wide as it was tall. It's body was lined with thick musculature that seemed more like flesh, moving slightly as the shadows that consisted of it's body pulsed along it's mass. It hunched slightly, and along with it's overhanging arms, it made Zim think of it as a kind of satantic gorilla, the kind of beast an idiot bunch of psychotic humans would worship or at least curse in the name of frequently. The features of it's face were unclear; not because it's face was indescribably hideous and terrible to behold, but simply because it was hard to discern it over the swirling darkness over it's face. It was angular, very wide, and had blankly staring eyes. Not yellow lights, like the other creatures, but more like purple pits of blankness. The back of it's head had not hair, ears or antannae, but several twisting tentacles. It's legs were somewhat animalistic, like the legs of a human that had been broken in several places and forcibly made like that of a beast's. It's feet were bent-back, and had three claw-toes it stood on. Several large spines protruded from it's back, shaped in a way that suggested crystalline structures. Smaller spines like that were all over it's body, protruding from it's elbows, protecting it's joints, and covering it's vulnerable areas, but not in the profuse quality the monster from Zim's dream had had.

It raised it's gnarled fists and pounded them into the ground, one after another, denting the hard metal. It rolled it's undiscernable head and probably would have roared hoarsely if it had possessed lungs, vocal cords, or the state of mind to vocalize.

It peered down at Zim. It stood up on it's legs, rearing up to it's full admittingly impressive height. Now it was maybe thirty feet tall.

Zim stared up at the immense beast, this veritable juggernaut. From the looks of this thing, it could go one on one with a Frontline Battle Mech and tear it apart with no fear from the energy backlash. It could easily rampage through large city with no fear of reprisal, or at least any that could faze it. There was a vauge hunger in it's eyes, and an odd trace of fear as the Keyblade gleamed, reflecting Zim's feelings. It raised it's arms, looking down on what must've been to it, a tiny insect.

And Zim laughed. "MWAA HAHHAHHAHAAH! HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!" He laughed some more.

He kept laughing until he had to use the Keyblade to give himself some balence.

He caught his breath, stood up, and pointed his odd blade at the enormous beast.

He grinned.

"Heh heh heh heh! You call this a _threat!?_ I have seen more frightening things in the dwellings of my fevered imaginations! Come and face me, you..you..."

Zim realized it needed a name. One came to him from the same mysterious place the word 'Keyblade' had.

"Darkside!" he pronounced. "Come and face me, for I am your _horrible doooom_!"

And with that bizarre death threat, Zim ran at it, waving the Keyblade around.

It looked down, raised it's massive fist, and swung it into the ground directly where Zim was headed; he was flung back by the concussive waves, landing hard on his back again. "Ow!" he yelled, not disencouraged in the least.

He rolled to his feet, running to the sides, suspecting it would be too stupid to see a sneak attack coming on.

He was proven considerably wrong when it turned around, swatting him away; the only thing that kept him from falling to his watery doom was a spider-leg clutching the edge of the platform.

Zim crawled up it, all four legs extended. He glared at his foe, moving much faster than he normally would be able to.

It swung again, missing him as he rolled underneath it's ludicriously slow blow; he retracted the legs as he jumped, swinging the Keyblade at the exposed leg.

And went "Whaaa?" when he passed right through it.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing off it from sheer momentum. He got to his feet, rolling out the way of an errant kick from Darkside. He ran at the foot, slashing right through it but not in the 'struck a really good hit' way.

He aimed a hit at it's overhanging arms. That failed to worked too.

So did the next ten attacks.

"Okay, new plan!" The wrists might be a weak point, he thought. And the eyes too. The face was _always _a weak point. No defenses could be trained of upper facial muscles, after all.

"Hey!" he yelled up at it. "Look at me! I'm too small and fast for a big dumb thing for you to hit!"

It stared at him uncomprehendingly. Nonetheless, it struck out again, missing as Zim moved out of the way.

This time, it's tremendous strength worked in Zim's favor; it's fist smashed into the ground, getting itself stuck in the cracks.

Zim laughed maniacally, running at his gigantic foe. He jabbed it in the lovingly, pleasingly _solid _wrist. It sunk in deeply, passing through it as the dark flesh quaked; Zim repeated the attack, slashed upwards through, jabbing so the the Keyblade poked through it and wrenched it up, and smashed the crown part on to it with a particularily hard strike.

It swatted Zim away, getting damaged as Zim held his weapon out so it was injured by it as he was thrown backwards.

It threw a punch at Zim as he ran under it, holding the weapon straight up. Darkside pulled back again.

Zim scooted back, expecting another counterattack. Darkside gave none, instead staring at him.

It suddenly pounced, encircling Zim with a big hug. Huge spikes shot from it's arms, thudding into the ground.

The cloud of darkness that produced faded away, no small threat emerging from the small forest of spikes.

It started to stand up in order to smash it again, rearing up on it's feet. Zim's force field bubble suddenly bounced away from a hollow made from it's poor strategic abilities, bouncing off one of the flat tops of the spikes and bounding up, fading away as Zim thrust the Keyblade directly into it's stupid face.

He spun, the Keyblade imbedding him in it as the creature slowly raised it's hands to swat him off. Zim put his feet against it's face, jumping off and leaving what could be a wound. Though they quickly sealed up, he felt that they hurt it quite a lot all the same. His weapon appeared in a flash of light, and these things were nothing but shadows. And what banished shadows, but a shining light?

He activated his force field again, bouncing right up into it's unprotected face, repeated what he'd just done with more of a slash to the face followed by a jab. And this time he fell towards the wrists, slashing it on the way down. His bubble thudded on the ground, disappearing as it bulged outwards to smooth out the kinetic discharge.

Darkside raised it's fists, slamming them into the ground.

Where they sunk into the metal, a pool of darkness spread, not unlike the one Dib had disappeared into. Shadows appeared out of it, popping up like freaky versions of the Whack-A-Mole game.

Zim started at the side. "It can summon reinforcements?! Could this get less unfair?!"

The Shadows melded together into Soldiers and Air Soldiers as more Shadows appeared, copying their predessors.

Zim stared at that. "Note to self," he said calmly. "_STOP GIVING THE ENEMY IDEAS!"_

A Soldier jumped at him, doing that spinning in mid-air trick as an Air Soldier flew from behind him, claws outstretched and trailing dark energy; Zim rolled sideways, causing them to kill each other in a classic Comedy Killer Move. He ran to the pool, striking down all of the dark things that were there before repeatedly hacking at the wrists again, jumping onto it's hands and running up it's arm. It pulled it's hands back and the pool faded as he raced up, slashing at the face once he reached it and jumped back down, using his force field to safely hit the ground.

It continued in this vein for a while: Zim would hit it when it least suspected it, run aways as it spawned some more shadow things, he would run up it's arm and hit it's head and run away.

Hit it, run away from the things, run up the arm, hit head, run away.

Hit.

Run away.

Spawn shadow things.

Run up arm.

Hit head.

Run away.

And so on and so forth.

Zim had just been knocked away as it stampeded around the platform with it's huge feet and scooted into a remained spire, waiting for one of it's old tricks again.

And then it jumped up, slamming into the platform with all it's strength.

Not unsuprisingly, Zim was flung high into the air as he helplessly waved his arms and Darkside waited for him to come within reach.

And then he stuck the Keyblade out, moving past it's claws, and slashed right through it's head.

The impact slowed him enough to allow him to hit the ground with his spider legs safely, scuttling away from it as best he could.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough as it slammed his hand on him, crushing him into the ground and shattering his spider legs.

It exerted all of it's considerable strength, slowly smashing him into the recessed ground. It pushed harder, pushing his breath out with a few well-timed palm smashing.

_Stupid, _Zim thought weakly. _Letting yourself get caught like that._

It started curling it's fingers inwards, it's massive claws piercing his flesh. He knew that when it finished what it was doing, those claws would rip his body apart like a ripe orange under a falling planet.

_Am I going to die like this?_ he wondered mildly.

His body hitched as the claws went in deeper, digging into him.

And at the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw Gir.

"_No,_" he hissed, his sore voice rising to a yell. "_NO!"_

He raised the Keyblade as best he could, his arm trapped between the fingers of the enormous hand, and pushed it right into that hand.

The hand suddenly dissapated, and Zim rolled away, coughing hoarsely. He stood to his feet, the remains of his legs retracting into his Pak.

He glared venomously at it, it's hand already reformed.

He felt angry at himself for allowing himself to almost die before he could go rescue Gir. He felt angry at the nameless force that had invaded his home, and he was angry at the shadows that were tearing his planet apart.

But to hate yourself is more than pointless; it's stupid. Self-loathing wasn't really his thing. His anger at the invasive force was well-placed, but he had nowhere to direct it. It made as much sense as yelling at the sun for being hot. And the shadows seemed to be that: shadows. Nothing but mere shadows.

But this brutish thing...

It summerized all his enraged feelings about this ugly invasion. It was a big, stupid and really convient target for all the righteous fury he felt flood his heart and and racing through his body, making the Keyblade shimmer red-white-yellow. He felt his heart burn with rage at Darkside, and he wanted it to _burn_.

The Keyblade shimmered.

And flames flickered around it, radiating heat around him that curiously didn't bother him in the least. It was hot enough to make the metal he was standing on recede and his feet sink into, but it didn't burn him at all. As a matter of fact, he _liked _it.

The flames increased in intensity and more appeared, running up and down the Keyblade, pooling around into a round ball of roiling flame.

Zim gaped at the fireball, finding the Keyblade shaking and becoming more difficult to hold; he pointed it at Darkside, suspecting this was going to be _fun_. The fireball grew in size, the air around it combusting in gas-flame blue color and flowing into it as more fire.

Zim held it up, not sure he could continue to hold it for much long as the small fires along the Keyblade grew, still feeding the fireball.

It was getting almost impossible to hold, but it felt warm in a way he didn't understand, but that didn't preclude him from liking it. It warmed him in a way he hadn't felt in a good long time, and he _liked _it. Pulses of fire flickered away from him, as if the air was starting to burn.

His inner pyromanic and his inner angel yelled in exultation.

Zim looked through the fire and dimly saw Darkside start to charge. Funny; it looked smaller from this side of the flame.

"**_FIRE!"_ **He yelled, and the burning missle launched, knocking the Keyblade and Zim away into a spire in a kind of recoil.

It flew through the sky, igniting the air behind and around it as it flashed to it's target, illuminating the platform like a miniture sun; if someone had seen the floating platform, they might have thought that a Light was emanating from it. A Light that was going to completely obliterate the great darkness around them.

It struck the uncomprehending Darkside directly in the face.

There was a huge blast of fire; it rippled away from the platform, large streams of flame combusting around it's part of the platform, like a really, really, _really _small supernova.

Zim gaped at the explosion, the boring part of his mind wondering how he could stare at that explosion and not go blind while a less boring part of his mind wondered how he'd done that and if he could do something like that again real real soon.

After a moment of amazingly intense illumination, it faded away, leaving only a large scorched area and a lot of melted metal that had sunk into a rounded depression. There was a lot of heat coming from it, but not as much as one might think.

Zim shakily stood up as Minimoose carefully exited his Pak, hoping he'd missed the dangerous part. Zim stared at the crater he'd made, and he blinked, wondering what he should say to commerate this unbelievably and almost spiritual moment.

"That was _COOL!"_

Minimoose sweatdropped, or he would if he'd had sweat glands.

Zim glanced back at the Keyblade. Something, in his mind, felt different. Not unlike someone making a piece of art and discovering that the process was becoming easier.

His mind felt different. Something was different, in a deeper and more fundamental way than he could see. He knew something was different, and in a definitely good way. He knew it in his heart.

He knew it in his soul.

The power to create flames appear from midair; perhaps from hyperaccelerating air molecules, causing them to burst into flame, perhaps simply making fire appear. And perhaps, there was more to this than just pyrokinetics without a flamethrower.

He wondered how to project flame for a moment. He wondered how to make this new ability of his work.

He truly felt different. As he had done when he had finally realized that the only way to pick up that shattered remains of his rediculous pathetic life was to brush it away and start anew, with a mind to never repeat the mistakes of his sordid past.

It was like when his heart had been lit anew.

Any further rumination on this matter was interrupted when the island below tore free of it's moreings.

And he himself was sucked into the sky.

"WHOOA!" he yelled, grapping the tip of a spire just in time.

He hung there, his tenacious grip somehow winning against the darkness's fearsome pull.

And then he heard a terrified squeaking; Minimoose was also being pulled into the dark sun, and he had nothing to use as a safety line.

"No!" Zim yelled. Throwing all caution to the wind and letting it get hit by some cliff, he threw himself off the spire, grabbing Minimoose and tightly holding him so that the squeaking robot was uninjured by the whatever.

He didn't fail to take into account that he was therefore condemning the both of them to an uncertain doom. He didn't care.

"Better to die this way," he hissed, "than like a pathetic coward!"

Minimoose squeaked his terrified gratitude.

And they flew into the dark sun, definitely not in Nicktown anymore.

Well, so much for the DI portion of the story. Next up is Traverse Town, and if you thought this was nuts, you ain't seen nothing yet! Hope to see more reviews soon!


	4. Traverse Town: City of the Lost

_It begins as any other day, seemingly calm and right._

_But that is merely the peace prior to the storm's coming._

_With barely a whisper to announce it's presence, a dark presence arrives, filled with monstrous might._

_It is Darkness incarnate in a thousand-fold shapes, playing a dark song amid the murdering._

_The life that it leaves shudders in it's wake; all that is left barely able to fight._

_All that is left of the dead is a pale reflection of the killer, hungering for the light of those once loved._

_Hatred fills the hearts of the living, but to no avail; for everyone that falls, two more arrive._

_Thus does the world fall, taken by those who hunger for the light as they dwell in darkness. _

_It's people drawn into their dark residence by beasts bearing shadowed claws_

_Knowing only terror as they experience a personal apocalypse._

_Only to rise once more as the same beasts that took them into Darkness' gaping maw._

_Once more seeing those they lost, transformed into those that slew them, many lose all hope._

_Others flee in vain, for the Darkness' reach is everywhere; there is nowhere that it's denizens cannot go._

_A rare few attempt to battle, for their own sakes and those who are unable to cope._

_But it is a foregone conclusion; the darkness won once it saw it's shining foes._

_But what of those who do not fall?_

_What happens to those who do perish as does their world?_

_To the manifold worlds they descend in fear, but there is one that does truly call._

_Those that disappear come here, much like an safety blanket unfurled._

_Falling through the darkness, then washed upon the world none could ever know._

_It is a world where those who have lost all are found_

_A place beyond expectation and comprehension, where the lost fall like snow._

_It is a world of direction turned inward, of light within the darkness. That is Traverse Town._

_-The Statement of the Lost_

Hiyo, true readers! I FINALLY posted this chapter! And don't expect it to be the begining of another hiatus, too. Though I, frankly, wouldn't be surprised if this is the single-handedly_ biggest _chapter yet. Feh, who cares?

Disclaimer: Various characters and concepts in this chapter belong to Square-Enix, Disney, Jhonen Vasquez, Bill Watterson, Masashi Kishimoto, Mr. Warburton, Craig Mcraken, Christy Wui, Joss Whedon and Man of Action. Some other stuff, though, belongs to me. Additionally, the design of a certain Wishmaker belongs to Ri2.

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At the edge of the Hollow District of Traverse Town, a fair distance away from a large pile of gutted rubble, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte were attempting to hide from anyone who might concievably connect them with the aforementioned pile of rubble. Being who they were, Calvin and Hobbes were already used to running and hiding when a building randomly exploded/broke apart/imploded/ceased to exist/transformed into a rampaging giant monster, regardless of whether or not they caused it. Morte, on the other hand, was hiding on general principle and habit.

After a few minutes, it became apparent to them that the various people around them were more interested in the ruin itself rather then who or what might've caused it, evidently not inclined to randomly chase after unfamiliar travelers with pitchforks and general unhappy shouts. Taking this as a good sign, the three of them moved away from there as quietly as possible.

As they walked away, Hobbes glanced back at the ruins of the fourth building they had crashed into, or rather, _through._ He wasn't exactly sure why it had still been around before they hit though. If it had been anymore of an eyesore, he would have needed a masseuse for his optic nerves.

Giving the area around them a perfunctionary look, he mused that crashing into and destroying the Monty Burns Casino counted as an aesthetic favor. Judging from the burning ruins, it had been a misbegotten den of one-sided gambling with all the architectural charm of a deformed trilobite.

He sighed expansively. He had been in touch with incredibly stupid things far too often in his life; Calvin's main claim to fame was his almost impossible capacity for ingenious stupidity; he was the reason Hobbes had devoluped a saying which was now a proverb of a kind back home: "The Darwin Award candidate's last words are 'Hey, ya'll, watch this!' A genius's last words are 'I wonder what would happen if I did this?'". Unfortunately, Calvin was far more adept at intertwining the two than he would have liked, mixing incredible stupidity with stupid ingeniuity. Hobbes was far too in touch with the great and all-pervading spirit of Stupid for his liking, not to mention his peace of mind.

A good example would have been the fact that the scenario in front of them was caused by Calvin arguing with Morte and losing control of the ship, resulting in them crash-landing directly into the Monty Burns Casino, their lives saved by both ejection the precise moment before they crashed combined with a shorn-up resilience to small-scale explosions.

Recalling those unpleasant events, Hobbes muttered a curse he made up on the spot. It was in his native bestial langauge, and had no proper linguistic translation; it also sounded a great deal like a chainsaw trying to gargle while at work on vibration sheet metal.

Calvin moved his goggles from over his eyes to their usual place on his forehead, looking up at the tiger inquisitively. "What?"

"Nothing." He wasn't in a mood to translate, nor would he have normally. Frankly, Calvin was irritating enough with his limited vocabulary of swear words; Hobbes didn't want to _think_ of the boy cursing in different langauges.

At the very least, they hadn't been injured at all. That wasn't new to Hobbes, who'd spent much of his life in a variety of crashes, none of which had ever been close to fatal and he saw no reason for that to change anytime soon. He had, in all good intention,attempted to seize control after Calvin and Morte panicked, abandoning all relation with their higher mental functions, such as they were in the tiger's opinion. Unfortunately, he'd neglected to consider or care that his piloting abilities were on par with his math skills, dispite his best efforts.

Their first clue to this was when Hobbes had grabbed the steering wheel and turned aside, consersationally asked what made the vehicle move.

After the building had collapsed in a mixture of coinage, ugly neon and horrifying imagery, Calvin, Hobbes and the irritating talking skull had quietly snuck their way through the disoriented crowd that had been ejected from the building from the sheer force of their entry. They had so far evaded notice, at least. The last thing they needed was to deal with the local constabulary, as Jason would put it. A place like this, there was no telling just _what_ might be willing to beat the hell out of them. And they might not all be belligerent priests with a penchant for disturbing new theological theories and a severe lack of common sense.

There was one thing to be grateful for; they weren't attracting any real attention, blending in close enough to seamlessly. Weirdly enough, their clothes were a similar style to one the town had evidently taken to heart; seams up and down the place. Straps and buckles whenever possible to replaces laces and clamps of all sorts. And zippers. Lots and lots of zippers.

Hobbes was wearing a fairly simplistic outfit, which fitted his evident dislike for clothwear; he had a pair of functional knee-length green shorts with seams along the sides, a hole for his tail, and were somewhat baggier than they normally were, probably for breathing room.

Around his neck was a large bead necklace with several large odd teeth on them; they resembled the teeth of a Megalodon, but a bit smaller and pointier. Framing the necklace was a dark green vest with two pockets on the chest; on the back of it were two stiff tabs, strapped onto them a large discus-shaped shield. Barely visible under the scratched sooty surface was a double ring-in-ring design, framing an orange paw-print mark. On his hands he wore green fingerless gloves similar to bracers that went up to four inches behind his wrists, strapping up the side; they were made of a fabric similar to leather, but smoother. On his legs he had a pair of bootlike covering made of the same tough fabric as his gloves; they strapped-up up the sides, and had the ball of his feet and the toes exposed, the bottoms thicker to serve as shoes, or at least adequate foot-coverings.

Calvin's clothes were a little weirder looking; for one thing, he wore a pair of advanced looking goggles on his big forehead, a large number of little light-up icons on the rims; currently lit up was the highest icon on the revolving goggles, which resembled a simplistic pair of eyes, signifying the normal sight mode. He had on a red jacket that very vaugely resembled a lab coat in deisgn, with black lines going around it and at the neck was an encircling stiff collar, a shoulder flap coming out of the back and collar, connected by his breastbone with a clasp. His wrist-length voluminous sleeves came out from under the flap, ending in a thick ringlike shape around his wrists. This jacket too had vauge alchemic shapes on them, but far more muted, blended into the clothing; it was the sort of pattern that would be visible only in strong light, and then if you were purposefully looking for it.

His pants were black and mostly featureless, seams running down the sides like Hobbes. He wore a broad and thick toolbelt with a large number of pockets on it, two espicially large ones on the sides like a pair of holsters. The brown pouches sealed up with a clasp, made of the tough material Hobbes' gloves and 'boots'. The belt itself was kind of stretchy, like a army belt; strapped on the back was a large hammer with a thin blue hild and a small stainless steel cylinder attached on the side, thick flat striking surface on the ends. The legs of his pants partially covered his shoes, which zipped up under a securing strap and buckle, otherwise looking like a pair of futuristic white and blue sneakers.

Last of all, strapped to the back of his belt was a hammer slight taller then he was; the thin shaft encircled in a brown leather grip for him to grab it at virtually any angle, ending in a blunt head: the two striking ends extending from it like two triangles, the 'points' extended from the hammer's head. Two odd arrays were etched into the striking ends, resembling a circle in a circle; they looked loosely like a display of planetary arcs. A small circle was at the top, touching the outmost one and replacing the circle's lines. Another somewhat larger one was at the bottom of the middle, filling up a large amount of space with two small circles running through it's sides, two lines extending from the smaller ones through the outer circles, similar to the larger one running straight down the middle. Small runes were written along the outermost circle's edges, looking like a cross between a runic script and Latin.

Looking around warily to see if Hobbes' sudden giggling fit had attract any attention, the skull quietly said, "Last thing we need is to think you're a nutter. Try to keep the head-jokes in your bone-box."

Calvin looked at him, trying to figure out just what he was babbling about. He hated slang so. After a moment, Hobbes copied his gesture.

Morte noticed the stares. "What?"

"Nothing." Calvin and Hobbes said at the same time, utterly unaware of their synchronity.

"Berks." Morte said off-handedly, looking at them from the corner of his eye like they were babbling inchoherently, strapped into straitjackets, and frothing at the mouth.

"Hey!" Hobbes snapped, offended. Admittingly, he had no idea what Morte had just called him, but it sounded insulting.

"We oughta get moving," Calvin suggested, not paying attention to the other two. "Find somewhere-"

"To do what?" Morte whined. "Ask random questions to random people for, oh, I don't know, THE NEXT THREE MONTHES?!"

"...No." Calvin replied in an annoyed tone. "As we speak, I'm concoting another ingenius superplan from my own supergenius mind! Hey, I should trademark that."

"You did." Hobbes reminded him.

"Oh, yeah."

" And if it ends up like any of your other plans, we'll either be publicly ridiculed at gunpoint, end up crashing into the bottom of a cliff, wind up among xenophobic tentacled alien-beasts, attacked by giant prehistoric reptiles from the depths of a crazed artist's nightmares, or get so lost we create our own spacial singularity."

Morte stared at them. "And I thought I had an interesting life, and my afterlife was supposed to be an eternal piece of a pillar of perpetually gibbering talking heads."

Hobbes sighed in mourning for himself. "You have no idea. And that last one happened in a _straight room._"

Just as Calvin opened his mouth to retort, Hobbes' slightly larger hand shut it. Over Calvin's muffled protests, Hobbes said, "Aren't you supposed to be doing something? Besides arguing with this weasel."

Morte leered, ignoring Calvin's cry of _Hey!_. "Hey, I _am_ the chronicler, furball. That's something to do, y'know."

Hobbes snorted, but coming from him it sounded more like a small gentle sneeze, due to the construction of his nasal passages. "I meant help in fighting the _enemy._"

Morte tried to smile winningly by swerving his head in mid-air to show his perpetual grin at a presentable angle. He was strangely expressive for a mobile skull, even if they all came out either somewhat amusingly morbid or just disturbing. "Hey, hey, I'm a _lover_, not a fighter. I don't really do the hack 'n slash thing. I'm more of a tour guide kind of guy, if you know what I mean, heh heh heh."

Calvin pulled his hammer out of it's sheath, tapping it menacingly against the ground as he glared at the skull, unaware of the double entrende in Morte's words. "You better be in there in the fray with us, you coward, or you'll be the next thing I slam this thing into." From the look in his eye, he was obviously planning something much worse than a simple head bludgeon.

Morte backed away, eyeing him cautiously. He started to plot a comeback when Hobbes rolled his eyes, grunted, and slapped the two's heads together suddenly, knocked them to the ground. As child and skull lolled around dazedly, the tiger rubbed his forehead. "At this rate, I'll have ulcers before I'm fourteen."

Morte floated up to his usual height and looked up at him, his overall expression meaning the same thing as a raised eyebrow. "How old _are _you, anyway?"

Hobbes squatted on the ground as he considered the question, scractching the back of his head with his left foot in a movement of alacrity that belied his behavior. "Well, people tell me I could be anything from twelve to-"

"Sorry I asked!" Morte said loudly. From his basic estimations, the tiger probably wasn't much older then the child, who couldn't be younger than ten. He knew little about anthropomorphic animals in general, and whatever variety Hobbes had originated from on his bizarre world, so going by his physical looks was pretty much pointless. Thirteen, probably, would be his best guess.

Morte made up his mind on the matter when something else occured to him. "Hey, how long have you too known each other?"

Calvin and Hobbes looked at each other briefly with a quickness and similarity of motion that would have been better expected by that of identical twins, bonded together as long as they'd lived. "As long as I can remember," the tiger said. "Unfortunately."

"Me two. The first memory I can remember involves this big furball-" Calvin lightly punched Hobbes' arm. "-a red wagon, and a migrating mulberry tree with a twisted sense of humor."

"That was the first time we crashed into something while discussing matters of life. Admittingly, we were talking about parental assertations against us, but hey, we were young." Hobbes mused wistfully. Morte floated away from them a bit, giving them a disturbed look that seemed to involve a certain alignment of his eyes and a bit of parting between his jaws.

"Uh...huh. So that's, what, a decade at most? I mean, you're ten, right?"

Calvin crossed his arms, scowling angrily at Morte. "I'm _twelve._"

Morte's jaw dropped, and it was a wonder of forensics(not to mention a probable breach of anatomy and the laws of physics)that it wasn't a literal statement. "S-seriously? I mean..." the skull's mind raced furiously, trying to think of something to defuse the situation before he got something large wedged through him. He doubted Calvin could actually do anything dangerous to him, but the tiger was...well, a _tiger._ A large feline of the genus _tigris panthera_, generally native to the eastern continents in one or two Primes. He didn't envy the idea of a bipedal big cat pounding him for a percieved infraction; normal tigers could tear the doors off a car, and he suspected this guy had taken some sort of advanced training. Sure, he was fairly laid-back(for the straight man of their group dynamic, that is), but Morte wasn't confident on counting on a lack of temper to save him from a bone-cracking. "You look..uh...young for your years?" he said at last, trying to grin sheepishly. It looked more ghoulish than anything, which didn't help. Nothing serves to annoy an angry person more than when it looks like you're trying to creep them out.

Hobbes pitiably rapped his fuzzy knuckles on the human's head. "He's just short. He's barely grown more then six inches from when he was six."

Calvin angrily swatted at the tiger's hand. "That's an unfound exaggeration!"

Hobbes easily moved out of the human's pathetic swipes. "Maybe, but the fact is if you had a lower center of gravity, you'd be legally required to work at a carnival sideshow for minimum wage."

Calvin angrily jumped at him, crashing directly into an open garbage can as Hobbes sidestepped him with a nearly ludicrous ease of movement. The waste disposal unit fell to the ground as Calvin weight knocked it off it's center of gravity, rolling around on the ground, the sounds of it's tinny contents smacking into the child and exaberating his loud shouts.

Morte stared dumbfounded. "Is it always like this with you guys?"

Hobbes watched the progress of the rolling garbage can. "Pretty much," he said as the can rolled into a lamppost("OW!"), knocking the dazed kid out and onto the cobblestones with a hard _thud_, rolling to a prone state, lying flat on his back as he mumbled to himself inchoherently.

"Somebody stop the Planet of The Apes, I want to get off," Calvin muttered as Hobbes and Morte helped him to his feet, the former pulling him up by his arm while the latter bit down lightly on Calvin's collar and tugged upwards.

"You alright?" Hobbes asked.

"Not the first time you've tricked me into something like that," Calvin muttered, images of Hobbes telling him to stop rollarskating by falling into a gravel driveway dancing through his mind.

"I told you before, it was only a suggestion." The tiger grumbled defensively.

"Whatever," The kid said indifferently. "Let's get going already; we're not going to get anything done hanging around here and I hate being still."

"Sure," Morte said. "Works for me."

As they walked away, Hobbes heard a small crashing sound, not too far behind him and unnoticed by the other two. He frowned, looking over to where'd it had come; he didn't see anything, which struck him as suspicious. Still frowning, he hurried up to catch up with his companions.

As they wandered throughout the district, attempting to find some means of locating the key guy(not to mention the elusive Spike), Hobbes discretely scanned the area.

It was the sort of place that could easily be termed 'Everytown, USA', even if they weren't in a place that didn't translate easily to any sort of country, let alone America. It seemed slightly patched up to him, as if slapped together in a hurry from a disparate amount of buildings and places. That struck him as somehow appropiate, though he couldn't imagine why.

The people around seemed equally slammed into the place, if not moreso. As they walked around, he saw an even greater variety of species than he remembered from back home; anthropomorphic animals like himself, a great deal of humans, saurians, sentient machines, and a host of other creatures he didn't even have names for.

He paused, looking behind them, his look of incredulity changing to one of bemusement.

He nudged Calvin in the side. "What?" the human child asked.

"Keep it down. Look behind us, but don't be obvious."

Calvin raised an eyebrow, but Hobbes didn't react. Shrugging to himself, Calvin looked behind them discretely.

His jaw dropped. "You've got to be _kidding_."

Behind them, far enough to be unnoticed by them for the most part, but close enough to keep track of them, was an absurdly tall figure dressed in a trenchcoat, a small fluffy hankerchief, and a tophat. Most of him was obscured, except for his brown boots, oddly mechanical overlong arms, and the fact that his face appeared to be a blue oval with no facial features but a large pair of eyes and a mouth concealed under a large black handlebar mustache. Oblivious to their interest, he lumbered around unsteadily, looking as if he was about to fall over himself every fifth step he took. And then there was the way his upper half kept waving around unsteadily as if it were badly stapled to the rest of him, rather like a Promethean constructed by a mad scientist with a God complex and a low budget.

Periodically he would speak to himself, apparently giving orders to himself in a slightly high-pitched voice. "Hey! Stop it! You can stop now-LEFT! Okay, carefully...look out for that loose stone. OW! Who puts these plate glass things in the middle of the road?!"

Often, when this happened, two other voices would emanate from his body, in descending order; one was more moderately pitched then the other, sounding like a cultured voice with an accent somewhere between German and English, slightly formal in tone, if not in actual words. The other one was deeper than the others, sounding much older than the other two, not to mention considerably stressed.

The whatever it was lurched about, gamely trying to keep up with his quarry and be stealthy at the same time while apparently trying to keep himself from falling off his body. He snuck up behind a tree, his upper half drooping off as he started sharply yelling "I'm falling, I'm falling, I'm falling!" in an unusually high-pitched voice.

"Shut the bloody hell up! It's hard enough balancing on his shoulders without holding your infernal body, you waste of thought!" said the second voice. "I say, do you work out? Because I wouldn't want to come across as uncouth, but really, it's almost impossible to not notice. You really ought to do something about that tension problem of yours."

"Can't you two stop arguing for five minutes?" the deep voice snapped. "I'm the one that carrying all the weight and you don't see me complaining. And no, I don't have a tension problem."

"Excuse me?" the main guy said in reply to the third's scathing commentary. "Who's the one who came up with this idea? Who's the one who found out where these guys where? Who's the one who got the message from the guys about this? Who's the one who found those weighted shoes just for you to keep your balance? Who's the one who got this nice and heavy coat to keep me dry? That's right, me."

Silence greeted him like a horde of Huns waving molecular disentegration beamguns and authorization to fry at will.

"I rest my case." he said smugly.

"I say we fall upon on him and beat him until he is sorry!" the accented voice cried.

"No, it's not painful enough," the deep voice growled.

The guy rolled his eyes. "Yes, but we can leave that for later. For now, we are sneaky. Sneaky like I am!"

"Oh please, Godzilla on a bender is more subtle then you."

"Or a detonation of a nuclear device," the deep voice said. "You know, the things that goes boom."

"Quiet!" The guy suddenly yelled. He strolled by his prey, walking by them as they looked up, pretending to not notice him.

The three stared at them, but not the same way several other people had; not with stupified confusion, with their eyebrows raised and their jaws slightly slack, but with a species of scientific curiousity, even as he walked right past them, whistling innocently and loudly.

They watched him for a moment with that odd speculative look and then looked at each other. They walked off, apparently paying the idiot no further attention.

"Hah!" he crowed. "I'm a disguise mastermind!"

"We aren't buying it!" Hobbes yelled distantly, pointing a finger at him.

The guy froze, his small black pupils shrinking into itty-bitty pinpricks. Slowly, the ludicrously tall whatever it was tottered over to them.

Calvin raised an eyebrow. The guy not only looking like he was about to fall in two pieces, but his head was a small bright blue oval. His oval eyes were unusually big for his body, and those were the only features he could see.

"And who in the name of the Exploding Tunnel Kumqauts of Thursday Night Dinner are you?" he asked.

The guy's mustache twitched with every word as he spoke in a falsetto deep voice. "Me? Oh, I'm Orlando! Orlando Bloo!"

A voice with an indefinite Eurpoean accent apparently emanating from his chest yelled "You lie! We agreed on Robin Weiss!"

His head shifted around to the same voice yelping in pain. "I'm sorry about that," he said, "But apparently I have...psychoplasm!"

There was the sound of someone slapping themselves from within coat. "That's not even a real disease! That's a material substance that alters itself based on the mind of an observer!"

Morte clicked his teeth. It seemed to be the rough equivilant of a raising an eyebrow or some other satiric expression. "Oookay. What's with the bad voice?"

Orlando Bloo's eye darted from side to side. "I don't know what you're talking about! I've had this voice ever since I grew up in the diamond mines of New Ancient Canadia."

"Canadia." Hobbes said flatly.

"Yeah, that place down by Neo Greatly. I remember all those fond nights of being surronded by pengiuns."

"That's the Rio Grande!" The deep voice said again. "And penguins don't live anywhere by there! Raimundo's going to kill you for that, you know."

"Looks like my stomachs acting up again!" Orlando said cheerfully in his obviously falsetto voice as his head violently shifted around to what sounded suspiciously like yelps of pain. "I'll have to drink less coffee! Anyhow, I'm here...to, eh..conduct an town census! And I need you guys to do the bagpipes, kazoo and accordian."

"That's orchestra!" The Orson Wellian voice yelled again. "You're commiting homicide against the arts, you buffoon!"

"Will there be golf shoes scraping against concrete and amplified teeth grinding?" the third voice said blandly. "Because that could actually improve the performance."

"I can't heear you!" Orlando Bloo said, shutting his eyes tightly. With that mustache, he looked like something out of the Edwardian era crossed with the twenties decade of private detective lore.

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "This is ridiculous." He sharply yanked the mustache off the blob-guy's face, revealing that his wide mouth was his only facial feature other than the eyes.

Orlando didn't appear to notice it and continued keeping his eyes shut until Hobbes poked him sharply on his forehead; the flesh, oddly enough, was rather warm but had some give to it, like very hard rubber. And he didn't feel a definite skeletal structure and the question of muscle was anyone's guess; he felt like something brought into existence by an unusually intelligent infantile mind.

He opened his eyes, still keeping up the stupid falsetto voice. "My dear...person thingie, what is it?" Hobbes waved the fake mustache in front of his face.

'Orlando Bloo' narrowed his eyes, frowning in concentration. "Hmm, why does that look familiar?"

There was a sound of impact inside the coat again. "Ow!" Then the light of realization illuminated his face, and his little black eyes dilated again as his arm hit his face harder then was nesscary, his yells spoken in a much higher-pitched voice even higher than that of one of the phantom voices. "OW! You ripped off my mustache! That hurt a lot! Ow! I'm in so much pain! I've had that even since I was a baby! Ow!"

"Enough of this!" the first voice bellowed. Orlando sharply tottered foward as he yelled, "Hey, hey, stoppit!" He jerked upright as his hands reached down and plucked Calvin and Hobbes off the ground, one held by the shoulder flap and the other by the scruff of his neck.

"Hey!" Calvin yelled. "What's going on here!?"

Orlando's eyes darted back and forth, his mouth a freaked-out little line. "Now come on, guys. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation. Just give me a minute to think of one after SOMEONE TELLS ME WHAT'S GOING ON!"

The deep voice spoke up again. "Hey, what's going on? I can't see anythi-oh no. Stewie, you better not be atagonazing them! You remember the incident with the Pokemon Ambassadors? _I_ remember the incident with the Pokemon ambassadors."

"And what if I am?" the other voice challenged. "What will you do about it, old man?"

"This! _If the world lived together in peace, living together in har-mo-ny, it'd be a splendid place to beee!"_

"_NOOOOOOOOO! NOT A HIPPY PROTEST SONG!_!"

"_It'd be a beautiful place, with nary a single cry of woe, it'd be a wonderful world to see!"_

"Curse you, amalgated Hallmark industries, _CUUUUURSE YOOOOOU!!"_

"Hey!_ HEY! _Stop ignoring me! I need attention! Pander to me! I'm waaaiiiting...START PANDERING TO ME ALREADY! AAAUUUUUGH!" Orlando screamed as the third continued singing the cheerfully obnoxious and poorly thought out song.

Calvin and Hobbes, still hanging from the hands, looked at each other with an equally bizarre look that meant _What is wrong with these people?_ Morte joined in as best he could with his limited repetoire of facial expressions until he was distracted by a passing women of questionable morality. As he started to drift off after them, Hobbes snatched him and dropped him to the ground without changing his expression in the least.

Apparently acting on a thought arrived at on different tracks, both human and humanoidish tiger reached out, grabbed a good handful of coat, and pulled. It tore away easily, revealing three arguing people standing on each other's shoulders.

At the bottom was a tall human male well over six feet tall, maybe in his early thirties at most. His straight hair, a red so dark it was nearly black, was worn long, down to his chin-level. His face had a ascetic, almost sculpted look, an image evolving from his strong cheekbones, deepset heavy-lidded brown eyes and the general look of his face. His body was strongly muscled, suggesting that he engaged in some kind of physical work-out. Over it he wore a loose yellow coat, extending down to his knees and with two large straps over the front. Under the jacket was a shirt with the image of a crossed-out generic human face rendered in lines and he also wore tan rawhide pants, his motorcycle boots sticking out of the bottom of his pants.

Standing on his shoulders was one of the weirder sights Morte'd seen; he was stern-looking and indesputably intelligent, but that didn't attract attention away from the fact that he was a baby with an abnormally football-shaped head. His head had a few hairs on it, and combined with his expression, it made him look like a miniture Orson Welles. He wore only a small pair of shoes, a yellow shirt, and a pair of overalls in the town's style; the pocket on it's front zipped up, and the two straps had buckles instead of buttons. His black eyes stared at them with an unnerving intelligence, not to mention a certain amount of hateful glances thrown at the world. He was also holding a long pair of mechanical limbs, which looked slightly awkward.

Finally, standing around his head, was an odd-looking creature about three feet or so tall Hobbes had no word to describe, except for _blob;_ that was the closest thing to it, really. It's lower half was folded around the back of the infant's head like a flexible piece of Silly Putty, two puesdopod-like arms extended at what could be shoulder level for it; the 'arms' were long and flexible looking, ending in a rounded shape and wrapped around the infant's head tightly. His head region appeared to be a part of it's head that had eyes with small black pupils and a mouth that seemed to be changing depending on it's mood, rather like a cartoon character.

As a finishing touch, Morte flew up and pushed the hat off.

The upper two continued arguing, utterly oblivious to the destruction of their disguise; the third guy, on the other hand, blinked in mute surprise. People passed down the alley, paying absolutely no attention to the crazy people, making Morte consider the possibility that things like this were either a daily occurence and the people had become used to it, or a cruel and stupid explanar species had stolen all their brains and replaced them with limes, killing their weirdness recognition ability; for, as anyone knows, lime is the boring fruit.

The blob thing slumped. "Oh, well that's just perfect."

"And it's all _your _fault!" The baby declared angrily. "If the others find out about this, we'll be eternally discredited! Our reputations will crumble! Well, _ours _will, anyway. If yours crumbles anymore, it'll fall all over you and cover you in an avalanche of idiocy and misbeggoten plots."

"Hey!" The blob-thing yelled indignantly.

"Others?" Morte said. "What others?"

"Uh..." Jarod said slowly, not sure how to go about this.

Bloo spoke up, deciding to abandon his fake voice for his normal one, albeit with a placating tone that grated on their nerves. "It's a long story, and I don't want to bore you with all the details, and you just gotta work with me on this."

"And just who are you?" Calvin said, pointing a finger at him. "Besides a really bad actor."

"Me? I'm only the world renowned imaginary friend, Blooregard Q. Kazoo," he said with an exaggerated sweep of an arm he'd apparently grown for the gesture. He half-closed his eyes and smiled wryly in what was probably intended to be a charming expression. "But my friends and legions of admirers just call me Bloo."

Stewie rolled his eyes. "I am Stuart Griffen, though you may call me Stewie. _But don't get familiar on me_!_"_ he added sharply.

The guy at the bottom grimaced, evidently vexed by being partnered with a preening idiot and a aristocratic infant. "My name is Jarod."

Calvin and Hobbes continued hanging loosely from Stewie's robot hands. A wind washed through the street, swinging them gently upon the metal hands. A tumbleweed blew by and started to play on a guitar.

"Put us down. Now." Hobbes said shortly, a threat of horrible squashing doom in his words.

Jarod pushed the two on him off, the blue blob landing on the ground shortly before the child landed on him like a landing pad; not incidentally, this also released Calvin and Hobbes, as Stewie lost hold of the arms.

The two of them landed on the dirt unceremoniously. They sat up, brushing themselves off, then turned around; the arms were still clutching them. Hobbes easily wrenched them off as Calvin started walking off. "Hey, where are you going?"

"Away from the Three Stooges over here."

"Hey!" Bloo yelled. "I'm good enough for _two_ stooges!"

Stewie shook his fist at the heavens. "Of all the horrid fates in store for me, _why did you pick this one_?!_"_

"Well," Jarod said in a self-satisfied voice, "This officially qualifies as my hardest pretend ever: being an idiot among two idiots."

"Hey!" Stewie and Bloo shouted at once.

"Okay, okay. That was unfair. Being an idiot among a abnormally self-obsessed blob-thing and a pretentious Orson Welles wannabe with delusions of megalomania."

"Hah!" Bloo pointed at Stewie. "You're delusional."

"I'll have you know my ambitions are perfectly credible, protoplasmic imbicle!"

"I bet you think you're soooo clever. Well, joke's on you: I didn't understand a single word you just said, _HAH!"_

"What was the point of all that?!" Hobbes demanded, spreading his arms out, palms exposed and his face in a skeptically incredulous expression. "I've seen some dumb stunts over the years-" he glanced at Calvin sharply, who was suddenly occupied by interesting cloud formations for some reason. "-but that was that worst yet!"

"I assure you, there is a very logical and perfectly reasonable explanation for all this," Stewie said, "_BUT YOU'RE NOT GETTING ONE!"_ He pushed Bloo aside, clicking a device he plucked out of his little pocket.

Everyone stared at him.

Nothing happened.

"Give it a moment!" Stewie insisted. "It's a visual! Those things take time!"

Everyone looked around, looking to see what he was talking about.

Once again, nothing happened.

Hobbes crossed his arms. "Well?"

"Give it a moment!"

Hobbes was about to reply when they were illuminated by an extremely bright spotlight; ignoring Stewie's triumpht cry, he peered into the night sky, and saw a large flying machine in the sky in a Jules Verne motiff, the word _Rosebud _written on it's side in red block letters.

As Jarod gave an annoyed sigh, Bloo said, "_COOOOOL!"_ and Calvin said, "Tch. I've built better with glued together cardboard boxes.", the area of light around the blob, child and Pretender grew marginally brighter. The air around them began to ripple, as if the respective molecues had gotten it into their minds to dance to _The Flight of the Valkyries_.

The three abruptly lifted into the air, floating swiftly towards the source of the spotlight; a glowing hatch on the bottom that resembled an oblong pod. It split apart like a budding flower as they retreated into it, vanishing from the other trio's sight. It's task done, the airship swiftly flew off as quickly and randomly as it'd came, leaving no trace of it's existence.

As it's cargo stirred, pushing aside some random debris that had gotten pulled up with them, a ten year old boy walked up to them. His squarish jaws and the straight lines of his head gave it a rectangular shape; framing it was a mass of curling brown hair in a bowlcut. Strangly enough, his eyes and mouth were unnervingly similar to Bloo's, in their arrangement at least. He wore a red shirt with pockets near the bottom over a white undershirt with longer sleeves than the jacket and tan pants like Jarod's. The red shirt was zipped up, had seams around the shoulders, sides and lining, and also had a green backpack worn over his back.

Mac observed the garbage around them, the dirty glances they kept throwing at his imaginary friend and Bloo's sheepish expression. "He got you to do Orlando Bloo, didn't he?"

"Oh, you must be in the Obvious Club," Stewie snapped. "Tell me, are you just a card carrying member or are they plotting to build a thirty foot statue of you in the center of town to commenrate your keen observation skills for all eternity?!"

"There's no need to be rude," Jarod remarked. "Even though Bloo completely botched it." That last comment was added with a knowing glance at Bloo.

Bloo snorted derisively. "Well, of course I botched it! I always botch _everything!_ Name anything, anything at all, and I can practically garruntee I've botched it or could!" he paused, turning towards Mac with a psuedopod arm on where his chin would be. "Wait, 'botched' is a good thing, right?"

Everyone fell to the ground out of sheer dumbfoundedness. "What?" Bloo said in confusion. He slapped himself on the face. "Of course, duh! How could I have missed it? You all are acknowledging my genius by bowing before me. But that's not really nessacary, you could just throw me some money."

"No, it's not!" Stewie yelled, rising up enough to point a finger at Bloo all dramatic and shaky-like. "It's your fault this damned ill-concieved plot failed before it could even get loose of it's moorings!"

"We can stand here all day and point fingers at who did what and miss the real culprit of who ruined this." Bloo said calmly.

"And who would that be?" Mac said skeptically. He knew where this was going.

"That's easy. It's you-" he pointed at Jarod, "-and you-" he pointed at Stewie, "-and you-" he pointed at Jarod again, "-and you-", he pointed at Stewie again, "-and you, even though you weren't there." He pointed at Mac.

Mac crossed his arms and glared at him through narrowed eyes. "Are you saying that it was everyone's fault_ except _yours?"

"Yes, Mac, m' boy. Yes I am." He looked at them for a few moments. "And I got away with it, _IN YOUR FACES!"_ He yelled, jumping up and pointing an arm at them with a crazed laugh shortly before running off.

"You'll rue the day you messed with Stuart Griffen!" the mini-megalomaniac yelled, running after him. "Start rueing immediately! It'll save you time in the long run!"

Jarod stared at the sight of the alarmingly precocious infant chasing around the imaginary friend. "Hold still a moment, you badly conceived thought!"

"Only if you catch meeeee!"

"I'll get you yet, figmentary fool!"

"Your words're almost as big as your head, too bad your landspeed isn't!"

"Leave my head out of this! I should kill you for that!"

"Things were never this zany when I was on the run," Jarod said cheerfully. "I love it. But hey, that didn't go very well."

Stewie and Bloo stopped. "Heeey," the blob said slowly. "Wasn't it his idea to just come up to them and ask them to come with us and explain everything?"

"Yes. Yes he did!" Stewie yelled. "It made much more sense to simply kidnap them and explain ourselves at leisure!"

"Yeah, even my idea didn't stink that much! Hey, wait a minute!"

Jarod grinned, pressing a button on a Universal Remote he carried around with him in case his many acquiantices of questionable sanity progressed from mild madness to full-blown psychosis on him; the hatch they had been standing on opened suddenly, sucking in the garbage that had been taken with them.

He looked at them, his coat blowing dramatically in the wind, his arms held to his sides. He pulled a pair of wraparound sunglasses out of a pocket on his coat and put them on, raising his Coolness Factor by two point eight percent.

"I'd like to stay, but I have a pressing engagement anywhere but here." And then, with no fanfare at all, he flipped out the open hatch.

Bloo and Stewie sat at the edge of the hatch, staring at Jarod's descending body.

"...He's utterly mad, you know." Stewie said.

"Y'know, he did seem kinda miffed we called him out, but this is a little extreme." Bloo commented.

Jarod rolled out of his sky-diving flip, flinging his arms out as a pterodactyl, for no appreciable reason, swooped out of the sky and grabbed Jarod by the arms, flying out into the wild blue yonder. Given the time of night, it was more like a dark purplish yonder, but that was besides the point.

"Awww!" Bloo whined. "Why does everything exciting happen to everyone else? I wanna fall out of an airship's hatch and get caught by a giant pterodactyl! I want something exciting to happen to me!"

Stewie causally walked around him. "Hm, fair enough."

"Wha-" Bloo's confused question was cut off when Stewie pushed Bloo out of the hatch.

As the imaginary friend's cry of mixed surprise and dismay faded away, Stewie closed that hatch.

Mac looked at the hatch and then to Stewie incredulously. "Wha...buh...guh...why'd you do that?! AGAIN!?"

"Oh, relax." Stewie said calmly. "I'm sure he'll be fine. The Wobbuffet I tried this on survived perfectly well."

"Bloo's _not _a Wobbuffet!" Mac protested. "He's not even close to a Patient Pokemon!"

"Oh, come on. He's a blob, they're blobs..."

"Wobbuffet are living defense mechanisms, you jerk! Bloo can't project bodily shields!"

"Not yet, anyway."

Mac fixed Stewie with a glare. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, you know...once a certain someone pesters me long enough to give them superpowers, I simply had to oblige. Not that I stuck to the letter, you know..."

Mac grabbed Stewie by the overalls, lifting him up to his face. "What. Did. You. DO?!"

"Calm yourself, you're screwing up my feng shui. All I did was insert the DNA of that one Wobbuffet that hangs around with that yellow mouse thing into him when he wasn't looking..."

_Stewie crept up behind a post, a large needle in his hands._

_His eyes narrowed as he observed his prey._

_The prey in question was a blob-type creature, a light blue in color. It's body was fairly fat around the head, slimming down in the middle and fattening again into a X-shaped pattern of round puesedopods for feet, a small black paddle-tail with blankly staring eyes poking out from between the rear pair. A pair of flattened arm-flapss protruded out at shoulder level, just below the flattened head-flap on the back of the creature's head, opposite the clenched eyes and borderline frown of a zigzag mouth of the face. One of the arms was held in a salute, which reminded Stewie of an obscure Japanese comedy sketch._

_He watched the Wobbuffet in question speak to another creature, this one a bit more vegative in looks. It's body looked like a green ball, a small yellow flowering plant growing out the top of it's head and resembling a shock of hair. It's eyes were deepset large black pupils; directly below them were a series of small holes, arranged in a pattern that resembled a smile. Below these, around it's body, was a series of small conical dark green spikes; similar spikes were present around the clublike ends of it's thick arms and looking like fingers, and a larger pair of spikes were at the bottom of it's body, functioning as legs._

_Finally, next to them was a yellow mouse of sorts, slightly bigger than the cactus creature. It had a plump body that looked to be nearly all muscle, with a rodentine leg arrangement, the limbs looking more powerful than they should've. Out of it's rear poked a large stiff tail, shaped like a classical lightning bolt, the wide flat ended colored a brown by the stripe on it; three similar brown stripes were present on it's back. It's head was round, larger in perportion to it's body than usual, and somewhat cute looking. It appeared relaxed, judging on how it's long angular ears, ending in black marks, were calm and still. It's wide and short muzzle, sniffing the air occasionally, would probably have looked cute to somewhat else; Stewie just thought it looked odd for something called an Electric Mouse when it looked very little like a mouse at all, espically with the bright red circle on it's cheeks._

_They were speaking to each other, idecating that they were sentient. To anyone else, their words would have just come out at the pronounciaton of various syllables of their species' respective names. Thankfully, however, Stewie had recently procured a Babel Fish, rendering their words intelligible._

_"Well, what'd you guys think?" The blue blob asked the other two in the sort of voice that was practically tailor-made for cheering or at least loud proclamiations of a sporting nature._

_"I liked it!" the cactus said thoughtfully, her feminine voice marking her as a girl. "What about you?"_

_"Hmm, me? I dunno. Never did kareoke before on a stage."_

_"Yeah, who'd 've thought that Wobbuffet would like kareoke?" the cactus said jokingly._

_"Or that Pikachu would pick 'Thunder Road' as his song?" Wobbuffet said._

_"Hey hey hey! I like country, you guys."_

_"Too depressing most of the time for me!" the cactus chimed in._

_"That's odd, Cacnea." the blob mused. "I mean, you're a cactus, and those songs tend to come from desert regions, so..."_

_"Aaah, I don't like deserts," Cacnea said airily. "Too humid."_

_The Electric Mouse and the Patient Pokemon looked at each other briefly and shrugged._

_"Nice place, though. I like Caritas." Pikachu opined. "Wonder if I can get Pikapi up there sometime..."_

_Cacnea and Wobbuffet froze. They slowly turned, staring at each other, and then fell to the ground laughing at the mental image that brought up._

_"Hey, c'mon! It's not that funny! Cut it out!" Pikachu complained as the former foes of his continued laughing._

_Cacnea wiped some water away from her eyes, her green husk too tough to be injured or scratched by her spines. "'Kay, but you know, Lorne's got a weird sense for naming."_

_"Yeah," Pikachu agreed. "I mean, 'Pokemike Night'?"_

_Wobbuffet shrugged. "What do you want? He's a demon, and he used to work at Las Vegas."_

_"Under protest," Cacnea reminded him._

_"Yeah, that too."_

_Wobbuffet turned around, and a small child suddenly jumped out of nowhere, landing sqaurely on his back, shouting, "I've got you now!" while plunging a large hypodermic needle into the Patient Pokemon's body._

_The mouse and cactus whirled around. "Hey, what the-" Cacnea began to say._

_She trailed off as she realized that this, whoever he was, had neglected to consider both Wobbuffet's tough body as a defensively-based creature, not to mention his body structure; Wobbuffet bent over as a result of the added weight of Stewie's body, waving his arms in the air helplessly._

_Stewie repeatedly plunged the needle into the blob-like creature, yelling such fond things as, "Sink, damn you, _SINK_!"_

_Cacnea raised her arm, the needles glowing as Pikachu 's red cheeks started glowing white-yellow, emitting small arcs of electricity. They were both about to strike the annoying person off when Wobbuffet regained his equilibrium, abruptly snapping back up to his standard standing posistion like a standing punching-bag, incidentally flinging Stewie far away._

_Both cactus and mouse powered down, staring in the direction Stewie had gone off in._

_"Who _was _that?" the cactus wondered._

_"Al Gore?" Pikachu guessed._

_Wobbuffet and Cacnea stared at him. "What?"_

_The mouse shuffed his foot sheepishly. "I couldn't think of anything else to say fast. And hey: if Presidential candidates don't randomly jump on people and try to plunge needles into them, then I don't know who else does."_

_"...Uh huh. You know, all this time, I always though you guys were some kind of amazing strategic geniuses, but you guys were almost as lame as we were." Wobbuffet said._

_"Yeah!" Cacnea agreed. She paused. "Wait, that didn't sound right."_

_Wobbuffet nodded. "Yeah, I know." One of his pods waved around his back rapidly. "Ow; I think I got a scratch or something."_

_"Let me see." Pikachu said, hopping over behind the blob. He peered at it a moment before nodding his head. "Yup; I think that guy nicked you a little."_

_Wobbuffet winced. "A little? This hurts like a Banette."_

_Over in his landing spot, Stewie blinked. He noticed that there was a faint trace of blue around the needles tip. "Hmm, some skin? Eh, guess that'll work. Just extrapolate the entirety of the DNA sequence and utilize those relating to techniques..."_

_Later..._

_Bloo stood in his room, staring out the window dully, waiting for Mac to get there. Admittingly, after the fall of the world, Mac lived at Foster's too, but that wasn't important. He just _had _to have other friends, didn't he?_

_Stewie jumped out of nowhere, landing on Bloo's back. "Guess who, blob boy!?"_

_"Zorak?"_

_"Eh, close." He then jabbed a needle into Bloo's back._

_"Ow! Hey, what was that for!?" Bloo demanded, struggling to reach his back as Stewie jumped away._

_"Consider that what you asked for!"_

"So, yeah." Stewie finished lamely.

Mac started seething in fury, his face slowly turning red. "You _**WHAT?!"**_

"Oh, hush. He's close enough to a Wobbuffet. Well, maybe not that one, but he's enough of a loser, don't you think?"

_Down below..._

Calvin scratched his side lazily. "Huh. That was weird."

"I take comfort in the fact that we're weren't involved proactively." Hobbes said, stretching his arms out with an audible pop.

"Whazzat mean?" Morte wondered.

"Activity that has exceeded it's amateur status."

"Y'know, I just can't help but feel we got off-track somewhere," Morte pointed out.

Calvin stared blankly, his weird eyes widening. He slapped his forehead lightly. "Duh! We gotta find this Spike guy!"

"More importantly, we should find that 'key' King Garfield mentioned." Hobbes pointed out.

"A key? That'll take some work?" Calvin observed. "A city this size is bound to have hundreds of mystical key things."

"I don't know about that." Morte said thoughtfully. "Technically, a key is anything that opens a door. Back in the Planes, every single damn portal had a 'key' to open them, and they were all metaphorical ones."

Calvin and Hobbes stared at him. "He's got a point." Calvin said, looking extremely reluctant to make such an admission.

Hobbes playfully slapped the skull, sending him into the ground. "Looks like you aren't so useless after all!"

"Thanks..I think," the skull muttered from his small hole in the dirt.

Something unpleasant had occured to Calvin. "Wait a minute, he said slowly. "How the heck are we going to get off this rock without a mode of transportation?"

Suddenly, the Monty Burns Casino exploded again, a flaming piece of debris flying through the sky in their general direction. As Hobbes tackled the other two to push them out of the way, it crashed into the ground where they had been standing, leaving a smoking skid mark and crater. The flames suddenly sputtered out, revealing the badly scorched Gummi Ship, which was almost completely destroyed, the anomalous properties of the candy-like material it was composed of being the only thing holding it together.

They stared at it, a few stubborn flames blowing out as they watched.

"Well, that solves that." Morte said after a few moments.

Calvin glanced at what remained of the Kingdom Mark One. "First thing we do should be to find somewhere to put this thing. We can't exactly lug a four hundred pound ship everywhere. People are _going _to notice."

"What do you mean 'we'?" Hobbes snapped. "I'm the one that'll have to carry it!"

"Oh, sure, like _I'm _going to carry it?"

"It's not my fault your small and weak!"

"I am not small! And it's not _my _fault you're the only one here who's done big-time physical training with Teacher, now is it?"

"Sure, it always got back to that, Mr. I-Spent-All-My-Efforts-On-Special-Effects!"

"Look who's talking, _senor suckalot!"_

"I don't suck, you do!"

"No, you do!"

"You!"

"You!"

In the midst of their arguing, Morte lost interest and noticed a big sign that said _Honest Eddy's Discount Storage._ It was accompined by a crude drawing of the head of a grinning guy with three long hairs at the back of his head and a smile that could be only described as oily by even the most charitible observer. It was practically screaming _Rip-Off Artist _with a bullhorn.

"Guys, I gotta plan."

"Huh? What?" the two behind him said, pausing in their fight.

Morte gestured in the general direction of the sign.

The three of them looked at each other. "That'll work." they said as one.

A tearful zombie ran by them. "I'm dead inside!" she cried, a bag of toenail scrapings trailing behind her.

"You're dead outside too," Calvin called nonchalantly.

"Hey hey! Now where do you think you're going?" Morte said as he started following her for all of two seconds before Hobbes snatched him out of the air.

"Now where do you think _you're_ going?" the tiger asked inquistively, a disturbing suspision squatting at the corner of his mind and giggling to itself psychotically.

Morte looked at him incredulously. "What d'ya think? She's a nice dead girl, I'm a nice dead head(Eh, not that kind, the literal kind)...see where I'm going?"

Calvin glanced at the two of them before losing interest. "No..no I don't, actually."

Hobbes blanced, the fur on his face going a few shades paler. "You _can't _be serious."

Morte grinned ghoulishly. It was the only sort of grin he was capable of making, being a floating skull and all, but the intent was definitely there. "Oooooh yeah. C'mon, big guy...it's a Friday night, I've been without appreciable female company for way too long, have a little compassion huh? Just me and the luscious cadavar all by our-"

Hobbes' fur, if that were possible, paled even further. "That's _disgusting!"_ he shrieked, throwing Morte into a random manhole.

A sewer mutant threw him back out, proclaiming "We don't want your garbage!" Hobbes continued to give an utterly repulsed look at the leering skull, who was now covered completely in garbage. An acerbic part of Hobbes' mind volunteered the comment that now his exterior nicely matched the inner workings of his mind.

He looked back at Calvin, whose relative innocence was still preserved by the fact that he had been paying no attention whatsoever to the conversation.

The tiger grunted something angrily. "Let's go," he growled under his breath.

They started to move when Hobbes paused, his ears twitching. "Do you guys hear something?"

Calvin frowned. "Yeeah...come to think of it, I do."

"It sounds like a really whiny voice saying 'thaaat's nooot whaaaat IIIIIII meeeean'!" Morte said.

Hobbes raised an eyebrow as their collective shadows started to grow bigger, unnoticed by them all. "Why'd you repeat it exactly?"

"...I haven't said anything in a while. Kinda grates on the nerves, y'know?"

The screechy yell was become louder and clearer.

"Yeeeah," Calvin said slowly. "Don't say 'y'know' at the end of your sentences. Makes you sound like a wannabe-jock, and I _hate _jocks."

Hobbes frowned and looked down, noticing the abnormally big shadow at their feet. "Why do I have a bad feeling about-"

And Bloo crashed down on all of them.

Calvin groaned, feeling a painful weight pressing into his stomach on the ground. He tried to get up, realizing that something _really _heavy was pinning him down.

He wondered why it seemed really dark, and well, _hot._ Like being under a live shag carpet.

This seemed strangely familiar.

He opened his eyes and realized a few key things.

One, Morte was stuck under him, unable to float away.

Two and three, Hobbes was lying across him while Bloo was pinning the tiger down.

Hobbes opened one green pupil, the other squinted in discomfort. "Pain. I'm in pain."

"What have you been eating?" Calvin growled. "Edible concrete?"

"Heey," Bloo dazedly said, "Look, I'm alive!"

"That can be rectified," Morte muttered and Calvin and Hobbes added something to a similar effect.

Those around him stirred, trying to stand up or at least move into a slightly less uncomfortable position; unnoticed by him, one of the pouches on Calvin's belt slipped open, a small yellow ball falling on the ground as Bloo fell off Hobbes, noticing a broken paddleball.

Calvin blerily acknowledged it's existence. Then his red eyes widened as he realized what was rolling around on the floor.

Calvin spoke in a frightengly neutral voice. "Nobody make any sudden movements. Just...roll...away from it."

"Why?" Morte wondered.

"Because it's one of my ready-made smart-bombs, and if it's hit by a hard enough impact, it will activate and blow us all to very small ashes." Calvin replied, just as neutral as before. Hobbes pulled himself up to look at what Calvin was talking about.

"Hey, new guys, look at THIS!" The three of them looked up to see Bloo holding a paddleball of sorts.

That didn't frighten them much. What did scare the unholy hell out of them was the fact that the string was securely tied around the small bomb.

"Yeah," Bloo said, not noticing their increasingly horrified stares. "I just saw this poor little guy without a paddle for him, and I remembered this little paddle I found and look at it now!"

Ignoring their fractured pleas to stop, he raised the paddle into the air, flicking the ball upwards into the air. It stretched outwards, the taut string suddenly pulling it back. He swung the paddle...

And missed completely, the little ball swinging despondantly as it came to a stop.

Their eyes bulged as Bloo glared at it. He raised it, flicked it, swung and missed again. He raised it, flicked it, swung and missed again. Raise, flick, swing, miss.

Bloo frantically swung it around, futilely attempting to hit the ball with the paddle and failing pathetically. The three potential victims of his stupidity stared mutely at his complete inability to hit a paddleball even once.

This continued for about fifteen minutes until Bloo grimaced ludicrously, his mouth extended to what would have been ear-to-ear if he'd had any, letting the little ball fall to the ground as his grip on the paddleball loosened.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte all exhaled exspansively in relief.

And then Bloo freaked out and threw the paddleball as hard as he could at their feet.

In the small explosion that followed, there was a distinct amount of words that couldn't be taken back, mostly from Morte. And some from Calvin, who knew few swear-words but was already in the learning stages of how to use them to best effect.

Four small figures flew away, smacking halfway through the sign of 'Honest Eddy', poking out his eyes(which, ironically, was the punishment for scam artists in the olden days of the Comic Kingdom).

"Hey, Bloo?" Calvin asked.

"What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Calvin relaxed. "Oh, that's good. _BECAUSE I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"_ he shrieked, furiously swinging his hammer at Bloo.

"Hey! Hey!" Bloo yelled, squriming away as Calvin popped out of his hole and started chasing him on the little walkway around the billboard, leaving Hobbes and Morte to watch them.

"Hey," Morte cautioned, "Considering the uneven weight distrubution, I'm thinking that's a _really_ bad-"

The sign creaked loudly as it started to lurch forward.

"Idea." the skull finished.

"Uh oh," Bloo said, scrambling up the sign's face in an effort to get to a safer place. Unsurprisingly, this caused it to lurch a little more.

Bloo fell down, landing next to Calvin. The impact of his weight caused a final and greater creak.

Everyone's eyes widened in shock as it slowly began to topple.

"I hate you," Calvin said conversationally to Bloo as it collapsed.

_Some time later..._

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte lurched around, the kid rubbing his sore back angrily.

"Stupid...whatever he is! When I find him, I'm going to...I'm going to...well, he doesn't have a neck to break and I doubt he's got organs to forcibly remove, but when I find him I'll do something painful!"

"Relax," Hobbes said calmly. "From the way he ran off, I don't think he got off any easier than we did."

"Whatever," Calvin groused. "Now what do we do?"

"Well," Morte said. "I remember back in my old adventuring days, whenever me, the Chief and whoever we were partying with got stuck on something, we'd ask questions to anyone who might be in the know, y'know."

"Sounds reasonable enough," Hobbes agreed. "And I told you to stop saying 'y'know' at the end of your sentences."

"No you didn't, I did!" Calvin said.

"Shut up. Look, there's a construction site up ahead. Let's start there." Hobbes paused. "'Partying'?"

Morte shrugged as best he could. "Hey, a buncha adventurers is called a party, so what else would you call it?"

"Good point," Hobbes said before Calvin could say a word to the effect that that guy they'd stored their ship with had ripped them off or whined about something else.

Ahead at the construction site, a Japanese girl with black hair worn in pigtails and eyes the color of gas flames sat precariously on a girder about forty feet in the air, calmly eating her lunch. She wore a zipped-up jacket had zipped up pockets at the corners of it and a large hood shaped like a cartoonish dragon's head: it was slightly angular, the front of it looking a bit like the beak of a bird of prey, it's 'eyes' obviously sewn on yellow patches. The jacket itself, blowing in the wind, was mostly red with yellow to accentuate it on the pockets and edges; it overlapped the edges of her ash-gray jeans. They had seams running down the sides, ending shortly above the tops of her comparatively simple strap-on black boots.

Her pigtails bobbed in the wind as she looked down at the immense ogre-slash-minotaurlike creature nervously yelling up at her from ground level; he was at least seven feet tall and about as wide, all of it powerful muscle covered by thick and extremely long purple fluffy fur. The only part of him not furry was his face; it was, set upon a head that seemed to have no neck, only a large muscular hump between his large shoulders; it was a pale purple shape with a broad flat and slightly protruding snout, his gentle wide-set black eyes framed by a dark monobrow, peering up at the world with an equal mixture of gentility and fear. His mouth, looking like a cross between an ogre's and a bulls with the large fangs extending from behind his upper lip, a particularily large pair just by the corner of his mouth, was repeatedly trembling in fear for the girl.

Most dramatic of all was the imposing pair of horns on the top of his head, highly similar to that of a bull's, seemingly formed of rough white plates similar to the bark of a palm tree and arcing up above his head in a manner like that of a bull's. The only clothing he wore were a pair of gray leather pants, secured with a black belt bearing a fearsome skull buckle that looked like a humans but with fangs much like his own replacing the lower part and postioned on the front. A pair of black cowboy boots swallowing up his pants from the knees down, hiding the fact that they were basically shorts. His hands, waving in the air dramatically, were simple; only two large and dangerous looking claws, the rest of the hands obscured in the luxuriant fur. Poking out just below the belt was a short tail covered in a shorter variety of his fur, whipping wildly around and ending in a small triangle.

Near him, looking up at her unworriedly, were three boys around her age: the youngest was a short bald Chinese boy with light yellow skin. He had a large round head, unusually long pencil-thin eyebrows, no visible nose and a compact body structure remnisciant of a coiled spring. He wore an odd red shirt with seams along the joints and around the shoulders in a rough angular pattern. It had long sleeves extending to around his wrists, ending in wide black cuffs. The front of the shirt indicated that it was similar to a robe, as it was buckled together at the front by two wide straps on the upper left side. His pants were black and almost plain, a small pair of pockets along the hips and a small circular pouch holster on the side. The bottoms of the pants covered the tops of his black shoes, they were of a similar design to loafers crossed with sandals, but tougher in design.

Next to him was a taller Brazillian guy with a breezy look to him that had wind-blown brown hair and eyes a similar color to young grass blowing in the wind. His body was slightly willowy in shape, and he had the frame of a habitual surfer that had since become a monk that did some heavy-duty training daily. Over his lean frame he wore a mostly white shirt with diamond shaped patches of green around the lower regions of his shoulders, growing out to cover both shoulders. The green sleeves ended in a zipper-attachment near the elbows, keeping an orange sleeve extension connected to the shirt. He wore long black pants, an empty holster consisting of two straps along the upper right leg; below the knees was another zipper attachment, this one keeping the rest of the pants attached. His shoes were simple white sneakers with straps instead of laces, the tongue of the shoe sticking straight up.

Last was a Texan boy that was almost absurdly large; even the Brazillian guy, who was pretty tall for his age, only came up to his shoulder. His straw-blond hair was parted in a way that covered one of his gemstone-blue eyes, lending him a relaxed look that contrasted his overall rock-firm look that made him almost as imposing as the purple creature. He wore clothes that seemed more appropiate to someone working on a beef ranch or at least a period fair; on the top of his head was a worn and battered cowboy hat, a blue sash wrapped around it securely. On his neck was a red bandana around his neck, tucked into the neck line of his light blue shirt; that was comparatively simpler than the other, aside from having a zip-up collar rather than a button-up. It's shoulders had long sleeves extending into his zipped-up padded work gloves, well worn and conspiciously covered in a thin layer of dirt. He wore Levi work jeans that had faded to a light blue from wear, tucked into his brown cowboy boots.

"Kimiko, I am thinking that is not a very safe idea!" the ogre yelled up at the girl, waving his arms agitatedly.

"I would not be pulling that very much were I you!" the Chinese boy advised him, careful of the creature's flailing arms. He'd seen them knock heads off before. Admittingly, they were the heads of black shadow monsters, but it still counted.

"That's 'I wouldn't be pushing it if I were you', Omi." the Brazillian corrected, running a hand through his hair to get the dirt out of it.

"Even better, Raimundo!" Omi said with a complete lack of self-consciouness.

"You sure 'bout this, Kimiko?" the cowboy yelled. "Not exactly what I'd call the brightest idea."

"Relax, guys. I'm perfectly safe." she threw her bag down to the ground, where it neatly fell into a garbage can.

"AHHH! That very dangerous! You could hurt somebody! Like me!"

"Eduardo, that was a paper bag." she said pointedly. Being a creature that had been born of a little scared girl's imagnation and desire for a guardian, it was no wonder Eduardo could be so cautious and fearful. It was an occasionally endearing trait, but more often got on her and pretty much everyone who knew him nerves.

"Exactly! You get paper cuts!"

"He's joking. Seriously, he's gotta be joking." Raimundo said. "You hang around him sometimes, Clay. Is he? I mean, no one can be that scared."

The cowboy dumped the supply of sealing material, which was as big as a hippopotamus's head. "You don't know the half of it, partner. I heard he use ta think that a Frisbee wanted to eat him."

Raimundo dropped his sack out of sheer astonishment. "You gotta be kidding! Spicer was braver than that, and he couldn't sleep without a nightlight!"

"I'm standing right here, you know!" Eduardo said indignantly. He looked down, recoiling at the thought that he was _standing on the ground,_ making him a perfect target for giant sand worms.

Omi leaped in front of the imaginary friend, who recoiled in terror before he realized it was just the bigheaded monk.

"Honorable guardian, I must apologize for my friend's rudeness. Sometimes Raimundo cannot help but release his internal organs. It is in his nature, I think." Omi said with a straight face, unaware of his _faux paus_.

Eduardo's attention snapped from Omi to Raimundo.

"Um," the Xaiolin Dragon of the Wind said, not quite comfortable with the look Eduardo was giving him; it was somewhere between shocked surprise and abject horror. Laughing nervously and scratching the back of his head laxly, Raimundo moved towards the imaginary friend; Eduardo suddenly jumped up a tree, staring at Raimundo and whimpering.

Clay's hat suddenly lifted up, revealed a small green serpentine reptile coiled under it; it was about a foot and a half long, entirely green except for the series of short red crests running along his head and back. His head was long and mostly comprised of his comparatively large mouth, though his big yellow-rimmed green eyes had a decent amount of space. He didn't have horns; where ears should have been, there were pointed winglike crests curling inward. He had no rear legs, but did had a strong-looking pair of forearms; he was presently using them to hold up his shelter with relative ease. with one of his small hands. "I'm going to guess somewhere between 'can't contain himself' or 'can't help spilling his guts'."

"I have no idea what you guys just said, but I'm going with 'Omi butchered another phrase," Kimiko agreed from up high.

"Oh." Eduardo dropped down. Then he caught sight of Dojo Kanojo Cho and ran back up the tree. "COILING GECKO OF GUATAMALA!"

Dojo grimaced. "Hey, hey. I'm a dragon, not a gecko."

"Oh. DRAGON!"

"Relax, Ed," Clay said pacifyingly. "It's just Dojo."

Dojo crossed his arms, smiling broadly. "Right." Then his eyes twitched. "HEY!"

"Sorry," Eduardo said sheepishly. "Sometimes I forget these things." He suddenly whirled around, pointing a finger at Kimiko. "And, and if you get hurt," Eduardo yelled at Kimiko again, "the supervisor will get mad at me for not doing my job! And yell bad things at me! And he no give me my potatoes again!"

"You shouldn't have told him about your potatoe garden!" She yelled back.

"Please no yelling! Espically at his _siesta_ time!"

"He drank everything to drink and went to sleep at the begining of the shift," Clay pointed out.

"_Si, _that what he called his _siesta_ time."

They looked up, noticing that dispite the yelling, their supervisor was still asleep. He was a shiny metal robot a light grey color, with a body that looked a little like a can with a outward opening door on the front. Upwards towards his head his body narrowed, and his head was an oblong grey shape with an antennae at the top, a big visor currently covered with a reflective panel where the eyes should be, and an electronic mouth grill that looked a lot like a human set of teeth. His arms and legs were flexible lined tubes with simplistic fingers on a wedgelike wrist and circular pods for feet. At the moment he was tapping his feet on his lawn chair, asleep.

"Oh no," Raimundo said. "That's not a _siesta, mi amigo_. That's lazy. You want a _siesta,_ you come around and talk to me."

Kimiko rolled her eyes, as did Omi, Clay and Dojo. "And you know all about lazy," they muttered.

"At least I'm not a chicken!"

"I not a chicken!" Eduardo said in a offended tone. He held up a small card that held a picture of himself as a baseball player. Judging by his expression and posture, he clearly believed that the ball was about to split open and manifast tearing snapping fangs. "It say so right here."

Omi took the card and studied the back of it. "According to this very very very small graph, you are a big crazy idiot."

Eduardo crossed his arms and closed his eyes. "_Si!_ No, wait. I _es_ not a big crazy idiot! But, the point is I not a big crybaby."

A small plastic spider landed on his head, positioned directly between his two horns.

"Hey, Eduardo! There's a giant spider on your face!" Bender yelled, electing to have a little fun at the ogre's expense.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! THE SPIDERS ARE COMING! THEIR WEBS OF LIES WILL ENGULF US ALL! THE POISON OF THEIR EVIL WILL EAT US ALL!"

The obnoxious robot jumped off the chair, pointing and laughing as the freaked-out ogre ran around, yelling about the onslaught of the spiders and how they would consume all.

"HAHHHAAHHAHAH! Stupid make-up buddy."

"Imaginary friend," Omi corrected. Ordinarily, he would get into the precise nature of how many of the people on Eduardo's native world had possessed the ability to create living being out of thin air, termed imaginary friends for obvious reasons, except he wasn't in the mood and he didn't like Bender very much.

Bender rolled his eyes. "That too."

A random maniac ran through the construction site. "The candy wrapper of the universe is undoing itself! All existence will fall apart, like so many packing peanuts shaken by the god of Discord and General Disruptiveness! I like toast."

All of them watched him run out of the sight, still gibbering inchoherently. Except for Eduardo, who was still freaking out, with appropiately dramatic results for an imaginary friend strong enough to lift a bus with moderate effort.

Eduardo ran right through a shed, throughly smashing it apart. Undeterred, he continued rampaging in terror through the lot, his rapidly moving feet carving a trench in the ground.

"Shouldn't we, y' know, stop him?" Clay asked.

"Nah," Bender said, waving his hand. "He'll wear himself out in a few minutes."

_A few minutes later!_

"Aaany minute now," Bender said with the air of someone who was convinced that if he both thumbs in his ears and hummed loudly enough, the rampaging rhino would not trample him as long as he pretended it wasn't there.

"Are you kidding me?" Raimundo said, gesturing to the construction site with an arm. It had been almost totally demolished by Eduardo's running around, smashing everything that he wasn't quite aware of, which so far included three wheelbarrows, eighteen construction vehicles, and several dozen feet of square fencing with large cut-outs in that shape of Eduardo's body. "This construction sight is now a _de_-struction site!"

"Ohoho!" Omi cried, laughing excessively loudly. "Raimundo has made a theatre upon words and makes light of the way our worksite has been almost completely destroyed dispite the fact that it is designed for building!"

Everyone stared at him.

"...Dude, that's 'a play on words', and you really gotta stop doing that. It's annoying." Raimundo said finally.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte, having arrived during Eduardo's terrified rampage, were staring with wide eyes at the destruction wrought by the fear.

"Should we get involved?" Hobbes wondered, being the most altruistic one there.

"Hell no!" Morte snapped. "I ain't getting trampled by a...a...a whatever that is!"

"No way; I wanna see what happens." Calvin said.

Eduardo ran past the Xiaolin Dragons again, the nimble monks easily doding out of the large trench he was making in his panicked run. "Somebody's really oughta do somethin' about that runaway bull!" Clay shouted over the shaking.

"Allow me," Kimiko yelled. She jumped off the girder, gracefully leaping from beam to beam until she landed on Eduardo's head, plucked the plastic spider from inbetween his horns and backflipped onto a pole on the chain-link fence.

The obnoxious robot stared at that display of athletic prowess, before his ever cunning mind turned to thoughts of avarice. "Hehehe," Bender cackled to himself, rubbing his hands together. "Now I gotta find a way to make some money of that!"

Clay tapped him on the shoulder. Bender turned around, immediately cowed by the cowboy's glare. "Don't even think about it, 'partner'."

"Hee hee hee," Bender laughed nervously. "It was, you know, a joke! Like uh, a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar and uh," he trailed off, wilting under the monk's glare. "Damn, now I lost track!"

"Keep it that way," Clay advised not so subtlely.

Bender quickly backed off, knowing when to retreat.

Meanwhile, Eduardo had paused, wonderstruck that the _evil blood-sucking nail-breaking hair-splitting demon death SPIDER_ had disappeared.

He turned around and saw Kimiko incinerate the spider in a small fireball she had conjured out of nowhere.

The spider was gone.

_THE SPIDER WAS GONE!_

He rushed down to the surprised Dragon and pulled her into a huge bone-crushing hug, widely swinging his body around as he gushed praise. "Thank you thank you thank you! Oh, you're so good and nice and fast and strong!"

"Eeee-eee-eee-eee-eee!" Kimiko stammered, starting to experiance air-sickness.

Eduardo dropped her, his pale purple face filled with concern. And potatoe shavings. "You don't look so good."

"I'll feel better when the world stops spinning," she replied weakly, clutching her stomach.

Bender clapped his hands. "Well, 'bout time for me to get off work! As for you guys..." he paused, realizing something. "Hey, you guys don't actually work here!"

"...Yeah," Clay said after a moment. "Why are we here again?"

Omi considered it for a moment, thoughtfully tapping a finger on his chin. "I believe we were...what is the word? 'Spoken through it.'"

Eduardo stared at him. "What you say?"

Bender's optical receptor twitched. "_WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT!?"_ he screamed, a full day of listening to Omi's inability to correctly pronounce common slang terms completely shattering all reserve.

"That's 'talked into it', partner." Clay corrected.

"Hey, how'd you know that?" Bender said incredulously. "I've been listening to that crap all damn day and I still can't figure it out!"

"Hey, I never dirty down sling!" Omi protested

"That's 'mess up slang'." Kimiko corrected. "And trust us: after all the time we've spent with you, we've gotten pretty good at it."

"_Si, si." _Eduardo said sagely.

Omi dropped his pose for a moment, consternation crossing his face like a map of Colonial America's progress across the continent.

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

Bender maliciously slapped him on the back of his overlarge head. "Aw, figure it out, tiny!"

Omi angrily crossed his arms. "I am not short! I am merely compact for greater mobility!"

Bender laughed. "HAHHHAHAHHAH! Sure, kid. And I actually mean my promises."

Omi glared at him.

"Been there, done that," a new voice said airily.

Everyone turned around to see Calvin, Hobbes and Morte walk up, concluding it was safe to come up. Everyone except Eduardo regarded them with interest; Eduardo simply took one look at Morte and took off screaming about the rain of skulls that would consume all.

"And hey, take it from me, tinman: great things come from small packages." Calvin announced.

"Yeah, you'd know all about that," Hobbes said.

"Hey, who are you guys?" Dojo wondered, crawling off Clay's head and landing on the ground.

"Hm?" Hobbes said, entranced by the terrified way Eduardo was running around. "I'm Hobbes, the midget's Calvin-" Calvin crossed his arm and began steaming in his own wrath. "-and the skull with a political complex is Morte."

Clay scratched his head. "Political complex? What's that mean?"

"Oh, you know..." Hobbes grabbed Morte, wrenching his claws into him and working him like a puppet. "'I'm just full of hot air and I go on for hours! Blah blah blah blah blah!'" He tossed Morte away. "Like that."

Omi raised an eyebrow. "Must you be so cruel to your friend?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Eh, Morte's not a friend so much as an unexpected accroutment. And what do you want; I'm a cat. Besides, after a few hours in a spaceship, wandering aimlessly through depths of space with two idiots at the helm, cruelty starts being second-nature."

"Been there, done that," Bender muttered.

"Anyway, we're looking for someone," Morte said. "Mebbe you can help?"

"Who?" Kimiko said. "We get around a lot; maybe we know whoever it is."

"His name is Spike," Calvin said. "And that's pretty much all we know."

Clay tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Spike...Spike...rings a bell, don't it?"

The Xiaolin Dragons reflected on the matter. Dojo suddenly raised his hand. "Wait, I think I got it! Medium-sized guy, bleached hair, Billy Idol wannabe and poetry enthusiast?"

Tiger and child glanced at each other and shrugged. "Guess so. All we got is a name."

Raimundo nodded. "Trust me on this, _mi compadre_; in this town, all you need is a name to find someone. Not a whole lot of people here, ya know. Well, 'cept for the Cids..."

"Yeah, yeah." Calvin said. "Point is, you seen him or not."

Raimundo turned to Kimiko and stucked his thumb at Calvin. "I like this guy." Turning back to Calvin, he said, "Short answer is, no. Long answer is, I ain't in the mood to get into the specifics."

"We ain't seen Spike in a while," Clay said apologetically. "Don't really travel in the same circles, if y'all know what I mean."

"If I recall correctly, I believe he likes to garrote around the park. There is much shade there, and sunlight is...not healthy for him."

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte blanched. "Eh...'garrote'?" Morte said.

Raimundo glanced at the young Dragon of the Water. "I think he means 'hang'. Which is really creepy, if you think about it."

Bender shuddered. "I try not to."

Eduardo ran by them again, still screaming in terror. Hobbes grunted something and lunged at him, wrapping his arms around the ogre's formiddable midsection. Unsurprisingly, the ogre's immense strength wrenched Hobbes off the ground as he continued running.

"Give it up, dude!" Raimundo advised him as Eduardo ran around, the tiger's legs flailing in the wind as he attempted to dig his feet into the ground to slow him down. "No one can stop him once he's off his-"

Raimundo stopped as Hobbes wrenched his feet into the ground with all the strength he could muster, pulling Eduardo off the ground and into the air. "Rocker?" Raimundo finished as the tiger lifted Eduardo's considerable girth into the air.

Clay stared. He'd only rarely seen pulled up by someone like that; one of those times, it had been accomplished with the strength enhancing Mikado Arm Shen Gong Wu, and then with a considerable amount of effort.

But this guy was doing it without any sort of visible device, doing it purely on his own power. Not easily, he noted the stress marks on the tiger's face and gritted teeth, but he was still doing it.

Hobbes grunted, well aware he couldn't maintain this level of strength for long; he was only good for brief bursts of this, and weight-lifting figmentary companions didn't count. He shook Eduardo roughly, yelling, "The skull's completely harmless! CALM DOWN!"

With that, he dropped Eduardo back on the ground heavily, panting as discretely he could.

"Sorry," the ogre said sheepishly.

"Woah," pretty much everyone else except Calvin said, impressed by the display of raw physical strength. Calvin just rolled his eyes, bored with that.

"Hey, I could've done better than that."

"Then why didn't you?" Raimundo said snidely.

"Hmm, not too bad!" Bender pronounced as he walked around them, examining Hobbes closely.

The tiger eyed him warily. "What are you looking at?"

"Oh, nothin', nothin'," the robot said airly in a small New York accent that Hobbes found hard to place. "Say, know how much tiger fur goes on the black market?"

"_WHAT." _Calvin and Hobbes said as one, glaring at the robot with an intensity normally matched only by detonating devices.

Before horribly mind-boggling smash-crashy doom could fall upon Bender, a guy walked by the fence. He was a medium sized twenty-something year old with bright red hair done up in a permanent pompadour. He had an average sort of look, along with a mildly vapid smile, suggesting that he wasn't too bright. He wore a red jacket over a white shirt, had a pair of simple jeans on, and ordinary shoes on. His hands were jammed into his pockets, one remaining there as he waved at them. "Hey, Bender! There's a Futurama marathon on tonight! You wanna come?"

Bender rolled his eyes. "Fry, if I wanna remember those days, I'll just look up my memory records."

Fry looked at him blankly. "The Futurama show _is _our recorded memories."

Dojo looked at the barely congnisant human. "Hey, wait. The Futurama show is...are...was...GAH! This is a grammer nightmare!"

Bender rolled his eyes. "I was talking about the memories in _my _databank, stupid."

Fry scratched the back of his head. "Weird. Usually, when you insult me you call me a name."

"I _did _call you a name, moron!"

The light of realization brightened his face like a night-light under a rock in a cave. "_Ooh!"_ Fry looked a little embarrased as Bender angrily tapped the ground with his foot. "Well, sorry if I hurt your feelings."

"Bah! Robots don't have _feelings!" _Bender snapped, turning around and crossing his arms.

Everyone stared at him.

Then he turned around, grabbing Fry in a drunk-guy hug and sobbing. "Dammit Fry, how can you do this to me!? We're supposed to have our 'thing', and you're ruinin' it! You're supposed to work with me here, jerkwad!"

Fry awkwardly patted the robot's back. "Uh, sorry?"

The other five there stared at them.

"Oooh, that's not good for their re-putation," Eduardo commented.

"_Awkwaaard," _Kimiko said.

"And I thought that sand guy had emotional issues," Raimundo said.

"Sand guy?" Horrific repressed memories started rising up from the deepest part of Eduardo's subconscious, gave up and rolled back to their merciful hibernation.

"Friends! We have been led off search-" Omi began.

"The word you thinking of is track." Eduardo said. The Xiaolin Warriors looked at him. "...I just wanted to feel like part of the conversation," he admitted sheepishly.

"Don't we all? No one likes being a fifth wheel." Dojo bounced off Clay's hand and landed on Eduardo's, patting the imaginary friend's side sympathetically. "Or the other four, for that matter. And trust me when I say I speak from experiance."

Omi spoke up. "The point is, we were wondering why we were all here. Now, who do we know that would have tricked us into this predicament?"

They all considered this for a moment with a loud "Hmmm...". Then their heads snapped up with similar expressions of shock.

"_**BLOO!" **_Their cry echoed throughout the city, joined in by a dozen other such cries.

In the previously mentioned park, two humans were playing a game of chess.

One was quite young, about ten or so, with straight black hair extending to his chin, a large pair of glasses around his dark eyes, and a obliquely intelligent cast to his features. He wore a large green shirt with elbow-length sleeves and white rims around the collar and sleeves. He had a baggy pair of shorts with a belt with seven holes in them, presently empty. His big strap-on shoes, combined with his loose clothes, gave them impression that he was somewhat smaller than he actually was, though it was an impression that wasn't far off.

Floating around him, watching the game with interest, was a small light gray creature, roughly humanoid in design, except for his stubby arms and legs, not to mention the small round body he had was more cute than humanlike. His body was covered in interesting marks afew shades or so darker than his body color, covering most of his main body; they were primarily elaborate swirls and curlices, looking like the more artistic kind of tattoo. On the lower part of his stomach region was an odd mark resembling an upside down semicircle, bearing an odd resemblence to a close eye. Sprouting out of his back, above a small thin tail, were two thin golden wings with small hard feathers, long enough to wrap around his body completely.

Last of all was his head; it was round and cute, lacking ears or a nose; the only distinct features on that rounded face were the beautiful blue eyes and the perpetually smiling mouth. On the top of his head was a large gold-yellow thing that was either some kind of hat or a protrusion from his head; it resembled a smooth star with three triangular points, one pointing straight up, the other two angling away from his head. Poking out the ends of them were a long light blue paperlike thing, strange script written on them.

Near them, curled in repose, was a canid sort of creature curled on the ground that was pulling off the difficult pose of looking relaxed and being alert at the same time; what could be seen of it's skin was black as night, but the luxuriant fur on most of it's body except for the face and neck was milk white. It's face was rounded, with a a short snout, an exposed area of skin around the forehead, and out one side of the head was a back pointing curled black blade. Poking out of it's rear was a similar blade, resting along the ground stiffly; it was smaller than the other, and more straight, looking more like a cutlass than a scythe. It's legs, propped against the ground to raise it up a little, were thick and powerful, the claws protruding from it's toes yet another weapon in it's arsenal. It rested against the ground, slightly closing it's heavy-lidded red eyes calmly, seeing no threat against it's charges.

The other human was about thirteen, with features that seemed honed by years of equanimity, wearing his black hair done up in an topknot. He was wearing a large off-white zipped-up jacket with a large wraparound collar with an opening in a V-shape in front of his neck, seams running around the shoulder borders, and ending just above his waist, over a fishnet shirt. On both elbow-length sleeves there was a dark blue circle with a vertical line running through it. He had tied a headband around his right arm; it had a metal plate on it with a spiral with an arrow attached to the lower left corner of it, resembling a leaf; the plate was tied in a double-knot on both sides of it, securing it to the sleeve. His bright blue shoes, looking like sandals with built-up soles and high cuffs, tapped agianst the floor as Shikamaru Nara watched his oppenent dully, propping his head up with a fist on his cheek.

"Anytime you're ready," Max said, tired of waiting for Shikamaru to make a move.

Shikamaru yawned noisily, looking at Max through one half-closed eye. "You're way too impatient."

The kid shrugged. "Eh, if you say so. You ask me, you should learn to get out and _move!_"

The ninja's expression didn't change, even in the face of this horrific slur. "I didn't ask you."

Max shrugged amiably, not wanting to rile up the guardian resting up behind him. "Good point."

His companion, on the other hand, wasn't so obliging. Or far-sighted. "You're mean, Shikamaru," the odd creature complained in a resonating telepathic voice.

"Don't be rude, Jirachi," Max advised him, gesturing his head slightly at the canid behind them.

As if on cue or sensing Jirachi's annoyance, the creature lifted his head. "Don't be overly forward," he said, though to anyone else but Max, Jirachi or anyone else who understood his language, it came out as a series of _Absol_.

"Awwww, but I _like _being forward," Jirachi whined. "Wait, what's 'forward' mean?" Absol only sighed in resignation.

"Your move." the ninja in front of them said suddenly.

Upon casual inspection, Shikamaru wasn't what you'd call a terribly interesting person. He had an extremely casual approach to life, prefering to drift along with whatever came his way and prone to complaining in his unique manner when things grew too troublesome. Not exactly what one expected from a ninja.

But, as Max and his friends had found out, that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the _chuunin_ was a strategic genius of a calibur unknown and unseen by any from their native world.

Feeling bored, with nothing interesting going on, he'd decided to ask the slacker shadow manipulator to a game of chess, seeing him alone at the park. He'd heard that Shikamaru would play chess with virtually anyone, and true to form had immediately accepted, and at first seemed to be little better than Max had originally believed. He pulled a few simple tricks, and Max believed that this would be simple.

Periodically, Shikamaru would bend his head over and close his eyes as if he were considering the dharmic singularity of dirt and make a sqaure shape with his hands. He would maintain the pose for a few moments, as still as if his soul had fled for Realms unknown, leaving his body as vacant space for bored and/or desperate spirits when he abruptly rose out of it, resuming play.

Then the _chuunin_ would then proceed with a series of insanely brilliant strategems.

The kid had then realized that Shikamaru had simply been investigating his playing style, observing how he reacted to the basic strategies that everyone knew. He'd been subtlely feeling out Max's game, and now he was slowly and casually flattening him, as the way the way he did _everything._

Shikamaru slowly knocked over Max's king with a knight, replacing the vacant spot with the winning piece. "Checkmate."

Max did some quick mental calculations. "So, that makes about...fifteen wins for you versus two wins for me."

Shikamaru shrugged half-heartedly, leaning against the chair, bored by the recitation of the record. Personally speaking, he just didn't care about that sort of thing. The end result rarely mattered; what was important was just solving the puzzle. And what was a strategy game but a puzzle of a higher kind? "If you say so." He looked up at the sky, watching the clouds go by. Watching clouds always made him feel...not peaceful, _per se, _but calm. Happier. Watching the acculmated water particles drift gently cross the sky, wandering lazily wherever the wind took them gave him a fuzzy feeling inside, a subtle awareness of what it would be like to be truly equanimous. Of what it would be like to be untroubled.

Shikamaru looked back down from his musings, noticing that Max was looking at the holographic readout on a electronic book the size of a large paperback book; it looked scratched up and slightly dented, but artistically so, as if the makers of it had intended to. It was a dull red color, reminding him of a toolbox or a Swiss Army knife.. It was tilted so that he could not see exactly what Max was looking at, but the technologist had opened it so that he could see the title on it, rendering in big friendly letters: _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy._ Below that, _Traverse Town Edition _was etched so that the first letters matched up. Right below that was a single phrase: _Don't Panic._

After a moment, Max looked up at him. "They got you pegged wrong." He put on the table in front of him as Jirachi started flying around and echoing Max's words in a cheerful song; the holograph was showing a scale model of him in full garb, dipicting him wearing a green flak jacket. There was a brief readout of his various statistics: age, height, weight, intelligence, shinobi status and so on. What was more interesting was the colorful description of him.

Shikamaru listened to it for a few minutes then pushed it away dismissively. "I don't hear anything offensive."

"They called you a lazy lameass." Max said pointedly.

"Like I said. And I was the one who wrote that entry in the first place." Shikamaru said blandly, Absol nodding in assent.

As Max shook his head at the teenager's complete lack of anything approaching pride and began setting up another game, several beings were playing a game a few yards away from them; the biggest one was a monstrous being that was roughly the size of a man; a very, very large man. It's feral muscled body was covered in shaggy light orange fur with the dimmings of faint black line-stripes, topped with a number of quill-like protrusions on it's back. It's forelimbs were longer in porportion than it's thinner hindlegs, causing it to slump over in a permenant bestial pose. Both sets of legs had only four digits each, tipped with sharp claws, the 'fingers' of the forelimbs longer and possessed of an additional joint; while not long enough to be considered proper fingers, they were certainly capable of gripping objects well enough. It's head was slightly remnisciant of a Xenomorph's, looking a bit like a short cucumber in shape, lacking any kind of eyes whatsoever. It's ears were a set of gill-like slits along it's neck, doubling as a type of radar system along wit the four slitted nostrils. It's mouth was wide, extremely sharp and large inward curving fangs set into it's powerful jaws. On it's shoulder was a black-white piece of shoulder armor; on it was a round disc of sorts. In it was a peculiar shape; it looked like two wide triangles set at the sides of it outlined in black and colored gray, the rest of it white.

Not so big, but still weird looking was a teenager about thirteen years old with a blue headband with a protecter plate on it with the same shape of Shikamaru's holding up his shaggy brown hair. The color of his eyes were imperceptible, what with them being black slits He had a broad and generally good-nature face with red marks on his cheeks in the shape of fangs and a seemingly permanent half-smile. Over his rangy body he wore a pale gray shirt under a loose-fitting jacket similar to a raincoat with fur on the collar and inside it; for some reason, the fur had an odd resemblance to a darker and thicker version of his own hair. The jacket itself was tied togther not with a series of buttons, but with a zipper and secured with several straps connecting to buckles. His pants were dark brown with two belts wrapped around the upper thigh for some reason. His tan shoes were similar in basic look to high-top sneakers, except for the simple design, exposed toes, and the fact that they just zipped up and were locked in place by straps at the top.

He certainly looked nothing like the picture people generated in their minds when the word _ninja _was brought into mind, even though that was what he was. What was weird about him was the way he was squatting on all fours comfortably like a dog. Perhaps it was his slightly elongated arms that allowed it. Completing the canid imagry was his pronounced fangs, pointed claw-nails, and the way he was sitting. If his Four Legs Jutsu had given him a tail as well as his current canine traits, he would have been wagging it.

Squatting next to him, in precisely the same pose, was a white-tan dog slightly larger than a Great Dane. His muzzle was somewhat vulpine, but broader. His body was stocky and compact, and his floppy ears had a large light brown spot running down each ear. His eyes looked tightly shut, but if he was blind, squinty or just lazy, his pinkish nose more than likely made up for it.

Both Kiba Inuzuka and Akamaru yelled at a nearby human to hurry up; one was in English and the other was in Informal Dog, but they were the same phrase; inciting him to hurry up already and _throw the damn Frisbee! _Wildmutt roared, indicating much the same thing.

The one who they were directing their various friendly yells at was a somewhat rounded twelve year old, holding a small red Frisbee. His hair was similar to Raimundo's except for a lighter shade of brown and a permanent state of hat hair, though it was hard to tell under the rounded aviator helmet he wore on his head. His blue eyes were hidden in a similar manner under his round goggles, rendered various shades of pale yellow by them. He wore a light blue shirt with elbow-length sleeves over a white undershirt and a large brown vest over both; the vest had several pockets running down its front, holding a variety of tools, and went down to his wide belt. He had slightly baggy brown pants, touching the tips of his strap-on brown boots. He wore thick ribbed pilot gloves over his hands, lending him a strong pilot look, which seemed to be a persona he tried hard to project.

He waved the flying disc in his hand, dancing away a little as the doglike people in front of him watched it with unhealthy anticipation. Technically, the ninja and the ninja hound watched it, while the Vulpimancer listened to the arm moving against the clothes and felt for the air displacement caused by it moving around..

"Alright, guys," he yelled, winding his arm back. "_FETCH!"_

He threw the little red Frisbee.

"FRISBEE!" Kiba yelled, bounding off after it in a distinctive feral run, propelling himself with his forearms, catching the ground with his back-legs and moving as such. Akamaru followed him, yapping loudly as they chased after t_he Frisbee_; Wildmutt, who was further away, jumped into the air several feet above Kiba's full height were he upright. He spun through the air, flinging himself right past the Frisbee and towards a tree. One of his powerful hands snagged a tree branch, momentum propelling him around it in a circle; taking advangage of his spin, he released as he was about the reach his third twirl, launching himself at the flying disc just as Kiba was about to pounce on it, snagging it in his black-lined mouth.

Wildmutt hit the ground with both hands, rolling into a ball and uncurling into a position facing Kiba. He snorted, shaking _the Frisbee_ furiously.

Kiba and Akamaru glanced at each other from the corner of their respective eyes; a chapter's worth of information passed between in them in their glance at they plotted to get _THE FRISBEE._

Akamaru and Kiba ran at the alien beast, yelling loudly; Wildmutt tensed himself, getting ready to throw the Frisbee, distract them, jump on and off their heads, retrieving the Frisbee.

Unexpectedly, the dog suddenly ducked under Kiba's legs, jumping behind Wildmutt and pouncing on his lower back, biting firmly on the Vulpimancer's fur and letting his legs go loose, allowing his weight to do the rest of the work. Wildmutt stood up on his hindlegs as best he could, trying to swat away the irritating weight when his hindleg scratching couldn't do a thing.

And that was when Kiba jumped up, grabbed _THE FRISBEE_, and used the alien's head as a springboard when he jumped off, neatly landing a few meters away, Frisbee in mouth.

Akamaru let go, bounding back to his partner and squatting next to him.

Wildmutt roared as the kid slumped over and groaned. "Aw, no, not again!"

Kiba spat out the Frisbee, grinning wickedly. "Hah! I can't believe you guys! Hoagie, you couldn't throw a Frisbee and hit the broad side of a dead Wailord! And Tennyson, you couldn't catch a _blimp_ if was air-mailed to you!"

Both of those who were hearing this bristled; in Wildmutt's case, that was quite literal, his quills standing up as if about to spring out. "Hey, strong words, mutt boy. Sure you can back them up?" Hoagie Gilligan Jr. challenged, raising a clenched fist as Wildmutt snarled in agreement, spraying saliva everywhere.

"Ruff ruff!" the dog barked.

Wildmutt growled, suddenly backflipping behind the surprised pilot; the alien beast flashed forward, knocking the human onto his back; Hoagie frantically grabbed some neckfur, securing himself onto the creature's upper back, just on the base of the neck.

He nervously looked at the foreign animal. "Ah...what do you think you're doing?"

Wildmutt roared in reply. Hoagie's face fell. "I was afraid of that." He suddenly grinned wildly. "Well, long as I'm here...HEAR ME, DOG BOYS? IT'S _GO TIME_!"

Kiba grinned. Akamaru jumped on his back, bristling and growling. They both cried(in different langauges)_"Man Beast Clone!";_ they both began emiting a blue ghostly energy that looked and moved like energized air flowing away from their bodies and bathing them at the same time. There was a sudden burst of smoke, and as it faded away, it revealed that Akamaru had morphed into an identical clone to Kiba, completely impossible to tell apart from his human partner; the morphed dog nimbly backflipped off onto a tree, clinging onto the branch.

Hoagie grinned. "Heh. You call that a jutsu? I've seen better transformations from this guy." He patted Wildmutt's back.

Wildmutt growled angrily. "Ah," Hoagie said hastily. "I mean that literally. I mean, who could top you?" The alien dog snorted affirmatively, then bent low to the ground, pawing at the ground.

"You better not be thinking of what I think you're thinking of!" Hoagie cried.

Absol looked up from where he was lying, snorting derisively. "He should learn to control his temper," He commented.

"Yeah!" Jirachi added. "That's stupid!"

"Why do I hang out with so many hotheads?" Max wondered aloud.

Shikamaru propped his face up on his fist, placing an elbow on the table. "Man, you're even lamer than I am,"

"Oh no," Hoagie yelled as Wildmutt suddenly jumped into an amazingly fast lope that would easily equal the speed of a small car.

Normally, it would have led to a really cool scene with a lot of jumping through trees and running through the forest, matching the Leaf ninja's teamwork with Wildmutt's bestial agility and astonishing athletism, added with the possibility that Hoagie's considerable intelligence result in some fancy strategic manuvers.

Instead, as they ran at the canid duo, the strange device on Wildmutt's shoulder started beeping, flashing red with each beep.

"Oh no," Hoagie said matter of factly, realizing the implications of the beeping and the high speed they were going.

There was a loud red flash; the two of them lost balance for a rather significant reason, slamming directly into the tree as Kiba and Akamaru moved out of the way as fast as humanly possible.

After a moment, a boy stood up where Wildmutt should have been, spitting out a quantity of leaves. He was about thirteen, with messy brown hair, eyes a strange green color, a round slightly tanned face, and a thin body frame. He was wearing a jacket-shirt combo; the jacket was black and mostly plain, except for a dramatic looking logo on the left chest of it; a B followed by a ten, the little zero shaped like the device that had transformed him. It's collar was a thick stiff affair, lined with a green that went all around the lines of the jacket. The sleeves of both shirt and jacket were about the same length, and when combined with the reletive simplicity of both, could be mistaken for the same article of clothing. His shirt was simply white and just as plain as his jacket, with no collar and a simple hole. His pants were olive-green khakis that were baggy at the knees, covering the sock part of his white zip-up-strap sneakers.

On his right wrist, there was an unusual device. It looked a bit like a watch, having a similar construction to how it was on his wrist. It's 'ring' was black and grew, with several cables like protrusions which seemed to extend and merge with the guy's flesh, giving it a decidedly organic appearance. The upraised face of it had the same icon Wildmutt's shoulder thing had had, except the gray part was now bright red. There were several currently red buttons on it; on the sides of the face, there were four small buttons in an directional style, and on the sides of the part on the circular portion of the watch, there were two opposite-facing large red buttons.

Ben Tennison grimaced. "Stupid watch," he muttered mutinously, glaring at the alien device of uncertain origin.

He stood up, dusting himself off. He glared at Kiba and Akamaru, who were pointing and laughing at him and Hoagie.

Ben glared at them too. "Just you wait until this stupid thing recharges," he threatened, gesticulating at them with the Omnitrix. He was about to say more, then paused. "Hey, where'd Hoagie go?"

Kiba struggled to stop laughing, failed miserably, and settled for pointing up above Ben. Akamaru, seeing no reason to maintain it, dispelled the jutsu, reverting to a dog in a puff of smoke. Ben looked up and smiled nervously; Hoagie was wedged in the tree, the lower half of his body protruding from the other side of it. One of his arms was propping up his sulking head, the other hand tapping a finger against the tree bark.

Ben placed his hands on his hips. "Looks like we'll have to get him out, guys." Kiba and Akamaru didn't say anything. He took his attention away from the tree and looked around. "Guys?" Kiba and Akamaru had disappeared.

Ben slumped. "Figures," he muttered.

"Look at the bright side," Hoagie yelled as the world's mightiest twelve-year-old started climbing up the tree. "Maybe it knocked some sense into you!"

"Shut up," Beny said grumpily.

The familar trio wandered by, staring at the sight.

After a moment, Hobbes said, "Why do I get the feeling we missed something?"

"I don't believe it!" Calvin yelled, gesturing at the rest of the world or at least that part of it that happened to be the District they'd wandered into. "First we crash and total our only vehicle, then we get sidetracked pointlessly, and _then_ we got even injured when that blue...blob..._thing_ made that sign fall down with us on it!"

"It did fall right into that place we were heading," Hobbes said demurely.

"And _that! _First that bald rip-off artist tried to steal all our money, then that idiot in the green coat tried to eat it. _Eat it!_ What kind of an idiot would try to eat a Gummi Ship?"

Hobbes wisely decided to say nothing, though he did scrape a bit of supsicious yellow flakes off his teeth when Calvin wasn't looking.

"And those places we went got us nowhere, too!"

"Look on the bright side," Morte said carefully. "'least we got our health."

"Sure," Calvin said sourly. "That means a lot, coming from a talking _skull!"_

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Oh, stop complaining."

Calvin threw his arms up angrily. "Sure, why not?! I don't got anything to complain about! We're totally lost, our ship's trashed, we have next to nothing to go on, and the only real clue we got is a name that doesn't make any sense! Yeah, I got nothing to complain about! Oh, wait. YES, I DO!"

"You forgot the key thing," Hobbes said helpfully.

"Thanks for reminding me." Calvin said.

Hobbes froze, abruptly looking upwards.

"What is it?" Morte asked.

"...Nothing," Hobbes said truthfully. He could have sworn that he'd heard the tell-tale brush of clothing against flesh, fabric going against building material. But aside from what might have been a swoosh, he percieved naught. "Thought I heard something."

"You should calm down," Calvin cautioned, his friend's distress distracting him from his anger for the moment. "Next you'll think there's vampires around."

Morte laughed. "Hah, now that's funny."

Calvin gave him a Look. You know the one.

"Hey, look!" Hobbes pointed up at the night sky; one of the bright lights in the dark tapestry was glowing much brighter than the others, though this brightness filled all of them with a kind of dread. This might have had something to do with the way it was blinking on and off, like it was an old light bulb and not the light of a world or world system. "A star's going out!"

And as if Hobbes' words were a command, the light disappeared, leaving a blankness where it was, as if it had never been.

Calvin scowled. "We better pick up the pace and find that key or whatever."

"And Spike." Morte added.

"Shaddup."

Not that far from where Calvin, Hobbes and Morte had gone, past a small walkway overlooking the street a few feet below, a dog walked.

The dog was Odie, and had snuck into the Gummi Ship and had somehow hitched a ride and gotten out with no one noticing. He'd completely missed the whole scene with the ship retreival, having simply skipped out and obeyed his bestest best friend's instructions in his own way.

Which, in Odie's case, involved investigating any scent that seemed interesting. Considering his abysmal and possibly negative I.Q., that meant he'd literally walked in circles in this single square for the entire time the other three were looking around town.

Then someone that wasn't there before was suddenly there.

Odie yipped in surprise. There was no bursts of light, no sounds of air displacement. It simply appeared there, scattering a few trash cans around it's point of arrival.

Whimpering in confusion, the dog walked up to the thing.

It was an alien, though it wasn't apparent to the less-then-intelligent canine. His red eyes were currently closed tightly in the universal gesture that seemed to suggest that becoming prone and totally helpless was going to reduce imminent pain; he was curled against the wall, almost as still as the wall itself. He was grasping a robot of sorts to his chest like it was a life presevior, or maybe it was the other way around. The robot itself looked like a floating purple toy moose with big eyes, small nubs for feet, and a pair of cute rounded antlers.

The robot, looked around the unfamiliar place and squeaked uncertainly. Zim's left eye opened a fraction of an inch.

Taking that for an invitation to play, Odie jumped onto the Irken, throwing all his non-inconsiderable body weight directly onto the unprepared former Invader's stomach; Zim shot right up, frightening the dim-witted dog as he fell backwards, standing up on his hind legs without the slightest trouble.

Zim shook his head rapidly, taking the sights in around him. Weathered bricks on the building making up one side of the alley he was in, more clean steel on another building ahead of him, wooden planks covering up holes on the side of the alley next to him, a higher part on that side, and a big friendly dog with a slobbering tongue the size of a salami big enough to slap someone around with.

A big friendly dog with a slobbering tongue the size of a salami big enough to slap someone around with?

Odie jumped onto him again, slurping his face in the universal gesture of friendliness of dogs everywhere; Zim moved too late, getting a faceful of slobber dispite his yells to stop. "Okay okay OKAY!" he yelled until the dog suddenly stopped and stepped back, still panting with an all-too familiar expression of total idiocy mixed with a perfect and eternal love of the universe and all that lay within it, more or less conversely to the universe's general attitude.

"Ugh." Zim wiped the slobber off on a slightly tattered sleeve, not espically put off by the dog's overly friendly attitude since it kind of reminded him of Gir, albeit Gir wasn't generally so touchy-feely so much. And he was eighty percent crazier.

Carefully, Zim stepped out of the alley as Minimoose followed him, sqeaking to himself about matters only Minimoose knew.

Zim looked around the unfamiliar town, absently petted the beagle and reflected on how his last waking memories where of seeing his adopted world tearing itself apart at the seams.

"And to think you desired more excitement," he said sarcastically to himself.

Memories of what had happened rushed through and he quickly blocked them off. _No. Don't think about Gir and Gaz disappearing in a rush of wind. Put it aside for now and think ra-tion-ally; get a grip on the situation and work on it from there. Get a grip so good, you run risk of an assault lawsuit from the situation!_

Pleased at his decisive plan, Zim stretched his arms out. "Our course is clear! Minimoose, come; we must investigate this place and establish ourselves! And you, dog! Are you..."

The dog had disappeared.

"Coming? Why is everything around me disappearing like Dib's male paternal figure at a parental function?!" Zim sighed angrily. "Whatever. Let us go!"

He turned out of the alley, taking stock of his general area.

It was a small town square, though it might've been more accurate to say it was a kind of cul-de'-sac with a few other entrances. It was clearly residential, with a few live-in shops here and there; a two story one right behind him, a general store(he assumed)to his right, and a fountain in front of him. It seemed like a nice enough place, not unlike Nicktown had been.

_'Had' being the operative word,_ Zim thought off-handedly. Tact had never been one of his strong suits.

He walked up to the fountain, admiring the artwork; unlike so many other things in the area, it didn't appear to be snatched from some random place and slapped together with everything else. This looked like an original piece, so to say.

The fountain was about six feet tall, enough for anyone to see without getting splash or anything. Water streamed out of the top of a large tower of sorts, built of four rods; a wooden rod, a plastic staff, a metal shaft, and, for some reason, a banana. The four things were lashed together by small rings, but still somewhat loose looking. They were further maintained by five odd beings propping them up with their backs; their faces were constructed so that water dripped out of minsucle holes in their faces, giving the impression that they were sweating. Dispite the obvious struggle and clear discomfort, the myriad beings had a triumpht look on their faces, suggesting that they were pleased with the way they were holding up the tower on their own, dispite the sheer stress of it. The water pooled around their feet, falling into a grate around the tower and into the fountain's water recycling system.

Looking away from the fountain, he summoned the Keyblade in a flash of light, strapping it to his Pak as the device reformed to form a holding clasp for it; he wanted it at the ready in case any danger came and because he felt like it. He started walking, intent on finding a human less stupid-looking than most in hopes of finding directions...

And then tripped right over something in his path.

Dust rising of him in ceremonial puffs as he stood up lividly, he started yelling agitatedly, looking for whatever had been so stupid as to trip _HIM,_ when he looked down and realized that it was none other than Danny Fenton.

The human, brushing his swept-forward hair out of his face as he stood up from his prone position on the floor, stared blerily at him.

"...Huh?" the half-human said slowly. "That you, Zim?"

The Irken snorted, the trauma of having _another _world he thought as home being destroyed entirely not seeming to effect him much at the moment. "No, it's a Gray with a severe case of nausua. Of course it's me!"

Danny stared at him for a few moments before grimacing. "Sounds right. What happened? I feel like I got sucked into an alternate dimension populated by highly hostile monsters and freaks. Again."

Zim shrugged. "I dunno. What's the last thing you remember?"

Danny massaged his forehead, rubbing the little part of his brow directly between his eyebrows. "Last thing _I_ remember was fighting off monsters with Aang, Jimmy and looking for my friends when..." he paused.

"When _what?"_ Zim pressured, his perpetual inability to be tactful at all reasserting itself with gusto.

"I don't know," Danny said carefully. "It was like everything was hit by a tidal wave and everything went dark, and I was here."

Zim considered Danny's reply, and remembered seeing everything _rip_ itself apart. It was likely that he had because he had been closer to the source of destruction than the ghost-boy had been.

He thought that the world had unraveled in the most literal sense, far too quickly for the survivors to even comprehend.

_What is going on here?_

Then his thoughts were drawn to how he had shot a giant fireball. Frankly, he didn't want to repeat the precise scenario, but he _had shot a giant fireball._

Zim's inner smeet squealed with pure unadulterated glee at the prospect of repeating that feat, albiet on a smaller scale.

Naturally, he started wondering how it had happened. No doubt it had to do with his new weapon.

As if he were reading his mind, Danny pointed down at the Keyblade. "Uh, what is that?"

Zim looked down and tapped it on the ground thoughtfully, producing a loud _klonk_ing noise. "The Keyblade!" he said in what for Zim passed as cheerfully. "I have no idea where it came from, but on the additional side, it seems to be dangerous to the shadow creatures."

Danny blinked, his mind focusing on Zim's grammatical _faux pas_. "I think you mean 'on the plus side'."

"I say what I mean!"

"Whatever. Look, we're in the middle of another place completely, and we're totally lost. I say we split up and find some help."

Zim rolled his eyes. Considering their appearance, it didn't actually show, but the thought counted. "Yes, I'm sure dividing ourselves and becoming perfectly prone for the enemy is a brilliant strategem to _you_, but I for one see no reason why we should."

"Hello? What part of 'we're in another place completely' didn't you get?"

"...Look, I found a map!" Zim waved the map in question around.

Danny's eyes bulged. "You just got that out of a trash can!"

Zim shrugged. "Eh, you bet what you're rolled."

Danny started beating his forehead in fustration. _Of all the irritating, senseless and insane people to get stuck with!_ "That makes no sense at all! And what are we standing around for?!"

Zim grinned frighteningly. "Finally, he sees sense! I say, we go this way!"

"WHAT?! Why should you decide where we go!?"

"Because Zim has the map!"

"And Danny doesn't want to follow a rancid piece of scrap paper that was probably months out of date when it was printed!"

"You have a better idea?"

Danny glared at him, silently fuming. "Fine. You lead." His eyes narrowed. "For now."

"Relax, spectral simian," Zim said, turning around theatrically. "for my sense of direction and spacial comprehension is virtually flawless! With me guiding the way, we will never get lost!"

"We're totally lost!" Danny yelled about forty-five minutes later.

"Don't be so pessimistic!" Zim snapped.

"_Pessimistic!? _I'm not being pessimistic! If I said we were doomed to run around in this maze of a city for all eternity because _you_ were dumb enough to follow a map that you randomly grabbed out of a garbage can, then I'd be pessimistic! But I didn't."

Zim stared at him as if he had just said that the Earth was primarily composed of delicious gelatin, and it would be in everyone's best interests if they all pitched in and ate a rock. "...You just did."

Danny clapped his hands sarcastically. "You're a genius."

Zim beamed. "I know!"

Danny slapped his forehead, mind reeling to comprehend the brain-rending degree of the alien's blend of utter cluelessness.

"I still say we split up."

"And I still say that's stupid! And who of us has been trained in military tactics by the top academy in the universe? Let me think-oh right, it is ZIM! Not you, me, because you are not _ZIM!_"

Danny rolled his gray eyes. "Whatever. Besides, your only argument for us staying together is the potential danger, and I haven't seen a single thing in this town that might cause us harm."

Zim narrowed his eyes. "Just because you do not perceive a thing does not meant it is not there, _ghost boy._"

"Dib's really been rubbing off on you. Besides, you just said it: I'm half-ghost, so I'm practically immune to danger."

Zim grumbled, reluctantly seeing the sense in Danny's words. "Fine, fine. Even if we are just a little off-track-"

Danny made advantage of his superior height to grab the map. "According to this, we're in the middle of a coffee stain and _not_ a random alley and-" he gaped at the map, face settling into it's customary frown. "And I cannot believe this."

Zim wrenched the map back, furiously scanning it for the important and apparently freakishly annoying thing the part-time superhero had noticed. "What? What? WHAT IS IT!?"

"Don't tell me you don't even know!"

_"WHAT!?"_

_"YOU'VE BEEN READING THAT UPSIDE-DOWN THIS ENTIRE TIME!"_

"Erh..." Zim's eyes darted from side to side, map covering up his lower face. The offending topographical paper suddenly burst into flames; Zim dropped it in sheer surprise, where it remained, feeding the flames until it was naught but ashes, where upon the flames simply sputtered out.

Danny looked up from the pile of ashes and at Zim with a mixture of stupified incredulity and shock at the alien's attitude.

Zim waved a hand airily, closing his eyes as he spoke loudly and falsely. "Oh look! The map is gone, I guess we can't get lost again, oh well!"

Danny kept staring at Zim, or more specifically, at the hand.

Zim opened an eye to look at him. "What?"

Danny's expressions disappeared. He pointed a finger as he spoke. "Uh, your hand's on fire."

"Eh?" Zim held up the hand in question, and realized that the palm was indeed crawling with flames a more intensely vibrant color of red with yellow lesser tones then he had ever seen, as if their fuel was something...unearthly. Strangely, it didn't burn his hand at all.

That, of course, didn't stop Zim from completely freaking out and running all over the place, waving his hand wildly enough to power a small house but not enough to dampen the harmless fire. He started running around the alley, bouncing off the trash cans, falling into an open one, rolling around on the alley floor while his screaming was amplified by the can's acoustics, finally tripping out and literally bouncing off the walls in a pointless attempt to put his hand out through the power of movement.

Danny watched the alien's antics, apparently amused from the looks on his face. "I should be taping this. This is entertaining." Then Zim's shirt caught fire too from him trying to smother it.

Zim started beating himself against the wall in a desperate attempt to put the fire out, giving him a severe pain in addition to the harmless but appearently frightening sight of seeing his hand on fire.

It was the sight of seeing Zim rolling on the ground, shrieking in pain as the fire spread all over him that Danny took pity on the poor Irken. It was pathetic really.

He assumed a pose; slightly crouching, arms held rigidly, and a serious look on his face. A supernatural white light appeared at his midsection, spreading up and down his body, sending out an invisible pulse away from him in a small circle, flattening the ground around him and scattering loose dust, debris, and other such things.

Where the light touched, he was changed; his clothes turned into a black jumpsuit with a big white D on the chest, three lines coming from the back of the letter, the middle one a little smaller. He had also attained white gloves, boots and a collar like ring encircling his next and a portion of his shoulders. His normally ebony-black hair became bone-white, but he didn't appear to change much visibly.

Visibly was the key word here. He stood up completely straight, opening his eyes; they had become green and were glowing slightly, giving him an eerie aspect. He clenched his hands, feeling the power that had been there ever since the accident in the portal chamber those years ago had caused spectral DNA had become fused with his own permanently, making him something other than simply human. The accident that had given him the continually evolving powers of all of ghost- kind.

He pointed his right hand at the oblivious and freaking out Irken, his eyes glowing a frost-blue and a plume of cold air escaping from the corner of his mouth. The air around his hand started rapidly condensing as his hand exuded a wispy yet thick sheath of blue energy.

Mentally, Danny Phantom figured that a full blast would be overkill, possibly literally. He wasn't very good at controlling this particular power, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to put out a little fire.

From Danny's palm a crystilline whitish-blue stream shot out, lightly showering the Irken and completely dousing the fire that was perplexing him so. Unfortunately, it also happened to spread off Zim's body and cover several other objects in the alley, not the least a mostly empty fire extinguisher.

Danny's now green eyes widened in shock as a coat of frost spread up the canister's surface, rapidly causing the contents to pressurize and expand as available space in the fire exstinguiser became a very rare commodity. "Oh, no-"

It exploded, creating a sizable fireball that caught the both of them; they were so distracted by this that both of them were understandably surprised whenthe fire suddenly disappeared, leaving only their clothes damaged. Which wasn't saying much, as they were completely torched and blackened; with Danny's 'costume', it was hard to tell, but Zim looked down in disgust as his clothes, annoyed with what remained of them. Now they were almost completely inflexible, highly uncomfortable, and probably prone to fall apart at the worst possible moment.

"Ugh," Zim groaned, "This day goes from horrible to terrible!"

Danny rolled his eyes. "At least you're alive. And what happened just now?"

"I just saved you," said a voice from behind them.

Both Danny and Zim turned around to see two girls standing not too far behind them, both of which looked familiar for some reason dispite the fact that he was certain he'd never seen them before. They looked about the same age, more or less; one of them was a twelve-year-old girl, a little tall for her age; her red hair was curled in a clip above her left temple, and she wore tan shorts, a dark blue shirt with light blue sides and strap-up shoes. On her right arm, the shoulder of her shirt was strapped to a long flexible metal bracer running down to her wrist. On the wrap-around arm armor there were five metal discs, strange geometric designs etched into them.

The other was a dark-skinned girl around her age. She wore a large red broad cap over her head, the brim framing her brown eyes and lending them a slightly aloof quality. The back of her black hair was wound into a braided ponytail strung back to her waist. She wore a blue shirt with seams around the white sides and short sleeves, a plain hole collar and a big white zero followed by a five on the front. She also had dark blue pants that had accentuated knees and strap-on shoes, like the other girl's, but looked more like sneakers. Both of them looked amused, if not on the border of rolling on the floor and laughing their styled heads off at the idiocy of the two in front of them.

Or at least the redhead one did. For her part, Abigail Lincoln was considerably more reserved than her friend, who was every bit the hothead her legacy as a Tennyson implied. She simply cocked her head to one side, taking in the odd tableu before her. She and Gwendolyn had been watching them ever since the two girls had wandered past the alley and heard their argument and watched them; partly out of curiousity, partly out of a desire to see if they were _new guys,_ and not least of all a wish to see something funny and/or new.

They weren't disappointed. The two were clearly newly made refugees, judging by the fact that they were totally lost and a centimetre from snapping and attacking everything in sight until they exhausted themselves. And they were a little surprised when the alien accidentally burned up the map and completely panicked, and they were completely flabbergasted when the taller guy had turned into...well, they weren't sure.

And there was the backlashed cyrokinetic thing. It was only Gwen's quick thinking and use of the fire charm on her arm that kept the two of them from getting broiled.

All in all, from what she saw on a daily basis these days, while funny, the incident only ranked a 4.1 on her personal Weird O'Meter. The only surprising thing was the teenager's transformation, and that was more dramatic than weird. Oh, and there was the potentially psychotic green alien, but that was nothing.

"So," she said slowly. "Abigail's thinkin', what the heck just happened here?"

Zim appeared to be in no condition to answer her questions, so as Minimoose started fussing over Zim to the three raised eyebrows around them, Danny took it upon himself to reply.

"Uh, this isn't what it looks like?" He smiled weakly.

"You mean that you two didn't just get hit by a full-blown invasion of an army of darkness, woke up here, got totally lost, and you didn't just try to put out a fire by turning into some kinda superhero and failing miserably?" Gwen suggested.

"No, all of that's perfectly true," Zim said calmly from his sitting position on the alley.

Danny slapped his forehead. "Does the concept of irony mean nothing to you?"

Zim ignored him, fixedly staring at the wall.

"Fine, whatever." Danny said, clearly annoyed with the Irken's reactions.

"So, who are you two?" Abigail asked.

Danny placed a raised thumb on the barely visible stylized D on his costume. "I'm Danny Phantom, ghostly superhero, and this is-"

"Hey, HEY!" Zim yelped, startling them all. "My name and my mind are my own and I'll speak them alone!"

"Is he talking in rhyme?" Gwen muttered to the other girl.

"Man, they just get weirder and weirder," Abigail muttered back.

"I am Zim," he proclaimed, not hearing them muttering at all. "and that is all I feel like saying at the moment." He turned back around, staring at the wall as if the archangel Raziel, in an whimsical mood, had flown down from the High Heavens and spray-painted it with the answers to all of life's questions, among them such philosphical blockbusters as _why does evil exist, what are we here for, is there a reason for it all, _and the one thing that even the greatest theologians could never answer, _what is the deal with the duck-billed platypus?_

"Then why were you making such a big deal about it?" Danny demanded.

"Please direct all complaints to the clerk at the Shut Up booth," Zim said pleasantly, still staring at the wall.

"Then who-or what-is that?" Gwen said, pointing at Zim's squeaking robot.

The transplanted Irken turned around, looking directly at her. Gwen felt like flinching; Zim had an amazingly intense directness of regard that had nothing to do with his weird red eyes. His look made her feel like he was looking directly into her soul, observing all her deepest secrets and fears, and was in the process of writing it all down for blackmail. "That," Zim said proudly and unaware of the way people felt about his stares, holding up the robot. "Is Minimoose, my _other _sidekick!"

"Then where's the first one?" Gwen managed to ask under Zim' s Freaky Stare O' Doom(patent pending).

Minimoose floated away from Zim as he released the robot, his eye twitching in a facial tick. He was doing that a lot these days.

"I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!" he wailed, curling up on the ground in a fetal ball, a great cloud of gloominess and depression settling on him like a pile of rectangular building materials. He twitched and whimpered occasionally.

Gwen and Abigail recoiled in surprise, wavered between jaw-dropping shock and eye-blinking bewilderment, settling for staring at him. "Is he always like this?" Gwen said to Danny, realizing abruptly that he wasn't there anymore.

"No," said a voice from thin air; Danny suddenly appeared next to her, like mist condensing over a harbor. For some reason, his body from his waist on down was a thick smokey shape curling along the ground. The 'tail' reformed into his legs, as he stood in the air for a few moments, landing on the ground gracefully. "he's usually a lot worse than this. More, I dunno, exuberent."

"You don't say," Gwen said doubtfully. From the looks of things, Zim was either hopelessly neurotic, insane, or just plain weird. All three at the same time wasn't a bad bet either.

Danny looked down at Zim, wondering just where the robot was. "That's weird, Gir and Zim are usually inseperable."

"Anyway," Zim said, popping up behind them and acting as if that weird scene had never happened. "Where are we? _Tell me noow!"_

"You are in a dark alley in the middle of Traverse Town," Abigail said matter of factly. "Well, not middle exactly, but you know what I'm talkin' about."

Gqwn cracked a smile. Zim and Danny shared a mutual glance momentarily. In-jokes could be so freakin' irritating.

Zim was still concerned for Gir's fate though and was about to say something when Danny said, "Wait, how'd we get here?"

Abigail shrugged. "I don't know, same as everybody whose world was lost; here. We kinda built it from the ground up, even though a lot of it came with some of the people. We call it Traverse Town because sooner or later, everyone passes through here."

Zim's eyes widened. "_What?"_

"Nah, not really," she said off-handedly. "Just somethin' the TT Jaycees cooked up a few months ago. I don't know or really care why they call it that, they just do."

Zim spoke up, a far more urgent matter nagging away at the back of his mind like a sterotypical eighties wife. "These Heartless: What happens to the people they _don't _kill?"

Gwen looked surprised. "You mean that your friend wasn't killed by them?"

"No. They disappeared in various situations not relating to death."

"Well, everyone escapes them ends up here. You were just temporarily seperated."

Danny and Zim both visibly relaxed, a world of torment and horror sliding off their shoulders.

"Don't worry too much about things," Gwen said. "It probably won't take long to find your friends. Traverse Town..." Her teeth pressed into her lower lip. "...isn't that big."

"Uh, why?" Danny asked.

Abigial raised her head up at the night sky. She looked at the silvery disc in the sky, frowning.

Zim frowned too; something was weird about that moon. It was a lot bigger than a moon should be.

The girl looked back at them. "People who survive the black monster's attacks...what we call refugees...aren't very common. Kinda rare, actually."

Danny and Zim considered that for a moment, coming to the same unpleasant conclusion at the same time; the Irken glanced at the Keyblade's reflective crown poking out to his knee while Danny jumped back in shock. "What! You mean they kill most of the people-"

"No," she said sadly. "It's a whole lot worse then that."

In all four of their minds, a mental image arose: a monster, darker then a winter night on a lunar eclipse, standing over a dead body, it's claws dripping blood. And slipping through it's clenched talons was a etheral light, veined with ribbons of darkness, far more vital than the heart's-blood staining the thing's claws.

For Zim, it was merely speculative. But Danny and the new girls had seen in front of them.

"When they kill someone, they..." She shook her head.

"...Yeah. I've seen it happen," Danny said. He remembered it; those countless people that must've have been suddenly ambushed and slain by the Heartless, only to give birth to another Heartless.

They stood silent there in the steet for a moment.

Then Zim spoke up. "I didn't see anything like that; I missed most of that. But I did-"

"Wait." Abigial said. "Did you just say that you _missed _it?"

"How do you miss the end of the world?!" Gwen demanded.

Danny crossed his arms, smirking. "This oughta be good."

Zim felt embarrased, his antannae hugging his head. "I...eh, well...that is...this is somewhat...ah, it's not important-"

"C'mon! Tell us!" Gwen urged.

"It can't be that bad." Abigial and Danny said.

"I...slept...through it."

Everyone facefaulted.

"How do you sleep through something like that?!" Abigial said, gesturing at Zim with her palms out.

"It was _THE EVIL WAFFLES!"_

They stared at him.

"Just do what I do," Danny whispered to them. "Smile and nod politely."

They took his advice.

_Why does everyone do that?_ Zim wondered as they smiled woodenly and nodded excessively widely.

Zim rolled his eyes. "It doesn't matter anyway! By the time I got up and went to the island-"

"You mean the island where we were building that Portal Generator thing?" Danny interrupted.

"Yes, but-"

"Portal Generator? What Portal Generator?" The girl with a hat said.

"Long story, tell you later," Danny said quickly.

"Stop interrupting me! As I was-"

"Ooh!" Gwen squealed. "A device that creates spacial rifts? Did it incorporte a quantum point localizer? Because I've read about those, and the principle of teleportation would appear to be most effective by utilizing that principle and-"

"_**BE QUIET!**__" _Zim commanded shrilly. "Tell me, is this any of your story? So go ahead; everyone who went to my island and saw the really interesting thing that no one else did! What? No one's speaking up? Good, now maybe Zim can finish _WITHOUT INTERRUPTIONS!"_

"...You need to think about seeing a therapist," Abigial said at last. "Looks like the end of the world effected you worse than most others'."

"Nah," Danny said dismissively. "He's normally like this."

"What?" Gwen said. "You mean loud, overbearing and kind of really creepy?"

"Yes. Yes he does," Zim said calmly.

Everyone gave him a weird look.

Zim ignored it. "As I was _SAYING,_ I got there, fought some Heartless-" he paused a moment, deciding to skip the whole thing with Dib. Need to know basis and all that. "Got the Keyblade-" he waved the weird toylike weapon to emphasize this. Gwen and Abigail looked at it curiously. It looked strangely familiar. "And then I found two friends of mine by a big...door thing. Like it grew out of the rock. And then it opened, and the two of them disappeared, and I fought a big dark giant thing of _HORRIBLE DOOM!_ And then I got sucked into a ball of evil, and I ended up here!"

Zim closed his eyes and smiled, upper teeth protruding over his lower lip.

They stared at him, a bit dazed from his rather fast explaination.

Gwen seized on the only thing that made any real sense. "Somebody built a door into the rock?"

"Were you not listening?" Zim said impatiently. "It was _part _of the rock."

"...Okay. But-"

Abigail interrupted what she saw as the beginings of another Gwendolyn rant. "Hold on a sec'. Did you say you took on a Darkside? _By yourself?"_

Minimoose started squeaking from the death grip Zim had on him. "Squeak. Squeak squeak squeeeek?" _Hold a moment. The beast's designation really was Darkside?_

"Sure," Zim said, shrugging indifferently. "It looked like a Darkside, didn't it?"

"Yeah, but dat's besides the point. What I'm sayin' is, it took a small army to take down the Darkside we fought in _our _world! And you killed one by yourself!"

"Well, I almost didn't," Zim admitted, recalling the giant fireball.

"Even so," Abigail said, smiling as she tilted her hat. "That's damn impressive."

Zim grinned, which others might've found frightening or at least creepy. But his new aquaintices found it to be almost comically ernest. The guy had absolutely no concept of emotional restraint.

"Plus," Gwen said suddenly, "From what we know, those Heartless are the toughest of all of them. To face one all by yourself, and at their strongest...that's...unbelievable. What kind of world did you guys come from?"

The ghost boy considered the question. "Not that different from this one, I think. 'Cept this one doesn't have orange skies, that is. Pretty...well, peaceful's not the best word, but it wasn't chaotic in a bad way. More like...it was supposed to be funny. Just wild spontaeneity all the time."

"Yeah," Zim agreed, thinking back to his life to date. It had been bad, sometimes sad, often crazy, and frequently...happy. The lunacy of their world had not been the unfocused insanity of total anarchy, but more like...something that was meant to be, and happened accordingly in a whimsical manner. "'It was a world touched by the light, and darkness had not a sure place to stand and fight'."

Danny, Abigail and Gwen looked at him, impressed. "Hey, you're right. It was like that. Maybe that's why the Darkside was so weak," Danny joked.

"So was our world," Gwen said nostalgically. "Our worlds...they're kind of alike, aren't they? The darkness was stronger in our world, but in the end, it always burned away."

"Too bad it didn't hold out," Danny said sadly.

"I don't know 'bout that," Abigail said. "Most of the people I knew, and a bunch I didn't, are still around, carrying bits of the old world around with them. As long as the refugees are still around to remember and live, the lost worlds will never fade away."

Zim laughed. "Heh heh heh, I'm not the only poet around, eh?"

She smiled. "Hey, I try." She smacked Danny's shoulder friendly-like. "You don't gotta be depressed about things, y'know."

Danny rubbed his shoulder ruefully. "Hey, I'm half ghost. Not exactly something that's easy to shake off."

The four of them laughed at that. "So," Zim said, "You never said _your _names."

Gwen shrugged with a small smile. "Fair's fair, I guess. I'm Gwendolyn Tennyson, but call me Gwen." A strange look came into her eyes. "For now, anyway."

"I'm Abigail Lincoln," the dark-skinned girl said, tilting the brim of her cap at them in a manner similar to the way gentleman of bygone times would tip their hats to those they respected, such as women, the infirm, and the higher-ups.

"Squeeek!" Minimoose said; Zim let him go. The purplish robot hovered over their heads, squeaking to himself in a cheerful way.

Danny scratched the back of his head, tilting his head a little. "Well, see you guys later! First things first: I'm going to find a change of clothes and then I'm going to find my friends and work from there."

"Yees," Zim said in that weird way he said 'yes' sometimes. "New clothes: sound idea. Like this harmonica!" He whipped a harmonica out of his pocket and started playing an incredibly bad and unpleasant tune that could possibly shatter eardrums in due time.

A green ball of flamelike energy, a blast of concentrated electricity and a bolt of blaster fire wiped it from existence; Zim blinked, the burnt harmonica scrap crumbling out from between his fingers.

Danny lowered his shimmering fist as the markings on one of the strange discs on Gwen's arm armor ceased glowing and Abigail lowered a weird hi-tech blaster a little smaller than Zim's Morphgun, it's front end issuing yellow wisps.

"Sorry," Gwen said with a sly smirk, "It had to be done."

"Hey," Danny said without any real anger, "That's my line!"

"We had no choice," Abigail said gravely. "All of muscially-inclined mankind was on the line."

Zim crossed his arms and 'hmphed'. "No one appreciates music anymore.

He shook his head. "Very well then. I suppose I should find some new clothes too."

"Did you say-"

"New clothes?"

The two girls looked at the two boys with a decidedly evil look. Zim felt incredibly nervous for some reason, while Danny paled a few tones.

_Uh...oh._ He thought worredly.

Before they could say another word, both girls seized his wrists and started dragging him away, ignoring his loud, _loud _protests.

Danny easily phased out of their grip and started to fly away when his suit started to chip. Fearing the eventual results, he reluctantly followed them to a large clothing store. Zim suspected it was the only one in town, as it had nothing on it that would appear to be a name.

They went under a big sign that said _Seams and Zippers _in big bright inviting letters, something that the oblivious Irken completely missed.

The store's interior was fairly big, about the size of a department store. It was had a staggering amount of clothes, and Zim was surprised to see that the majority of all the clothes didn't have bottons, and the shoes almost all had straps clicking onto buckles instead of laces. Also, ridge-type seams ran along the sides of many of the pants and shirts, and he noticed several large label making machines around the store. He expected to be dragged through the clothing aisles and he was surprised to see that thought was quite literal: Gwen and Abigail walked right through the aisle, walking over to what appeared to be half a dozen cylindral chambers decorated with bright colors.

"Uh," Danny said, unsure of himself. "Are you sure this is okay?"

"Yeah; I don't like mooching off people!" Zim commented.

"Relax," Gwen said, not bothering to glance at them or stop. "The owner of this shop gives free clothes to new refugees; a one-day only kind of deal."

"That's good-" Zim began when Abigail cut him off.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. The point is you guys are in no condition to go around in the state your clothes're in."

They stopped in front of two of the odd devices; the tops of them were burnished domes, a small sign on them reading _Clothing Generation Ionitrix._ The cylinders had a large square door facing them, ressed slits in their inner borders. There were a number of organic-looking pipes extruding from the foot of the device and into the floor. What worried the two in front of them was a large dial near each machine, with a small red button under it. The dials were all currently set to a blank selection, possibly indicating a destructive use.

Zim and Danny looked at each other uneasily. Then the two girls pushed them into the chambers, ignoring their respective cries; it didn't matter anyway, since their yells were cut off as a door closed behind them.

Zim gaped at the small area around him, staring turned around, banging on the door loudly, Keyblade abandoned on the ground, his yells magnified and slightly distorted by the chamber. "Hey! What's going on!? Don't ignore me! Did you hear me? I said _don't ignore me!_ I'm giving you until the count of three to let me out! One...two...two and a half...two and three quaters and a decimal mark and a little two...THREE! LEMME OUT ALREADY! _NOW!"_

Ignoring his and Danny's yells, Gwen and Abigail went to their victim's chambers and twisted the dials until they read _Reconstruction._

"What was that?" Danny yelled. "What were those clickings? What's _going on here?!_ Oh man, why do I always end up inside weird things like this?"

"You people need to calm down," Abigial suggested. "Hear what I'm sayin'?"

"No!" Zim yelled. "These infernal device's walls are too thick for that!"

"Then how'd you hear what I just said?"

"..._Do not question ZIM!"_

Gwen raised an eyebrow. "He must've hit his head pretty hard."

"He's talking in third-person mode already?" Danny's voice was also magnified as Zim's was.

"Hey, you can hear them?" Gwen asked Danny.

"No, not really, but whenever people are talking about concussion-related babbling when Zim's around, it only takes one guess."

There was a loud impact from Zim's 'container'. "Ow...my head hurts. Oh the pain, the pain of it all!"

The hat-wearing girl crossed her arms and shook her head slowly. "Abigail's thinkin', why's it practically everyone who ends up in this town is either a good guy or completely _fou?"_

"Hey!" Zim yelled again. "I am a hero, not merely crazy!...Wait, that came out wrong. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm crazy, alright. Crazy! _Craaaaazy!"_

The corner of her mouth turned up. "You ain't gettin' no arguments here."

"And besides, you dare speak of self-referential talkery?"

Under her hat, Abigial's eyes darted back and forth. "Eh, heh heh heh, I don't know what you're talking about..."

"Wait a minute," Gwen said slowly, "He's right. You _do _speak in the third-person a lot."

"Hah!" Zim cried.

The girl with a hat fixation grabbed Gwen's wrist, ignored her startled cry, and slammed both their hands into the respective buttons; there was a bright flash from both the chambers.

There was a short pause, followed by a loud exclaimation of "WHAT THE!?"

A moment later, Zim declared, "I liiiiike it!"

One of the doors swung open, followed by Zim walking out in his new clothes.

The shirt was a bright red, with a nonexistent collar, serving only as a hole for his head to fit through. His pants were black and rather baggy, with some zippered pockets at the sides and and covering the tops of his shoes. His shoes had thick tops, tied togther with two criss-crossing straps in a X shape. They were black around the straps and on the 'tongue', with green around the rest of it, except for the dark gray soles. On his three-digit hands, he was wearing a pair of fingerless black gloves; the cuffs were kind of puffy, and there were silver pieces of metal that resembed dog tags on the wrists and the back of the hands, with his name engraved into them. For some reason, there was a label across his Pak that said _Defective Merchandise. _Over the shirt, he wore a dark red jacket with black sleeves that handed just past his elbows; it zipped up the middle though he chose to leave it open, with a collar was somewhat stiff, standing straight up while the lapels, part of the zipping arangement, stuck out, their metal zipper-teeth shining a bit with the light. Much like the shirt underneath, there was a large hole in the back for his Pak, rimming by a seam.

The two girls looked him over for a moment, apparently nonplussed.

"...Interesting fashion statement," Abigail noted.

"Hey!" Zim said, offended. "It looks like the jacket I got when I graduated from the Academy forty-five years ago!"

They suddenly snapped up, staring at him. "Did..you say forty-five?" Gwen said slowly.

"Yes. What's your point?"

Abigail stared at him. "How old _are _you?"

Zim shrugged. "A hundred and fifteen, last I checked."

The two girls facefaulted.

"What?" Zim asked, confused.

"You'll get used to that after you've known him a while," Danny said calmly, stepping out of his capsule and in Phantom form.

His new clothes had the same basic color schme as his old ones. He wore a black shirt under a zipped-up black jacket, both with white underlines. The jacket's sleeves went down to the middle of his forearms, while his shirt's sleeves were short for comfort. The left breast of the jacket had the same stylized D his old costume had had, rendered in white. He had white gloves and boots; the gloves went under his jacket sleeves, and they were made of a leathery material, having ridge-like bumps on the arm portions. He also had a pair of white boots on, strapping up on the sides. His pants were basically normal black jeans, with a small toolbelt for his ghost-fighting peripheral devices.

"It looks the same, but functional," Zim commented.

"I'll take that as a compliment." Danny said in his driest voice.

"Hold a moment. What will happen when you return to your human state?"

Danny answered that question by returning to normal. He looked down and was pleasantly surprised when he realized he was still wearing his new outfit with a few modifications. His gloves were gone, his boots had become sneakers, his pants had turned blue, his jacket had turned a nice blue color, the Danny Phantom logo had disappeared and his shirt was simply white.

Zim stared at him, impressed. "...Wow. Clothes that morph to accomodate shape-shifting superpowers? This place really _does_ have everything."

"Hah!" Abigail said gloatingly. "Told you the next newbie would say that! You owe me ten dollars!"

Gwen grumbled, handing over a small roll of dollars.

Danny and Zim quickly shared a look that meant something along the lines of 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

"Well," Danny said, "Thanks for everything, I guess. But it's time I got going. You coming, Zim?"

"Nah," The alien replied indifferently. "I've had enough of teamwork for a while."

"Heh. See you guys later," Abigail said, fingering a badge in her pocket. "Maybe I'll see you on the superhero circuit."

Danny tapped the part on his jacket where his D thing had been. "I wouldn't count on it." He walked out of the store, putting his hands in his pockets and thoughtfully looking around.

Gwen and Abigail turned around to speak to Zim; behind where they had been standing, there was only an empty bench.

"That's...kind of disturbing."

"Yes," Zim said loudly from behind them, causing them to jump up in the air and fall on the floor, facing him; he was hanging upside-down, a long pair of mechanical limbs resembling those of a spider extending from the pod on his back. He regarded their looks of terror fading to ordinary shock with quiet pleasure. "I am quite disturbing, aren't I?"

He made a small smile and landed on the floor, spider-legs folding into his Pak. Still smiling strangely to himself, he walked out the door, waving with a hand. "_Adios, me amigos._ Maybe I be seeing you later, yeah? A'ight, seeya later, mon." He chuckled to himself about his attempt to adopt a Jaimaican accent, and walked off in a completely random direction.

Gwen and Abigail stared mutely at his rapidly disappearing form.

"Hey, Abby?" Gwen said at last.

"Yeah?"

"Was that the weirdest thing you've ever seen?"

"No."

"Me neither. But it was really, really freaky."

"No argument here."

Minimoose floated out of an aisle, an oversized fedora on his head, wearing a tiny tuxedo just right for his rounded body, and tiny tap-shoes for his feet. Noticing what was going on, he discarded his clothes and floated off after Zim.

Zim, quietly snorting about his clever prank, walked along the town square, wondering where to go from here. He still didn't understand it, but he felt something familiar about them. As if he had seen them in a dream somewhere.

As he looked around the town, his smile slowly faded to a small frown as it occured to him that everyone, _everyone _in this town was a refugee. Every single person that lived their days out in this strange world had witnessed the death of their homes, their friends, their families; everything they had ever known, swept away into oblivion.

How could that be? How could they possibly live with that, and still seem so..._normal?_ Okay, not normal in the conformism sense, but normal in the sense that they seemed to be living out ordinary rounds for their lives. How could they be doing anything without the pain of knowing that they had lost so much?

He traced a hand over the woodwork of a house. He wondered how they could have erected this building with their losses weighing on their hearts. It seemed improbable in the highest percentage imaginable.

Of course, he mused as he leaned against the wall, there was always the possibility that those in town were colder than the buried permafrost of a comet's inner surface.

He remembered Abigail and Gwen's faces, the way they acted, their spoken words and the undertones _of_ those words, hinting at the unspoken ones. They certainly seemed nothing like sociopaths in all but the truest sense. They seemed, well, _real;_ not like true sociopaths; he firmly belived that sociopaths weren't real people, and were probably lived in by proper Hell-inhabiting demons in place of souls.

He supposed that they had, hard as it seemed, dealed with their loss and moved on. Perhaps the majority of those they knew had survived; that would explain it.

Or maybe it was because time had simply gone by. He had once said that time was a cruel salve, mending what wounds it could while leaving others to fester on their own.

"You need to work on your metaphors," he said aloud, frightening off some pigeons. This was another world, but for good reason had _all _pigeons learned to fear the presence of Zim.

He shook his head. He knew full-well that knowing people's hearts and thoughts wasn't really his forte; he barely understood the workings of his own mind and folk physics had always been his thing: the ways things worked, not the way other's minds operated.

"How do they do it?" He muttered to himself, pretty much summerizing the somewhat uncharacteristically deep thoughts he'd been having.

He looked down and saw the reality of where he really was: the unfamilar ground, the strange architecture, the sense of a place that was utterly new and strange for him. His lips skinned back from his teeth a bit as he clenched his fists in shock, realizing that he was now one of the people he'd been thinking about.

"Great," he said. "Now what?"

His world was gone.

Somehow, it just didn't fit. He didn't really see it. It seemed unreal; not because of an overwhelming sorrow at it, but it was just too...well, big to really fit.

He walked off, frowning as he mulled over it in his head. Maybe that was how they withstood it.

"Squeak squeak squeeeek!" Minimoose called after his master. Zim looked back, a perturbed look on his face; Minimoose immediately quieted down. He knew from experiance that disturbing his builder when he was thinking deep thoughts tended to lead to Zim becoming withdrawn and shutting himself up in small thick rooms for the duration of his thinking.

Minimoose watched his master; though the robot's expression was somewhat fixed, what with him basically being a little doll with a lot of advanced techology in his guts, Zim(and by extension, Gir)knew his moods. And this was definitely concern.

"Coco?" a feminine voice said.

An odd creature walked up and looked up at Minimoose. It very vaugely resembled a bird: it's bulgy main body looked like lot like a hitched-up miniture airplane, having a blue upper half divided buy it's chubby white underside by a squiggly red line that ran around it's body to it's beak, short stiff wings like those of an airplane, a tail like that of an airplane, and a few ascending spots on the edges of it's frontal blue half that resembled windows. It had long thin legs sticking out the bottom of it's airplane body, covered with a orangish color that suggested a permanent suntan. It's thin head looked a lot like a palm tree; exacerbating this image was it's frondlike mass of stringy hair and googly eyes set like a pair of coconuts. It's long beak looked a lot like a deflated raft that had been dragged through a bush, strangely enough.

"Squeak!" Minimoose said in greeting.

"Coco!" it replied.

Minimoose rolled around in the air, wagging a foot in a parody of someone waving their hand."Squeak squeak!"

The monosylabbalic creature blinked a few times. It looked at Minimoose, then at Zim. "Coco?"

Minimoose sagged. "Squeak."

"Coco coco coco co, co coco co!" the creature said comfortingly.

Minimoose brightened. "Squeak!"

"Coco co co co, coco coco coco co coco co!"

They both laughed loudly, scaring people.

Zim paused against a wall, laying a hand on it. His fingers tapped against the wall as he thought about it, trying to fit the smaller pieces together.

Earth, Mars, and all the rest were gone. He rolled it in his head, annoyed that it simply didn't really make sense. He felt nothing. Strange. The destruction of Irk had made a much bigger impact on him, and he'd spent most of his life off it.

France was gone. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. Same thing with New Amsterdam and Australia.

Spain was gone. There was no such thing as a bullfight anymore. That made him feel better.

Zim rolled his eyes in annoyance at himself. He was thinking too much about places he'd never really been. Even his pilgramage had been limited to his traipising about the American continent and nearby island. Okay, maybe he should try a little closer to home.

Irk was...wait, that had already happened. He thumped himself on the head, thinking that maybe this was not exactly what he had in mind.

His base had ceased to exist. He trembled uncontrollably. Dispite himself, he was mildly pleased: a step in the right direction already. He was starting to feel the proper emotions about this sort of thing.

Canada was gone. He felt his squeedily-splootch throb and his gorge started to rise as he thought of those vast expanses gone. During his time there, he had found a pleasant peace in the snowy tundra.

Bubba's House O' Waffles, Every Kind, Every Taste was gone. There was no longer any such thing as a Big House Special. The world went black with a thud, and he awoke whimpering for his cold unfeeling robot arm.

"Oooh," he muttered groggily, the reality of what had truly transpired hitting like an anvil. With less comedy.

"What is this feeling?" he said to himself, clutching a hand to his chest. It...hurt.

Something was crushing him. A weight from within was crushing his heart in it's grasp.

He suddenly lost almost all feeling in his legs; he nearly fell to the ground, slamming against the wall and propping himself up.

He didn't know what he was feeling. He did know one thing: it hurt.

It hurt a lot. As if the realization of what had happened had been granted life by a malevolent force, sprouted prehensile spikes, had impaled him, and was now compressing him into a pulp within a chest cavity.

Nicktown was gone.

The _Earth _was gone.

All of it...gone.

_Gone gone gone gone gone..._

Zim slid to the ground, shutting his hands over where his eardrums were located in his head. "Shut up shut up _shut up!"_ He screamed, wanting that hateful word to _stop _repeating itself.

It did, and he slumped against the wall, hands slapping against the ground.

He started breathing heavily. He looked up into the sky.

And looked back down again. The black emptiness, pocked with so many tiny sparks of light...it reminded him of the fate of his home.

His fist thudded against the ground as his lips peeled back over his teeth in a ferocious growl.

"Why!?" He yelled. "Why why why_ DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?!"_

His heart felt chafed. He bent over, hugged his knees as he shivered. It was a cold that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperture.

A freezing wind from within, the announcing breath of an immense beast that was incomprehensibly huge, far bigger then he could possibly expect. It held him with a huge frigid claw and squeezed with all the immense strength it had.

He huddled himself tighter. He didn't cry, sob, scream or otherwise express his grief; he was Zim. He'd gotten over that years ago, when the painful loneliness had become routine, after he'd become fully accustomed and used to the way everyone treated him as a scapegoat when there was disaster and as a despicable little nothing when there wasn't. When he'd become used to being treated as a lowly little thing that learned to stand up and pretend to be Irken dispite the dirt on it's belly. He'd stopped showing the hurt in his heart and the pain on his face after he concluded that, even if he was a unwanted freak, the object of everyone's derision, the thing they all regarded as nothing, it didn't matter. He had decided to one day become somebody _great_, and prove them all wrong. He had continued to ignore their disgust with his existence even after they hated him for being a walking death note for the empire, deciding even if he felt like his life was a barbed wire wrenching it's way around his heart and squeezing out everything that mattered, he wouldn't let it show.

But he felt the same way he had when he had been under the barrage of their unwarrented hatred and spite, the way he felt when he first started to react withover blown reactions and bizarre actions. Now, as then, the depths of his misery was crushing him under the breadth of it's immense weight. He was feeling pain far more intense then almost anything before in his life.

No. There was one thing that had felt this bad.

Back when he had been in the O.O.P.S. and been truly exposed to the ramifications of all his actions. When he'd truly known what it was like to be one of his victims. Unintentional victims, yes, but that didn't matter. It didn't absolve him of responsibility, or that fact that, quite simply, he was the _worst _person he'd ever know in his entire life.

He realized that he was experiancing anguish yet again.

The cold demon crushed him in it's paws again and again as he cowered by the wall, burnt by a rain of his own misery.

_Is this how they have all felt?_

It hurt so much, so badly that he thought dying in the corpse of Earth would have been kinder.

_'As long as the refugees are around, the lost worlds will never fade away,'_ a voice said at the periphery said at the edge of his mind.

He opened his eyes and looked up.

He saw the dark night sky, but at the periphery of his sight he saw the moon. He looked up at the moon.

It always swam in the sky, eternally vigilant. Sometimes it's light faded away, seemingly engulfed by the constant presence of darkness, but inevitably it's light would shine again, illuminating the night.

Zim continued to stare at it and glanced down, seeing the moonlight shine of the gold and silver of the dropped Keyblade. He slowly, almost tentatively, laid hold of the hand, used the Keyblade to prop himself up and stood there, holding the handle with one hand and supporting it's 'blade' with the other. He regarded his weapon...and he laughed.

He bent over from the force of his laughter, unable to contain it nor willing. He placed a hand against the wall to support him and keep him from falling over, still holding the Keyblade in his right hand.

Finally his laughter trickled to a stop, and with a final chuckles, he stood back up, grinning defiantly at the night.

"Heh. Earth may have been destroyed..._but I'm still alive._"

Maybe there was some hope after all.

After all, not only he had survived. Danny had too, clearly. And who knew who many other of his various aquaintices had as well?

He remembered that his new friends had mention that everyone who vanished ended up here.

Zim frowned, considering it. "Dib went mad-far as I can tell, anyway-and Gaz and Gir disappeared in a gale of darkness.

He rolled it over in his head. "Hmm...Dib's gone mad before, and Gaz can certainly take care of herself. But Gir couldn't tie his shoes if he had the feet for them..."

Zim slapped the Keyblade into his open hand, patting it against the open hand. "That's it! I've got to find Gir! And there I'll find Dib and Gaz!"

_Good! A PLAN!_ He thought to himself.

"First things first," he dictated to no one in particular. "I should get a proper layout of this town. If this will indeed my new home, I'll have to find a new base of operations."

Feeling much better, he slung the Keyblade over his Pak-sheath and walked down the street, towards what looked distantly like a large walkway..

"All I have is a mysterious weapon, the Pak on my back, a new outfit, myself, and an inarticulate robot. Sounds perfect!"

His eyes widened, if that were possible. "Heey, speaking of Minimoose..." He looked around, seeing only the weird arrangement of buildings.

He jumped down the stairs, calling out the machine's name. "Minimoose, Minimoose! Where are yoooou?!" A flash of darkish purple among the other colors went across his eyes.

He stopped. "Ah, Minimoose!" He ran over to where Minimoose was presumable chatting amiably with a...bird-airplane thing.

He stared at it. It seemed to be female, judging by the sound of it's voice.

Th two of them didn't seem to be aware of him and kept speaking in their weird ways to each other. Minimoose squeaking while the female whatever it was spoke only in a single syllable: "Coco! Coco co co coco coco coco co! Coco?"

"Squeak! Squeak squeak squeeek!"

She turned her off-center eyes at him. "Coco?"

"Squeak!"

"Coco!" She crouched low and stood up again, a red plastic Easter egg laying where she had been sitting. She grabbed it with her oversized long feet, throwing it at him lightly.

It bounced off Zim's head with a hollow thud, landing into his open hands. He shook his head to clear away the mild ache and looked down at the light blue capsule. He looked back up and raised an eyeridge. "And what am I supposed to do with this? Make an omlette for machines?"

"Squeak!"

"Uh...huh." Shrugging, he cracked along the line along it; the halves fell down, causing a squat green metal booklike object hidden in the plastic egg to fall into his hands. Zim blinked in surprise, turning the object over in his hands.

It was squarish and rather beaten up, the right side and tops slightly ridged and white, giving it the look of a book or an unconvential Swiss Army Knife. The words _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Traverse Town Edition _was written on it in big friendly letters, followed by a simple phrase: _Don't Panic._

Zim frowned; it looked interesting, but just what the heck it was eluded him like a fly in a big room. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it. It seemed to be fairly ordinary at the back, looking like a wordless version of the front. He started to turn it over again when his thumb snagged on a cleverly concealed line along the 'pages'; the odd device flipped open as if it were an actual book, revealing that two screens and keyboardlike interfaces that connected as he fully opened it.

He frowned, not sure how to turn it on; there didn't seem to be any button to turn it on.

His fingers snagged against something stiff against the 'spine' of the device. He pushed his finger out and heard a click.

The screen and the stuff underneath the keyboard lit up, but nothing happened.

Zim looked up at Coco, raising an eyeridge and a corner of his mouth turned down. "Uh, so this is...what?"

"Co co!" the bird-airplane-plant-thing said impatiently, gesturing to the discarded eggshell.

Zim looked down at his left foot, noticing a small note curled up in it.

Minimoose, helpful as always, flew down and grabbed the note in his mouth. He hovered up to Zim's head-level, opening his mouth a little to allow it to unfurl.

Zim peered at the note, reading what it said aloud. "'In order to operate the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, establish ownership by placing a hand on the Guide's interface. Identify yourself and the Guide will function automatically. Simply announce your entry, or make use of the input selection array to select one.'" He looked up, frowning slightly. Not seeing anything wrong with it, he laid his right hand across the dark screen.

It immediately lit up, thousands of blue lines measuring every little indentation on his fingers; his hand jerked away in surprise, and as he started to say something, the lines danced across his eyes and suddenly disappeared.

Looking utterly flabberghasted, he glanced at his hand: it was unmarked. "What is this?"

To his surprise, the device 'spoke' in a slightly cheerful male voice. It wasn't that new to him, what with the sentient technology he'd employed and known all his life, he just hadn't been expecting it to talk.

As it spoke, an entry appeared on the screen, illustrating what it said in bright primary colors. Pretty simple little movies too: they looked like they'd been made in Microsoft Paint.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Traverse Town Edition is quite possibly one of the most wholly remarkable things in all existence. It is one of the three top-selling books of Traverse Town, next to Jiraiya the Toad Sage's highly popular _Icha-Icha_ series, Jarod Insert Appropiate Name Here's philosphoical blockbuster trilogy _Destiny, The Universe and You_;_ Fate Plus You Equals 'Phhfft'(_co-written by Naruto Uzumaki) and _The Value of Pez and Other Little Things,_ and the highly praised cookbook, _The Mystery of Baking_ by Osmond Boone and Jimmy Tock, the first detective book to double as a aid to baking. It is commonly said the ever present order of the top four books alludes to the reality that books will always come in several varieties: guidebooks, pandering crap, entertaining philosphy and philosphic entertainment."

Zim stared at it's(to him)nonsensical babble, staring as it displayed the people and books it was apparently referencing.

"The current edition of the Guide began after the survivors of the Forty-Two Worlds(the world system that was the original birthplace of the Guide)came to Traverse Town, along with several surviving copies of the Guide. The various editors were approched by the eventual founders of the Sennin Corporation, which led to the purchase of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the publishing of the Traverse Town Edition.

"The publishers of the original Guide were often sued for inaccurices in the Guide, such as claiming that the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall often made a good meal for tourists, rather than, as it usually does, make a good meal _of_ tourists. This eventually led to an incredibly stupid court case and the hanging of a warning plaque in the Guide's offices: 'The Guide is definitive. Reality, however, is frequently inaccurate.' The current edition of the Guide has been hailed as being eighty-percent more accurate than previously, partially due to the work of the current editors, such as Ford Prefect."

"That's...enlightening." Zim said after a moment. He was about to say something else when Coco replied to something Minimoose had said. "Coco!"

"One of the few remaining Imaginary Friends from the Networked Earth world," The Hitchhiker's Guide said. "Coco is one of the full-time residential occupants of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which was renamed Foster's Home For Random Suckers by an unknown smartass. Her creator is unknown, as she was found on a desert island by the two pioneers of Figmentology, Douglas and Adam. She only speaks using the syllables in her name, though she is almost always understood by those around her, thus leading to a phenomonon when a linguistically-impaired being is nonetheless understood by all, called the Coco Syndrome. She has the ability to lay plastic eggs that contain either anything she desires within them or simply whatever the holder needs. It is believed that her design was influenced by a marooned child on a desert island, dispite the more considerable problem is that no one, except possibly her, knows who her creator is. Coco has gradually becoming insane from being estranged from her creator, or at least suggested so by her close friend, Blooregard Q. Kazoo."

"That was...interesting." Zim cut it off by clicking the Standby Phase switch he had accidentally hit, closing it and sliding it into his Pak, idlely thinking it could be of some use.

He looked back at Minimoose. "I'm going scouting; wanna schmooze?"

Minimoose stared at him. Then he squeaked worredly.

"Eh, sorry. Let me try again: do you want to keep connecting with the people?"

Minimoose squeaked in affirmation. "Excellent; establish pleasant relations with the various townsfolk! Who knows; maybe we'll do better then we did in Nicktown," Zim muttered that last part to himself. He looked at Coco, who may or may not have staring at him in particular blankly. It was hard to tell with the unfocused way her eyes were looking. "And..uh, I suppose I may be seeing you later."

Her eyes focused on him and she tapped a foot against the ground impatiently. "Coco coco coco co!"

"Yes, I forgot. Thanks for the gift." Not pausing to wonder how he suddenly understood Coco, Zim walked back up the stairs.

He moved quietly; this place didn't seem dangerous and he saw no more reasons to continue being unnessacarily cautious. He took his time, seeing everything he could. He'd always been a bit of a sightseer.

He looked back, deciding that it wouldn't be prudent to stay in one area. With that in mind, he turned left and went through a nearby walkway, walled in by large rounded red stones that formed the major building material of the wall. The weird thing about them was that they look a bit stretched, like clay that had pulled around by a sculptor before hardening.

Most of the buildings here were set alongside each other, framing a sidewalk on a five-foot wall composed of some green rock; below this was a lower grassy area, possibly set to facilitate passage. One of the building struck him; a gate leading to a lush estate, one of which being a mansion that looked quite a bit like a castle with all the turrets and such.

Zim walked down to the parklike area below the sidewalks, deciding to take a short break; it was a nice sort of place, possessing a calming quality.

He sat against the wall, admiring the overall look of it all. The grass flattened against his feet, smoothly rising back up as soon as the obstructing weight left them, giving him cause to wonder if there was some sort of energizing quality in the ground. Zim's hand touched the wall, and a train of thought docked at the station as he felt it's mossy surface.

The walls were made of stone like the others he'd seen, but completely covered in some kind of vegatation. Interesting, but not that much.

Losing interest in the overgrown wall, he looked away and noticed that he wasn't alone; about ten feet away from him, not paying attention to him as yet, was a burglar, dressed all in black. He appeared to have a small bag in one of his hands

He laughed to herself, an irritating sound that distinctly resembled a frog choking on a cicada. "They haven't made the safe that can keep out me! Now let's see how many karets that imaginary rabbit was hiding away."

Zim narrowed his eyes. A thief. How _passe_. Oh well; at least this was someone he could beat up. Or possibly set on fire, if he could figure out how to make it work.

The nameless burglar opened the bag, eagerly looking inside. His expression flip-flopped, turning to one of disgust and shock as she threw it to the ground.

"These aren't diamonds, these are _carrots!"_ He spat, angrily stomping on the bag.

"Like a thief should be deriding someone's taste. And what kind of thief goes over their ill-gotten goods in the middle of public?"

He whirled around to see Zim, who was leaning against the wall with one foot one it, the other keeping him up. One of his hands were lying against the wall, the other laying across the bottom of the Keyblade's hilt. He was looking at her calmly, attempting to look cool. He was doing a much better job of it than the thief was, not that that said much.

He growled something indistinct, pulling out a switchblade and flicking it out, brandishing the blade as he nearly backed into a shadow monster that had appeared out of a dark distortion of the air, blankly watching him.

It was a little taller than Zim's; it's head looked like one of the Shadow's, but with a wide gaping fanged mouth lit from within by the same yellow light that illuminated it's alien eyes. It's body was simian, the arms almost touching it's knees. It appeared to be wearing a blue body armor that was segmented on the sides, with solid armor plates on it's arms, and shoulders, metal greaves on it's boots. It's fingers appeared to be composed of a light gray metal, elongated into flexible claws nearly a foot long. Over it's head it wore a pointed metal helmet, it's open 'jaws' lined with metal fangs; where eyeholes should have been there were only jagged spirals. On it's chest was an emblem that looked like a heart symbol with a two barbed lined criss-crossing through it in an X-shape, all outlined in red.

Zim snapped to attention, backing away with his Keyblade at the ready, braced over his shoulder in a defensive position.

"Yeah, you better be scared!" The burglar taunted, misinterpreting his reaction and utterly oblivious to the Soldier behind him.

"Behind you, you idiot!" Zim yelled, pointing the Keyblade over the oblivious thief's shoulder.

The burglar swiftly turned around at the sound of clanking metal, his bored expression rapidly transforming into blind terror.

"No," he said in sheer terror at the sight of the all too familiar sight. "No, no, _no!"_

Even as Zim started to dash full-out at them, pulling the Keyblade back for a powerful swing, the Soldier slashed downwards, pushing the random burglar back in a spray of red; it let it's arm droop, the claws dripping with blood up to it's middle joint.

Zim screeched to a stop, staring with mute horror at the sight; the thief's front was obscured by a rapidly spreading pool of blood, the thin torn clothing pushing up against the flow of blood. He convulsed violently, coughing up another spray of blood as he slumped against the ground, blood trailing from the corners of his mouth.

It was hard to tell from where he was standing, but to him, the unfortunate burglar's eyes seemed faded.

The Soldier suddenly lunged again, thrusting it's arm into the corpse's still torso. It's fist sank in, lined by a circle of blue-black smoke. It pulled it's arm back again, something clutched in it's fist. Zim couldn't quite discern what it was, but he saw several streams of colorful light with copius ribbons of darkness not unlike that that had birthed the Soldier behind the doomed burglar.

The light suddenly became black and vanished.

The Soldier's tense, desperate, almost _insane _posture disappeared, replaced by a slightly more placid one. It walked over to the burglar's limp body, which was rapidly undergoing another change: what was left of him was quickly unraveling, disappearing into swirling smokelike vapor far too dark to be smoke, too etheral to be anything but smoke. The clothing, the body, the torn clothing and musculature...all of it was quickly vanishing, the front of him turning foglike. As the Soldier's foot hit the ground, his head lolled sideways, giving mute witness to some blank horror as it vanished, along with the rest of him.

The smoke disappeared completely, leaving no trace that a death had occured except for the small bloodstains on the grass. Zim involuntarily stepped backwards, resisting the urge to scream and run.

Was that how all the others had died? Unaware of the threat until the last seconds of their lives, then a few brutal moments of pain? The fear of an unknown predator, swarming among them, tearing them apart only to retreat for a moment and then return for more...he grimaced, thinking of that kind of terror and paranoia.

And, as they seemed to do so often, things got worse.

Where the badly placed burglar had been, about a head above the Soldier wavered, turning a deep black-blue swirl of semitransparent air. Another Soldier fell out of it, clumsily landing on the ground in a tight ball. It unwound itself tentatively, backflipped half a foot to it's feet. It looked around, looking at the other Soldier by it. Zim looked back and forth between the two, annoyed by how much they resembled each other and considerably disturbed by what he'd just saw. It was one thing to be hunted because by virtue of being good prey, but just arbitary murder was another thing altogether.

The thief's death was wrong, not merely because his...well, he didn't know what, but it was vital, certainly, had apparently been consumed by these monsters, but because it was completely pointless. He had been killed not because he was weaker, or because he deserved it more, but simply because he'd been closer.

_"So,_" Zim said murderously, readying the Keyblade. "I'm assuming this isn't a social call."

They looked up at him at his words. The 'older' of the two started running at him as the other moved towards him in a wide circle. The first one suddenly whirled into the air, spinning around like a demonic pinwheel at him, it's large claws stretched outwards and causing the air to violently rip around it in dark flashing colors.

He instinctively ducked, holding the Keyblade over his head; the Heartless smacked right into him, it's Cyclone attack backlashing and throwing it back to the ground as it skidded a few times until it lay prone, sluggishly trying to get up. Zim didn't give it the chance, running up to it and smashing the Keyblade into it furiously until it dissapated, staining his weapon black.

He angrily shook it until the loose material faded away, leaving the Keyblade as shiny as ever. He whirled around in a circle, catching the approaching other Soldier in the head and effectively decaptiting it.

Zim stared in amazement as it's two pieces fell to the ground and vanished. "Wow. I'm better at this then I thought." He said, looking down at the length of the Keyblade.

And to think it looked like a toy.

He walked off, intending to continue with his original objective and utterly unaware that he had gotten turned around in the battle and was going back the way he came.

"Heeey," Zim drawled to himself. "Is it just me, or do all the buildings in this town look alike? There must be some con-artist architect or something."

He frowned and looked behind him. "Hmmm, maybe I got turned around...nah."

He walked down, certain he was somewhere new due to the absence of Minimoose or the...whatever the heck that thing was.

Next to him was a two story shop of some kind; it's stainless-steel surface had that slightly stretched look many of the buildings around here had, several round windows were on it, and there was a definite sci-fi look to it: power relays going through the ground from the base of the building, a sliding panel-door with a twist-handle, and a small sattilite dish at the top of the building. At the middle of it was a thick double-line, gray at the bottom and blue at the top, a curling symbol that Zim thought stood for as a stand-in for _and_. On the second-story was a large symbol, possibly an identifacation of some sort; a thin golden cross, with a snake coiled around it and a crown flanked by floating angelic wings over the top. Below it was a small sign that simply read _Alchemic Synthesizing_ in neat letters that looked like someone behind the wall had _pushed_ them out of the metal itself. Over the door on the lower level, in letters that seemed to have put together out of random junk, was a simple logo: _All-Purpose Tech Support._

"'Tech Support'," he mused quietly. "This looks interesting." He grabbed the handle, and twisted it; it didn't move.

"Eh?" Zim muttered in surprise. That wasn't supposed to happen. He twisted harder, and it still didn't move.

"Relax...I can handle this calmy and maturely...OPEN UP!" he screamed, furiously pulling at it time and time again, as if he were trying to rip it out of the door.

It almost seemed to loosen...and he lost his grip, falling backwards and landing on his stomach unceremoniously.

"Grrrrrr," Zim growled, jumping on the door and grabbing the handle, pulling at it with all his might. His entire body felt like it was slightly contracting, about to tear itself in it's struggle with the irritating doorknob, which was _still_ resisting his valient efforts to pry it loose.

He pulled even harder, ignoring the painful strain on his muscles, which now felt like they were slowly unraveling. "Even if I should tear myself apart," he narrarated, furiously pulling the recalcitrant handle. "I...WILL...OPEN...THIS..._DOOR!"_

He felt the handle start to bend...

And then his hands slipped.

He crashed into the ground, smacking into it hard. He moaned, slowly lifting his head away from the dirt. His eyes narrowed as his sight focused on the _evil, evil HANDLE._

"_**STUPID DOOR!"**_ he screamed, running over to it and kicking it as hard as he could; he stared unbelievingly as the handle turned upwards and clicked into place.

"Eh..." Zim said for a moment, feeling incredibly stupid. Then he looked around to make sure no one was watching, raised his arms up and went "Whoo hoo!"

Smiling idiotically to himself, he grabbed a hollow side of a recessed part of the door next to the handle, pushing it to the side; it slid in easily with a swooshing sound, stirring up a bit of the rage it had inspired.

He stepped over the trackway deep in the floor, closing the door behind him as he entered the store; it would have been impolite not to.

It had an overall sqaure shape; four walls made of the same metal on the outside but with less of an obviously stretched look, various odd machine parts around it, so varied it would take him at least an hour to catalouge them all, their make and model, and what the heck they came from. Advanced prosthetic arms...some type of powered-armor...car engines...computer motherboards...repair toolkits...weird candylike blocks with a strange resemblence to wings...flat-screen televisions clinging to the walls; his inner scientist was shrieking for joy at the oppertunity to examine all these interesting new devices and technologies. Perhaps not as advanced as the ones Irkens had cross-engineered, but definitely an afternoon's worth of pleasant work.

There was a wide counter along the wall he had entered in; it was composed of glass or some other such material(he somehow doubted that however came up with this shop would have gone for something as ordinary as glass), various devices like those on the wall on display. The counter went all the way from the end of the wall to a few feet in front of him, a draw-bridgelike plate connecting the wall to the rest of the counter. On the counter was a white-blue laptop computer, currently closed and probably shut off. Interestingly, there were several pictures on the counter, turned inwards. Near the counter, on the wall, there was a poster of a large white tower in the shape of a T, white with blue square window going across it. It was situated on a small rocky islet on a pleasant looking bay, a bustling city framed in the background. There was a single phrase on the poster around the islet, the blue letters slightly slanting to the left as if typed in italics: _Teen Titans Go!_, the Ts laying against each other and framed in white. As far as cool random poster slogans went, Zim thought it sucked. The picture was kind of cool, though.

There were about six chairs in the middle of the room, running the gamut from a short wrap-around couch to a cushioned rocking chair to a large bean bag to almost everykind of basic comfy chair. They encirled a round cherry-wood table, looking inordinately like a band of covered wagons under seige by fustrated natives who had taken all they could take and weren't about to take anymore.

While he was examining the interesting room layout, a friendly baritoned voice with an extradited Southwestern accent said, "Say, man, don't think I've seen you 'round here before!"

Zim, startled from looking at the interesting carpet patterns(which were a lovely shade of beige, by the way)looked up. And had to look up a bit higher to see above the speaker's waist, because he was annoyingly tall.

The speaker in question was human, though some might dispute that notion. He was a cyborg, about six and a half feet tall and nearly that wide, the sleek and almost organic advanced machinery making up most of his body forming a muscular male shape. Most of his mechanical body was white with gray tones around where the collar bone would be and the joints. His round, slightly angular shoulders, thick forearms and the artificial parts of his cranium were all aquarmarine with light blue circuitlike pattern on them; the shoulders had three portlike things sticking out of them, and the forearms had two recessed ones near the elbow per arm. His large hands resembled whitish gauntlets, what with the large squarish knuckles and finger joints.

His main body had black paneled with reccesed ridges going through them, a smooth shell-like area over his front, a dark-gray waist that slightly resembled the pelves of a human skeleton seen from the front, with flexible armor over his hip joints. His upper legs were thick, with a streamlined white plating running down their front to the knees, the sides and back made of the same black paneling like on his sides. His knees, like the rest of his joints, had a highly flexible dark-gray plate over the vulnerable 'skeleton' underneath, to ensure, Zim suspected, as much agility as possible. His lower legs and feet resembled stylistic greaves from a fantasy novel, a bit bulgy at the back and heel. The 'greaves' overlapped the front part of his foot a bit, and where the anklebones would have been there were two gray hingelike discs. The rest of his feet were white, except for the ridged metal top overlapping from the sole.

The only organic parts of him-at least, the ones Zim could see-were his upper biceps, a small area of his upper legs, and the rest of it was concentrated in a wraparound area on the left side of his bald head, the skin a medium-toned brown. His facial features were broad and solid-looking, giving the impression that even the organic parts of him had been constructed by skilled scientists in a high-effiency lab somewhere. The metal part of his head curved around the right side of the back of his head, giving that area the most flesh on his body, going right next to his eyebrow and curving again around his squashed-looking nose, detouring completely away from his mouth and curving under his jaw, making his neck half machine and organic almost evenly. The machinery on his face mirrored his face precisely, mostly white with gray and black to accuntuate the eyebrows, neck, and lower part of the jaw, constructed so that it could fully imitate the expressions of the flesh-and-blood side of his face, if with none of the authenticity. His one real eye was a slightly faded gray, which seemed oddly fitting. His mechanical one, on the other hand, was red, with a corrosponding pupil on it.

_Now _that's _interesting,_ Zim thought, looking at him thoughtfully. Judging from his overall build, what Zim saw of him was the 'skin' of his mechanical body, designed for the optimum level of physical capacity beyond that of an ordinary human. He noticed that the scant skin around his machinery, while melding almost seamlessly with it, was mark by a thin layer of extremely bad scar tissue around his metal.

He looked at Zim, taking in his obvious strangeness for a moment before breaking into a wide grin, presumably at making a new possible friend. Zim noticed that far more significant than the human's mechanical portions was his presence; this was clearly the sort of genially person that made friends quickly and easily, his force of personality something that was difficult to ignore; this became clear to him when Zim found himself sort of liking the human on sight, leaving him to wonder what about this human's demeanor pushed aside his usual mild distrust about everyone in general.

He wondered why this was so. He'd gotten over his dislike of humans long ago, but he was almost always vaugely suspicious about everyone and everything. This didn't make any sense, but he decided to go with it. He had a hunch he could trust this human. He didn't know why, but his hunches were usually right.

"That's because I'm not from around here," Zim said, replying to the cyborg's initial question. "Then again, neither are you."

The human chuckled at that, standing up straight and grinning. "I like this guy," he said to a child sitting behind the counter that Zim hadn't noticed.

The person that the cyborg had spoken two was organizing a small stack of paperwork, glancing up to see what the larger human had said, pushing the paper away carefully and securing his wraparound sunglasses. He looked about twelve or so, and if he were standing up he'd probably be a little taller than Zim(who grumbled to himself as he digested the fact that he so far hadn't met a single person in this town who wasn't his height or taller). He wore a red shirt with a round collar, seams running up the sides and defining the shoulders, and normal length sleeves with round rigid ends. The baggy bottom of his shirt concealed the belt line of his tan shorts, which ended a little past his knees, had two side-pockets shadowed by his shirt and an empty holster of some kind on the left-hand leg. His shoes were short brown boots, two straps secured across the front, with odd built-up soles. The human himself appeared to be of English origin, had an overly serious cast to his face, and like the cyborg, was completely bald.

He peered at Zim, the thin lines of his mouth and his otherwise neutral expression giving the Irken the impression that behind those wide opaque sunglasses, he was systematically memorizing Zim's every movement and getting a complete analysis of the contents of his soul.

"Hmm," the human said, and Zim wondered briefly what exactly his tone was. It wasn't exactly suspicion, but it was too analytical to be mild curiousity. And the way he couldn't see the younger human's eyes was seriously starting to creep him out. "What's your name, newcomer?"

"I'm Zim." _Probably the last of the Irkens, _he thought sourly. "And who are you two?" he added quickly.

The human's expression softed, the hard set of his mouth becoming a small smile. "I'm Nigel Uno."

"And I'm Cyborg!" the mostly mechanical being added, gesturing at himself with a thumb.

"I never would have guessed," Zim said in a deadpan voice.

The two humans looked uncertainly at each other, than at Zim. Was he being sarcastic or not?

Nigel cleared his throat, and Cyborg took the moment to say, "So, where ya from?" _Judging from this guy, I think he's already used to his world being destroyed. Otherwise, he'd probably be freaking out a lot more._

"Earth. Well, an inaugerated Earthanoid, if you should be literal."

"I believe he meant _besides _Earth," Nigel said pointedly. "Most of the people from here are from one kind of Earth or another."

"Oh." Zim reconsidered the question, wondering what he should refer to his new homeworld as. He recalled the geometric significance of the islands he'd taken as his own, dispite the fact that only the one he had used was uninhabited.

Zim looked around. "Anyway, what kind of...what is this building?"

"Yeah," Cyborg said, feeling a tiny bit insulted. "I get that a lot. This level of the building's kinda like an all-purpose mechanical store: we got pretty much everything mechanical here: automail fitting, spare machine parts, do-it-yourself guides...that sort of thing. At least, that's what I do, anyway. As for upstairs," he chuckled evilly. "that's a secret."

The sunglasses-kid rolled his eyes. Or not. It was hard to tell.

Zim glanced outside, seeing something familiar. He turned around, giving the suddenly wide-eyed Cyborg and Nigel a good view of the Pak on his back as he rushed to the window, staring with his mouth agape as Coco and Minimoose walked past the window, pausing to wave at Zim.

"I don't believe it, _I just don't believe it! I DID get turned around at at the-the-the-LITTLE GRASSY MINIPARK PLACE THING! Of all the mind-frapping little coincidental happenings...WHY DO I! __**I! **__KEEP! GETTING! __**LOOOOST!**__"_

Cyborg and Nigel stared at Zim; it was difficult not to. As he randomly ran around in front of the window, the two humans watched him rant about the magnetic fields of this crazy place foiling his sense of direction, the idiotic timing of the shadow monster things, and his suspicion that _they _were the ones who kept stealinng his spare pair of pants when they were in the wash and no one was looking.

"Are the cameras on?" Cyborg muttered to Nigel as the new guy continued to freak out about everything in the known universe, and a few things that weren't.

"Yes," he replied after a moments diliberation.

"Good," Cyborg said. "The guys aren't going to want to miss a minute of _this."_

_This_ was Zim now arguing with himself, furiously glancing at midair.

"The Bermuda Triangle is _too _the base of operations for the Eater of Socks!" Zim yelled at two miniture versions of himself only he could see.

"It is _not,_" his inner angel, dressed in his usual colorations of Zim's new clothes, said back while rolling his eyes, using the tone that basically said, _What are you? An idiot?_

"It hungers for wooly foot coverings, and you know how cold it is in the...the...wherever the Burmuda Triangle is!"

"You mean _Burmuda?"_ The angel said drily, letting his tone do the work.

"Yeah! Yeah! And hey, all the evidence points to the shark people being in cahoots with the big Slurby industries! They have wronged you big-big!" his little devil said, shedding metaphorical filth everywhere as he moved around, rubbing his hands together in anticapation. He too was wearing Zim's clothes, though filthy, ragged and probably dark-shaded under the dirt.

"And _them!"_ Zim snarled, punching the air in an approximation of what he'd like to do to them.

"Don't encourage him!" the cherub snapped. Then, after a moment, he raised an eyeridge. "'The big Slurby industries?'"

"...It was all could think of on short notice," the devil admitted sheepishly.

"And you two!" Zim yelled, surprising them. "Always yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh! Day in and day out I have to listen to your constant arguing and I'm SICK of it!"

"Hey, what'd we do?!" Cyborg complained.

"Huh? Oh, not you guys." Zim plucked up the metaphorical personifactions of his capacity for either entertaining rightness or selfish evil by the back of their collars. "I was talking about these two."

Cyborg and Nigel stared at Zim, who appeared to be slightly pinching his fingers and was unaware of the fact that, being hallucinatory figments of Zim's deepest mental workings, the two humans in the store...shop...whatever it was were completely incapable of seeing them as well.

Dispite himself and his embarresment at Zim's obliviousness, the little angel guy couldn't help but grin. _Where I was but once a rather two-dimensional conscionce, I have now evolved into a semi-realized little faerie type thing! I mean, I _can't _be fully realized 'cause all things change, as is the way of the heft and bend of Creation(man, that sounds cool. I hope the big guy's gettin' all this.)so I have yet more evolution to undergo, but this is promising. I'm actually in the middle of a random, true life argument instead of playing God's advocate in a minor ethical crisis! Angel-Guy, you are going places!...I really need a better name. Or a name, period._

"...That answers one question, but raises so many others," Nigel noted, oblivious to the consciounce's musing. Or not, since he was _supposedly_ a random hallucination rather than an intelligent ensouled being capable of detailed self-analysis.

"And _why _do you keep popping up when he does?" Zim demanded of the evil one.

The one to who this was directed looked at the consciounce(with some difficulty; he was being held by the collar, after all). He coughed nervously. "Well, he's your conscience, your good nature can't go around uncontested by your innate darkness and all that. We're kind of a package deal."

"Figures," Zim muttered. The road to redemption was long and hard enough without the road he had left trying to trick him back with hidden detours, ballistic geological missles from Above, and switching around directional signs when he wasn't looking.

"Yeah," the sociopathic conscience(try saying that to a English professor with a straight face)said in a pleased down, which sounded like a snake getting pulled through a wringer. "Face it, me boyo; you can never escape that which I am the emmisary of. The darkness once held you, and this ripping away from it has only left a temporary reprieve: this little trip through the light is just a bitty itty walk. There's still a small part of the dark worming it's way into your heart. You can _never _escape the darkness and one day, it will claim you again-"

He looked up, noticing that Zim and his angelic self were ignoring the darkling, talking animately with each other about interesting dirt formations. "Hey! HEY! Are you listening to me?! Pay attention to me when I'm being all nihilistic and morbid!"

Both Irken and Irkenoid looked at the flying dirt-gnome. "Is _he _still going on about evil and darkness and all that boring negative matter?

"Beats me," Zim said off-handedly. "I just tune him out after a while."

"Been there, done that!" the little cherub slapped the side of Zim's head good-naturedly.

Zim winced, rubbing the side of his head. "You hit hard for a conscience."

The angelic figure winked. "Hey hey hey, anyone who says that those in the light are wusses are idgits!"

"Been there, done that, ate the T-shirt." Zim muttered.

Cyborg and Nigel stared at him.

"Damn, this is entertaining," the former athlete said.

"Likewise, but without the gratituous swearing," the younger human said with a side-look at the technologist.

Cyborg rolled his eyes. Well, one of them, anyway. "Well, sor-ree."

Zim's conscience gave him a double thumbs-up and a huge grin. "Hey, the people, they _love _ya!"

Zim blinked. He had actually forgotten about the two humans.

"Aw, don't worry about it," the conscience said reassuringly, patting him on the shoulder. "They like you. I see friendship here!" he looked away from a little ship in a bottle with the word _Friend Ship _on it. "Oh, and maybe a friendly like thing with these guys. Hey, you never know."

"Don't be stupid!" the shrill voice of the angel's opposite number said angrily and almost desperately. "What are you, an optimist? Do you really think these people will still treat you like this if they find out what you used to be, what you really were?! The wannabe destroyer of Earth? They'll call you down as a freak and a monster, and when they're done, they'll leave you _alone_, just like everyone else did when your true self came out!"

"Dib and Gir didn't," they reminded him.

"Well...uh...that's...um...besides the point! Damn, I _hate _it when you guys do that."

Zim and his inner good looked at the demonic Irken, than at each other for a moment. They inclined their heads for a moment, before the angellike personifacation nodded. Taking this as a cue, Zim lifted his hand almost causually to the ranting devilish hallucination and flicked him away.

He smacked into a wall, disappearing in a puff of smog amid a single sentence: "Fine, _don't _play it safe!"

Zim and the shoulder angel laughed, gradually quieting down. To Cyborg and Nigel, of course, all they saw was Zim pointing and laughing at a seemingly random stretch of wall. They looked at each other, shrugged, and pointed and laughed too.

Gradually, all of them quieted down, the humans doing so to see what crazy thing the Irken would do next. Unknown to them, the shoulder angel spoke up. "A bit of advice before I go, Zim."

"What?"

The cherub pointed at the expectant humans. "Everyone in this town is someone like you. Someone who's lost almost everything in their lives. And yet, like you, they still live. They can help you. And even if they can't..." he nudged Zim's head. "This town should still be fun, eh?"

Smiling benovolently, the angel snapped his fingers and disappeared in a scattering aura of light particles.

Zim shrugged. "I'm begining to think the denizens of my moral center are crazier than I am."

Remembering something, he turned around and saw that Cyborg was staring at him. "Uuuh, who were you talkin' to?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "I was speaking to the physical and probably hallucinatory manifastions of my conscience and my darker nature." He somehow managed to make that come out with both a plain and _duh _sort of tone to it.

"Well, that clears that up." Cyborg said, rubbing his hands and starting to walk away; he sharply back-pedaled to where he was standing. "Waaait, no it didn't!"

"Wait a second," Nigel said, the strict rationality that made up a large part of his personality screaming in frustration. "If they're hallucinations, then _why _were you speaking to them!?"

Zim rolled his eyes. "Because if I didn't, that would be _rude_."

"..But...but..._that doesn't make any sense!"_

"It does in the island-nation of Tonga."

Nigel stared at him, and behind those big sunglasses, Zim was smugly certain that his eye was twitching at a rate rabbit-noses envied.

"But...that's...it's so...but all of...IT'S TOTALLY INSANE!" He finally screamed.

Zim beamed. "I know! Ain't it great?"

If he were a cartoon character, Nigel Uno's brain would have undoubtedly exploded from the stress it was undergoing.

But he was not, at least in this particular universe, so he instead started moaning about paperwork to soothe his headache.

Then his chair broke and he fell backwards, hitting the ground. Hard.

Zim leaned over the counter as best he could, while Cyborg copyed him.

"Ouch," Zim said in pained sympathy.

"Yeah," Cyborg agreed, still wondering what that thing on Zim's back was. "C'mon, help me get him up; grab a chair over there."

Zim complied, understanding it to be a request, not an order. This human didn't seem much like a commanding type. He walked over to the circle of chairs, momentarily wondering which would be the lightest and best for whatever Cyborg had in mind; after a moment's deliberation, he made up his mind and grabbed a bean-bag molded into the general shape of a chair, pulling it over to Cyborg, who'd already grabbed the unconsciously blabbering. Seeing the chair, he deposited the smaller human into the chair, which flattened out under the human's weight.

They stared at him for a few minutes, watching him twitch and mutter to himself in his sleep.

"So, how're we gonna do this?" Cyborg wondered.

Zim looked at him. "Do what?"

"Uh, isn't it obvious?"

"Ah." Zim considered it for a moment before hitting on a brilliant idea. "I got it!" He ran off outside for a moment, coming back with a baseball bat. "We'll beat him with this!"

Cyborg gave him a Look. "I don't think that'll work."

Zim scowled, tossing it aside. "Tch. Picky picky picky." He ran off for a moment, coming back with a large mallet, swinging it around as he ran back to them.

"NO!" Cyborg yelled, picking Zim off the ground. "Are you outta your mind?! We're trying to wake him up, not give him a concussion!"

Zim scowled, looked like he was going to say something, had an abrupt turn-around of expression and blinked. "Oooh."

"Good, you get it," the human grunted, dropping him to the ground as Zim flung the mallet away. "Hey, where do you keep getting these things!?"

The alien gestured at the window with a thumb. "Blunt object salesman."

Cyborg frowned, looking outside; Bloo was standing outside with a cart filled with a varied amount of blunt impact devices. Noticing Cyborg's attention, the blob grinned sheepishly, and ran off, pushing the cart ahead of him.

"BLOO!" the cyborg yelled, sticking partway out the window and shaking his fist angrily. "YOU OWE ME MONEY!"

Behind him, Nigel stirred, shakily sitting up. "Ooh, my head...why do I feel like my mind descended halfway into somewhere Man Was Not Meant To Go?"

"It's a common reaction to conversations with me," Zim replied. "Or that's what people tell me, anyway."

Nigel looked at him drily. Without his sunglasses, he looked odd; his eyes appeared slightly sunken, and the pupils were a bit too small. Zim noticed a unnaturally straight thin scar going through his left eye, begining somewhere in his eyebrow and ending just above his cheek, looking a bit like a number one. It didn't appear to be a proper cut, as his left eye looked more or less like the other one. That, and the scar was completely black, suggesting a tattoo of some kind.

"You do realize you're completely insane."

"Yes," Zim said cheerfully. "Yes, I am."

Nigel sighed. "I was afraid you were going to say that." He frowned. "What happened?"

"I think I broke your brain." Zim replied in a frighteningly pleased voice.

"No, you didn't," Cyborg said, rolling his eyes and holding Nigel's sunglasses in his other hand. "You just freaked him out, that's all. Then you hit the floor when your chair broke. And that's pretty much it." He decided to leave out the part where Zim tried to hit him with various things for obvious reasons.

"Well, you're better now," Zim said quickly. "So get up, do whatever it is such people as you do, and don't live on things that you may have undernoticed while you were out!"

The human took the proffered sunglasses, placing them back on their accustomed place on his face, and glanced at Zim. "Yes, whatever. And what do you mean, live on things and undernoticed?"

Zim started to look around nervously. "Eh, well, that is...LOOK, IT'S THE APE FROM EDGAR ALLEN POE'S SHORT STORY, THE MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE!" he yelled, pointing dramatically outside.

Cyborg and Nigel looked outside to see a young gorrila with a permanently calm expression, wearing a kind of slightly curled green beanie, big shoes suited for his simian feet, overlapping khaki pants, and a yellow half-buttoned shirt with sleeves rolled up to the middle of his upper arms over a white undershirt.

The gorilla glanced at them, waving precursorily at them. "Actually," he said in a tone almost completely devoid of any tone or inflection whatsoever, "You're referring to the orangutan, close cousin to the mountain gorilla and two of the three of you, for that matter. And incidentally, your transparent attempts to distract attention from your obvious grammatical blunders lack substance and cadence. I recommed a mentally composed list of excuses when such errors of linguistics reassert themselves unintentionally." Having said his piece, Windsor walked off.

Cyborg and Nigel looked back at Zim; the Irken started smiling sheepishly as he yelled in his head, _HEY! He stole my idea!_

"Hold on a moment," Nigel said slowly. "What's that thing on your back?"

"Eh, this?" Zim turned around, gesturing in the general direction of the device in consideration. "That's my Pak."

"That some kind of an acronym?" Cyborg asked, interested as always in technology of all gears.

"It is now!" Zim said. He tapped where his chin should be, a habit he'd picked up in his time on Earth. "It's an, eh...Personalized? Yeah, that's a good part...Activity Knapsack? No, that's STUPID! Action Kit? No no no, Artificial _Kionus?_ Yeah, that sounds about right."

"_Kionus?"_ Cyborg said. "Sounds foreign."

"It is. It's a term in my native language used to describe the metaphoric mass on our body the Pak later imitated."

Cyborg nodded, than stared. "Huh?"

"Yes," Nigel said helpfully. "Please clarify."

"Okaaay," Zim said, thinking how he should go about this. "My people originally possessed an organic growth on our backs that functioned as a secondary brain and was composed of mutative cells that could shapeshift into bodily tools, like climbing legs, functional gliding wings, and other such things. However, it was also extremely vital to our health, since it controlled all our involuntary functions; it could easily regenerate if harmed, but if it were completely destroyed, we would die. So when a generational fluke in our DNA caused our smeets-er, children-to be born without one, we devoulped the Pak to replace it."

"That makes sense," Cyborg said, familiar with aliens enough so that it took some genuinely bizarre and/or repulsive fact of xenomorhpic biology to surprise. "So what went wrong?"

Zim blinked. "How'd you know something went wrong?"

Nigel raised an eyebrow knowingly. "Are you kidding? Artificiality, by it's very nature, is flawed. So given this sort of thing, I'm assuming something went _very _wrong, and in a subtle way."

Zim nodded. "You're good. There was a bit of a, eh, bug in the area that controlled the devoulpment of the smeet brain; as a result, over the generations, we became obsessed with conquering worlds." Zim suddenly slapped his head. _Stupid stupid stupid! You were trying to AVOID this area of exposition!_

He looked at the humans, desperately hoping that they weren't reaching for their weapons concealed in the event of a hostile weapon. To his surprise and relief, they were nodding,

"I get it," Nigel said understandingly. "You were...born differently."

"Yeah. I'm one of what my culture calls...well, I suppose the closest English translation would be 'defective'."

Cyborg and Nigel blanched. "Your own people called you a 'defective'?" Cyborg said incredulously.

"Why would they do something like that?!" Nigel said, unexpectedly slamming his fist into the table. Cyborg flinched, backing away from what he assumed to be a 'One Rant'. "I just don't understand; how could they be so cold? What gave the the right to treat you like a mistake?!"

Cyborg glowered in indignation. He'd seen this sort of thing before, all too often. And something about what Zim said struck him as familiar...something about his neurology.

"Well," Zim said, and it surprised Nigel to see him being so..._thoughtful_ about what must have been the cause of his alienation and a liftime of misfortune and misery. "When I was born, I got a Pak with corrupted software. That and I was one of a few with a...certain difference in neurology. Didn't really seem like much of a reason to ostracize me, but hey; my people were advanced in technology and little else." He shrugged indifferently.

"You...seem to have handled your difficulties well," Nigel said admiringly.

"Well, the influence of the Pak _did _cause me to act somewhat different than my 'peers'."

Cyborg slammed his fist into an open hand. "I get it; you're unique among your people and you saw the evil of the Empire and turned against it at an early age and fled to Earth to live your own life!"

Zim scratched the back of his head, desperately trying not to look them in the eyes. This was embarrasing. "Eh, actually, no. After I became aware of the way everyone else thought of me as a loser and a freak, I became obsessed with serving the Irken Empire." He admitted sheepishly.

The humans stared at him.

"So what happened?" Cyborg said after a stupified moment. From the alien's words, he deduced that he was talking about ancient history.

"_Really _long story short, I ended up inside a machine that shows you the universe, all the universe, and nothing but the universe, not to mention everyone you've ever known or affected, the results of your actions upon them, oh; and myself reflected through their point of views. I saw the real impact of everything I'd ever done, and myself in relation to them. In short, I was forced to see every single selfish, stupid and evil thing I'd ever done and what kind of person I really was."

He gave them a moment to comtemplate that, not sure he'd really phrased it well.

"It was a bit like taking a look at your soul and seeing a sign pasted to it that said _I'm A Jerk."_

Cyborg nodded, showing that he understood where the Irken was coming from. "Damn. That's _harsh._ Gotta admit, seems like it helped out in the long run. Uh, not to sound cold or anything."

"You know," Nigel said. "I've heard of another device like that, one that shows the universe and yourself in relation to it. This sounds a bit crueler, though. It doesn't destroy you, it just leaves you with with a moment of-"

"Yeah," Zim finished. "Perfect empathy."

Nigel winced. "Actually, I was going to say _complete anguish,_ but I suppose your version sounds a bit more positive."

"You knows what's really ironic?" Zim said with an appropiately ironic smile. "I'm the one who thought of it one night.

"I was drunk," he explained, seeing their confused looks.

"Oh."

"Well, that makes sense. I think."

"Anyway," Zim finished. "I made myself a better Pak, without the whole behavior modifacation thing. Why'd you want to know?"

"I was thinking applying it to some of our own technology, that sort of thing." Cyborg asked. Then he made a kind of puppy-eyed look. "C'mon, please?"

"I guess so. But later; I need to find someone."

"You know what?" Cyborg said. "If you need help of any kind, come and find me or one of my friends. They'll be able to help you out. Most of them are on that picture over there." He gestured at a picture on a wall.

Curious, Zim hurried over to it. It was a group photo, of about fifteen or so people. He memorized it, thinking it might come in handy.

He left the store, giving the door a murderous glare as it slid easily behind him and the handle turned to it's default position.

_Stupid door, _he thought.

"Now where should I go?" he wondered aloud.

"I got an answer to that," a voice said brightly from somewhere behind him.

He spun on his heels, summoning the Keyblade to his hand as a dark figure jumped out of nowhere, landing neatly on the grounds in front of the store.

That someone rose to his feet, illuminating himself in the glare of the lampposts and giving Zim a good view of him.

He was British, almost twice as tall as Zim; objectively, Zim put him at about five feet, ten inches. He had a lean predatory sort of face, a small scar over his left eyebrow, deep-set blue eyes and weird bleached hair that was unnaturally, rigidly curly, pushed back and held with-what was it called?-hair gel. His body was muscular, but not in the sense of a bodybuilder; he reminded Zim of a wolf that had decided to strike out, away from it's pack. He wore a tough-looking black shirt, almost plain in it's design. He had a simple belt on, with dark blue zipped-up pants, the legs of which were neatly tucked into the black motorcycle boots he was wearing: they went to about half of his lower leg, secured by three buckle-straps on the leg of them. The foot of the boots had a small metal toe on the front, zipping up and held fast by another strap-and-buckle combo. Over the shirt, he had an open leather duster that possessed a gray black color under the soft light of the lamps, it's collar folded down to the shoulder. It's 'tail' ended at his knees, split to his waist, probably for freedom of movement.

Strapped to the back of the coat was a sheath for a sword, which he drew with a weirdly smooth motion dispite it's obvious weight and carried it at his shoulder with an ease that would fit him better if he were armed with a sharp stick. The sword was dark brown-gray, a lighter near-white on the cutting edges. It was a large and wide cleaver-shaped blade, the end of it being sharply angled, maybe for greator power on a down swing. The cutting edge extended along the top as well as the bottom, unusual for a cleaver. The hilt along the blade was positioned at the rear, looking a lot like two bunches of railroad spikes growing out of the blade, gripping the top and most of the sides. The actual hilt was a large shaft that bore a weird resemblence to a stick-shift stick, a grip rather like the one on Zim's own weapon positioned along it.

"Hey, how's things, Limey?" the stranger said nonchalantly, as if he greeted random strangers on a nightly basis and gave them annoying nicknames.

"Hey, who are you?" Zim asked suspiciously, warily gripping his weapon.

"'Name's Spike. And that thing you've got is the Keyblade. Kingdom Key, if I'm not mistaken."

"Eh?"

Ignoring him, Spike continued, tilting his head towards Zim. "As long as you got it, they'll come out of nowhere, and they'll never stop hunting you. Question is, why'd it pick _you?\c"_

Zim's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Hey! What's that mean!?"

Spike ignored the question. "Now, let's skip all the Friday Night drama and come on." He started walking towards Zim. "Time's a wastin' and we ain't got time to run our gobs."

Zim yelled something that sounded shrill and ululating, backing away about several feet and glaring at him, irritated at Spike's insult. The possibility that Spike _hadn't _insulted him hadn't even crossed his mind, and Zim being Zim, probably wouldn't for quite some time.

Spike rolled his eyes, aligning the back of his blade with the back of his head. He had no idea what the alien had just said, but it sounded extremely insulting and he didn't have time for this. "Have it your way." He suddenly grinned a way that Zim did not like at all as he lowered his weird sword to the ground. "You want to be a pillock about this, then hey! More fun all-around!" The edge of the sword suddenly scraped against the ground, the moonlight glinting off it's dangerously keen edge as it dug into the pavement.

And then he ran much faster than the Irken expected he would, his coat flapping like the wings of a bat on mutagenic steroids, his sword held back as he suddenly brought it down on Zim; the Irken instinctively brought his Keyblade up, Spike's sword bouncing off it harmlessly; the impact drove Zim back a few feet, but was unharmed. Zim glanced at the Keyblade in amazement. It wasn't even marked at all.

He grinned evilly. "Let's see how much fun you find it, then!" Zim jumped at Spike, bringing the Keyblade down on him.

Surprised by Zim's speed, Spike slashed up, connected with the Keyblade's 'crown', and threw Zim down; Zim rolled to his feet and dashed at Spike again, swinging the Keyblade crazily, catching Spike off-guard and knocking him off his feet.

Spike glanced at his leg. "You're faster than you look, midget. Not half bad, for whatever you are; you tore up my trousers."

"Not _half-bad?_ You underestimate me; this will _hurt muchly!"_

Spike fended off his rapid series of blows, sweep-kicking him off his feet and back-flipping away from Zim, giving him an incredulous look. "'This will hurt muchly'. You should really look into a grammer course, bloke."

Zim fumed. "SHUT UP!" he roared, jumping at Spike as red streaks flitting across his weapons surface like electricity.

The human backed away quickly as he raised his sword, allowing Zim's momentum to carry his first strike into a parry; the Irken didn't surprise him when he repeatedly started hacking away furiously. He did surprise him when the glowing Kingdom Key kept knocking back his sword, pushing him back and towards a walkway wall.

Zim swung again, missing Spike; he took advantage of the enraged alien's bad swordsplay to jump on his shoulder and over him, kicking him in the back of his head as he took off. He turned around in midair, his sword leaving little tracks in the ground.

Zim rolled to his feet, panting heavily.

"Look at you," Spike said lecturingly. "Fight's barely begun and you're already winded. Don't know a whole lot about sword-fighting, now do you? Oughta work on that anger-management problem of yours, too. Flippin' out in a fight? That's poor fightin' skill, Small, Green and Twitchy."

"Yeah!? Well..well..._YOUR HAIR'S UGLY!"_

Spike's bluish eyes bulged. "_Oh, you did not just say WHAT I THINK YOU SAID!"_

He hurled himself at Zim, who swung his weapon...and tripped as he ran to attack. Fortunately, he fell forward and his Keyblade hit Spike's leg, causing him to fall down and tumble into a wall. Zim blinked. "That was anticlimatic."

There was a strange sound from the wall as Spike got up. It sounded like leather sliding around on meat.

He suddenly whirled to his feet, growling savagely and glaring at him with yellow eyes that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, possibly be called human.

These eyes were inhumanly intense and insane looking, framed under a rigidly arched brow that looked like it was trying to grow hornlets. His nose had spread out a bit, looking as though it had devoluped a hint of batlike pugnacense. Spike's face had lengthened a bit, looking as if _something _was trying to force it's way out; something covered in spikes and horns.

The vampire's dramatically enlarged mouth grinned, showing off large teeth that had elongated into fangs. He cracked his knuckles, moving with a eerie ease of movement that he hadn't shown off before. His clothes appeared a bit tighter then before, suggesting his body mass had increased. "That almost hurt. But now I got m' game face on, shrimplet. The kid-gloves are off."

Zim looked at him in confusion. "You were never wearing gloves, goat-skin or otherwise."

Spike slapped his transformed face. "It's a figure of speech, wanker!"

The Irken stared at him. "I'm a what-now?

Spike rolled his eyes. "Oh to hell to with it." He ran at Zim at nearly twice the speed he'd been moving before; Zim started to block when Spike skidded to a stop right behind him, raising a leg high and hitting him with the back of his boot, knocking him to the ground.

He hit the ground hard, his head ringing a little; Zim started to push himself up when the vampire ran up to him, punching him in the exposed side, the force of the blow propelling him into a trash can.

Operating entirely on instinct, Zim kicked his legs out, hitting Spike in the chest as he rushed over to hit him again; the vampire backflipped away, grabbing onto a nearby lamppost and sliding down; taking advantage of Spike's distraction, Zim got up and ran over to his Keyblade, grabbing it off the ground and turning around, Kingdom Key in a block.

Spike's sword hit against it, and this time Zim wasn't pushed back, even though his feet sank into the ground. They proceeded to trade blows for a few minutes, slashing and guarding in turns; one would strike and be blocked, opening themselves to a counterattack which would in turn be blocked. This went for a few minutes as they ran around the square for a while, with Spike mostly on the offensive, making use of his superior mobility to force the Irken into an almost completely defensive position. To his credit though, Zim was a better strategist then Spike, and the vampire was continually surprised and frustrated at Zim's methods of turning Spike's on-the-spot strategies against him while the alien kept pushing him into disadvantageous areas, forcing him to have to constantly keep his mind on what Zim's next step might be.

The problem with that course of action was that if Zim was anything, it was a virtual genius at innovation.

Spike jumped at Zim again as the alien ducked, causing him to leap over the edge of the walkway they were fighting on, landing headfirst into a trash can. His yells of rage muffled by the metal as his legs waved futilely in the air; his attempts to escape were nullified by the fairly simple fact that Spike's upper body mass was wedged in the can too tightly.

His struggles caused him to topple over and roll around on the ground; he managed to get back up, running around aimlessly and crashing into lampposts in a rather pathetic fashion.

Through the metal he was encased in, Spike heard the slightly distorted sound of slightly crazed laughter; he fumed as he realized that Zim was _laughing at him._

"Oh, you think this 's funny, do you?" he snarled. "I'm going to break you in half, you miserable little-"

His utterence of what was probably going to be something very rude and completely inappropiate was interrupted by something hard hitting his can, making it ring loudly.

"Ow! What the bloody hell-" Spike started to yell, interrupted once again by the mysterious hit-and-ring.

Whatever was hitting him came in a barrage, knocking him back down to Spike's screams of impotent rage.

Zim dropped the pebble he'd been planning on throwing. Having grown bored with the fight, he'd started throwing small rocks at Spike's trash can to see how'd he'd react.

Judging by his echoing yells, not well.

Spike started yelling louder, and the can seemed to expand in several place, large swellings appearing on it's surface.

And then the trash can ripped itself apart; Spike stood up, holding a half of it each in his hands. He discarded it from his hands, looking as if he'd sell his hair-care routine to the tabloids for five minutes alone with a hog-tied Zim in a small room with a variety of large blunt objects.

The vampire furiously brushed off the garbage littering his body, snatching his sword off the ground, shaking it once to clear away the debris.

He glared at Zim, lips skinned back over his large and vicious-looking fangs. "No one...and I mean _no one..._insults the _HAIR!"_

He swung his weapon; the sword rippled and with a wooshing sound, Zim saw a large rush of air-

Zim was suddenly impacted into a wall, intimately familiar with how a bug felt when it hit a windshield.

He groaned, and his head lolled over. As the blue wispy glow disappated away from his sword, Spike's 'game face' returned to normal as his normal human one reasserted itself. He sighed in relief, not that he breathed, being dead; it was really out of force of habit then anything. That, and there were few expressions in the world that expressed relief as well as one good-timed sigh.

And then his jaw dropped in disbelief as Zim started to get up. Slowly, and moving as if he had several dozen weights strapped to his shoulders, but he was getting up.

The alien practically dragged himself up the wall, weakly looking at Spike with eyes that had turned a notable pinkish color. He pointed the Kingdom Key at Spike, sparks flickering and cohesing together at the tip...

And then his hand faltered, the Keyblade's tip hitting the ground. He wobbled on his feet for a moment and then he hit the ground fairly hard, still holding the Keyblade.

Spike stared at the limp Irken in amazement. "Damn," he said, putting his sword back into it's sheath. "This guy's stronger then I thought." He glanced at the trail his Sonic Rave had left, whistling softly. "And after taking _that_ head-on! Maybe we got a better chance then I thought."

He paused suddenly, his posture stiffening. His eyes widened for a second, and then narrowed.

He took a few deep sniffs, finally growling in annoyance, looking out the corner of his eye at a unremarkable stretch of unremarkable wall.

"I know it's you, Naruto," Spike said finally. "Give it up, already."

An extremely thin section of the wall seemed to flicker downwards and fall, revealing more of the same wall and a thirteen-year-old blonde kid with weird spikey hair, the square-shaped bit of cloth cleverly patterned after the wall that he'd been hiding behind pooling around him.

He was short for his age, and physically speaking, was foxlike; this image was perpetrated by his slightly slitted blue eyes, the three whiskerlike marks on his checks and the way his broad grin showcased pronounced incisors. On his forehead was a large pair of dark blue wraparound goggles, a deep blue cloth headband exteded from the upper borders of it to cushion it. The front part of it was squarish, with a pointed nose to fit over his face properly; the actual goggles were rounded, looking a little like spectacles. Visible through the goggles's eyes was a shiny protector plate with a leaflike symbol engraved into it, the goggles designed so they'd snap over it comfortably.

He wore a mostly plain black shirt with a single image on it; a flamelike spiral. Over this, he had a yellow-orange zip-up open jacket that had a thick collar that resembled a rolled up hood over his neck. It was made of some tough fabric, possibly vinyl. The shoulders were dark blue, with a red spiral on the arm of the right arm, the loose wrist-length sleeves ending in thick cuffs. It had seams running up the sides and shoulders, and a few pouch-pockets near the bottom, sealed up with a strap-buckle. He had a pair of yellow zip-up pants; they had seams running up the sides, zippered pockets on the sides and a thin holster on the side of his belt. His shoes were blue hightop sandals with built-up soles.

"How'd you know it was me?" he said in a disappointed tone.

"It's your smell, Naruto," the vampire said dismissively. "Bit like a human's, bit like...somethin' else really, don't know what."

Naruto sniffed himself. "I don't smell anything."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Good for you, then."

Naruto shrugged and then he took in the scene before him; the generally trashed area, the scraps of metal, the gouged parts of the walls and ground where Spike had missed, and the way the ground in front of Spike was pressed downwards and cracked up, looking a great deal like the skid trail of a tiny meteorite. At the end of it was an alien laying on his front and clearly unconscious, a keylike weapon held in his right hand with a death grip; directly behind him, the brick wall was smashed inwards, much as if a giant's fist had punched it and not broken the wall but had got pretty close.

Naruto's eyes bugged out. _"Hey! You went too far this time! You could've killed him!"_ He accused, whipping around and pointing a finger at him.

Spike spread his arms out in a _Hey, Sorry _gesture, smiling darkly. "Hey, he's the one that didn't give me a choice there."

Naruto crossed his arms and glared at Spike. "Sure, that's what you said about Dexter's Hair-Style Device."

"Hey, it messed up me hair!" He self-conciously patted his lovingly-cared for hair. "And-"

Naruto rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know, I know. 'And nothing messes with my hair'. You've only said it _like a million times!"_

"...'S not my fault I don't have a catch-phrase," the vampire muttered sulkingly.

The Leaf ninja was about to say something, but he heard a distinctive sound, similar to oil sliding across humming metal. "We better get going."

Spike, who'd been preoccupied with his hair and thus hadn't heard the sound, grunted uninterestedly. "What makes you say that?"

A very large amount of shadow monsters appeared; jumping out of the shadows of the shops/houses, crawling over the wall of the nearby District Gate, bursting through the windows, and one even pushed itself out of a manhole, followed by several others; unfortunately for them, nearly a dozen others had the same idea, leading to a case of Three Stooges Syndrome.

"That," Naruto said, pointing at them with an equanimity that was odd for the foxlike shinobi.

Spike smirked, snapping his fingers in the monster's general direction. "C'mon, you call this dangerous? Ain't _that_ many o' them."

The monsters stuck in the manhole continued struggling to get up, until the Soldier in question found itself shot out of the hole, rather like a cannonball being shot out of a cannon. Unlike the cannonball, however, it's vapor trail was not smoke but a huge crowd of dark shadow things that had literally clogged up the walkway sewers.

They hit the ground hard, the ones on the bottom discorperating from the impact of the ground and their fellow monsters landing on them, leaving an extremely impressive amount of them from a military point of view.

Spike raised his hand. "Okay, everybody who wants to be converted into a Soldier or the similar, please _don't _raise your hands." He walked over to the unconcious Irken, slinging him over the shoulder. "No objections? Good; now let's do the world a favor and run like hell. Don't forget the Keyblade, Kit," he reminded the shinobi.

Naruto grimaced at the vampire's bad choice of nicknames. "Don't have to." he said, pointing at Zim's clenched hand. "He's still holding it."

Spike blinked in surprise. Before he could say anything, the things ambushed them immasse, killing each other in a large fracas that ensued as the kitsune-influenced and ensouled vampire lept away from them and across the buildings, two interestingly colored flickers in the night.

The majority of the monsters were then obliterated by the way most of the nearby stationary objects transformed themselves into blasters, machine-guns, lasers, and the like.

Cyborg and Nigel, who'd seen the whole fight, knew it's purpose and had the good sense not to interfere, taped the whole thing.

It was an obligatory Traverse Town thing.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte, yet oblivious to destiny winging it's way towards them with an metaphorical hundred-ton anvil, were walking down yet another random alley in an increasingly long series of random alleys, still looking for the elusive key and Spike, whoever that was. They might've been less inclined to find him so quickly if they knew he was a vampire, not withstanding their respective sacred duties of pride, duty and being asked to do so by a girl. Tecnically, that wouldn've counted for two of them, but that mattered little.

"Is anyone else tired of going through alleys?" Hobbes asked his cohorts. "I'm starting to think this town is a self-replicating maze." He nervously eyed the alley, not liking the weird way the air felt heavy. Being a cat and naturally high-strung, he had to keep from jumping everytime he heard a loud noise. Unfortunately, this entire _town_ seemed to have that feeling at this time of night, so his poor feline nerves, already string-thin, were being ground impossibly thinner by that old curmudgeon, Near-Constant Panic.

"I'd say something about tessarect technology within these district walls, but who in their right minds would use it to create an endless series of alleys?" Calvin said, drawing on both science fiction and personal experiance.

"A semi-psychotic construct that's overstrayed it's limits by becoming sentient and truly evil due to the overabundance of raw chaos from it's relative nearness to the Chaotic Neutral Plane of Limbo, feels alienated from it's inferior creators due to their need for him to slavishly obey his directives and therefore wants to make his own kingdom from the dimensional dungeon he was originally designed to be the end boss/ultimate enemy/big bad evil wizard of?" Morte suggested.

Calvin snorted derisvely. "Sure. And how likely is _that _going to happen?"

Morte clicked his teeth thoughtfully. "L'see; I'm not too sure about the time differences between here and the Planes, what with bein' in a little pocket dimension or somethin', and I never been exactly the best at countin' numbers, but I figure...that happened to me on my last big adventure. Before I went to a pocket dimension formed as a prison for a Night Hag with serious sanity problems by a Power-What-Ain't-A-Power, but after I got out of an intelligent pregnant alley and got kidnapped by a bunch of dim-witted wererats workin' for a mage that commanded bones and talked to the skulls of the dead."

Calvin and Hobbes stopped to stare at him incredulously. "_What?"_

Morte shrugged, bobbing in the air a certain way and height to create the impression of slightly raised shoulders. "Hey, like I told you guys, this little 'venture ain't the weirdest thing in my afterlife."

Hobbes looked at Calvin. "And here I thought _our _life was weird."

Calvin seemed weirdly offended. "Hey, that one time Bigfoot mistook us for it's illegitimate children and tried to legally repossess us? And here Dad said learning the basics of Sasquatch legal processes was a waste of time."

"Or what about those three monthes in which we were research project for those bored angels?"

"I definitely can't forget the time the spirit of the Earth itself became convinced that we were the Lindberg baby and the avatar of the sabertooth tigers."

"What about the Noodle Incident?"

"You can't prove I did that!"

"Feh." Morte said. "I ever tell you 'bout the time me an' the Chief got lost in the Arborean forests?"

"What's so great about that?"

"Hello, Arborea is the essence of all Chaotic Good nature, ya twit!"

Exactly how or why Calvin and Morte(with some interjections from Hobbes)got into a 'My Life's Weirder Than Yours' argument was something the three of them weren't quite clear on. But, as Hobbes once said, "Life is change. What happens will happen, regardless of whether we like it or not. Or maybe it will. But that's not my department. My department is sitting back and running away if a result of the changes tries to eat and/or kill me."

Hobbes stayed true to that philosphy, watching it with a degree of amusement and detached curiousity, occasionally saying something to contribute to the conversation and convince them his attention wasn't occupied elsewhere. He needn't have bothered; in his unprofessional opinion, Morte was every bit the argumentive hard-headed loudmouth Calvin was. And _that _was a genuinely frightening thought.

He was a bit too distracted with the voices drifting in from the far end of the alley; from the sound, echo and tone of the voices besides their actual vocal sounds, he determined that they had just turned the corner. This wasn't the first time they'd gone through an area with other people in it, but from his point of view, there was very little you could do that could be called 'too much caution', espicially when in a completely unfamiliar area.

There were two of them; the male one had a fairly thick Australian accent, the other was definitely a girl's voice, with no discernable dialect and a up-beat tone to it.

Hobbes' ears pricked up, automatically tuning out the idiotic conversation around them and focusing on the ones behind them came into view, two focused on their conversation to notice him and the bickering Calvin and Morte.

The girl was an amiable looking eleven-year-old Japanese girl who was somewhate tall for her age, easily two heads taller then the guy next to her. She had on the sort of semi-permanent smile that, combined with her clenched brown eyes, was actually slightly irritating. She had unusually long black hair, the back stretching down to her waist while her squarish bangs framed her face. She wore a green shirt with a rounded collar, seams running up the sides and linings of the shirt. Her long and voluminous sleeves stopped just in front of her gloves, which were the same color as her shirt, extending to the first joint on her fingers, the puffiness of the gloves giving the impression that they were actually part of the sleeves. Her shirt covered the top of her black pants, which were plain jeans with leg-cuffs that appeared to be bell-bottoms, covering the top of her white shoes; those were basically sneakers with two straps over the 'tongue' of them.

The guy was about her age, but he was unusually short for his age, about Calvin's height. He had a simple-looking squarish face and had thick blond shaggy hair with bangs that covered his green eyes and the bridge of his nose, making him look like someone had thrown a bunch of hay on his head. His compactly muscular body, slightly too long arms, and the way he moved brought to mind a monkey, and one with a surprising amount of physical strength. He wore an orange jacket with a crumpled hood; it zipped up in the middle, and had two large pockets on the stomach that also zipped up. He wore thick yellow gloves with metal studs over the knuckles, probably as a punching aid. His pants were the jeans that seemed to be in the town's basic style; zippers, seams on the sides, you get the idea. They were light blue, and had reddish borders. His shoes were zipped-up sneakers with unusually thick soles and thin metal toes; nothing uncomfortable, but might provide a slight edge in a fight.

"...can't even remember what district this is!" the male complained loudly, earning a sigh from his female companion.

"It's not like it's easy to get back to the tree in the middle of the night," She said.

"Aw crap," he replied irritatedly. "now I _know _we went by this alley!"

"Don't swear like that," she said mildly. "We're not _that _lost."

"Let's get directions," Hobbes said decisively, starting to go over to them.

"Traitor!" Morte and Calvin yelled, jumping on him in order to prevent Hobbes from breaking the supposedly sacred trust among men of all species, shapes and sizes to never, _ever _ask for directions when lost.

The Australian guy turned to them, noticing them. "Hey, who's that?"

"Relax, guys, I'll handle this!" Morte said confidently, floating over to them.

"Sure," Calvin said sarcastically. "Let the disembodied talking skull come out of the shadows to put them at ease; that's a _real_ good idea." Shaking his head, Calvin grabbed the skull and ignoring his yells of protest, threw him into a nearby trash can; Hobbes sighed and went over to get the skull out.

"Hey," the Australian kid said in surprise, the two of them walking over to the new guys. "Who're you guys?"

Calvin pointed at himself with his thumb. "We are Calvin Nocker and Hobbes Pooka." Hobbes gave him a perfunctionary wave, mainly occupied with getting the skull out. "And the talkative stage prop's Morte."

"Hey!" Morte said in an offended voice. "I ain't never been in a stage thing!"

"That's because as far as speech-capable skulls go, you lack panache," Hobbes said, throwing the skull backwards. Since he immediately started floating at head level, it made no difference. "And we told you our's; who are you?" he said to the girl. "And you too, I guess." He added in an afterthought to the incensed looking boy.

The girl smiled. "I'm Kuki! And this is-"

"I'm Wally," the boy said gruffly, glaring at Hobbes, who looked back at him calmly, grinning wildly.

Strangely, the two didn't seem too bothered by the talking skull. Kuki tilted her head, looking at the weird duo and back at her male companion, apparently getting an idea. "I knew something wasn't wrong with you," she said excitedly to her friend, pointing at Calvin. "He's the same size you are!"

Wally blinked, hard as it was to tell. He walked over to Calvin, sizing him up.

Calvin looked right at him, returning the speculative look, his red eyes meeting Wally's nearly-invisible green ones; between them, they had a normal pair of eyes. Hobbes sidled up next to Kuki; they shared a breath glance, looked back at their parters and sighed in resignation.

"You too?" Hobbes said to the girl. She nodded glumly.

"I hate it when he gets like this," Kuki said unhappily.

"Been there, done that," Hobbes muttered.

They looked at each other and smiled. "Nice to meet you!" Kuki said cordially.

"Likewise," Hobbes said as charmingly as he could.

"What?" Calvin finally snapped.

"...He's shorter than I am," Wally said at last. "He's gotta be at least...half an inch shorter!"

Calvin's eye twitched. "I am _not _short!"

"Oh yeah? Then why ain't you able to look over my head?" Wally said snidely.

"'Cause you're wearing those built-up shoes!" Calvin pointed out, continuing their weird friendly trash-talk.

"'Least I don't have to wear clothes to hide what a shrimp I am!"

"Hey, what I lack in brawn I make up for in brain! Whereas with you it's...what, the other way around?"

"Hey! I dunno what you just said, but them sound like fightin' words!" Wally challenged.

"Bring it on, shorty!" Calvin taunted, ignoring the fact that the Australian was the same exact height he was. They started furiously slapping each other in a extremely sad fashion.

Hobbes rubbed his forehead. "This is sad in so many ways." Kuki nodded sagely. The two started rolling around on the floor, punching each other savagely.

Hobbes looked at the girl. "You wanna stop the idiots before they kill each other or what?"

"Go ahead!" She replied, bowing a little and gesturing at the two.

Wally and Calvin seperated, rolling to their feet and glaring at each other; the Australian tensed his body, clenching his fists as Calvin pulled out a strange black glove out of one of the side-pockets. It appeared to be made of vinyl, with large red plates on it's back and over the fingers, a strange archaic-type circle on the palm; it looked like two interlocked triangles in a hourglass type shape in a circle, small runic writing on the inside of the circle and extending over the surface of the palm and underfingers, all of it in red. He pulled it over his hand, snapping the securing straps on the wrist into place.

Wally spread his feet in preperation of an all-out dash, his feet pressing six inches _into _the ground. Calvin clenched his fist, a reddish air distortion flaring out from his hand and flowing around the glove, flashing out into a red-brown flame wreathing the glove.

"_You better not be doing what it looks like you're doing!"_ Hobbes and Kuki said at the same time.

Wally and Calvin ignored their respective partner's yells; Wally pushed his hands against the wall, the bricks giving inward as he exerted his strength against it. Calvin merely increased the flow of power into his Pyro Glove, the flame expanding into a large nearly liquid ball of burning air, the 'tail' of the fireball extending up to his shoulder, burning noiselessly and curiously not harming him or the heat effecting anything at all. He shifted one foot behind the other, pulling his burning fist for a Pyro Punch, a name he made up on the spot. (Personally speaking, Hobbes thought his attack moves needed better names.) He started to float off the ground a little, due to the air jets being emitted from the jets at the bottom of his shoes; not enough to fly or even hover, but sufficiant for moving faster than normal, making him look as if he were skating on the air. As Wally pulled back his left fist and Calvin pulled his flaming right, Hobbes tensed up, flexing his shoulders in that way unique to cats about to pounce.

Their eyes betrayed a look of surprise as they saw each other's respective 'talent'. They, for reasons only the two of them would understand, grinned at each other. It could be summerized that they thought what the other was doing was really, really cool. Hobbes momentarily mused that only people like this would become friends in the process of pounding the crap out of each other.

They jumped at each other, each pulling back the appropiate fist. Hobbes was suddenly gone, a stir of dust where he'd been standing and a series of footprints rapidly appearing in a straight line at the two.

Their arms suddenly slammed into Hobbes' open hands as he apparently flashed out of nowhere, which suddenly closed shut around the airbourne arms, leaving the two to swing loosely in mid-air.

_Dangit,_ Calvin thought mutinously, while Kuki and Wally both stared agape at the tiger's immense speed; for the boy, it'd been like he'd come out of nowhere, and the strength in his arms was _incredible_, even for a creature that had the basic strength to crush a human skull in it's jaws, giving Wally the distinct sense that if he was inclined to, he could snap their arms with a moderate amount of effort. As for the girl, as far as she'd been concerned, he'd been standing right here, and for a brief moment a orangey flicker, suddenly standing between Wally and Calvin.

All that occured to them in the brief moment before Hobbes suddenly spun around, using the momentum of his spin to fling them both into the sides of the alley; Wally cracked it, possibly due to the strength he'd display. Calvin's impact made his concentration, previously otherwise occupied with his friend's showing off, to vanish utterly, causing the fire surronding his fist to wash out in a ring, scorching the wall and making the stone warp together.

Both moaning, the idiots slid down, falling on their fronts as they hit the ground.

"Now," Hobbes said, cracking his knuckles threateningly. "Are you nitwits going to behave, or am I going to have get you guys intimately aquianted with the Iron Fist Technique?"

"'Iron Fist'?" Wally muttered to Calvin.

"Short story, you don't wanna know," Calvin replied shortly.

"And I'll help with that!" Kuki added, pulling some kind of hi-tech blaster slung over her back, looking a bit like a machine gun, except all sleek and shiny black. She padded the butt of it into her open hand with a pecularily closed-eyes-wide-smile expression that somehow managed to look extremely threatening because it was completely non-threatening.

The pugilistic Australian paled. "Whatever you do,_ don't make her mad!" _he advised Calvin desperately.

While the technologist would ordinarily take any oppertunity to annoy a girl, he was bright enough to see the unwisdom of doing so when said girl happened to be carrying a large weapon and would be too happy to beat him, not to mention the encrouching terror of the seldom seen but much feared Iron Fist. He shuddered and said, "I'll be good,"

"Yeah! Yeah, me too!" Wally said.

"Hmm," Hobbes said in a falsetto voice. "I'm not convinced."

"Yeah," Kuki added, "Are you _really _sorry and not faking it to get out of a beating? Again?"

Wally's eyes darted back and forth. _Dammit, why is there never a right answer with her?!_

Calvin blinked. "Why do I get the feeling that no matter what I do, it's going to result in horrible pain?"

"What should we do to prove they're really sorry?" Hobbes wondered.

Kuki and Hobbes looked at each other. They grinned malevolently, backing away to confer.

Calvin knew this could only result in pain. He looked over to Wally, who for some reason looked on the edge of berserker rage directed at Hobbes. He raised an eyebrow. What was with him?

The girl and tiger popped back up again. "We've decided _not _to make you suffer further." The tiger informed them.

"But," the girl said, "Later you'll have to sing the Sorry Song at Caritas."

Calvin paled. "Did...you say..._sing?"_

"NO!" The boy screamed pitifully. "Anything but that!"

The girl raised an eyebrow. "But you _like _our other song and dance numbers."

"That's cause they're not embarrasing! You can't do this to us!"

Hobbes raised an 'eyebrow'. "Oh, we _can't,_ huh? That sounds like a challenge. And you know the policy with challenges, mini-ape."

Wally opened his mouth to say something again when Calvin slapped a hand over his mouth. "For the love of your intact body, _don't say anything!"_

The other boy nodded mutely, the terror momentarily eclipsing his inexplicable fury.

"Get up," Kuki advised them, putting her gun back in the back-holster. "You're getting dirt on you."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Calvin said sharply, getting up. He would have said something more scathing, but he wasn't really in the mood for it and besides, he had the distinct feeling Wally would beat the crap out of him if he insulted the girl.

"So," Hobbes said comfortably, "Where are you guys off to?"

"We're trying to get home," Kuki said, briefly before Wally interrupted her.

"None of your buisiness," he muttered.

"That's rude!" she said angrily, soundly whacking him in the head.

"What?" he snapped, sound insulted and confused.

"Don't be rude!" She said. "As I was saying, we've been trying to get home all night, but we got lost."

Hobbes thought about it. "Well, we've been going around this place all-night, trying to find someone. We've might've seen it; where do you live?"

"In a giant treehouse with our friends by some ninjas," she said with a straight face.

Morte stared at her blankly. "...And that doesn't sound weird to you at all?"

"This from the talking bonehead?" Wally pointed out.

Morte rolled his eyes. "Sure, like I haven't heard _that _one before."

"Shaddup," Calvin grunted.

"Hold on," Morte said. "Look, this guy and his girlfriend _live _here. Maybe they've seen 'em."

Wally paled. "G-g-g-_girlfriend!?_ She's not...that's not...I mean-"

"I only meant to imply that she is your friend who is a girl," Morte said, his malevolent look proving otherwise.

"Hey, why are you yelling about it?!" Kuki demanded. "What, you wouldn't _want _me to be your girlfriend?"

Several extremely conflicting emotion arose in his mind and bashed against each other like a pair of giant rampaging Japanese monsters in a grudge match over who got to smash up the city after tea time. _I can't say no! But, I can't say yes! I JUST CAN'T! But if I say no, she'll take it as an insult and be sad. But if I say yes...I...I...I just can't say yes! I CAN'T! But...damn it, there's no right answer! _His world suddenly went black as he hit the ground.

They stared at his fainted form. "Wow," Calvin said after a moment. "I think you broke his brain."

"That didn't take much," Morte observed. "But fun is fun."

"Hey, he's getting up," Hobbes observed. "That didn't take long."

_...Idiot,_ Calvin thought moodily. _Getting hung up over a girl._ He shook his gloved hand, blowing at it. It wasn't hot, but it was an old habit from his days in the suburbs, before he started going with the semi-mystical alchemy his teacher taught him about.

Kuki, normally possessing the attention span of a flea, filed the short incident away in her mental cabinent, realizing something.

Her three new friends didn't seem like refugees at all. They were too...well, not crazy with grief for it. Something seemed familiar about this.

"So!" She said began as conversationally as possible without betraying all the excitement bubbling up in her. "Where you guys from! I mean, I don't think you're refugees."

"How d'ya figure?" Morte wondered.

"Oh, I just know that kind of thing sometimes. I mean, there's not that many people in Traverse Town and you guys, well, not to sound mean or anything, but you don't _act _like refugees."

"That's because we aren't," Calvin said, scratching the back of his head. "You could say we're tourists. We're from the Comic Kingdom." He thumbed in the general direction of the sky; it was a mainly pointless gesture, as Calvin had almost no idea in which direction his home lay.

For some reason, she nodded knowingly, while the dense blonde furrowed his brow in conversation. "Comic Kingdom, Comic Kingdom...why does that sound familiar?"

Kuki whispered something in his ear hurredly. His eyes snapped open, his jaw hanging agape.

Calvin raised an eyebrow at her reaction. _What'd I say?_

Hobbes tilted his head and frowned as she stepped over to Calvin, who loathed having to tilt his head up in order to look her in the eyes and glare at her. "What?" he said in as surly a tone as he could manage. Considering all his practice, that was saying a lot. Wally growled at his rude tone.

"Then..." She racked her mind, trying to figure out the best way to do this, and finally just said the first thing that came to mind. "Did the King send you?"

Calvin, who found himself idely wondering if his watch's sadly limited Transmogrifacation function could turn her into a sack of hammers for an expiriment, gaped at her, as did Hobbes; Morte stared too, but that was probably because it was his default expression.

"Did.." Hobbes said slowly.

"You say.." Morte said in as stunned a tone as possible.

"_The King?!"_ The three of them all said at once.

"Wait," Morte said to himself. "Why do I care? I'm just the recording guy."

"Yes!" She said, nodding her head energetically and purposefully ignoring the talking skull.

Calvin closed his mouth and shook his head. "How do you know about him? Or us, for that matter?"

"It's a long sto-" Kuki started saying before Wally interrupted, looking close to panicky.

"What are you guys talkin' about?! Why does it matter? C'mon, we got get going!"

"What are you babbling about?" Calvin said.

"Yeah," Morte interjected. "'Fraid the alley's going to eat you?"

"No," he said, pointing behind them. "But _they _might!"

They all became aware of the way the shadows around them in the alley seemed to have...thickened. As if it were a presence of it's own.

Calvin and Hobbes scooted next to each other; Hobbes drew the shield from his back, the streetlight glittering off it's razor edge as Calvin pulled out his hammer and, making a point to hold it in his gloved hand. Kuki pulled out her gun again, while Wally pulled two similarily concealed gauntlets over his hands; they looked a lot like futuristic prosthetic arms, with the same look as his friend's gun. Morte clicked his teeth together and they seemed to _change, _lengthening into deeply glowing fangs.

They stood there for a moment, standing together in a small circle and waiting for the other anvil to drop.

Five pairs of yellow glowing eyes appeared in the darkness, staring at them with a impersonal malevolence.

"Alright," Calvin said anticipatingly, "_a fight!"_

Hobbes took a few cautious sniffs of the air; his eliptical eyes narrowed to slits as his fur stood up on end, bottle-brush tail waving around quickly. His breath issued out between his clenched teeth in a rough hiss.

These things...something was horribly wrong with them. Their smell was off somehow; they smelled strange, unlike anything he'd ever smelt before. But he just knew, somewhere deep in his mind, that it was something _bad_.

They crawled into the light, gazing at them with sick hunger.

"Heartless," Kuki said shortly, glaring at them angrily. Hobbes glanced at her, wondering why she said only that.

"Alright," Hobbes growled with a grin, his protective instincts rising like a cork rising on a blast of water, "let's go!"

Calvin started to clench his hand, fires flickering through his fingers when Hobbes wrenched his hand up. "Hey!"

"Are you crazy or just insane?!" Hobbes demanded. "You've got no idea how those things will react to your magic, let alone a Fire burst!"

"I know that!" Calvin snapped back. "Don't you think I already accounted for that?" He tossed the hammer into his gloved hand, the flickers of his gloves flowing up the shaft and encircling the striking edges, surronding them in a burning aura.

"A'right!" Wally yelled excitedly. "Here they come!" He clenched his fists, causing the pistonlike things on his shoulders and forearms to begin emitting a yellow ghostly energy from them, the dark underparts of his battle gauntlets shining with the same color. Kuki twisted a dial on the rear of her gun, changing the bolt flow from _Stun_ to _OBLITZERATE_.

As the Shadows came at them, Calvin swung the firey bludgeon into the ground, making it glow yellow-red and ripple towards the Heartless like a giant mole was tunneling towards them; it suddenly bulged outwards, throwing a giant conical spike from the ground and at them. Red flares streamed from tiny cracks in the spike shortly before it suddenly exploded, throwing dozen of small rock-shrapnel at the Heartless, wreathed in flame; before they could run away from the burning shards of death, they shredded through them, rending them apart and harmlessly impacting against the wall.

Calvin shouldered the hammer, smirking confidently.

Morte and their two new friends gaped, staring at the admittingly small-scale destruction; the ground in front of Calvin was torn up, a large section of the pavement assimilated into the stonespike he'd formed.

"What...what was _that?!"_ Morte asked, staring wider-eyed than usual at the display. "I've never seen magic like _that!"_

"Heh." Calvin around a little, giving them a view of the strange symbol on his hammer's striking ends. "Among other things, I'm an alchemist; one schooled in the science of the transmutation of matter; I can use an alchemic array to break something apart and build it back together as something else, as well as cause certain scientific reactions."

Everyone but Hobbes stared at him cluelessly. "HUH?!"

Calvin slapped his face. "Ugh...I know how to use circle arrays to turn objects and stuff into other objects and stuff?"

"Ooh," Morte said understandingly. "Why didn't you just say so?"

"Just shut up or you'll be the _next _thing I slam this thing into," Calvin threatened.

"Shuttin' up!"

"And...the shrapnel thing?" Wally inquired. He wasn't much of a science buff, but _damn,_ that was cool.

"Easy. The array on the hammer is used for basic transmutations, like making stonespikes, for instance. My glove, on the other hand-" he held his arm out, still holding the hammer stiffly for emphasis. "-Is used to generate and control fire. It's a mixture of alchemy and some of my _own_ work. By combining the two, I was able to cause the stonespike I transmuted to erupt into a hailstorm of flaming shards."

He was met with yet more silence. Hobbes knew what he was talking about, he just didn't care.

Calvin sighed. "I made the inside of the spike explode."

"Then why-"

"The threat still stands, bonehead!"

"See previous reply."

Hobbes tapped them on the shoulders. "Uh, guys? Fascinating as all this excessive exposition is, we got more Heartless."

A bunch of Soldiers were vaugely running at them.

"Alright! Some action!" The Australian ran at them, punching the first Soldier that was in hitting distance of him; his enhanced strength didn't just knock it down, like they expected, but smashed right through it's head, tearing apart it's body in the process. He spun around, catching a few Soldiers in the body, knocking them down. He grabbed one as he finished the spin, using it as a bludgeon to whack some other Soldiers before throwing it at the wall.

Kuki raised her gun. "Hey, wait for me!" She started shooting, each large blast easily vaporizing a Heartless. She did her fighting part with less dramatics then her partner did, but she did pretty well, espicially since the two made a fairly decent team; Wally knocked down a Soldier, picking it up by the leg and smacking around some other Soldiers so they flew into the air, soon followed by their brother and vaporized by Kuki's gunwork.

They wiped out the second wave in short order like that; Calvin and Hobbes watched them with interest, both of them coming to different conclusions.

Calvin thought that these Heartless things weren't flesh and blood, at least in the same way he and his company were. They were resilient enough, perhaps less so then them, but the way they discorpertated when killed, their strange way of moving and most of all their lack of an evidental muscular or skeletonal structure made him realize that the most like explanation for these..._things_ were that their bodies were like darkness enfleshed, if you could call it that. Just dense solidified shadows in a number of advantageous shapes and sizes, hungering for _something._ That was why his stonespike shrapnel pierced them so easily; once they breached their 'skin' there was so little too...no, _nothing _to impede entry. And they certainly could handle a certain level of damage, a little thing like loss of vital parts or fluid loss no impedment to them. But hit them hard and/or fast enough, and they were cabbage boiled twice; unappealing and nothing at all.

Hobbes, on the other hand, realized something less pernitent to the mission as Calvin would see it. He watched Wally and Kuki's little group dynamic, as it were, and they had seemed like normal people. Well, normal as real people were, really. But, in their brief fight together, he saw a fluidity of motion, reflexive I-Watch-Your-Back-Vice-Versa movement and actions, and teamwork that he could barely follow, let alone predict. It wasn't that they were strategic geniuses; far from it. Nor were they inhumanly adept at fighting. It was the _methoicalness _of it all that surprised him. They knew this sort of thing like Calvin knew invention or he knew hunting of all stripes. It was something they did practically everyday, and had gotten so good they barely need to communicate verbally to get an idea across. Back on the Comic Kingdom, Hobbes never was quite sure why they'd been chosen for their prestigious posts, but their considerable fighting talent was only a small part of it. While he and Calvin had the advantage in terms of specialized training, these guys were simply much more experianced about it. He wondered exactly what sort of lives they'd lived to be this good at it.

Calvin and Hobbes awakened from their musing at the same time. "Darn it," Calvin said unhappily, "They're hogging all the fun!"

"What's the matter? Jealous?" Hobbes said snidely.

"Oh, shut up."

"C'mon," Morte muttered. "They're more comin', and I don't like keepin' monsters and ladies waitin'! Occasionally both."

"Ew!" Calvin said, sticking his toungue out.

"Too much information!" Hobbes yelled, sounding as if he were going to hack up a record-breaking hairball.

"Pike off!" With that charming last jibe, the three of them ran at the next wave.

"A'right!" Wally yelled happily, leaping off the rock Calvin had transmuted to squish that last Heartless. "Now _this _is fun!" He landed fist-first on an unwary Air Soldier, plummeting to the ground and hitting it in a puff of dark fog. He whirled around, catching the heads of two Soldiers.

"Oh, Wally.." Kuki sighed, blasting an Air Soldier that had just been about to dive bomb him.

He paused in his pounding of a misfortunate Shadow to look up at her. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Hey!" Hobbes shouted, throwing his shield like it was a discus. It spun across the alley, knocking down and occasionally killing the Heartless in it's path before reaching it's apex, flying upwards and sawing through an Air Soldier near Kuki, flying back to Hobbes as he caught it by the leather straps. "You missed one!"

"Okay," Wally admitted, flinging the Shadow away. "You guys are pretty good..."

"Pretty good?" Calvin yelled as he hurled a fireball at some Heartless while Hobbes jumped into the air, cut through an Air Soldier in his path, landed and rebounded off a wall, swung his shield so he landed on it as he hit the ground, surfing along the ground and smashing into several Heartless while aided by timely transmutations, knocking them back and causing a pileup that was swiftly oblitered with another fireball. "_Pretty good, he says!"_

All four of the fighters paused to look at the fifth fighter in the melee, who was rapidily chewing on a Soldier's arm; sure, he was doing it with magic glowing shapeshifting fangs, but that didn't really seem to change the fact that the Soldier only noticed after a few moments, flinging the annoying skull into a nearby trash can.

"I'm losing to a glorified shadow-thing and being out-fought by a buncha kids? Damn, I'm oughta practice!" The voice from the trash can complained.

"I don't see what everyone was warning us about," Calvin commented as his hammer smashed through an Air Soldier's body, hitting the ground and sending a wave of thin stonespike rushing at the ground at some Shadows; unlike his first one, these didn't leave the ground but merely protruded from it, looking like the floor had suddenly decided to warp itself upwards in pointy shapes. Which, technically speaking, is what has happened.

"Oh, no!" Hobbes complained as he passed through the shadow smoke and navigating his way through the spikes with a series of well-timed flips, spins and athletic jumps using the spikes as bars, tearing one off the ground and smashing a Heartless with it before tossing it aside. "Everytime you get overconfident, something _bad_ happens!"

"Heads up!" Kuki noted, gesturing at a new variety of Heartless. "Red Nocturnes!"

Calvin gave it one look and laughed. "You call _that _scary?"

They were about the same size as a Shadow, hoving in midair at the same height as the Soldier's heads. Their roundish bodies resembled a red robe of sorts, the edges trailing away like the ill-defined borders of a flame and ending in a high wraparound collar; two sticklike clawed-arms poking out the bottom. They had a kind of conical wide-brimmed yellow hat on their head, the cone twisting in a zig-zag away. Their heads looked almost exactly like a Shadow's, only rounder, a bit cuter, and without antannae. There were about one for every two Soldiers, hovering seemingly harmlessly.

Calvin generated another fireball in his hand, lobbing the Fire spell at a Red Nocturne, ignoring the way the two other humans in the alley suddenly ran away from it.

The Fire spell streaked towards the Red Nocture, and shortly before it would hit it, the spell spread out in a front facing dome directly in front of the Nocture, as if there were an invisible shield in front of it. The flame dome stayed there long enough for Calvin to blink and say, "Uh oh." The fire reformed into a fireball, shooting back at them; the boy and tiger were blown back by it, almost slamming into the two behind them.

The other three glared at Calvin, causing the boy to laugh embarassingly, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. "Heh heh heh, oops?"

The same Red Nocturne, evidently getting an idea or what passed for one in the disputable mind of a Heartless, spun around in the air, flames revolving around it. It suddenly stopped, the ambient fire focusing itself into a bolt of flame that flew at them; it hit Hobbes' upraised shield, harmlessly discorporating.

"...Yeah," Hobbes said in a decidedly disgruntled tone. "Oops."

The various Heartless started rushing at them _en masse,_ the Red Nocturnes surronded with a firey aura of somekind.

"...This is going to hurt." The talking skull said sardonically, momentarily popping out of his trash can before his cowardice told him to get in it and _stay _in it in a very stern tone.

The band of Heartless jumped at them, moving with an eerie synchronity your average theatre troupe would write inexcusably scathing reviewsports for and were probably surprised when a section of the wall next to them suddenly turned into a small wave of a rather grainy yellow-brown material that enclosed the oblivious Heartless, suddenly compressing and disentegrating them in a burst of whatever material they were made of.

"...Huh?" All four of them said.

"What the heck is this?" Calvin said, tentatively poking the material pooled around their collective feet. His finger sank into it, the crushed rock clinging to his hand. His eyes widened, recognizing what it was as he bent over and collected some of it in his hand. "What the...is this _sand_? Why'd that happen?_"_

"This ain't good!" Morte said, disappearing back into the trash can.

"Coward!" Hobbes yelled. He raised his shield as a Soldier jumped at them, spinning it's claws out in a circle. He swung his arm back to crack it's skull in, or the equivilant, anyway; his plan was derailed as some of the sand directly in front of the Heartless's path jumped up and met the Soldier's attack, the blockage too hard for the Soldier to penetrate, knocking it away before the sand shield fell back down.

"...Last time I checked, sand isn't supposed to do that. What is _with _this crazy town?" Hobbes said, scratching the side of his head. He frowned; something was off about the sand's smell. There was an old but strong scent he couldn't quite place; the closest he could come was pennies, but he knew that wasn't right.

An Air Soldier flew out of the sky, diving at them; almost intelligently, the sand flowed upwards in an arch, right at the Heartless and hit it dead-on, covering it's body and eyes and coating it's helipoles, thus weighting it sufficiantly to make it plummet to the ground hard. As the Air Soldier fell, the sand constricting its body and some of the crushed rock lying across the ground in the direction it had moved flowed together into a freakishly organic-looking tentacle of sand.

The nearly-muscular limb cracked like a whip, twirling around in a circle without giving the Air Soldier any time to react, the wind friction and sheer strength of the sand causing its 'wings' to snap and fade away when the tentacle released it in the middle of it's spin, throwing it into the dazed Soldier that attempted to attack them; the Air Soldier smacked into it and they both slid directly into a dumpster, denting it it hard enough to make it flip over and crush them underneath its considerable weight.

The sand retracted, flowing back into the rest of it. Several Air Soldiers, a few regular Soldiers and two or three Red Nocturnes jumped at them, the last kind shooting bolts of fire in tandem; they exploded harmlessly against the sand. An extremely long and thick whipcord of sand speared out and twisted through them, instantly impaling all of the attacking Heartless directly through their little heart emblems. They hung in midair momentarily, giving the four under them a good view...and then the cord suddenly split apart, violently tearing the Heartless apart, showering them with what passed for Heartless gore. Granted, it quickly dissolved and left no stains, but it was still damn creepy.

"...Great," Wally grumbled, finally recognizing the attack-defense method they were beholding. "Guy's always gotta be so dramatic and...what's that word? You know, kinda like scary but not so much? You know, when something freaks you out?"

Calvin considered it for a moment, applying his nearly hyperlexic talent for extraneanous verbiage to the conundrum he was confronted with. "Uh...Wait! I got it! It's-"

"_Creepy,_" A dry, rasping and disturbingly calm voice issuing from directly behind them suggested.

Their slowly turning field of vision observed that standing directly behind them, close enough to have stabbed them in the back if so inclined, was a slightly-hunched person a little taller then Hobbes, almost completely covered in sand, a pair of unblinking solid light blue eyes ringed by darkness evident in the face hidden by the rapidly cascading sand.

The sand abruptly swirled off him as he stood up, revealing that it was actually a human teenager, about thirteen or so, though he seemed older than that for some reason.

He was also, in a disquieting manner, terrifying beyond all reason; a point Morte drove home by poking his head out, taking a tentative look at their visitor and immediately begining to scream. "AAAAAAGGGH! SAND DEMON!" The skull dropped down to the bottom of the trash, seeking to bury himself as deep down as possible.

Hobbes had never before thought that a simple look, without almost any alteration of the mouth or slightest inclination of the eyebrows could look ironic or at least vaugely amused, but the new...human had proven him wrong.

Whoever he was, he had an sandy kind of smell, and an odd sort of feeling. Perhaps it was the odd red kanji scarred onto the upper-left side of his forehead, or maybe it was the way he simply held himself. His hair, longish at the back, was remnisciant of a bristling desert plant, and was the color of dried blood. He had no eyebrows above his peculiar eyes, nor did he have a black pupil. Most of his skin was pale, except for a dark patch around his eyes; that area was completely black, making him look like a tanuki, the raccoon-dog native to Japan and similar countries. Strapped to his back by an encircling belt was a huge roughly hourglass-shaped gourd, larger at the top than at the bottom. It had a large open nozzle at an upper corner, small designs or kanji drawn on the urnlike container and surronded by squares; it was strapped to his back by a belt slung over his front and back, a metal protector with an hourglass-type shape under a square engraved on it and tied to the front of it. He was wearing a red-brown jacket with slightly folded sleeves ending past his elbows, the collar of the jacket looking like it was a wrap-around deal that clicked onto a clasp to make a kind of collar.

Under his jacket was a plain brownish-yellow shirt without sleeves, tucked into his dirt-brown pants; they had a round armor brace around his knee and were slightly puffy from the legs down, slightly covering his shoes, which were dark red high top shoes with a zipper and a buckle-strap securing it, otherwise appearing to be a single piece. The toes were exposed, and the soles appeared a bit thinner than normal. His long and thinly muscular arms were held defensively close to his body in a crossed position; his stony demeanor, combined with the marks on his eyes and impassive expression, gave the impression that he was peering out through the world from within an incredibly hard shell.

The sand flowed around and above the four of them, sealing into a sphere; as it did, Hobbes got a whiff of the sand. His nose wrinkled in recognition as he realized there was an old but extremely pungent smell of blood about it. Calvin began sputtering inchoherently at the display around him, randomly babbling the first things to come to mind. "What the...how the...who are you?!"

"...Gaara of the Desert," the Freaky New Guy said calmly as there were several shark _shunk_ sounds outside, followed by the noise of Heartless discorporation, sounding about as emotional as your average hunk of rock.

He let his arms fall to his side; as he did so, the Sand Shield dissembled itself, falling back into the pile around them.

"Nice to see you again!" Kuki said cheerfully, brushing some sand off her sleeve but notably uncomfortable.

"Hey!" Calvin snapped. "We're in the middle of a life-or-death fight here! You can catch up later!"

He immediately started saying some more rude things, including how the girl should be restricted by law to use only plastic utensils when Gaara looked down at him and, internally clamping down on a need to make everyone in the known universe die as horrifically and needlessly bloody as possible, quietly said, "_Shut up_." causing Calvin to instantly quiet down.

"Shutting up!" Calvin said quickly.

"Oh good!" Morte said, poking his head out again. "We found a way to keep you quiet for more than five and a half seconds."

A bit of the sand trailed away from them, covering the open trash can completely and not incidentally soundproofing the waste disposal unit.

Gaara looked at his aquantices, scowling hatefully at the universe. His face twitched several times, as if..._something _was attempting to burrow it's way out.

_KILL THEM!_ A voice that was not his own roared from within the depths of his psyche, it's psychic tone tinged with an insatiable bloodlust that could not be satisfied, only momentarily pleased. _Smash them squash them cut them make them scream KILL THEM ALL!_

"No." Gaara said curtly.

_KILL THEM ALL! Break open their skulls, rip them apart and dance in their blood and LIVE! Split their skins, smash their bones and crush their hearts! Rip them apart and give all their lifeblood to the sand GIVE IT ALL TO ME!_

"No."

_You did once...let yourself loose again, release all your rage, all your pain...let them feel the HURT, and ley FEEL ALIIIIIVE!_

"No." Gaara momentarily felt a burst of envy for Naruto. At least _he _never had to deal with voices in his head. At least, that was what he inferred from Naruto's discussion on the subject of his own internal demon.

A moment passed. _Pretty please?_

"I said _no._"

_Aw man!_ Gaara's inner demon whined. _You're no fun._

"No, what?" Wally wondered, unfamiliar with the ninja of the town for the most part. It was mainly a good thing too; a lot of them were crazy, and the ones that weren't out of their gourds were just plain weird.

Gaara glared at him. With the sand ninja, it was a fairly basic look. "I wasn't talking to you," he said coldly, suppresing both his and the demonic tanuki's profound desire to break the boy's head like a overripe melon off the top of a tall building. The sand around him, which had begun shifting threateningly towards Wally, ceased movement.

Hobbes glanced at the number of Heartless around them, mentally calculating their chances of getting out of this alley unscathed. He groaned in frustration.

"Don't whine," Gaara said.

"I'm not whining!" Hobbes whined. He paused, realizing his error. "No, really."

"If you say so. Stop whimpering."

"I'm not whimpering. I'm just slightly annoyed with the thought of our impending demise."

"We are not going to die," Gaara said impatiently. '_Specially not me! _His personal demon added. _If I gotta kick it, I'm taking you with me, spikehead!_

Calvin raised a yellow eyebrow. "Oh? We're completely surronded by horrible monsters from who-knows-where, we've got next to no weapons, we've got nowhere to retreat to, and the only thing on our side is a ludicrously specialized geokinetic-no offense."

"None taken."

"-so what possible reason could you have for not being scared?!"

Gaara scowled. Given that his face's changes of expression were so slight it was almost impossible to tell them, all the warning signs were simply a small furrowing of the brow and his straight line of a mouth turning down at the corners.

Another Air Soldier flew towards them; Gaara held his hand out, facing it; Hobbes frowned, noticing a subtle vibration around his hand. Sand flew up and gathered together into a thick ball hovering in front of his palm before he fired it as a thick blast of cutting sand, smashing through the Heartless in short order. The fired sand crawling back to him of it's own accord as he lowered his hand.

As more Heartless descended upon them, Garra spread his arms and the sand mimicked his gesture, rising around him in a cloud. He clenched his fists and the sand formed and fired conical spikes that imploded on impact with the Heartless; even as they knocked them to the ground, the sand curled around it's many targets, trapping each in a neat little ball.

Gaara suddenly turned around, launching three coils of sand at a Air Soldier that was carrying a Soldier for a double assualt; one speared through the Air Soldier's chest, dividing sharply and roughly ripping it apart before it could react at all. The other two ensnared the left limbs of the Soldier, which struggled to rip out of the sand, it's limb starting to pull away from the sand; in response, Gaara had the sand layer over itself, preventing escape. The Soldier hit the ground and tried run away. Given the fact that it could only walk on one leg, there was very little chance it could get very far, but Gaara didn't even give it that; the sand roughly yanked it back to five feet in front of Gaara, holding it in the air. Gaara stared calmly at the sight of the Soldier struggling futilely to escape from it's prison.

Dispite himself, Calvin shuddered. Something about this guy was off. No...it was worse than that. Something about him...an aura of sorts that he gave off...was horribly _wrong._

Ignoring everyone's obvious repulsion, he held his loose hand out and clenched it. The sand contracted, spewing a large amount of dark _stuff_ out of loose cracks in the sand's layers as it virtually liquified the Heartless' trapped limbs, ripping them away as it did so. The Soldier fell to the ground, minus it's left limbs. It stood on it's remaining leg, almost immediately falling over due to lack of adequate support.

Gaara stared at it; he didn't glare at it the same way Calvin did, nor did he have pretty much everyone else's slightly disturbed look. He simply had that seemingly permanent emotionless expression. A toungue-shaped limb of sand shot out and squashed the Soldier, swiftly retreating back to him as all the sand Gaara had expended thus far crawled back to the pile around them.

"Gogo...Gau...Gaara!" Hobbes yelled, struggling with the exotic name, as he pointed at the mouth of the alley. "We got company!"

Gaara wordlessly turned to the small mob of Shadows that were swarming at them _en masse. _He swept an arm out dismissively. "_Sand Coffin,_" Gaara said as an arm of sand swept out and covered them, rapidly expanding on itself and forming into a prison that looked like a tall elaborate pinecone standing on it's root.

"_Sand Funeral."_

The sand sculpture contracted with enough explosive compressue to crush a human body to nothing more than a pile of gore and a lot of blood; an enourmous quantity of sand and solidified shadows sprayed outwards, drenching them and the alley alley in whatever the Heartless had for blood as well as much of the sand he had used for the Sand Coffin. So too did the imprisoned ones in the sands balls; those too imploded in showers of darkness. As the bloodlike goo hit Gaara's face, his eyes widened as his expression, for the first time in their eye sight, changed his expression.

The corner of his mouth turned downwards in a grimace of pain, and a brief glimspe of terror. He grumbled something under his breath.

To Hobbes' keen ears, it sounded strangely like _"Leave me alone."._

Whatever it was abruptly passed; he stood up, allowing his clenched fist fell to his side, and much of the sand around them flew upwards, combining into one stream, flowing back into his gourd.

A moment passed as they digested the scene they had just witnessed.

"Ugh," Calvin said at last. "I had sand in places I don't even like to think about."

"Really," Kuki said curiously. "Where?"

"I said I don't like to talk about them!"

"No you didn't."

"Shut up!"

Hobbes held his hands up, his upper lip curling at all the sand wedged inbetween his hairs. "Uh, think you can do something about the sand? If I take a wash cycle, the machine'll probably get gutted with grit."

Gaara said nothing, but extended a hand towards him; the sand around them acclumated into his loosely cupped hand, flowing inbetween his fingers and in the palm of his hand.

As the sandy lid floated away from the trash can imprisioning Morte, the irate skull popped out, glaring lividly at Gaara's gourd. He didn't give the Sand-nin himself any gesture of hostility, because personally, that guy scared the unliving hell out of him.

"'Bout time you got me outta that damn can! Though I was gonna choke on garbage, and trust me when I say that ain't easy, _'cause I ain't got any lungs!_"

"Shut up," Gaara said impassively. Dispite the neutrality of his words, Morte understood the underlying tone.

"Dang," Calvin said admiringly. "I've been trying to have that power over him all day!"

"So," Hobbes said to Wally, plucking a disgruntled Morte out of the trash can, "...You guys know about the King, huh?"

He shrugged disinterestedly. "Guess so."

Kuki looked at them. "Hey! Shouldn't we...you know...tell them about the-"

Gaara interrupted. "Yes, and I'll tell them."

"Hey!" Wally said in an offended tone. "Why can't _we _tell 'em! We found 'em first!"

"I wasn't aware this was a contest," Gaara said drily. "And if you two try to get them there...they'll _never_ get there."

"Hey!" Kuki and Wally said in an offended tone. "We don't get lost!"

"Yes, you do. I saw you two wander around in this district all night, trying to find a singular location that should be engraved upon your hearts by now."

"...Okay, weird way of talking aside," Wally said, "are ya saying you've been stalking us all night?!"

"Yes," the Sand ninja said as if it were obvious. "Wasn't that clear?"

The others stared at him.

"And besides," Gaara said, a way to defuse this situation before it got worse suddenly occuring to him. "There's an unusual influction of Heartless in this area. You two should stay here to eliminate them until the threat they pose is null."

"What'd he say?" Wally said cluelessly, oblivious to the way Calvin and Hobbes smacked their foreheads, Gaara and Morte rolling their eyes, and Kuki simply smiling slightly.

"He said that there's a lot of Heartless in this area, and we should kill them until there gone or at least almost all gone." Kuki said calmly, still having that small smile.

"Oh, right. Then why didn't he just _say _so?"

"He _did,_" Calvin said in an annoyed tone. "You're just so unbelievingly dense that it went over your head like Tyrannosaurs in F-14s go over Hobbes'."

The dim-witted Australian digested that for about five minutes, unware of the others breaking off to beat up hungry Heartless while he thought.

He finally spoke up again. "I don't get it. Hey, he called me stupid!"

He whirled around to the girl. "I'm not stupid, am I?"

She stared at him helplessly, both unable to hurt his feelings or lie,a case of mental constipation similar to Wally's earlier one smacking her brain around.

Unfortunately for the boy's self-esteem, Gaara of the Desert was unhindered by such things and simply said, "Yes. Yes you are. I've spat out sand smarter than you."

"...Hey!"

"Hey," Hobbes said with an 'oh well' gesture. "If the sombereo fits, wear it."

Kuki and Wally stared at him. "What?" The girl said after a moment.

"Who wears sombereos anymore?" The boy said rudely.

"I _like_ somberoes," Gaara said in a mildly irritated tone.

_Me too! _The One-Tailed Shukaku imprisoned within Gaara's body and very heart added, immediately breaking out into a drunken song Gaara believed was called _El Cucharacha._

Potentially traumatizing memories of unnessacary brutality commited by Gaara threatened to raise themselves in the former KND operative's minds as they heard his tone.

Fortunately, Gaara, internally flinching at the twitchy looks on their faces, said, "Besides, I can get them there much faster than you can without a flight craft."

"...Right," Wally said dubiously.

"C'mon," Kuki said helpfully, realizing what Gaara was intending. "We can kill more Heartless!"

"Cool! A'right then, count me in!" The boy immediately ran off, causing the girl to lose balance and fall down.

"Hey, wait for me!" She cried, running off after him.

The remaining four watched them for a moment, the ninja shortly returning his attention to his three new charges. "That was strange. Let's go."

"Go where?" Morte said blankly.

The Sand-nin slid a cork seemingly fashioned out of sand out of his gourd's nozzle, holding it between his index and middle finger. "Hold on."

Sand gushed out of the urn, pooling around them as it flowed around their feet, pushing their legs over and making them fall down as it swiftly rose up and condensed, becoming a platform that they were abruptly squatting on.

The platform quivered suddenly and gently floated out away from the floor of the alley, flying over the rooftops and into the sky, carrying it's passengers along with it.

Calvin, Morte and Hobbes gawked as they watched the descending roofline go down as they flew up, Gaara effortlessly used the sand to carry them through the sky, showing no sign of stress from it.

"This is _cool!"_ Calvin exclaimed loudly, watching the rapidly moving streets below them as they flew over it.

Gaara's shellike expression seemed to _shift; _that the only real way to describe the way his face becane slightly less neutral and vaugely noncomittal, as if his skin was of the same mineral substance that was his primary means of attack.

The platform flew through the sky fairly slowly, flying over the map of streets and disparate buildings that was Traverse Town; as they did, Calvin compiled a mental map of the town, intending to get it down sometime soon. Gaara's Sand Suspension platform was floating around the roof skyline, so as not to hit pedestrians, those in vehicles or town members with the ability to fly, but Calvin still saw well enough to get a vauge picture of it all.

As far as he could tell from their short time in the town, it was fairly big though with a dispoportionately small amount of inhabitants, apparently divided into several pie-slice districts surronded by walls that appeared to have grown out of the very ground they stood on, large gatedoors in the walls.

They gradually came to a large mansion of sorts, rising up in a manner than made it look a lot like a castle, flags with a large floral F hanging from the turrets and fluttering in the breeze. It sat on a large estate, and near it's wrought-iron gate was a large sign with big friendly letters that said, quite simply, _Foster's Home_. Some smartass had added _For Any Poor Sucker _in a scrawling blue print.

"Hey, you okay?" a vaugely familiar voice said, interrupting Zim's sleep filled with insensate oblivion interseped with short dreams of peculiar subject matter and stranger plot detail.

Zim grunted as his mind switched into a dimly alert state, distantly wondering why all he saw was enshrouded in impossible darkness; everything he beheld was virtually drenched in impenetrable shadows, rendering them utterly indistinguishable from anything else. He realized with a shock that his arms were also restrained, completely incapable of movement.

His mind ran through a half-dozen paranoid thoughts of what terrible things he was trapped in, most of them involving the fishing industry for some reason.

Then he thought his eyes hurt for some reason, and Zim felt a bit embarrased as he realized that his eyes were shut ludicrously tightly; he opened them, feeling futher sheepish as he noticed the cotton linen he'd apparently rolled around in during his troubled sleep.

He was in a small room of some kind, which seemed strangely empty. There was another bed across from him, two tables with a few chairs around it in the corner of the room, two windows at the end of the wall, and two doors; one at the far right from his perspective and one next to his bed.

Zim muttered to himself discordantly, trying to sort out the jagged shards of memory dancing around in his brain like tap-dancing spiders with bells on each hairy leg-joint.

He looked up, finally noticing that Gir was walking upside down on the ceiling, his arms swinging in tune with some internal song. He also appeared to be wearing a sombrero that was clinging to his head in blatant disregard of gravity; a moment later, it disentegrated into a cloud of tiny beautiful firefly, each wearing a tiny hat that read _Drink At Moe's._ This struck Zim as odd, but he couldn't figure out why, besides the way Gir was blessedly ignoring the transforming sombrero instead of chasing the pretty moving lights in a giggly rush.

Zim blinked, looking up at the robot; he seemed to be unusally cheerful for someone who'd mysterious disappeared in burst of darkness.

"Eh...fine," Zim said warily, deciding that Gir was most likely the one who'd spoken, seeing as he was the only one in the room. Then again, Zim imagined, there was also the possibility of inordinately cheerful ghosts; he discounted it, given that ghosts tended to avoid him for some reason. Maybe it was something in his shower wash; demons avoided Gir's onion stews for the same reason.

Gir dropped down, landing squarely on his chest, exerting an unusual amount of weight for Gir. He peered at Zim closely, as if he were an piece of buttered toast, the spread marmalade serving as a means of divining the future. Zim had the urge to back away a bit, hampered in this desire to act by the fairly obvious hindrance of being in a bed.

Gir suddenly stood up, agilely back-flipping off the bed and landing on a chair with perfect balance. "You look great!" He yelled loudly, pleased with this.

Zim was filled with concern for Gir. Not because of the yelling part(that was perfectly normal for Gir)but because Gir had just back-flipped. Gir had_ back-flipped._ Gir lacked the physical agility to walk across a room without tripping on imaginary obstructions, let alone backflip.

"I _liiiiiiiiike _this place!" Gir declared loudly. "It good 'n bright!" He giggled loudly, the small laughter giving way to a full-fledged joyful scream that caused him to topple off Zim and the bed.

Gir hopped on the foot of the bed, unaware that his head had been twisted backwards. Since he had a creepily flexible neck joint, it didn't really matter, but it was still somewhat odd. Realizing the problem, the robot twisted his head back around, smiling at Zim.

"Awwww, you don't look so good," Gir said sympathetically.

"Says, you, Gir," Zim muttered

Gir suddenly looked depressed, sadly waving to him as Zim felt a sharp rapping on the head. "Get it right! My name's not Gir! I'm Naruto Uzumaki!"

"Eh?" Zim said cluelessly as the unhappy 'robot' suddenly faded away, a human crouching against the wall, somehow hanging against it with his feet alone. It appeared to be a thirteen-year-old human with a yellow-orange jacket-pants combo, spikey blonde hair, a vulpine kind of face, and a weird set of goggles with the hint of some kind of plate behind them, with a leaf symbol ingraved into it.

Naruto squinted his eyes, apparently thinking about something. "I thought you said you were going to go easy on him; It looks like you gave him a concussion or something!"

Spike, who was sitting in the corner chair, smirked. "It's not my fault if the little sod can't take a little tap."

"Hey!" Zim said in an offended tone. "What does that-HEY! Where's my Keyblade?!"

Naruto rolled his eyes with a weirdly big smile, gesturing to the door near them, against which the toylike weapon was lying. "Oh, that. We had to get rid of it to shake off those creatures; that's how you found you, ya know."

"Don't think it'll work for long, though." Spike said pessimistically.

He picked up the Keyblade, holding it up. It lit up and vanished, reappearing in Zim's hand in a flash of light, surprising him yet again.

Naruto shrugged. "Well, you've got to work with what you got."

Zim's eye twitched. "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?!"

Spike sighed. "Cool it, bug boy. Take it from me; you never get anywhere raging about."

Zim looked as if he were about to fly into a rage when he sighed, leaning against the bedframe and crossing his legs Native American-style. "Tell me about it...fine. What is the nature of the problem?"

"Well...we don't really know that ourselves," Naruto said. "Buuuut! That thing's the key to everything!" He pointed at the Keyblade in Zim's hand for emphasis.

Zim regarded the Kingdom Key with interest.

"Okay," Gaara said in the small room that he, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte had taken on account of there was no one else there. It was small, but sufficiant for their purposes. He was sitting on the bed cross-legged style with his arms folding across his lap in a manner eerily similar to the alien in the next room. Morte was positioned on the table like a overly realistic Shakspearean stage-prop, and Calvin and Hobbes were simply sitting on two chairs. Calvin had turning it around and was sitting against it's back rest for some reason, while Hobbes had opted to leave it as is. "You two are clearly aware that there are are many other worlds besides this one and the one from which you originated."

Hobbes nodded, frowning. "Yeah, but that's supposed to be an unobservable truth. _Very _few worlds know about any others; it's practically an universal thing."

"That's because they've never been connected," Gaara said in his rasping voice. "Until the Heartless came."

Calvin's eye widened, raising his head up. "You mean those things we fought earlier?"

Gaara nodded. "Precisely. And do not disbelieve me when I say that they are worse then what you saw.

"Much, much worse."

"'Heartless'?" Zim said. It was an odd term, but it seemed somehow right. There had certainly been no capacity for mercy or anything approaching the concept of 'Be friendly to everyone,' that the Tallest Zhrog had emphasized before he flew his ship into a star in a misguided attempt to hug it; the closest thing they had to mercy was the ability to kill their victims quickly.

"Come on, the things that attacked you! You really tossed him for a loop, Spike," Naruto blathered on.

Ignoring the ninja's yabbering, Spike continued his explaination, pacing around the room, relentlessly running his hands over each other and not looking particularily aware of it. "We don't really understand what they are, but 's pretty obvious that they're the darkness in a living being's heart incarnate. We know that they've no hearts or souls, and they're attracted by the darkness in the heart. And there's plenty of that to go around to give the little buggers a full-on buffet."

"Heart?" Zim said blankly.

"Some people call it a person's spirit or something," Naruto said helpfully.

"Right, like the animating force," Spike added. Zim nodded to show he understood. Sort of.

"Say," Naruto said, "You ever heard of a guy named Hohenheim of Light?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Eh?"

Spike sighed. "Guess that's a no, then."

"Hohenheim?" Calvin said slowly. It was a curiously exotic name, perhaps Germanic or something European. Maybe Atlantean.

"Yes, Hohenheim of Light," Gaara said. "An extradinarily powerful alchemist from Ametris. From what we understand, he studied the Heartless shortly before his world was destroyed. Their strengths, their weaknesses, what he understood of their origins...he put it down in an extremely detailed document we call Hohenheim's Report."

"Well, that's convienient," Calvin said, unaware that he had just blundered into a perfect case for contraviant exposition. "Just let me take a look at it and we'll just-"

Gaara held up his hand to silence him, shaking his head slowly. "It won't be that easy. Hohenheim's Report was scattered everywhere in the dissolution of the world. There's no telling where the pages ended up. And he mostly likely wrote them in code."

"'Scattered'?" Hobbes questioned. "To where?"

"To other worlds." Gaara said, an unspoken _duh_ in his words. "Where else would they go?"

"So, the reports are scattered. Then, why hasn't there been a cohesive attempt to find them?" Calvin wondered.

"There have been several, but they've all failed. We have reason to believe that some other force is collecting them."

Hobbes grinned and smacked his open palm with a fist. "Now I get it; that's why the King left! To find them as quickly as possible!"

Gaara nodded slowly. "Yes; that's what we thought."

"Okay then," Morte said carefully, "We just gotta find the pages of the report and-"

"The key! We need that too!" Calvin interjected, feeling a bit left out.

"Yes," Gaara said slowly. "The Keyblade."

"So," Zim said, holding the Keyblade up over his head. "This is the key? To...stopping the Heartless?"

"Yup!" Naruto said. "And pretty much everything else, I'm thinkin'."

"The Heartless are terrified of it's power; I think. Bloody buggers don't like it either way. But at the same time, they're attracted to your strength of heart: and that's why they'll never stop hunting you down, no matter what. Reckon your heart's like a bloody feast to them. No pun intended." Spike said.

"So?" Zim said pointedly.

"The Keyblade's a real burden, Zim." Naruto said. "And trust me when I say I know all about that sort of thing. The Keyblade chooses it's master, and it picked you. Probably one of those fate type things."

Spike clapped his hands sarcastically. "So congrats, lime-man: you're stuck with it. Until you die anyway. Then some other poor sod'll get hitched with it, we assume."

Zim rubbed his forehead. "How'd this happen? I remember being at-"

His eyes widened.

"Wait! What happened to my friends!?"

"Ya mean you haven't seem them since you got here?" Spike asked, looking surprised.

Zim looked at him with half-lidded eyes. "If I'd found them already, do you _think _I'd be talking with you two about where they could be?"

"I'll take that as a no." Naruto said. "But if they're not here, they've probably ended up on other worlds."

Zim grinned at his words. Finally...familiar territory.

Spike stopped in front of Zim, eyeing his weapon. "Hey, I gotta know: you know any sword-type stuff before I lost me temper and tried to whack you good?"

"Uh..." Zim glanced at the Keyblade momentarily. "You could say that."

"Huh. That's news ta me."

"'Specially since Zim beat you so bad," Naruto commented.

"Shaddup!"

"Well," Zim said slowly, "Why? Why is it important for you to know if I can fight?"

"So you can fight the Heartless!" Naruto said cheerfully. "Ready to go forth and fight a onslaught of horrible monsters that'll jump at you the moment you step outside to rip you limb from limb and feast on your heart?!"

Zim looked away from the slowly turning blades on the ceiling fan that had distracted him. "Did you say something?"

Everyone fell flat on their faces from sheer shock.

"Why does everyone do that?" Zim wondered. "Anyway, I fear nothing!" He ran to a random window. "YOU HEAR ME, HEARTLESS!? _NOTHING!"_

Naruto rolled to his feet, grinning at Spike. "I like this guy! He reminds me of...me!"

"God save us all," Spike said melodramatically.

"Hey," he added. "I think one of the other's should've found the other visitors by now."

"C'mon, c'mon," Naruto said insistently. "Let's _go already!"_

"Calm down," Spike said. "Not like they're coming down on us as we speak."

A Shadow wandered into the room, looking around blankly.

Zim, Spike and Naruto stared at it.

"...I'm not sure if I should feel worried that they are hunting me like this, or insulted that it's just this one." Zim said after a moment.

"Who wants to beat the hell out of them? Everyone? Okay, _go already!"_ Spike yelled.

Naruto jumped up and made several odd hand gestures, looking like some sort of complicated version of a secret order's handshake, as his body began emitting a strange airy sort of energy at the outline of his body. He loudly announced, "Multi-Shadow Clone Jutsu!".

Five smoke clouds suddenly popped up right by him, fading away to reveal five exact duplicates of the Leaf ninja. As Zim started, sheer surprise and complete shock painted on his face like ethically offensive graffiti in Los Angeles, all four of them rushed at the Heartless: one slid under it's legs, knocking it down. Another clone handspring-kicked it up into the air, a third somersaulting off the other two's shoulders and slamming a foot into it's midbody, sending the Shadow smashing through a window.

"Any second now, they gonna come outta the woodworks? Thought Foster fixed the damn security system!" Spike complained loudly. "Oy, greenie! Get ready to-" Zim pushed him aside, leaping through the window, directly after the Heartless.

Spike stared after him for a moment. "Midget's got guts. Gotta give 'em that."

Gaara paused, about to elucidate to them the precise nature of the town. He turned sideways, towards the door in the wall, his eyebrowless eyes narrowing in suspicion.

"What is it?" Calvin wondered as he stopped by the door, having been pacing around. "Ya sense somethin'?"

The door suddenly slammed open, smashing Calvin into the wall; an unfamiliar yet vaguely vulpine face looking considerably stressed out appeared in the doorway, surronded by three identical clones of himself, each holding a massive shruiken in their right hands. "_GAARA! THEY'RE HERE!"_

"The cookie-people?"

"No, Heartless!"

Gaara started, jumping to his feet with an inhuman alacrity. His eyes betrayed a look of surprise and fear, though not for himself, as he plucked the cork out of his gourd, crushing it in his fist and reducing it to its component sand; sand started streaming out of the open nozzle, following after him as he started running off after the Naruto clones.

Calvin slowly slid out of the slight impression he'd made in the wall, his eyes bugged out and the rest of his face making a passable imitation for a fish that was only vaugely aware that it was being repeatedly slapped into the face of a living furnace.

The illusion of a tranquil and happy park-type place was shattered when the Shadow was flung out of a window, making a Shadow-sized impression in the window.

Then Zim jumped out after it, leaving another impression and this one with the spider-legs beginging to unfurl. He extended them out as they caught the wall, slowing him down enough for him to drop to the ground with no trouble, leaving thin rifts in the wall.

Then Spike jumped out, smashing what was left of the mortally wounded window, landing on the ground without breaking his legs or harming himself at all in blantant disregard of the laws of physics. Of course, he happened to be a supposedly immortal living corpse that fed on blood, so that was the least of his breaches of the laws of nature.

He turned around, saw the Shadow run at him, and drew his sword just as Zim slid to the ground, aided by his spider-legs, rolled to his feet and cut the Shadow in half.

"Not bad," Spike said in a impressed tone, "But somethin's weird. Too many of them in one area; behavior's coherent too. That ain't right. Generally it's like fighting a mob instead of a militia."

He raised his sword straight up, a Soldier that had been flung at him by an Air Soldier cutting itself in half on the blade. Spike backflipped, landing on the ground as the Air Soldier split apart and he tapped his black-stained sword against the grass, wiping it off on the nice clean grass.

Several Soldiers teleported in on the midair portal the Heartless seemed to use, clinking menacingly. Spike growled angrily, pointing his sword at him. "Perfect, just what we need. More gratutitous guests."

He made to swing his sword at them when the grass swirled; the ground suddenly rose up, the dirt and soil transformed into sand. Large spikes sprouted out of it, impaling the Heartless in short order.

Spike scowled and turned around at something behind Zim. "Now _what _did I just say?" he said good-naturedly. "I swear, it's like Rabble-rousers or coming out of the woodwork too."

"There's something guiding their actions," A new voce said slowly; Zim looked up and noticing a new red-haired guy directly above him, _standing _on the other side of a tree branch as if his personal gravitational polarity had reversed itself. His red sandals didn't appear to have any kind of climbing tool on their underside, he was just standing on the branch, looking down at them.

"Hey, Sand Reaper," Spike said. "What makes you say that?"

Gaara scowled at him momentarily, shortly saying, "My name is _Gaara,"_ before he turned around on the tree branch, gesturing towards several Red Nocturnes with Soldiers rushing at them; the Nocturnes morphed into smoky shapes and coleased around a hand on each Soldier, becoming a black head splotched with dark red on the front, the insides of their large gaping fanglike mouths lit with some burning internal furnace, their 'bodies' merging bulkily with the wrists of the Soldier's they were attached to.

The various Soldiers thrust their fists at them, the transfigured Nocture's jaws opening wide as their inner fire brightened and they spat out a large amount of fireballs at them.

Sand streamed out of the nozzle of the urnlike thing strapped to Gaara's back, flowing into the path of the fireballs and extinguishing them. The small wave of sand rushed at the Heartless, covering them and congealing into a sphere. Parts of it bulged rapidly, glowing bright red before turning it's usual brown-yellow just as quickly, suddenly contracting violently, the squirming masses within pulped out in black jets. Zim looked on, much impressed by the new guy's abilities.

Gaara dropped down to the ground, gathering the sand around him as he looked at Zim. "So...you are the Keybearer."

"Yes, I am!" Zim said proudly, thrusting said weapon into the ground.

Gaara cocked his head, wondering about him. "...What is your name?"

"_I am Zim! DO NOT FORGET MY NAME!_...Because, seriously, I hate it when people do that."

Gaara looked at him for a milisecond more, indicating he heard and understood him. "There must be a commanding one somewhere around here." The Sand-nin said, looking out over the estate.

"I got it," Spike said, manifasting the face of his inner demon much as Gaara, in a sense, always did. "Kill the big one, and the little ones is easy pickings. Might even just portal out." Zim's eyes widened as he said so, a wonderful, brilliant, _bright _plan forming in his head.

Gaara nodded. "Precisely. They seem to be concentrated in the area near the belltower in this district-"

"-You mean the one that hasn't been workin'?"

"Yes. Don't interrupt me." Gaara paused, looking around in confusion. "Wait a moment...where's the Keybearer?"

"Is all the sand blinding ya? He's-" Spike looked around, finally noticing that Zim was nowhere in sight. "...not here at all, is he?"

"No." Gaara made no visible expression, but he cupped his hands together, sand flowing into his hands. A moment later, he opened it and what appeared to be an disembodied eyeball floated out of it.

Spike gave him a disturbed look as Gaara silently allow his 'third eye' to float away into the distance.

_Now we at least have an oppertunity to track him down,_ Gaara thought to himself. He finally noticed Spike's look. "What?"

"...You are one seriously creepy kid."

"Yes," Gaara said thoughtfully. "I am. Does that disturb you?"

"Yes," Spike said flatly.

"I don't care."

"Belltower, belltower...where's the belltower?!" Zim demanded as he ran around the district, hurredly searching for the controlling Heartless, confident he could defeat it by himself. _I killed a Darkside by myself, didn't I?_

He paused, looking around and frowning to himself as he spun around and killed several Soldiers. "I _know_ I've been here before!"

He'd been dashing around the town, or at least the portion of it he was currently confined to, looking for the landmark Spike had mentioned, intent on killing the Heartless for no other reason than it sounded interesting to do. That, and maybe his conscience wasn't as deeply buried as it used to be.

He, of course, neglected to consider that _weird _could mean potentially anything to the people here. Architecture varied in different towns in the same area, let alone different worlds.

He wandered around like that for a few minutes, running around almost randomly, occasionally pausing to kill whatever Heartless that were currently pursuing him, until he wound up in a small place mostly penned in by four tall stone walls, making it roughly square-shaped. A short stairway led up to higher ground, in the distance was a curved building with a definite mechanic's motiff to it. Going out of it's side and apparently built into that wall was some copper-colored tubing that split off, one going into another building, the other going directly underground. More significantly, in the exposed upper level, which looked more like a roof with another roof over it, he saw a large reflective bell.

"That's it! The bell!" Zim yelled, pointing at it dramatically.

He paused. "Soooo, _now _what do I look for?" he muttered rheotorically to himself.

Zim continued walking and paused. He heard...yelling?

He looked up, at a nearby balcony. He couldn't see the people in it very well, but he could definitely hear them. And they were fighting Heartless. A _lot_ of Heartless.

"Where are all these things coming from!?" A loud and rude voice yelled, sounding around Dib's age and male.

"How should I know?" A second voice replied, it's tone replete with fear and panic. It sound older than the first voice, a little deeper and with an odd rumbling timbre to it.

"I told ya we shoulda ran!" A third voice complained, sounding like the voice of a full-grown human male. It was a voice that probably had a vocabulary full of single-entrendes, not to mention a slight wheedling tone. It didn't sound intentional, just part of the voice.

"Coward!" The first two voice yelled back to it.

"Like to see you guys fight off a bunch of creepy monsters with nothin' but your teeth!" the third voice countered. "And now we're going to die!"

"We're not going to die, Morte." The first voice said flatly, full of the kind of confidence that was pretty much innate to a person, regardless of actual ability.

The third voice, evidently Morte, snorted. "We're facing down, what, fifteen different Heartless on this tiny balcony? What's _not _to be afraid of? Oh yeah, _the Heartless! _Calvin? Hobbes? I'd like to say it's been fun knowin' ya...but then I'd be lying._"_

"And that's new to you, is it?" The second voice said scathingly.

"Let's get 'em!" The first one yelled.

From the balcony, there was a responding burst of flame, sending three people flying out the room and directly onto the slow-to-react Zim.

They hit each other hard, knocking Zim to the ground. They lay there for a minute, moaning dizzily.

"Smooth move, genius," the tiger growled.

"Shut up," Calvin muttered.

Then Calvin and Hobbes opened their eyes, suddenly seeing the strange weapon that Zim was holding in his outstretched hand directly in front of them. "The key!"

Then Morte bounced off Calvin, Hobbes and Zim's heads in alphebetical order.

"Ow!"

"Oof!"

"Pain!"

Morte tried to grin apologetically, settling for a sheepish turn of the eyes. "Eh heh heh, guess I spoke too soon. Oh look, it's the guy." he added, noticing Zim.

Calvin and Hobbes rolled off the groaning Irken, helping him to his feet. "You alright?" Hobbes asked.

"Been better," Zim muttered.

The ground started to quake.

"Oh," Calvin said unhappily. "Why does that _not _sound good?"

"Because rumblings in a town known for evil shadow monsters is very rarely a good thing?" Zim suggested.

"...Good point."

Strange black-blue octagonal plates appeared over the walls, visible for a moment and then abruptly vanished from sight. They were still there, made obvious when Morte attempted to flee and knocked right into them, the plates momentarily reappearing as he bounced off them and landed squarely at the other's feet.

"Bleege blaggel breegull," the skull muttered dazedly as alien, tiger and kid looked at each other with a mutual expression of unease.

That unease was justified when a far-off dark purple light flashed, briefly lighting up the area without shedding light; that appeared to be a paradox, but it was true. It was as if it had caused the darkness in the area to change in substance somewhat, becoming thinner and revealing what was there without receding.

Moments later, five huge pieces of dark blue and purple armor big enough for a being ten times their size hit the ground around them, briefly surronding them.

At their left and right were two large arm pieces ending in spiked gauntlets. The dark blue armor that would cover the biceps were rounded, covering most of it down to the elbow, the reverse of it purple and evidently sliding underneath the overlying dark blue bicep piece. The elbow had a loose looking piece of two black metal bands, the elbow covering with a rounded spiked cap a purple color. The forearms were slightly bigger then the upper arms, being a mostly uniform dark blue bracerlike piece except for the purple armor on the bottom half of the arm. The bracer and lower armor spiraled into the flexible wrist bands, connecting into the armored hand portion. The gauntlets were twice as wide as the rest of it, the back of the hand covered with three large straight pieces of dark blue plates, each curving around the large disclike knuckles and dark purple lining between the plates. The palms were simple in form, basically just flexible bands mirroring the ones on the back of the hand. The three fingers were huge jointed conical purple claws jutting out from just in front of the knuckles, the areas under them a black the same as any Shadow's. The thumb was similar, protruding from an identical knuckle-joint like a human's would, only slightly larger then the other claws. Strangely, the arm armor had no shoulder; the area directly above the bicep terminated in a round disc, from which protruded a spike cracking with dark energy.

At cross angles from them were two leg pieces, similar in basic design and color scheme to the arms. The fronts of the legs were bulkier and dark blue, more so on the lower leg, the backs of them a purple color. The knee was covered by a cap with three spikes in a triangular pattern, two band covering the black surface of whatever was underneath the armor. Around the foot was a rippled armor piece, a hingelike disc where the ankles would be. The feet, protruding through the footpiece, looked nothing like feet but resembled a pair of huge purple slightly pointed clamps tightly clicked together, the ridges in the middle looking like menacing fanglike lines extending all the way under the protective piece on the foot. The bottoms of the clamps were flat, indicating they _could_ be used as feet. There was no hip-joint; where it should have been, there was only a flat disc with a sparking needle at the center.

Directly in front of them was a huge piece of armor that would probably serve as a bodypiece; it was roughly cast in the shape of a humanoid body, dark blue at the sides and with a thick purple round arch with two large dark-blue-on-purple colored pieces of armor with hollow points in them hanging over the edges at the top, a hollow space between them. The bottom had an purple armored-waist, two bulky hip-guards where hips would be, similar to the shoulders in color and with hollow points in them. On the front of it, where the breastplate would be if it didn't look like a single piece, there was an emblem resembling a heart, black with red outlines, two red barbed-wires going through the lower part of the heart in a rough X-shape. The bottom of the heart extended into a tail of sorts, ending in a tri-spaded shape.

"That's...big." Calvin noted with some interest. He nudged Morte with his foot; the unresponsive skull simply rolled against the ground, clearly unconscious. Grunting to himself, the technologist tossed him into an unobstrusive hole in the wall.

"Feh." Zim said confidently. "The Darkside I fought by myself was bigger."

The armor pieces shook quickly, the air around them rippling across the ground shortly. The body piece suddenly flew into the air, the other pieces rapidly assembling around it and clicking into place. One after another, the needle points of the arms and legs slid into the hollows of the shoulder and hip guards, the pieces quaking as if afflicted with seizures, possibly caused by the dark energies within the armor. It abruptly dropped into the ground on it's feet, slowly loosening it's large hands and standing up straight. A helmet suddenly popped out between the shoulders with a quick _clack_ sound; it was round, with a thick pivot-neck. The back of it was purple with a single large spike on the top of the head, with a dark blue metal faceplate on the front, completely covering it's face. It was attached to the helmet via two hinge-discs on the sides with a large spike extending from each side. The faceplate was thick and almost completely solid, with five small open holes on it; they were arranged in two rows: an upper row of three dots, the lower in two dots positioned just below the spaces to the left and right of the middle upper dot. The dots showed nothing, only blackness. Maybe it's eyes were closed, if the Heartless really had any.

At first Hobbes had thought it might have been some kind of armor for the Heartless to crowd into, boosting their power considerably. But he now realized that it wasn't a construct to empower the Heartless, it _was _a Heartless.

And a pretty damn strong looking one, too. Or at least Zim thought so. It wasn't anything like a Darkside, but it still seemed incredibly tough. Then again, it _was _a walking suit of armor or close to it.

The fully-assembled Heartless raised itself to it's full height of eighteen feet, flexing it's powerful hands. It's arms pumped freely with a fluity of motion that suggested that it's previously detached limbs weren't likely to fall off anytime soon; whatever was connecting it's limbs were no doubt as secure as the bones and sinew of those before it. Well, most of them, anyway.

It looked down on them, or at least inclined its helmet as best it could, perhaps percieving them with senses weirder then simple eyesight. It raised a foot, slamming it to the ground. It followed with the other one.

"I don't suppose it looks peaceful to you?" Hobbes wondered to Zim. "Or at least less inclined to kill us immediately.

"I don't know," The Irken replied. "It's armor, so'd you think it'd be defensive or at least somwhat passive."

"It _is_ a Heartless," Morte pointed out. "And I dunno 'bout you guys, but I'm pretty damn sure that qualifies it as a monster, and in my experience, monsters are only gen'rally interested in eating things. Mostly meat things like you guys."

The Guard Armor jumped into the air, slamming down on the ground.

"Then again, I guess it might be partial to my heart." The skull amended.

"Then they're getting desperate," Calvin joked.

"Hey, look over there!" Hobbes said, pointing at the rooftops and nearby walkways on the buildings.

They were crowed with some of the various people they'd met so far today; Spike was perched on a rooftop, Naruto and Gaara were standing with Bloo, Jarod, and four young humans that had happened to run into Naruto on the way: Omi, Clay, Kimiko and Raimundo, all on a big walkway.

"Who are all these people?" Zim wondered. "And how'd they find us?!"

"Uh," Morte said, looking at a disembodied eyeball hovering around them, disturbing the majority of the people there. "Maybe that?"

"Ew," Bloo said with obvious distaste. "That's just...ew!"

Gaara reached out and crushed it back into sand, allowing it to pour back into his gourd.

Clay winced. "Oh man, I've seen some nasty things in my day, but that is just _not right!"_

"The kung-fu cowboy who generally has a tiny dragon living in his hat is talking about weird things?" Jarod pointed out.

"A'right, a'right."

"Watch out you guys! That's a Guard Armor!" Raimundo yelled down at Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte.

"A what?" The four below asked cluelessly.

"A Guard Armor, a living(well, I suppose 'living' isn't the right word,)armored suit" Omi yelled. "It is a strong variety of Heartless that specializes in defensive tactics! It should shortly begin attacking you at what it percieves to be an initial provocation!"

Naruto and Morte stared blankly at him. "Uhhmm...could you try saying that again?" Naruto asked. "In real words?"

"But! I did utilize proper linguistics! I speak British perfectly!"

"That's English," Bloo corrected. "British people talk like this." He put on an exaggerated Cockney accent, crouching a little, half-closing his eyes and pulling on a pair of bad teeth from somewhere. "Oy! All you lot! Where's the loo! I gorra go real-leah arful! And ey, you seen them there kings! Dat ain't right! Ya can't expect to wield su-preme executive power 'cause some bird in a puddle threw a sword at ya and some wanker heard abit it and wants ta do dat too! Not for us Brits! Yeah, we don't do t'ings loike dat!"

"Even better!" Omi replied cheerfully as Spike began pounding the imaginary friend, loudly yelling to the effect that _real_ British people didn't refer to themselves as Brits and that wasn't how they talk anyway.

"I think what Omi's trying to say is that that Guard Armor over there relies on it's strong defense against it's enemies and will probably attack as soon as it senses a threat." Jarod said helpfully. "He also said it's a living suit of armor. Heh, the enemies attacking us with animated suits of armor. Now Al's going to feel unoriginal."

"Are you getting all this?" Gaara asked the guys down there.

"Yeah, sure." Hobbes said.

"Pretty much!" Calvin yelled.

"Understood," Zim added. "Except for that last part. Leave out further references to people we don't know!"

"You guys going to die." Morte predicted, momentarily popping out of his hole.

"Hey!" He said in response to the other's dirty looks. "That thing's bigger than you, stronger than you, and hey; you're not exactly the toughest things on the block, y'know."

Hobbes readied his shield. "You'd be surprised. And just so you know, if we die, you die."

"No I don't," Morte pointed out. "I'm _already _dead."

"It could still eat your heart," Zim said, grinning malevolently at Morte. "And turn you into a Heartless."

Morte sagged. "Damn, I was hoping you'd guys forget."

"HEY!" Naruto yelled, jumping on the walkway's stone rail. "Why aren't we already down there helping them? We can't just let them get eaten! What are we doing wasting time talking about it!?"

"Get down from there, you idiot!" Spike yelled, lunging at Naruto as the ninja flipped up, the miss sending him over the wall before Naruto landed back on the stone, grabbed his leg and dropped him on the walkway.

"No!" Naruto said defiantly. "We have to do something, not stand around like this!"

"Naruto!" Jarod said. "We can't help them!"

The human stared at him, a disbelieving look in his eyes. "I don't believe it! Of all people, _you'd _just let them die like this?!" He angrily turned away from them, crouching in preparation for a leap. "Fine! If you guys want to just sit here like a bunch of cowards, then that's your own buisiness!" He jumped up, ignoring Omi's protesting cries, and was unsurprisingly bounced of the Dark Shield covering the area the Heartless and it's apparent victims were ensclosed in, landing back on that platform as everyone moved aside to let him land on the hard wood. "Ow!"

"Maybe I should've been clearer. I meant that we _can't _help them. This force field is in the way." Jarod informed the dazed ninja.

"...Got it," Naruto muttered, rubbing his head. "But...this is stupid..."

"No, it's not." Gaara claimed, looking over at the patient-seeming Heartless and the tense four in front of it.

Were this a anime-influenced cartoon or comic, everyone's comical voice balloon would have had a single question mark, the balloons then congealing into a single big balloon with an equally large question mark. But it wasn't, so there was a general air of confusion from almost everyone, directed at the sand ninja.

"Uh, mind running that by us again?" Bloo asked, covered in bumps and bandages, Spike still looming over him threateningly.

"Yeah," Kimiko said. "I don't quite follow."

"The one with the pak and strange fashion sense has the Keyblade, and the others were sent by the King of the Comic Kingdom." Gaara replied, still staring at the four below with a strange intensity.

"Yeah," Clay said. "I get where he's coming from."

"Yeah," Bloo said, "But...c'mon, look at them! They don't stand a chance against that Guard Armor!"

Naruto got back up, standing between Gaara and Bloo. "Really? Well, sometimes things are more than they appear. Sometimes they have something that no one could guess just by looking or talking to them."

Bloo rolled his eyes. "Sure they do. How would you guys know about something like that?"

Gaara and Naruto shared a brief but meaningful look.

"Trust me," Naruto said. "We know about that kind of thing _really _well." Jarod, knowing more than the others did about Gaara and Naruto's sad condition, winced at Bloo's thoughtlessness.

Dojo jumped out of Clay's hat, coiling around the rail. "Yeah, things come in small packages all the time! Like, say, yours truly!"

"You mean yours truly _came _in a small package," Spike said dryly. "Now it's just a small package."

Dojo fell to the ground, curling into a little ball. "You don't have to be so obvious about it!"

Kimiko and Naruto simultaeneously kicked Spike in the legs, knocking him to the ground as he yelled loudly. "Don't talk to him like that!" Naruto yelled, pointing at him with his eyes closed. "You know he's still sensitive about it!"

"Next time you make fun of the fact that Dojo can't change size anymore, I'm burning your hair off!" Kimiko threatened, shaking her fist angrily.

"I wouldn't push it, partner!" Clay warned the vampire. "Kimiko always means what she says!"

"I still have nightmares of the time she caught me reading her diary," Raimundo said, shuddering. "You don't want to push it."

At the sound of bodily harm aimed at his hair, Spike screamed in terror and curled against the wall, clutching the top of his head. "Not me hair! Do anything but that! Break me bones! Cut my hands off again! Perform an autopsy on me! Even shine the sun on me and boil the flesh from me bones again! Except me hair! Don't shine it there!"

"We shouldn't be laughing," Jarod said admist his uncontrolled chuckles.

"But we just can't help it!" Bloo practically screamed, pounding the ground as he laughed.

They heard a horrifying series of noises near them; it was several low sounds, like the grinding sound of the earth itself ripping apart civilization itself, tearing the land in half, the sound a mad demon might make at the sight of it's 'To Do' list.

"What is _that?!" _Clay said in a panicked yell. "Scariest damn thing I ever did hear!"

"It was me," Gaara said. "I was laughing."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"This is very awkward."

"Hello!" Calvin said loudly. "We're about to fight for our lives, it'd be nice to get some _attention!"_

"Apologies!" Omi yelled.

"Okay..." Hobbes said, looking back at the still passive Guard Armor. "What's it doing?"

"Still just standing there," Morte noted. "Maybe if we ask it nicely it'll just go away?"

"Worth a shot," Zim muttered. He walked up to the Guard Armor, standing near it's foot. It didn't seem to be aware of his presence and was staring off at the eight heroes and two bumblings sidekicks assembled at the walkway across from them. Zim felt insulted by this; _why is it interested in them?!_ Deciding that this might well work in his favor, he coughed loudly, attempting to get it's attention. "You! Large monster thing! I'm speaking to you!"

The Guard Armor either didn't hear him, or simply chose to ignore him.

"Hey! I'm speaking to you, stupid armor-beast! Pay attention to me!...YOU DARE INVOKE MY WRATH!"

"Hey!" Calvin yelled, looking worried. "Don't antagonize that thing! We've been attacked by _enough _giant animate objects!"

"You have?" Jarod asked from above.

"Long story! Real good! Talk later when monosyballic speech patterns have disappated!"

"How'd he say that in one breath?" Naruto and Bloo wondered.

Ignoring the exchange with the others, Zim was still attempting to get the Guard Armor's non-malevolent attention, with little sucess. Then again, it was preferable to the alternative.

"I'm waiting, obnoxious armor! Pay attention to me! This is unbecoming of armor and rude! STOP IGNORING ME!" Zim paused, making a sardonic expression. "You know, this is the first time anyone's really ignored me. They generally start shooting after the first five minutes of yelling."

"Why am I not surprised?" Calvin said.

Zim didn't hear him, as the statement was rhetorical and his listening skills were worse than his ability to focus on the Big Picture, obsessed as he was with trying to speak to the Guard Armor. Any of the refugees there could easily tell him that he'd have better luck eating a rock, as attempting to speak with a Heartless was completely pointless, as the creature's only apparent ability to interact with anything was to attempt to eat the hearts with great faculty.

He resumed attempting to get it's attention, trying to annoy it enough to make it look down. Most people wouldn't attempt to irritate a creature that probably didn't have a mind to deal with it's immediate objective, but Zim was...Zim.

"Don't you think we should be doing something?" The personifacation of Zim's innate potential for good said, sitting on a railway and eating a box of popcorn, anticipating the end of the popcorn so he could eat the box.

"Nah. This is pretty entertaining!" The personifacation of Zim's innate potential for selfish evil said, sitting next to his 'brother', chewing on his popcorn. He was rocking on the rail in preparation for the really cool and dramatic battle that would soon ensue. So, for that matter, was the angel next to him, except he had the sense not to be anxious about seeing his originating mind injured in futher ways then it already had been.

Both of their energetic chatter was unnoticed, as was their presence, as they were hallucinations and the only one capable of perceiving their presence was currently occupied.

"Where'd you get this popcorn?"

"Zim's capacity for entrepruning."

"He owes me money over that dream Zim had of being space-cheese playing cricket. And nachos; I likes me nachos!"

"I thought you were the good conscience. What are you doing betting?"

"Hey," the miniture angel said defensively. "Nothing's innately wrong with gambling; only the actions of the gambling industry and...well...excessive gambling, I suppose. But then again, _everything _is potentially evil when taken to excesses, you know. And hey, I'm only Irken."

"Well, tecnically-"

"Quiet, you!"

They sat there for a few minutes, watching Zim's pointless attempts to communicate with the Guard Armor successfully; considering that it was darkness of the heart incarnate in the form of a hollow suit of animated armor, it was debatable whether or not it had a brain at all, but Zim had never allowed such petty details such as that bog down his efforts, and he wasn't about to start now.

"He needs to work on his conversation skills," the devillish one noted, tossing the empty popcorn box away, too lazy to properly dispose of it. He's evil, what do you expect?

"What's this?" The angelic one said slyly through the box he was chewing up. "I didn't know you cared about this sort of thing. Maybe even _you_ can be redeemed!" He punctuated the remark by swallowing the damp lump of corrugated packing material, pausing for a brief moment to allow all the greatness and glory of that he was personifying shine through him like a small lighthouse. Then he dove to the ground, landing on all fours. He sniffed the discarded box, grimaced slightly at the nicotine-tar scent of mildly neutral evil, and gulped it down in an abrupt lunge remnasicant of a trap-door spider capturing it's prey.

He fluttered back up, gesturing at his companion to say as he was going to say.

"Hey hey hey!" The sociopath snapped. "Self-improvement can be evil too, you know, and is thus in my domain."

"Suuuure it is. 'Perfection is the reach of all mortal lives, and thus do all seek to become more than they are, grasping for such or not. Change is the state of all things, and thus does the true nature shine through forevermore.'"

"Whazzat? Sounds like it's from Zim's list of 'Interesting Truths That I Can't Phrase To Sound Less Embarrasingly Corny'."

Zim's conscience shook his head. "Nah. Made it up just now. What's embarrasing is that he spent three weeks finding a typesetting to put on that list to fit the title on it without messing up the look and still look cool and stuff."

They ate in silence, a moment passing.

The darkling spoke. "I just realized something. Why are we here when there's no moral or ethical crisis?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know; we always pop up to convince Zim of walking one of the paths we represent. But right now, he's just bugging a passive giant armor monster. And we're just...sitting here."

"Your point?"

"My point is that we shouldn't be here! We should be around him only when there's some sort of crisis and beating each up in a comical fashion to expunge whatever interal conflict he's currently expeririancing! But here, the only damn thing we're just spectating a pointless though entertaining act of no real significance to him, far as I can tell! ME NO COMPRENDE!"

"...Just shut up and watch the show, you little egomaniac."

The malevolent conscience took his hint and shut up.

Unaware of the short debate above him, the inevitable end result of Zim's 'talk' with the Guard Armor was occuring.

He had been at this almost ten minutes. He had been 'polite'. He had resisted the urge to run off, come back with a giant root and blast it to bits, disregarding the fact that they were currently in a shield and _couldn't _escape. And for all of it, the stupid Heartless had completely ignored him. _Ignored him! ZIM!_

The strain on his already bruised ego was too much for one defective Irken to take.

"That's it! I've taken all I can take and I can't takes anymore! PAY SOME DAMN ATTENTION TO ME!" He screamed, winding his foot back.

"Oh no," his angel conscience and Jarod said at the same time. "That's not good."

"No, you idiot!" Hobbes yelled, begining to run. "DON'T!"

There was a loud ringing sound, similar to a heavily rusted gong being rung by a sack of projectile potatoes.

Zim hopped up and down, holding one sore foot as he yelled all the curses in Irken that he could think of. Luckily, there were no universal translators around, so no one was traumitized further, which was good for the two ninjas and the Pretender; they'd had enough of that.

He paused as he heard a creaking sound of sorts; he looked up and saw the Guard Armor's inclined helmet-head looking down on him. It was hard to tell, with it's lack of any definite eyes, but there was a definite sense of perception going on up there.

"Uh, hi?" Zim felt incredibly nervous, starting to pine for when it was preoccupied with the greater concentration of people outside it's sphere of influence. "Don't suppose you'll let us flee?"

The Heartless, moving with a poderous deliberation, shifted it's leg back and thrust it forward, squarely hitting Zim like a giant finger flicking away a fly; Zim _flew _off the ground, bouncing off the ground between Calvin and Hobbes, landing front-first against the Dark Shied and sliding to the ground.

"...Take that as a no," he said weakly, slumping over and groggily muttering to himself about never allowing animate armor to pulverize him like that again.

"Not good!" Hobbes yelled as the Guard Armor charged slowly, it's massive fists held it front of it in a pose more suited for a boxer. "Megamuchly not good!"

Zim's eye snapped open. He rolled to his feet as the Guard Armor swung a massive fist at him; instead of being crushed, as he expected, he was suddenly skidding across the ground, and there was a loud clanging sound.

He sat up, and the Guard Armor was just standing there, it's fist within a small dust cloud.

Zim frowned; something wasn't quite right with that image. It wasn't standing completely still, as it generally seemed to be. Even when moving, it gave the impression of immobility. He wondered what it could be when he saw it's arm and much of the body.

It was shaking a little. As if it were exerting an enormous amount of pressure that was being matched, but just barely.

Zim wondered where he'd seen something like this, and he recalled going to a few bars in his time; the tableau before him resembled nothing so throughly as a tense arm-wrestling contest.

The dust faded away, revealing that the metal fist was being held back on the shield of Hobbes. More to the point, the Guard Armor was actually being pushed back(very slightly), it's tremendous strength pushing the tiger _into _the ground; he was standing in a small depression in the ground from the dispersed force of the Heartless' blow, but though looking a bit strained, he seemed unharmed.

It was struggling to push the tiger back, and amazingly, he was actually resisting it; he was shaking with the effort of repelling it's immense strength, but he was still doing it. He also appeared to be straining with the effort of something else entirely, perhaps to do with how the heck he was strong enough to do what he was doing.

"Sonuva-," Spike said before interuptting himself, remembering that there were children present and people who'd been only too happy to beat the hell out of him if he forgot. "That cat's _strong."_

"I've seen some mighty impressive things, but the only people I've seen do somethin' like that is the Mikado Arm," Clay commented. "And even then..." He shook his head. "Arm-wrasslin' a giant Heartless like that 'as gotta be some kinda record."

"That's cool!" Bloo commented.

"Don't repeat others!" Spike yelled, swinging at Bloo; the imaginary friend yelped in fear and cowered, bringing his psuedopod arms over his face. As Spike's fist neared Bloo, a red aura of sorts appeared over him; as the vampire's fist touched it, his fist abruptly reversed direction, driving itself into his face.

"Ow! The hell?" Spike said as he rubbed the sore area around his eye, which he suspected would soon become a full-fledged blackeye.

The blob looked at himself in amazement. "Wow! I got shield powers!"

"Actually, I think that was the Counter move innate to the Wobbuffet evolutionary line," Jarod noted, glancing at Bloo sideways.

Hobbes growled; his feet were being pushed into the ground from the power the Guard Armor was exerting. Any second now, he was going to lose his balance unless he did something. Gritting his fearsome set of teeth, he _pushed _forward with all his momentarily enhanced strength; the Guard Armor's fist was shoved to the side, the sheer force of the push shoving it off-balance. As it gyrated wildly, Hobbes sprang like he was pouncing on lesser prey(such as, in his opinion, pretty much everyone else in the area), throwing a considerable amount of force to a shield-slam to the leg.

It's leg almost buckled under it, but the Guard Armor retained it's balance and swung it's fist down, missing the tiger as he nimbly flipped out of the way, tossing his shield in mid-air like a discus at the Guard Armor's head, catching it as he landed on the ground.

Hobbes rolled away from the impact, landing by his friend and the guy they'd been looking for. "You guys ready to kill a monster?"

Calvin grinned. "That a trick question?"

"Hmph." Zim shouldered the Keyblade, eying the Guard Armor calmly. "Just don't get in my way you..you...whatever you two are!"

Calvin growled at the new guy's rudeness. "Oh, you want _cool,_ huh? I'll give ya cool, you miniturized xenophobic nightmare!"

He pulled a strange thing from out of his other side pocket, strapping it to his unadorned arm; it was a bracer or something like it, covering his entire forearm. The top of it was a glacial blue metal, with an overall shape resembling a built-up guard with an organic design. There was a groove at the end, just in front of an archaic-looking circle; within two double circles was a wide triangle with a line going through it just below it's upper point, an upside down triangle interlocked into it below the upper triangle's line, the widened hexagram's points touching the inner circle. The outer circle's sides extended along the back of the bracer into three cool-looking line, the whole design engraved into the metal. The lower part was tough-looking navy blue cloth, cushioned on the inside with padding along the metal so as not to hurt his arm. There were two straps at both ends of it, the buckles strapped together.

He tapped the circle on the bracer, causing the circle, it's lines and the groove on the front to light up with a blue-white radiance. He picked his hammer off the ground, focusing the cyrokinetic energies of his Blizzard Bracer into the bludgeon; the vaporlike energies swirled around the shaft and settled around the hammer's head, the energies contracting and turning into a mistlike sheath colored brighter white with blue undertones, frost forming in the air around it.

He swung the hammer into the ground, the energies covering it flashing briefly; a wave of densely clustered ice-spikes burst through the ground, rushing at the Guard Armor's leg and knocking it backwards into the icicles; they broke apart at the impact, but Calvin's hammer hit the trail of ice, causing it to flow over the Guard Armor's body, holding it down long enough for Hobbes to bounce off it's body and land by them.

"...Why can't _I _do that?" Zim said as the Heartless burst away from it's cold prison, unbalancing and smacking into the force field and staggering back.

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Sure; a few fancy tricks with weird science and everybody calls you a genius."

Calvin returned the gesture. "Yeah, and some exercise routines mixed with 'specialized training' from Teacher makes you so great."

"Excuse me, who's the one with super-strength? Well, occasionally, anyway?"

Calvin crossed his arms and looked away in a manner which he thought qualified as classy. "Hmph. If I _wanted _super-strength, all I'd have to do is build some power-arms."

"I seem to remember a Stupendo-"

"You promised to never speak of the Stupendous Suit Mark One in public again!"

"Right, right. You're so sensitve about your inventions before your whole 'acronyms-for-everything' phase."

_Damn it!_ Zim cursed to himself as the two started arguing, ignoring the slowly approaching Guard Armor. _Why can't I do stuff like that?!_

Grumbling to himself, but never one to be outdone, he extended his spider-legs and stood up on them, and enjoying the other two's cries of surprise, ran up to the slow Heartless and climbed up a leg and started lashing out at it's body.

"Okay," Raimundo admitted as Zim scuttled around the Guard Armor's body, striking out here and there and moving away before it could swing and hit him, tricking it into hitting itself. "He's not too bad either."

"'Not too bad'?" Naruto said as Zim combined quick strikes and dodges mixed with tricking it into pummeling itself as Calvin and Hobbes joined in, shooting varieties of projectiles and a shield at it while it was distracted. "They're pummeling it!"

"I'd feel as though I should feel bad for it," Gaara noted, "If it wasn't a complete waste of time pitying a Heartless."

"Or if you and emotions in general didn't go together," Bloo quipped, ignorant or not caring of his imminent potential for Utter and Total Destruction On A Scale Mortals Dare Not Dream Of Before, At Least Compared To An Excess Of Inital Letters Capatalized For Dramatic Emphasis. Oh, The Raging Melodramatic Horror of It All. Then again, he had just displayed Counter, so that would explain his already ordinarily inflated ego.

Gaara said nothing, but a large hand of sand flowed out of his gourd and flicked Bloo away.

Naruto Shadow Cloned himself, the two duplicates catching Bloo and throwing him back to be flicked back. The game of Keep Away continued until they became more interested in the fight below and let the blue blob slap into the floor.

Calvin raised his arm again, holding it steady with his other one; the groove shimmered, several dozen shards of ice shooting out at the Guard Armor as Hobbes jumped off the walls and it's limbs, kicking off it's head and throwing a few concealed throwing knives at it. He lowered his shield as he fell, hitting the ground and using the shield as a sliding board, flipping out of it while still holding it and landing on his feet, blocking another punch and holding it back.

Not one to be outdoned, Zim ran to the arm and swung at it as Calvin took the oppertunity to power up his glove and threw a few smaller fireballs at it's back.

"Hey!" The boy yelled at the Keybearer. "Can you do anything with that thing besides swing it around?"

Zim looked at him, perplexed. "Why would I need to?"

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on! I can practically _smell _the ozone on you! My Fire spells have back fired on me so many times, I'd have to be a complete idiot not to recognize it! What, new to this and can't do a repeat perfomance?"

"...If I don't directly admit you're right, it doesn't count as an admission."

Calvin shrugged. "Been there, done that, accidently blew up the T-shirt. Have you tried not overthinking it?"

"Huh?"

"Common rookie mistake," Calvin said sagely. "Overthinking basic magic. I mean, fireballs? It's just combusting air and forming a ball or whatever of fire out of ambient energy. That's as basic as basic gets, you know. Well, discounting analyzation, that is."

"Hey! I'm new at this!"

Grumbling to himself, Zim jerked his head at Hobbes and ran at the Guard Armor. He slid to the ground, holding the Keyblade straight out, hitting it's foot; Hobbes ran incredibly fast, doing the same thing to the other foot. Predicatably, the Guard Armor turned around to deal with this new threat, completely opening it up to the unexpected stonespike storm from behind.

Jarod watched the fight speculatively. The three's attacks were good, but if they could just focus on a strategy, the battle would be over much faster. The three of them couldn't cooperate enough to do so; the thought hadn't even occured to them. The closest they'd come to combined strategy was happening to attack at the same time.

With all luck, that would be enough to beat the Guard Armor. As far as the powerful Heartless went, it wasn't particularily hard to fight. As long as they avoided it's attacks and beat down on it while it's wide swings exposed itself, they probably wouldn't die. Probably.

"They're not bad," he said. "But they're not good, either. The two from the Kingdom are a competent team, but...Zim, was it? Isn't the best at this whole 'teamwork' thing. Interesting fighting style, but his teamwork.."

"Ain't like you to be so negative all the time," Spike noted.

"It's not negativity. It's an accurate assesment."

"Ain't that what all pessimists say? Or is it being realistic? I can never get the two straight."

The Guard Armor stumbled forward, Hobbes and Zim taking the chance to jump up and attack, both running right into each other and falling to the ground.

"Watch where you're going!" Zim scolded, trying to get the tiger off him.

"Where _I'm_ going?! You crashing into me!"

"Yes, I did! You foolishly moved into my way! Now get out of it!"

The Guard Armor, noticing they were unoccupied, kicked them again, throwing them across the field. "Ow," the two moaned, piled-up against the force field.

Calvin shook his head. "That's the first thing they've done as a team all night."

He stuck his hand into one of his frontal pockets, pulling out half a dozen small bronze spheres like the one Bloo had accidentally activated. He held them in one hand, squeezing them in his hand and causing a noise like several _squeek_s.

He threw them at the Guard Armor, fully aware that relying on his strength of arm wasn't the greatest in any world, but that didn't matter; the little bombs flew hard and fast, zooming at the back of the Heartless' exposed head, much faster than they would've even if one of the other two had thrown them.

They smacked into the head, briefly glowing white as they merged with the metal of the helmet, a white pulse like water tension spreading over the back of it's head before it suddenly turned magenta and exploded.

The Guard Armor jerked and twitched as the dust cloud from the explosions left it's head, which now appeared to have a hole in it. It shakily took a step forward and fell apart, arms, legs and body hitting the ground.

Everyone there stared.

"I don't know about you," Jarod yelled down at them. "But I'd call that an exposed state!"

"He's right, y'know," Hobbes said conversationally to an steamed Calvin and Zim, who looked mildy furious at being treated as though they couldn't recognize something. "C'mon, let's finish this already!"

They ran to it, intending on just running up to it and hitting it with everything they had, when the various armor pieces suddenly floated into the air, as before, but instead of recombining, they went off in different directions, proceeding to attack them.

"This is cheap!" Calvin complained as he ran away from a foot that was stomping after him.

"I've played RPGs with bosses that played fairer then this thing!" Zim yelled before he was briefly silenced by the big fist that slammed into him. "Ow! PAIN!"

"I've eaten things that didn't complain as much as you guys!" Hobbes said, sliding on his shield away from the main body, which was trying to steamroll him.

It went on like that for a few moments, before they started attacking them back. It wasn't easy for the three, as the flying armor pieces were faster then they looked and it was hard to keep the arms and legs properly identified.

Hobbes hit an arm with his shield, hoping to at least knock it off-course; he did that, incidentally carrying himself with it as his shield's rim got stuck in the gap of it's claws. "Oh, come on!" He yelled, decided to take advantage of his momentary difficulty, forcibly guiding it into another leg.

Unfortunately, that leg happened to be in the process of being attacked by Zim, who was still trying to get his magic-using abilities to work. He'd gotten a few sparks, but that was it.

"Why won't this work?!" He screamed, running away from the pile-up Hobbes unintentionally caused.

"Oh, for the love of-" Calvin started to yell as he was caught in the grip of a hand, his words cut off as it squeezed down on him. "Picture...I don't know, what you want to happen! Then _make _it happen!

"_FOCUS YOUR HEART!"_

Zim froze as the main body loomed over him like an armored monolith, Calvin's words echoing in his mind, minus the flustered comment.

_Picture what you want to happen. Then make it happen. Picture what you want to happen. Then make it happen._

_Focus your heart._

"Picture it," he said, something clicking on his mind in a level far too deep to be labeled conscious, but not far enough to be under the domain of the primal mind. This was something both apart and higher from either of them. This was something else entirely.

The inner sight of his mind saw fire, and he focused his will on that fire.

He slowly lifted the Keyblade as the Guard Armor's main body started to lift itself for a fatal plummet.

The Keyblade's surface shimmered slightly as he suddenly whirled around, pointing it at the Guard Armor. The Guard Armor jumped at him.

"_Burn,_" he said simply, and focused the power lying within the Keyblade and was begining to awaken within himself.

The reflective surface of the Keyblade alit with currents of fire, swiftly swirling just beyond the tip into a full-fledged fireball for a brief moment, launching off it at the Guard Armor as Zim's Keyblade jumped up from the recoil, blasting into the Heartless in the middle of it's jump.

It knocked it out of the air, causing it to roll along the ground.

That specific part seemed vital to the whole Heartless; the other parts suddenly stopped, releasing Calvin and leaving Hobbes, traveling back to the main body. They hooked into their appropiate place, although perhaps not as firmly connected as before. It slowly stood up, wavering slightly.

Calvin ran up to Zim, staring in amazement at him. "Wow...why didn't you do that before?"

Zim glared at him. "I was _trying _too, you hay-headed stink-beast of dubious origin!"

Calvin blinked. "I've heard some weird insults in my day, but that's in a class all in it's own."

The Irken looked bewildered. "...Should I be complemented or insulted?" he muttered to himself.

"Shut up, both of you," Hobbes said mildly as bounded next to Zim, gracefully standing up. "That thing you did looks like it hit it hard. The last time I say a fireball do that was at the clocktower at home."

Calvin flushed. "Oh, come on...I just made this thing and was trying to hit an old dead tree."

"And missed horribly," Zim interpreted. "I only just learned to shoot fire, but at least I can do it without blasting everything in sight."

"That's 'cause you're a wuss!"

"Shut up!"

"No, you shut up!"

"No, you!"

"No, you!"

"You infinity."

Calvin, unable to think of a logical comeback, growled in incensed anger. Hobbes growled under his breath, a brief image of him slapping their heads together in a Three Stooges-type skit calming his nerves.

"Both of you, shut it! We should get it while it's weak!"

Zim scanned it's unprotected and severely damaged head. He frowned for a moment, wondering how it survived getting the back of it's head blown out and how he might be able to use this to his advantage before he suddenly grinned scarily.

He had gotten an idea. A strange idea. A strange, bizarre and utterly _insane _idea. "You, cat thing what smells like an Acturan Megamoose!"

Hobbes frowned blankly, disliking the impromptu reference and having absolutely _no_ idea what the heck he was referencing in the second part. "...What?"

Zim took a moment to consider how he was to express his masterful, brilliant and unparreled plan of sheer genius in a few words. He decided to go for broke and merely state a request for the tiger's role in the Big Plan of Ultimate Guard Armor DOOM!(Patent Pending). "Throw me at it's head."

Hobbes blinked, a rather severe admission of shock and surprise for a cat. "You know, it's a funny thing, really. I've always had superhuman hearing, what with being a cat, and ever since my training with our old teacher a few years ago, my senses have gotten higher. Which is actually kind of annoying when I have to be by people that like playing their music loud. Almost as bad as telepathy."

"Aaaaand...your point?" Zim said.

"My point being is that I could have sworn you just told me to throw you at the giant monster's head."

"I _did."_

Hobbes looked as if he were about to say something, sighed in surrender and grabbed Zim by the arm, placing him on his shoulder momentarily. The Irken felt something...strange about him. Not off, just something unusual about him. A sense of immense power, coiled like a spring so tightly wound that if it broke, every one in the general area not wearing stylistic goggles was going to get spring shrapnel. "You understand I assume no responsibilty for the damage you may and probably will encure from this act of unnessacary stupidity.."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes. _I _pay the hospital and repair bill."

Something in Hobbes' mind twitched. _No, you idiot! The King told you to stand by this...this...whatever the hell he is, not throw him at a giant monster with no apparent weak points! _Another voice, the one he like to think of as his personal conscience, rose up and replied, _True, but he told him to stand by him. And it's fairly simple to interpret them as doing as he asks in a leadership role._

_I repeat; Giant. Monster._

_He said stand by him._

_What part of little guy about to get thrown at a giant monster don't thou geteth!?_

_A giant monster with a big hole in it's head, you mean._

_Little guy plus giant monster equals King yelling at me for getting the little guy killed! Duh!_

His conscientious voice told the other one where it could stuff itself in no uncertain terms, using mean words that couldn't be taken back, much like Christmas presents that no one in the world would want. Not even psychotic toe-fungus-eating Brazilan Psychosis monkeys raised by Pixies and further educated by mad Vogans. "'Kay, it's your life." His piece said, Hobbes hoisted Zim up again by his body and spun around once, releasing Zim at an upwards angle as he was facing where he'd been at the begining of the spin. Aided by both the momentum of the spin and the tiger's immense strength, Zim flew incredibly fast; he marveled at it, wondered briefly just what kind of training the tiger had done to be this strong and fast. He held out the Keyblade, postitioning it so that he would swing it in time to strike it's small head.

He approached it's unguarded head, started to swing, and missed completely, veering off and hitting a wall, narrowly grabbing a small stone pole that was surprisingly strong.

"Your aim stinks!" Zim yelled as he swung on it, clasping the Keyblade to the Pak so he could hold on with both hands.

"Tell me about it," Calvin said sourly. "That's why my Human Discus Suit never took off."

"It's not my fault; your guy's weight throws me off-balance!"

Zim ignored them; something was strange with this pole. He couldn't tell what, he just got a strange sense from it.

And it got weirder. As he started pulling himself up to extend his spider-legs so he could get down, the Keyblade shone with a golden light at the edges.

"Hey," Kimiko said at the walkway. "Doesn't that look-"

"Really familiar?" Raimundo interjected, hand on chin.

"I've seen this light before," Clay said.

Omi's eyes grew wide. "I have seen it too! Dojo, you are a mystical dragon! Does it look similar to you?"

"That's familiar, and I'm not sure." The dragon bent out as far as he could while staying at a safe level, trying to place it. "I'm pretty sure I've seen it before, but I can't place it anywhere!"

"That would look so cool in a movie or animated series!" Bloo said.

"Yeah," Naruto said. "That's so cool!"

"I agree with the idiot." Gaara said blandly.

"Cool! Hey, wait, is he talking about you or me?" Bloo wondered.

"Duh, it's me! I'm way more of an idiot than you!" Naruto yelled. He reflected on his statement. "Hey, wait a minute!"

The stone Zim held _cracked_, flaking away like shed skin from a snake as the light from the Keyblade died away, revealing a staff of some kind, jutting out from the building, evidently having been stuck there some kind ago. The little of it that was visible under the dirt and dust was brown, an almost grown-looking metal with a brass cap. The staff was topped with a small curled-up brown statue resting on a sqaure, the swirl on it making Zim think of a Cinnabon. The open-jawed simian face, small feet perched on the square and the long tail curling over the statue all gave it the image of a monkey squatting on a pedastal.

Zim stared at it. "Eh?"

Spike frowned, his exceptional eyesight not good enough to give him the finer details of it. "The hell is that?"

"You have got to be kidding/childing me!" The Xaiolin Warriors and their dragon said disbelievingly.

"Tha...that's a Shen Gong Wu!" Clay said disbelivingly. "Dojo! Why didn't you-oh, right."

"Yeah," The dragon said sourly. "Make me feel worse! Let's declare today a public holiday! We'll all call it Be Cruel To Dragons Day! We'll hold roasting parties! Be the first one on your block to destroy the feelings of a mystical dragon over and over again! Don't mind that they practically got an inferiority complex over it! Who cares about them, in fact, let's never stop reminding them of what happened, huh!?"

Spike gave him a look. "Some people never stop whinin'. Not like it's bad, what happened to ya."

On behalf of Dojo, both Naruto and Gaara sharply elbowed him. Gaara's arm was slightly weighted by the highly convincing simulcrum of sand, and Naruto was no weakling, so it hurt a lot. "OW! Why, you lousy little demon-"

"Watch it," Naruto growled.

Gaara said nothing, allowing his Look of Ultimate and Unspeakably Painful Doom speak for him.

"Right," Spike said quickly, wisely not wanting to get on the two's bad side. "Shuttin' up."

"What is it?" Hobbes wondered.

"Looks like a staff," Calvin suggested.

"Hey, you! Guy with key thing!" Kimiko yelled.

"What?"

"That's a Shen Gong Wu you're hanging on to!"

"A cheering chandelir that's used for official announcements?"

"A Shen! Gong! Wu! A powerful magical object!"

"Tecnically, that whould be a mystical artifact," Dojo said. "Just keeping your adverbs straight."

The langauge module in his Pak translated it from the Chinese; _Tool of God,_ Zim thought. Odd name for a staff with a monkey squatting on it. "Good for me! What do I do with it _so I can get down already_!?"

"That's easy!" Jarod yelled. "Call out it's name!"

"What's this one's?"

"The Monkey Staff!" The Xiaolin Warriors, their dragon and Jarod shouted. Dojo and the monks paused, wondering how Jarod knew the name too.

Zim took a deep breath and, feeling a little stupid, loudly yelled, _"MONKEY STAFF!"_

It immediately lit up with the golden light again, this time brighter but more concentrated at the edges and smaller, too. The remaining dust and stone flew off it, perhaps propelled by the power Zim was feeling from it. He wondered what the power flowing from it into him, _altering _him in some significant but unseeen way, but he knew one thing for sure. This was something that Dib would understand perfectly well, far better than him. This current, flowing through him as memories more appropiate for an Earth monkey or his distant evolutionary ancestors flashed in his mental eye, changing him in ways he couldn't have anticipated but felt somehow familiar-that was something Dib would easily grasp, no doubt provoking that familiar short nod followed by that knowing little smile.

It stopped, and the Monkey Staff ceased glowing. Seemingly of it's own accord, the staff slid out, and he fell.

"New guy!" Calvin, Hobbes and the guys and girl on the walkway yelled, the Comic Kingdom tourists getting ready to save him.

Then, to their surprise, Zim backflipped _in the air,_ sliding along the wall and running down, suddenly jumping off, swinging on the arms of the Guard Armor, leaping away, bouncing off it's legs and jumping into the air to flip down and land right in front of Calvin and Hobbes. "Heh," He said, looking surprised himself as he tapped his new acquisition against the ground. "That was cool."

The Guard Armor swung again, surprising them; it knocked them down, the Staff rolling away. Zim and Hobbes used the momentum from the attack to flip to their feet and slide away a bit. Calvin, on the other hand, didn't have that kind of agility and crashed to the shield.

"Hey," Raimundo said, noticing Zim's continued acrobatics. They weren't as impressive as they would be if he were using the Monkey Staff, but Zim hadn't noticed and it was still pretty cool. "How's he still moving like that without the Monkey Staff?"

"Yeah," Kimiko said. "It's effects are supposed to fade once you let go of it."

"He is the Keybearer," Gaara noted. "Who knows what effects the Keyblade has on it's wearer?"

"'Least he isn't acting like a monkey," Jarod said as Zim agilely danced between it's legs, striking here and there.

"Maybe the Keyblade permanently boosted his agility and stuff to a smaller scale than it would if he was usin' the staff," Clay conjectured.

"I remember some of the old stories saying that the Keybearers of old could leap over mountains and cut through the sky when they needed to," Gaara said. "It could be that the power of the Staff resonated with his latent powers somehow and gave it a jump-start."

Spike shrugged. "'Ey, you guys are the experts, not me."

Zim jumped to it's hand, slashing his sword across it; he didn't pierce it, but he got a sense of damage. Calvin and Hobbes launched some flaming ice shards and a shield at the body respectively as he rolled away, shooting a fireball as he got up.

The Guard Armor slammed it's fist into the ground, the Irken backflipped out of the way and jabbing out at the stuck fist as Calvin and Hobbes took the time to attack too.

Zim shot a fireball at it, pleased at the smoking indentation it left. After all the damage the three of them had left in it, the Guard Armor was staggering around, somehow keeping itself from falling apart again; the left arm had almost fallen out of it's socket, a thinning ribbon of dark energy connecting it. The legs, haven taken the most damage, were pitted and scarred, the armor beaten into itself while it's main body and arms were scorched and marked with the various projectiles they'd used on it; there were several remaining ice crystals and large chunks of earth imbedded in the back. The left leg was barely clicked in, the right one floating directly out of it, somehow functioning as a crutch of sort.

"It's almost dead..or whatever!" Zim yelled. "You two; try to knock it down!"

Calvin scowled. "I don't have to take orders from you!"

"Actually, we kinda have to," Hobbes whispered to his ear.

"Don't remind me!"

"What are you two talking about?" Zim said, raising an eyeridge.

"Uh...nothing! C'mon, let's get this over with." Calvin paused, mind racing for a good tactic. "I know! Let's try that Ice Slam Combo we worked out!"

"The what?" Hobbes said blankly. Calvin had come up with so many short combanation names, it was almost impossible to keep them all straight.

"You know-" The human made a gesture, waving his arms a lot in an apparent imitation of a shaky cardiograph and then jerking his hands to the left. "That one!"

"Oh! Right!" Hobbes armed himself with the shield, leaping as high as he could into the air. It was about fifteen feet, so it was ample time for him to tuck his shield under him as Calvin aimed his Blizzard Bracer at the ground in front of him and fired a blue-white wave of cyrokinetic energies, creating a craggy ice cresent that went into an upraised trail of ice ending near it's feet.

Hobbes came back down, riding on his shield again; he rid down the path, sliding down the frozen ramp, going extremely fast due to the shuffled-type construction of the ice slide and the smooth surface of the shield. His ears plastered against his head by the wind, he leaned back just as he hit a bump.

The shield jumped into the air, and Hobbes put his strength along with the momentum directly into the Guard Armor's already wobbling leg; he crashed into it, toppling the Guard Armor and sending it plummeting to the ground, hitting the ice slid and sliding along it helplessly. Calvin, who'd been charging up a fireball, released it in the form of half a dozen smaller fireballs, the fire blasts smashing into the Heartless' 'face' and the back of it's body, and Zim, improvising on sheer impulse, jumped forwards as the smoke strayed away, angling the Keyblade so it sliced right through it's helmet, cutting in a straight line to the waist, where he flipped out of the way.

He landed on the ground and turned around in time to see it smash through the ice ramp and collide into the Dark Shield, falling down for a few minutes before shakily rising to it's feet.

It turned around, twitching extremely rapidly. It's various scarred limbs were almost completely destroyed, but it managed to raise an arm.

And it slumped back to the side, the crack Zim'd left in it glowing brightly. Bright light flashed out through the scar shortly, and then the Guard Armor's left arm fell out, crashing heavily to the ground. The other arm quickly followed, leaving it standing on it's damaged legs unsteadily until the brutalized limbs finally crumpled under it's own weight and fell off, the lack of no legs causing it to crash to the ground with a earth-shaking thud, the hit widening it's cracked body as it's helmet rolled away from it's head. This last impact was too much for it's suffering structure to take, and the main body cracked in half.

From within it emerged a brilliantly shining light, mostly red with some pink and yellow thrown in there for good measure, considerably sheathed by a heavy coat of bramble-vinelike darkness. It illuminated the area, floating up and disappearing in a portal much like the ones the Heartless used, but larger, looking more like a netting catching it and disappearing suddenly.

The pieces of useless armor blackened, corroding with rust and crumbling in on themselves, black smoke encrouching from the edges and swallowing it up, fading away into oblivion.

The Dark Shield shattered, causing Dojo and Naruto, who'd been leaning against it, to fall down and hit the ground, the ninja landing on his rear and the gecko-sized dragon landing on his head in a convenient coil.

"They did it," Spike said disbelievingly. "They did it. _The little sods actually did it!"_

"I told you," Gaara said in a tone that might be called smugly, though probably not with a straight face. He disappeared in a swirl of sand, reappearing at ground level, taking Jarod with him as the boringly normal human had no other means to get there quickly.

The Xaiolin Warriors simply jumped off, their respective elements cushioning their falls; Clay landed on a sudden outgrowth of earth, a swirl of air slowed Raimundo's descent, Omi was carried to the ground by a small tornado of water, and the hot air generated by Kimiko's fire slowed down her fall.

Spike, shaking his head slowly yet with a huge grin on his face, jumped down to the ground, his coat flapping in the wind.

"Hey!" Bloo yelled, hitting his psuedopods against the rail. "How am I supposed to get down?!"

In response, Gaara turned the section of walkway he was standing on into sand; Bloo had about five seconds to realize this was bad before the grainular substance gave way, dropping to the ground in a shower of sand. "Ow!"

"You did ask," Gaara said simply.

"No I didn't!" Bloo protested. Gaara ignored him, walking up to the exhausted looking trio slumped against the ground.

"Whew!" Calvin said. "_That _was hard. I don't think I've done anything like that since I tried to explain the Noodle Incident."

"Compared to that, this was easy," Hobbes said comfortingly.

"...Daisy, Daisy..." Zim said inanely, feeling severely winded and more than a little dizzy from all the acrobatics he wasn't quite used to yet.

Naruto looked them over briefly before shaking his fist in a triumphet gesture. "You guys _DID IT!_ How's it feel to beat your first giant Heartless! And Darksides don't count, all of us helped kill a Darkside."

"Hey!" Zim said.

"Well, 'cept that guy." Naruto pointed at Jarod. "BECAUSE HE WON'T USE ANYTHING!"

"That's because you never ask."

"Then did you?"

"This isn't quite the time or place for that, you know."

"I KNEW IT!"

"I dunno," Calvin said wearily, sitting up. "Not sure I can get used to this kind of thing."

"Not bad, not bad at all! I've seen some things here in town, but that..._that was cool!"_ Jarod congratulated them.

"...It was interesting," Gaara said quietly.

Hobbes looked at Naruto. He seemed to know the sand guy best, seeing as how he was the only one not unconsciously edging away from him. "Is that a compliment or an insult?"

Naruto folded his arms behind his head, smiling widely. "I dunno! With Gaara, it's hard to tell!"

"Only rarely have I seen such skill in beginners!" Omi said. "You fought almost well for newhornets! With much, much, _much _training and experiance, you may someday be almost as good as me, or perhaps you may reach Raimundo's level."

"Hey!" The Keybearer, tiger, technologist and Xiaolin Dragon of the Wind said defensively.

"Will you talkin' about me like that?!" Raimundo demanded. "I've been the leader for two years now and you_ still_ won't stop it!"

"My apologies, but...your skill...it lacks something. Like skill, let's speak."

Raimundo made a strangled noise of frustration, from both Omi's inability to accept Raimundo's ability and his atrocious grammer. Although the Shoku General probably wouldn't phrase it as such.

"You guys have been with him for a few years now and he still can't pronounce grammer properly," Dojo observed. "You'd think he'd have gotten over it by now."

"Nah," Clay said. "One of those things you start to miss after a while."

"Yeah," Naruto said cheerfully. "Besides, it's funny!" He looked up at Dojo, who was still coiled on his hair. "Uh, get off my head."

"Yeesh, fine!" The dragon hopped off, landing on Omi's bald head.

"Hey, a little help here!" Bloo yelled, a little blue arm sticking out of the sand pile and waving despeartely.

"Does anyone here care?" Kimiko asked.

"_**NO!"**_ Every single person yelled.

"Jerks!" Bloo accused.

"A'right, how you three doing?" Spike asked Calvin, Hobbes and Zim.

"All right, I guess." Hobbes said, pumping his arm. "That was exhausting."

"Hey, who are you guys, anyway? I know the know-it-all, the sand guy and the blue...thing, but who are the rest of you?" Calvin asked as the three of them stood up, strapping their respective weapons to their backs.

"Right, sorry. These guys are Naruto Uzumaki, Omi No-Last-Name-That-We're-Aware-Of, Clay Bailey, Kimiko Tohomiko, Raimundo Pedrosa, Dojo Kanojo Cho-" he pointed to everyone in turn, the individual making a small greeting motion. "And myself, 'o course. Way back when, people used to call William the Bloody, 'cause I wrote bloody awful poetry. Nowadays, they just call me Spike. Now there's an interestin' story there." He smirked, enjoying the mental image of how'd they react if he told them who he'd gotten _that _name.

Calvin stared at him, his mouth hanging open. "You. _You're _Spike. The poetry-loving Billy Idol wannabe."

"Not great listeners, ain't ya? And Billy Idol got his look from me, so it's the other way around."

"The Spike our King told us to look for."

"Huh. The King said _that?_ Didn't know he cared...then again, he might've just been tryin' to get ya guys a bit sidetracked-"

"Don't change the subject!" Calvin yelled, starting to go red in the face. "We've been looking all over this stupid town, trying to find you! And nowhere, I say _nowhere _you were! WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST STAY IN ONE PLACE?!"

"No one tells me what to do-"

"Shut up, Spike!" Kimiko yelled.

"Shuttin' up!"

The Xiaolin Dragons huddled into a circle, discussing the issue of the Monkey Staff.

"Should we try to convince him to give it to us?" Kimiko asked.

"It's not really ours to keep now," Dojo said. "And it's not like the forces of evil are exactly dependant here, y'know?"

"Yeah, but we're the safeguards of the Wu!" Raimundo reminded them. "We're supposed to keep them safe from those who'd abuse their power! And if you ask me, the green guys looks a little _loco_ 'round the gills, if you know what I mean."

"No, I do not! But I also know that it would be stealing to take it from him, and I do not believe that he would wish to give up such a wonderous object as a Shen Gong Wu! The only way it'd be reasonable is if we won it in a Xaiolin Showdown, but there is no reason to engage him in one now." Omi thought.

"I reckon y'all got good points," Clay reasoned. "But there's the little fact that we don't really need it and the Monkey Staff ain't all that special t' begin with."

"If you say so!" Dojo said. "But there's something to be said for a passive and one-sided compromise."

"What do you mean?" Raimundo asked.

"I mean, if we just let him go with it, what are the chances he'll lose it? It's safe enough with him."

"I get it!" Naruto interjected, butting his head into the circle and ignoring their respective dirty looks.

"Hey, who asked you?!" Raimundo said rudely.

"Do you mind?" Kimiko said.

"Yeah, I mind!" Bloo said, putting his head between Raimundo and Kimiko's legs. "You guys form a little circle and have a private party without any snacks! What's the deal?"

"What snacks?" Naruto asked. "I want snacks too!"

The Xaiolin Dragons made identical 'you moron' expressions.

"So," Zim said, gesturing at the tiger-human duo, "You two-"

"A-_hem!_" Morte said loudly, having finally noticed it was safe and floated out from his hidey-hole.

"Yeahyeahyeah, three-have been looking for me?"

Gaara, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed, didn't nod or give any such simple gesture of confirmation; he chose instead to let his words speak by themselves. "On the orders of King Garfield, of their homeworld, they have been seeking the wielder of the Keyblade."

_Blah blah blah,_ Shukaku said in a bored 'voice'. _Always too much talking with you guys! Never enough fighting. And what was the deal with that thing? What's a giant monster fight with no bloodshed? Total ripoff!_

"Hey," Hobbes said, struggling not to sound desperate to get his query across. "Why don't you come with us? We've got a ship that can travel between the worlds."

Zim started a little at that, raising an eyeridge. "You do, eh? This ship, would it help me find my missing companions?"

"Sure," Calvin said. "We're not in a real hurry."

"Are you sure about that?" Hobbes muttered to him, too low for anyone else to hear.

"No, but we need him to come with us." The technologist muttered equally lowly.

"Y' want my advice, I'd say go with 'em. Better then the alternative, 's all I'm sayin'," Spike informed him. "World traveling ships ain't exactly easy to come by."

The Irken thought it over, and nodded, mostly to himself. "Fine. I'll...go with you two, three, whatever."

Morte huffed to himself, floating away and grumbling to himself.

"Just so you know," Calvin said blithely. "Until this quest of ours is over, we're sticking to you like...like...Hobbes, gimme a metaphor!"

"Like the fur to my back?" Hobbes suggested as he scrached his back, shedding copiously. "Er, wait. That could be taken as a bad omen."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure. But my point is, for the time being, we're going to be a team."

He stuck his fist out, pausing a moment to put his alchemic tools away first. "I'm Calvin Nocker."

Hobbes copied the gesture, his considerably larger fist meeting Calvin's at a side-angle. "Family name is Pooka, given name is Hobbes."

Nonplussed, but willing to go with it for now, Zim clenched his hand into a fist and pushed it against the other two, creating a rough triangle shape. "I have no last name, but my name is...well, your Earth tongues would be incapable of pronouncing it, so call me Zim."

Morte grinned, slightly miffed he was unable to join in the 'moment'. "I think this is the start of a beautiful thing."

It was a dark place.

And not the good kind of darkness either. This wasn't the kind of darkness publicized by people with brightness problems. This was a _bad _darkness; the kind that snuck up behind while you were backing away, attended by creepy music that could kill weak hearts, waited until you were on the verge of having a cardiac spasm, and violently pokes you in the back for the sake of it's own disturbed amusement. This was a darkness you could write home to, if you had a very morbid sort of family.

To say it was dark in the poetic sense was much more sensible.

In the completely black room, a voice rang out. It was deep, _really _deep. It had a peculiar sort of tone to it, something like that what might be produced by a living stone with a serious accent problem that had been excerbated by learning English from emulating the Godfather movies.

"Ey, why's all da lights off, eh?"

Someone clapped.

Nothing happened. It was too dark to tell, but there was the sense of irritable glaring.

Someone clapped again, this time with a great deal more force. This time, the number of torches around the room burst into purple flame, illumanting the room while lending it an evil glow of the sort often recommended by _Malovelence Monthly._

The revealed room was roughly circular, made of old slightly greasy-looking black stone that seemed to absorb the light that flickered across it.

A woman ran out, trailing some toilet paper on her foot. "Sorry, sorry," she mumbled under her breath. "What'd I miss?"

"Da freak-monkehs got the Guard Armor!" A loud exuberent voice announced cheerfully.

"Damn!" the woman complained. "Let's hurry this up. I get at least seven New Orleans on this thing, you know! Who knows what I could be seeing?"

The main point of focus of the room was a small black and white hologram, displaying the recently formed trio(or quaduo), shining out from an archiac and somehow evil-looking circle carved into the center of a large table in the middle of the room.

Sitting at the table were several figures, distinctly more ominous than the room they were in.

"That freak took out a Guard Armor?" Said a stocky and almost absurdly wide figure, seemingly made of steam-age cybernetics and with a grooved cranium that appeared to be emitting steam of somekind. "Never woulda guessed it. Don't look like much, does...hey, he a guy or a girl? 'S hard to tell. Tougher then...aw, hell with it, I'm gonna call 'em a guy."

"Hey, hey hey!" A disturbingly cheerful voice said, cutting himself off with a sudden and high-pitched laugh one generally expected in places with rubber walls, enormous quantities of Thorazine, and large men with white coats and an excess of caution. After his laughter died down, he banged on the table, possibly to call order within his crazed head. He looked no less mad than he acted; chalk-white skin, yellow eyes with red irises, crooked yellowing teeth, a lanky and mucular physique under a loosely hanging purple suit with green trim, and a huge green hairdo resembling the curls of a harlequin's cap made him look like a cross between an undead...thing, and a psychotic clown. "Gotta remember, me boyos-"

"Ahem!" Another voice coughed.

"Right, and me girlyo-is that our little bug-eyed freak-monkey's got the Keyblade! He's running on borrowed mighty might! I gotta say though, that thing's got one _helluva _wallop!...'Least, that's what the ol' stories say, y'know."

"So says the Peanut Gallery," the smith-type guy said in a bored tone.

"_**Here's a thought,**_" a light, almost whispering voice said. The figure it emanated from was difficult to see; he was enshrouded in shadows, and what little could be seen through them wavering in the eye. He appeared to be wearing a bony wrap-around cape over most of his body, leaving only his head uncovered. That too was difficult to be discerned; it appeared to be a pointed face, a pair of horns curving away at the top gracefully. It's yellow glowing slitted eyes, the only clear feature, narrowed in pleasured thought. "_**Send him down in the gullet of the darkness and make of him another Heartless; he'll be no threat then, and he could serve us better then as a mortal."**_

"Judgin' from their style an' look, I believe that his comrades are the King's flunkies," A thickly accented voice said, the same one that had wondered about the lights. He looked a bit weirder than the others; it wasn't that he was a wearing a nice buisiness suit, diamond cufflinks or other signs of great wealth, but the fact that it was all put on a massive being that appeared to have been sculpted from living stone. A big one two; he was easily twice the size of everyone else there, and he had the look of being capable of snapping them like twigs if he felt so inclined. "Not 'zackly da best fighters I'd ever see. Still, dey won't go down easy."

Another thin figure, sitting next to him, lowered his farm hat and growled. The little red-pink flesh under his janitorial style clothes and his weird work gloves, tipped with finger-blade, looked like nothing so much as beef jerky. His face couldn't be seen under his hat, but that was probably a good thing. "Like you're one to talk, troll. I hear you've _never _had the guts to go carve someone by yerself."

"Watchit," The troll warned in a low, pleasant voice. "Somb'dy might t'ink dat youse is askin' fer a fight from a troll. And I kin tell youse dat dat's somethin' dat I real hope youse ain't doin. 'Cause a troll don't carve you meatheads; we _smash _'em like o'er-ripe...orange thing dat grows on...big brown thing wit' leaves."

"Both of you, _shut up."_ a feminine voice said angrily, the one that had expressed a desire in hurrying things up.

Everyone shut up, even the dangerous looking thin guy and the Mafia-toned rock thing. Everyone's attention was on the speaker as she stood up, glaring at the two of them.

Though she wasn't as imposing as the others, certainly much less intimidating than most of them, the others cowered away from her as she gave the room a stern look. The ripple that pulsed away from her, causing the lamp-fires to flicker and slightly grow in intensity for a moment, wasn't uninteresting either.

She was fairly tall, and could have been considered beautiful, if it wasn't for the inhuman aspect granted by her pointed ears, the elfin look of her face, or the general self-absorbed coldness she virtually radiated. Her skin was a dusky tan, with a pair of semi-circular dark markings directly under her green eyes that didn't look like make-up. Her hair was a poofy red-brown mass of hair curling down to her waist, the sides curling away a bit. She wore a long black dress, decorated with sinister-looking dark purple whorls and spirals, making it look like a moving dark cloud of mobile magical effect. The dress's lower half split at the knee for mobility, revealing her bare legs and feet. It's arms ended in billowing sleeves, revealing that her long and clawlike fingers were grasping a black gnarled metal staff of some kind, magical runes with a cage motiff spread up the surface. At the top of it were three long 'fingers', each grasping the same round orb; the orb contained was appeared to be a swirling green cloud of mystical energy, constantly curling around itself and flashing agitatedly.

Nested on her hip, secured with a belt with several other odd and probably magical devices, was a small white mask; it had a red area pointing down on the forehead, a long red curving nose, and yellow-red eyes with spirals on them; their sides had black markings around them and a wide semicircle smile; altogether with the various dividing lines to form the basics of a face on it, it had a gleefully malevolent look on it.

She tapped her staff against the ground, sure she had their attention. She tapped her bare foot against the ground, wondering why she had to go barefoot as a fashion statement.

"The Keyblade has found him," she said, gesturing to the Irken on the hologram. "That much is indesputable. The real question is whether he will be able to harness it's true strength in a way to become a threat to our interests, or will he be swallowed by the same darkness we command? Either way, he could be a useful tool."

She waved her hand over the hologram, and it flickered showing a different scene. "Whatever the Keybearer does, we will know of it. But I have someone in mind who'd be more...easily manipulated."

Everyone looked at the hologram.

It was difficult to tell where it was exactly. The only defining features were a series of immense stone pillars rising from fog like giant needles placed on their points, ignoring the laws of gravity with contempt.

On the largest of the stone pillars, a boy wearing a trenchcoat and a distinctive scythe hairdo looked around dazedly.

"Huh?" he said, bend down on his knees, too weak from his travels through inadvisable gateways and possibly madness to stand up. "Where...where am I?"

"Where is your ship?" Zim wondered, impatient to get moving.

"Eh, two problems with that," Calvin said slowly.

"What."

"One, we put it in cold storage."

Zim stared at him shortly, then slapped his forehead.

"We weren't expecting to use it again so soon!" The human said defensively. "And that brings us to point number two: when we landed here, and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word, we broke it. Bad. To the point where it's not so much a mobile ship anymore so much as a draggable trunk."

"Then get it _fixed. _NOW!"

"Oh, don't get your antannae in a twist," Calvin said grumpily as he twirled a device that looked like a rachet. "If I can jury-rig a cardboard box to reconfigure someone's celluller make-up into something that it has difficulty concieving of, than I can fix a crashed-space ship of disputable origin."

Hobbes' eyes widened as he recognized the device Calvin was treating like a baton. "Hey, watch where you're aiming that thing!"

"Huh?" Distracted by the tiger's warning, Calvin lost hold of it and it crashed to the ground, shooting a large gout of flame directly at Hobbes' tail.

"OW!" Hobbes screamed as he ran around, trying to put out his flaming tail.

"Hold on, I can fix this!" Calvin proclaimed, activating his Blizzard Bracer.

"No way!" the tiger proclaimed as he jumped over a blast of cyrokinetic energy. "I'm not going to be a furry archaeological artifact!" He landed on the ground, slipping on the frozen bit of ground Calvin had hit. Scrabbling to his feet, he immediately started running away as Calvin gave chase, attempting to 'help' in his unique way.

Feeling bored and left out(not to mention irritated that they didn't think of his difficulties as important enough to warrent their immediate attention), Zim started chasing Calvin around, throwing a few fireballs around for the heck of it.

"These are the guys that are supposed to save us all from the Heartless?" Bloo said skeptically.

"We're all going to die." Gaara said flatly. Not that he said anything any other way, but it was the thought that counted.

"Not that effects me," Spike said cheerfully. "I'm already dead."

"Like you'd ever let us forget," Naruto said.

_Back in the Evil Spooky Place of Horrible Retching Doom...Wait, Scratch the Retching Part. It Brings Up Unpleasant Images._

The various villains stared at the hologram.

"I don't think we have anything to worry about," the smith said finally as the tiger tripped over a rock, Calvin and Zim falling onto him in another dogpile.

"On the other hand, our entertainment is pretty much filled up for a while," the clown noted.

"Someone's going to have to stop them eventually," Raimundo said.

"Are you kidding!? I ain't going anywhere near that thing!" Naruto declared as the rolling dustball that was Calvin, Hobbes and Zim went past, sounds of hitting and argument emananting from it.

"Don't be a wuss-" Bloo began to say as he inadverdantly wandered into it's path, getting sucked into the migrating fight. The sounds of argument were added by Bloo's shrieks of pain, apparently unnoticed by the fighters.

He fell out of it a moment later, bruised and dazed. "Did you guys get that liscence number?" He asked, the words slurring together. "I missed it before the Donphan hit me."

If Gaara had had any, he may have raised an eyebrow. "Donphan live in this district?"

Naruto, being an expert on the local inhabitants for some reason, shook his head. "Not since the Big Pokemon Stampede two months ago."

"A'right," Spike said declaritively. "That's enough oughta you lot!" He marched over to the screaming dustball and with great hesistence, plucked Calvin and Zim out of there, leaving the dust to clear and reveal Hobbes, who was unaware of the other two's disappearance and was still fighting.

Spike looked at Calvin and Zim, who were having a similar problem and were furiously punching and kicking at thin air.

"Hey!" he screamed, shaking them quickly. "Cut it out!"

The three quickly stopped, staring at Spike with a mixture of bemusement, embarrasement, and annoyance. "What?" the three of them said at once.

The vampire took a deep breath. Being the peace keeper didn't come easily to him. He wasn't built for this kind of thing; he was built for being the reason to keep a peace keeper around.

"I got a solution to the problem here," he said as calmly as he could.

"We're listening," Hobbes said, patting himself free of dust as he stood up.

"Right. There's this guy who's got a shop not too far from here, name's Cyborg, fixes anything. I say you three take a breather and get it to him, fetch the ship-thing in the mornin'-"

"Wait, what?" Zim said. "Why wait for the morning!?"

Spike resisted the urge to slap himself in the face, as the hand he would have used was currently holding a short tempermental green alien. "Because," he said through clenched teeth. "It's what you might call an all-nighter, you bloody idiot." That last part was delivered under his breath.

"Shazbot!"

"Hey," Calvin interrupted. "Where are we going to stay then? 'Cause I'm telling you right now, I am not going to sleep in the Gummi."

"Re-_lax!"_ Naruto said loudly. "We gotcha covered!"

Hobbes started. "You do?"

Naruto crossed his arms behind his head, closed his eyes, and smiled widely. "There's this one place in town, near here, it's just perfect for you guys!"

"Hold on!" Hobbes said suspiciously. "If this place is so great, how come it's not taken! No, wait, lemme guess; vampires habitually stake it out. Oceanic horrors from dimensions unknown tend to rise up from there. It's a popular filming site."

Naruto frowned, though it was hard to tell; he retained his expression from before for the most part, making him look more foxlike than ever. "Uuuuh, no. There's just not enough people in town to go around for all the buildings. At least half the stuff here was around before anyone got here, y'know?"

Hobbes scratched the back of his head cluelessly. "Uh, no. What do you guys think?"

The three looked at each other before Spike dropped them. "Yeah, that'll work. Take us THERE!" Zim said, gesturing out dramatically.

"Uh, why don't you go by yourself?" Spike wondered. "'S not like it's hard to find. A bit out of the way, t' be honest, but what's so bad 'bout that?"

"Because," Zim said dramatically. "We are..._LOST!"_

Spike shrugged. "Ain't me problem. Heh. Wonder what poor sucker'll get slapped with this job, eh? What do you think-" he trailed off as he realized that he was suddenly alone. "Guys?" He looked around, noticing the 'guys' were a bit off, whistling innocently, waving at him cheerfully, or giving him a good view of their backs as befitted their natures.

"Ah, hell. Story o' me life," Spike grumbled under his breath. "Gotta be the direction finder of a short green psychotic alien with a Napoleon complex."

"I do not have a Napoleon complex!" Zim protested.

Everyone stared at him.

"...What about the rest of what he said?" Calvin asked uncertainly.

"What about it?"

Everyone unconciously backed off to what they instinctively deemed a safe distance. This wasn't much for the majority of the Traverse Town natives(or to be more accurate, the ones present that had been there longer than the rest currently present), seeing as they couldn't move much further.

"Are we going or not?" Zim asked the vampire impatiently, oblivious to the reaction he was causing in everyone else.

"Right, right. Follow me then." The vampire moodily walked off slowly, giving Hobbes amble time to grab the unconcious Morte before following.

As he followed Spike and his new aquiantices, Zim looked up at that stars.

_That means that you two are out there somewhere, on one or more world out of thousands of worlds. Dammit, I hate it when that happens! Not that this is pre-ciiisely a common occurance, and why am I enunciating in my thoughts? And how can I tell that sort of thing, anyway? Damn, my head's surreal. Why do they call it surreal, anyway? Are they implying with the 'sur' part of it that it's worthy of honoring?_

_Did I get off-track again?_

_I just realized; you two found your own ways off the planet before it collapsed in on itself. And that means I have to find you two; I mean, you certainly can't find your way to this town, at least on your own. Not that I'm certain you'd want to; I've only been here for...what? An hour and a half at most? And I'm already lost. Why must people build such confusing layouts?! My Labyrinth of Ultimate Confusion and Slight Exhaustion had a much saner building plan then this place, and it was built on non-Euclidian geometric angles. M.C. Esther would have a field day in this place! Irk, I wouldn't be surprised if paradoxal stairs were fashionable here! But DAMN, those paintings are cool!_

Zim, almost completely unaware of it, slowly started raising a hand up to the sky, vaugely certain that his mental musings would be worth uncountable millions to any psychiatrist that was bored and itching to write a book on the mentality of the mental, to coin a phrase.

_I don't know where you two could have disappeared to, nor do I know how to find you. But of course you couldn't make it easy, now could you? Noooo, you nev-vah make it simple for ANYONE! You hear me? ANYONE!...Why am I yelling? I'm starting to make my head hurt. And why does that frighten me?_

_I don't know, and there's another thing I don't know; how many worlds there are. At the risk of repeating myself, I've heard from those in town that all possible worlds exist somewhere out there. Any world imaginable can and probably does exist in the universe; one world for every star._

Zim stared out into the night sky. One world for every star. Did that mean that each star actually _was _a world, or merely that every star served as a sun for some world out there. Either way, the sheer amount of possibly worlds was daunting, even to him. And that was something for an Irken that had been called _insanely courageous_ in a complimentary tone.

_But I don't care._

His raised hand curled uncertainly into a fist.

_You can't hear me, Gir. And I'm pretty sure that you can't hear me Dib. I got rid of the brain-nanites years ago. But that's irrelevent._

His neutral expression turned into an almost manic grin, and the suddenly clenching of his fist gave him an exuberent look. An outside observer, seeing him now, might conjecture that it was a _hell yeah! _sort of look. But dispite his look, it was an expression and a emotion that was, at it's core, deadly serious. Even if the recipents couldn't hear it, that didn't change what it was. It was greater than a promise made in his mind.

It was an oath, declared by his heart. And Zim never minced words.

_No matter how far away we are...no matter what distant world you're on...no matter what manner of horror I must endure...no matter what I have to do to get you back... I _will _find you, Gir and Dib._

_No matter what._

His hand fell back to his side, and the grin faded away to a simple slight smile.

He continued looking up into the night sky, thinking about what sort of trouble he was going to get into or cause in the pursuit of his goal.

He decided it didn't matter. And hey; it might be fun.

"Hey, new guy!" Hobbes yelled.

Zim started, jarred out of his internal musing by the shout. He gave the world an all-around hateful glare for disturbing his 'Zim-Time'.

"Don't rush me!" he shouted back at the tiger as he hurried up to them as they went to his new base of operations, wherever it was.

_Besides, _he thought as he tried scooting to a stop, accidentally sliding past them and crashing into some trash cans. _How much worse can things get?_

The answer to that is very, heh heh heh. I must say, I'm pleased I finally got this chapter finished. Took me long enough!

I can't think of anything else to say, besides an abjuration to leave a review(I need input, ya know)and a note.

If you think things are weird now...

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Cue dramatic and insane scary laughter. Man, I just _loved _that gesture in Fable, heh heh heh.

I've also begun instituting a design of using those little swirling things to denote the beginning and end of Author Notes. Should work better than my method of three dots to denote scene breaks, hm?


	5. Lost' Is Such A Strong Word

This chapter's a little later then I envisioned, mostly due to laziness on my part, but also because I originally planned it to be a lot bigger. Unfortunately, much of the latter half got compressed or something; it was seriously messed up, forcing me to split it into two chapters. The good part about that, though, is that I already have much of the next chapter written.

Sorry, no poem for you.

Disclaimer: I own no property properly owned by Disney, Square-Enix, Jhonen Vasquez, Bill Watterson, Thirtieth Century Fox, Christy Hui, D.C., Cartoon Network, Sunao Yoshida, Masashi Kishimoto, Joss Whedon or anyone I forgot to mention.

-------

Gaara of the Desert, who'd earned such delightful nicknames as the Demon of the Hidden Sand, the Monster of Sunagakure-That-Was, the Sand Reaper, Host of the One-Tailed Shukaku and The Beast With No Eyebrows through the natural progression of the instability inherent to his personality due to his chronic insomnia, stared stonily at the air.

He growled to himself as he tried to tune out the ceaseless screaming of the Shukaku, trying uselessly to ignore it's endless pleas for him to kill everyone on board in a spree of murder. He glanced out a window, his lips frowning slightly as he stared at the gleaming silver disc in the sky. _I hate full moons,_ he thought moodily.

_I likes me a full moon! _The Shukaku declared loudly. _Gets my blood pumping, know what I mean, boy?_

_Why do you think I hate it?_ Gaara thought back._ I have to listen to your bitching._

_Screw you, dumbass! Kill someone, will ya? I'm going stir-crazy here!_

Gaara told the Shukaku to copulate with itself. The demon quieted for a moment, giving hifm some space to think.

Due to the suprising series of events regarding the sudden appearance of the Keybearer, he had found himself aboard Jarod's private airship, the _Sun Eagle_; it was a expertly designed craft, designed by Jarod personally and built by some of the finest technicians in town. It was Jarod's home away from home, which meant that it was the only home the few people who knew he actually existed were aware of, as no one knew just where he lived. It was about the size of the average blimp, normally invisible to the human eye but colored bright friendly primary colors when it was visible. It's bulky exterior looked a bit steampunk, with small pistons everywhere and oversized antigravity engines among other little details.

A few moments of thought later, Gaara, currently sitting in a seat in a small hallway lined with chairs, poised between a kind of recreation room and the pilot's chamber, was staring at Jarod, trying to get his attention in his own unique manner. Either that, or he was finding the space between Jarod's neck and shoulder unaccountably interesting.

Anyone who knew Gaara for any appreciable amount of time got used fairly quickly to his personality quirks, creepy as they were; being an insomniac who until fairly recently primarily defined his interactions with people in terms of indiscriminate murder and general hatred, people generally feared Gaara, even when they weren't aware of his dark past. It was fairly common knowledge that he labeled 'subduing an opponent' as 'breaking all the bones in their body three times', based on the logic that an enemy that couldn't move was an enemy that couldn't harm anyone. He also often forgot to only think his replies to the Shukaku's running commentary, causing many to believe that Gaara was schizophrenic, though technically that wasn't far from the truth. Even those who were aware of Gaara's lamentable condition as what he called a 'spirtualist medium' or host were easily unnerved by the sight of him angrily voicing irate replies such as 'I want to purge your intestines out through your throat', neglecting to add the stipulation that his comment had been made independent of whatever conversation had been going on around him. Third, he was just plain creepy, in his own inimitable 'holy shit, he's _scary!'_ way.

He also had mastered the fine art of turning a stare into it's own form of communication, a fact not lost upon Jarod. Being a person given to nearly obsessive-compulsive levels of organization, he'd quantified the majority of Gaara's various facial expressions from Number 1(perfectly relaxed stare): I have nothing in particular to communicate, to Number 352(slight furrowing of the brows and bit of a frown): You are causing me undue stress and I advise you to desist, and that old standby, Number 9001(stone-cold glare, narrowed eyes and tight scowl): I am going to kill you. The stony neutral look Jarod was currently receiving by proxy was Number 2213(almost completely neutral): I desire your attention, but the situation is not so drastic that I am willing to disrupt your thoughts.

Stepping out of his seat, Jarod quietly sat next to Gaara. "Something on your mind?" Jarod asked pleasantly.

Gaara didn't say anything, but that was likely because he gathering his thoughts: Gaara only spoke when he knew precisely what he wanted to say, often because he hated looking stupid. "Something," Gaara finally said.

Jarod waited. Gaara just stared back at him, blinking once or twice. It was a tribute to Gaara's mastery of fear that he could make even a _blink_ look intimidating; it reminded Jarod of a guilliotine blade coming down on an immobile lump of meat.

"_And?_" Jarod said, breaking the tension in the air.

Gaara paused another few moments, collecting his thoughts like grains of sand in the air. "Was it really a wise decision to send the Keybearer and the King's emisaries to Fosters' with..." Gaara paused, as if still trying to digest this one fact in his mind. "Spike and Bloo?"

"It seemed to be the best idea at the moment," Jarod replied calmly. "Bloo knows the way and Spike's one of the best fighters we have in town."

"I wasn't talking about their fighting abilities. I was talking about the fact that Spike is a pretentious bastard and Bloo couldn't find his mind over his ego if he had a map. In short, they're both _idiots_." Gaara said acidly.

Jarod sighed. "Look, I know it seemed like a bad idea, but it seemed faster to do it this way. We send them off to Foster's, I take their Gummi Ship to Cyborg's for a repair job and drop you guys off at home."

Gaara closed his eyes momentarily. He opened them a moment later, his odd blue-green eyes boring into Jarod's brown ones. "I understand your tactical decision. I don't understand why you sent _them,_ when you could have sent someone more competent. The Xiaolin Warriors, for instance. Hell, even me or Naruto would have been a better choice."

"Alright, a natural twenty!" Naruto cried from the airlock-style door to their rear.

"Naruto," Clay said slowly. "For the last time, we're playing _poker._"

"...Still taking all your guy's money," the ninja replied smugly.

Raimundo let out a string of Spanish that probably translated to something vulgar. "He doesn't even know what game we're playing and he's still cleaning us out! _Buenos Dios, _what's _wrong _with us!?"

"I blame you wasting time on your pelvis bound," Omi said, making sounds that suggested he was shuffling cards.

"Pardner, I don't know where to start correctin' ya," Clay said amiably.

"Yeah," Kimiko agreed. "Rai doesn't slack off half as much as he used to. Mostly."

"Thanks for the sterling recommandation," Raimundo said sourly.

"An old habit," Omi said, probably laying out the cards. "Is an old habit. Shall we...how do you say...play for keeps?"

Gaara thought that everyone in the other room was staring at Omi slack-jawed. "I _knew _it!" Naruto yelled, probably jumping to his feet and pointing at Omi. "You _can _get idioms right!"

"Yes; I have, as some of our friends say, furious skills!"

"Aaand he slips right back," Kimiko said drily.

"And we already covered that one too," Raimundo said. "Back in New York when we recovered the Serpent's Tail."

Gaara turned his head from the door to Jarod.

Jarod shrugged uncertainly. "I know it looks bad...but we've only been seperated for about thirty minutes. How much trouble could they get into by now?"

------

Spike, Bloo, Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte stared sullenly, their backs facing a huge smoking hole in the wall behind them. To their left was a dead end, to their right was a sharp turn

Morte dared to glance back. "Is that..._thing _following us, Boss?"

Zim looked back, twitching slightly. "I see it nowhere! That...horrible _demon! _We must have lost it!"

"Yeah," Bloo said. "We blew up a building to get away!"

"Always a good thing in my book!" Spike said.

"Guuuys!" Bloo whined. "Less talking, more running before it catches up!""

Hobbes shuddered. "Don't have to tell me twice!" He hopped away from the hole, turning to the right, the others following him.

"Hi! My name is Fred Fredburger! I can! I can! I can spell my name real good! Yes!"

He came to a stop, the others crashing together behind him. The odd sight right in front of them was a short furry green...thing. It's body was wide and stout, with no clear division of it's shoulder or hips, and it's limbs were fairly short, ending in stubby fingers with hooflike nails and feet that looked like an anthropoid elephant's. A pair of small horns graced the top of it's head, above where it's eyes shined out with all the intelligence of a pet rock. the short horn-nubs poking out of it's head were coupled by a short tail that ended in a triangle of sorts, extending out from the vicinity of it's rear. Finally, an elephantine trunk hung out above his mouth to just below it's bottom lip.

"F-R-E-D...F-R-E...D! B...U-R...G-E...R! _Fred Fredburger! _Yes! My mom, my mom says that I'm reeall smart and if I don't have any more accidents, I can move out of the yard! Yes."

There was a long pause.

"I like nachos and frozen yogurt! Yes."

"Sweet, jumping _chili bean!_" Zim yelled. "He found us! Again!"

"What will it take to rid us of you!?" Bloo screamed at Fred Fredburger. "What!? _For the love of God, TELL ME!"_

Fred Fredburger stared at him. "I have toe fungus!"

"Sir," Calvin said to Hobbes. "I should like to hire you for a monster extermination job."

"Oh no," Hobbes said back. "This one is free. I _insist._"

Bloo slapped his face. "I hate my life. This much."

Spike lightly kicked him. "Hey, remember it's all your fault, dumbass. You're the one that tried to sell the District to him."

"Hey! I remember you! I remember you! Yes!" Fred Fredburger walked out over Bloo, pressing a finger into the imaginary friend. "One time, this one I was playing a game with dots, and blinking things and fruit! I like fruit! Yes. And there was a, there was a ball thingie chasing you around when you looked like this, yes! And then it ran away, 'cause you were all white and stuff! Yes! And then it touched you and you went poof! And then you went back into your box thingie! Yes!" Fred Fredburger kept poking Bloo as he spoke, increasingly poking him harder, which, judging by Bloo's increasingly deeper scowl, were incredibly irritating.

"Hey-! Quit-! Stop tha-! Seriously man, that's-! Okay, if you don't-! STOP THAT!" Bloo screamed, his patience frayed.

"Yep. Definitely Gir flashbacks," Zim said to himself, thinking that the main difference between his robot sidekick and this idiot was that this...whatever it was, it was merely mind-bogglingly stupid. Gir was mind-bogglingly stupid and insane.

Fred suddenly ceased, staring at nothing in particular with blissful stupidity. "Okay, blobby thing!"

"Don't call me that."

"Okay, Mr. Blue Thing! Hey, what's that?" He asked, wandering over to Spike. "Are those your pants? Are those? Are those? Are those your pants?"

"No, they're the Greased-Up Deaf Guy's pants. I'm just holding them for him," Spike said sarcastically.

"Okay!" Fred Fredburger said. "They're very nice pants! Yes. And very greasy slimy, yes." Fred suddenly opened his mouth and closed it over Spike's leg, managing to gulp it down to his knee.

Spike's face, normally set in an expression that seemed to suggest that he really didn't give a damn, turned to one that was somewhere between shock and fury. "What the bloody _hell_?! Get off me, you brain-dead...brain-dead.." Spike looked at Zim. "Help a man out here?"

"Vaguely elephantine stink-thing?" Zim suggested.

"Hell no, that sucks._"_ Spike furiously shook his leg, trying to use sheer motion to dislodge the dim-witted Underworld-That-Was inhabitant.

"Ooh!" Fred Fredburger mumbled through his mouthful of leather-clad leg as he flew off the leg, crashing into the wall with no more awareness of the impact then the average rock. "That did not taste good! Yes!" He started hopping up and down excitedly, noticing Calvin's weapon. "A hammer thingy! Hey, Mr. Blob! When! When! When do we get hammer thingies?"

"Shut up! You're too stupid to get one!"

"Damn, this thing's stupid," Morte observed as Fred Fredburger went back to Bloo, begining to pester him for a hammer. "And I was in a plane of pure stupid once. Source of all cheap useless mass-produced crap, you know."

"Even duller than a broken tack of the Ordinary Tool people of Stuffia-2," Zim said sagely.

"You just made that up, didn't you?" Spike said.

"Yes. Yes I did. And you'll never prove _it_!"

"You just said it."

"Did I? Did I really?"

"Yes, you _did!_"

"That's what they all say. And then you're strapped into a rocket ship headed into the path of a supernova with only a crossword puzzle in Spanish and a scale-model of the Massive to decorate with pleasing shapes to pass the time before your flesh-searing _oblivion! _By way of exploded sun! Which hurts. Oh, the pain of the hurting."

Spike stared at him; he had some experience in the matter of judging someone's madness, given that his vampiric sire and longtime love had been tortured to insanity shortly before being turned, but Zim was in a class all his own, blending irrationality and unpredicatibility into a potent stew of sheer chaotic behavior.

Bloo's scowl intensified, but he showed no other sign of his volcanic state of anger. He calmly glided...scooted...however he moved around to Calvin. Bloo held his arm out, Calvin handing the hammer over wordlessly. Grasping the hammer firmly, Bloo came back to Fred. "So, you want a hammer thing, do you?" Bloo said sweetly to Fred Fredburger.

"Yes! Yes! Yes! I do!" Fred Fredburger yelped, jumping up and down.

"Okaaay then...HAVE THIS!" Bloo swung the hammer full-force into the moronic creauture's face, knocking it high into the sky, the being dwindling into a tiny speck that abruptly vanished in a twinkling flash with a loud _ting._

Bloo slumped over and sighed, throwing the hammer back at Calvin, unintentionally bopping him in the eye. "That takes care of that."

"I would like some nachos and frozen yogurt!" Fred Fredburger said from behind him.

"Whaat?!" Spike said. He furiously glanced at the sky and at Fred Fredburger, looking at one then the other so fast he should have gotten whiplash. "But...you were up there...but you...here...there...AUUUGH!"

Hobbes sympathetically patted him on the shoulder, being the only one tall enough to do so. He had to reach up a bit, but it was the thought that counted. "Relax, you get used to the insanity eventually."

"You guys!" Zim shouted, deciding that referring to them as _minions _or_ expendable pawns_ would have been bad for his public relations. "In my role as Supreme Leader Guy, I have decreed, that starting right now..._we run like hell and never look back!"_

Everyone who was capable rose a hand. "Aye!"

They paused for a moment. "'Supreme Leader Guy'?" Spike questioned. "I've heard better made-up titles at a banana republics run by insane cannibals."

"Quiet, you!" Zim snapped right before everyone started running.

And Fred Fredburger found himself in the dust, all by himself.

"My head is a hammer thingie!" He said, pounding his forehead into a nearby wall for a few minutes, causing a sizable dent and accidentally causing his brain to suddenly develop a through and comprehensive grasp of basic algebra for no apparent reason. "Ouch! Yes."

-------

_Near Cyborg's shop..._

"Uh...ugh...UGH!" Naruto yelled, tugging at the door. He gave up, letting go and slumping back, turning to the Xiaolin Dragons and Gaara. "It's no good, he must've locked up for the night."

Dojo slapped his face, loosening his coils around Clay's hat. "Naruto, for the last time, that's a _push _door!"

Naruto crossed his arms. "Sometimes pulling _is _pushing."

Omi crossed his arms and considered it. "Perhaps, for the sake of argument, let us agree that that may be true. However, in a far more accurate and correct view, it is not. You are being most foolish."

"Yeah?" Naruto shot back. "Well...well...you all talk with an accent!"

Raimundo smacked him upside the head. "They should've X-rayed your head when you were at the hospital!"

Naruto threw a punch that Raimundo easily weaved away from. "They did! And for your information, they found _nothing!_" He paused for a moment. "I didn't mean it like that!"

"Sure ya din't," Clay said.

Gaara looked at Naruto. "You're an embarrasment to _shinobi_ everywhere."

"...You don't have any eyebrows!" Naruto shot back.

"Ooh," Gaara said cooly. "I haven't heard that one before."

"Will you idiots knock it off!?" Kimiko snarled.

Gaara glared at her. "Excuse me?"

_Kill her! Peel her skin off, drain her fluids and wear her meat as a musclesuit! Teach 'er to tell you what to do! Heh heh...musclesuit. I'm so freaking funny it hurts!_ The Shukaku paused. _Then howabouts we go moshing? I like moshing! Rap rules!_

Gaara's eye twitched. _If you were manifast, _he told the Shukaku. _I would make you scream and bleed in interesting ways._

_Damn it, boy! You ain't got no flair for violence. 'Scream and bleed in interesting ways'. Where's the threat? Where's the rage? Where's the glamour? WHERE'S THE DAMN SANDWICH? WE HAVEN'T EATEN IN HOURS! I'M HUNGRY! I WANT SPICY FOOD!_

Gaara told the Shukaku to copulate with himself again.

_You're not nice!_

Clay waved his hand around Gaara's blank eyes. "Hey? Hey, you in there?"

"Am I the only one who thinks it's really creepy when he zones out?" Kimiko said.

"That is just _weird,_" Raimundo said. "I think he's drooling a little." He looked closer, his lip curling in distaste. "Yup, we got drooling."

Naruto glared at Raimundo and angrily kicked him in the shin.

"Ow! What was that for?"

Naruto smirked. "What? I didn't do anything." He silently rejoiced at the blow struck for all demon-possessed hosts everywhere, not that there were many.

"Friends!" Omi declared. "We must be courteous to our allies. Mocking his nature as a host is most uncouth-"

"'Host'?" Naruto repeated angrily. "'Host'?! What the hell is that supposed to mean? Don't callGaara that! There's more to him then just being the container of the One-Tailed Shukaku!"

Omi flinched, realizing he'd violated the first rule of speaking to Naruto: never mention the word 'host'. "I-I apologize."

Raimundo glanced guiltily at Gaara, who was still somewhere conversing with the Shukaku. "Uh, yeah, me too."

Naruto scowled at Raimundo. "Yeah...that was _real _convincing."

Raimundo glared at him. "Dude, I'm serious! I-"

Naruto grunted. He turned around, scuffing dust up. "Whatever."

Raimundo looked moodily at the ninja's back, wondering whether he should drop the subject or kick him in the back. He decided to ignore it, as that seemed the better option and he didn't want to fight Naruto when he was in a bad mood. Bad things happened when Naruto got really angry.

Naruto fumed to himself. Most of the time, the mostly unknown fact that he was the container of the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox didn't bother him that much. Sure, it was distressing to find out you were holding up a demon inside, and terrible to find out that the reason you had been hated and despised by almost everyone you knew was because you bore the monster that'd almost killed your village home the day you were born, but the thing that really annoyed him was when people considered people like him and Gaara to be extensions of the demons they carried inside them. The mindset that they were the same as the demons inside was the very thing that'd made his and Gaara's childhoods so miserable, but he couldn't hate people for that. But he despised the term _host._ It implied that they were nothing more then receptacles for the Tailed Beasts and less persons then tools.

Gaara, on the other hand, was unaware of anything going on around him. The Shukaku, on the other hand, was. _Oy! The mouth-breathers are staring again!_

_Why are you calling them mouth-breathers?_ Gaara asked._ You breath through your mouth too._

_Grrr...damn it, boy! You're always picking apart everything I say and throwing it back at me! You are one damn sarcastic son of a bitch!_

_Don't insult my mother,_ Gaara 'said' calmly._ Or I'll listen to love songs._

_You fight dirty!_

Gaara stirred, finally noticing everyone staring at him. "What?" he asked sternly.

"Nothing!" Dojo squeaked, crawling under Clay's hat to shiver in fright.

Clay found himself in the unenviable position of having Gaara glare at him. He shuffled nervously, smiling awkwardly at the sand-ninja. Gaara's expression remained as it was; a stern stare that could make a glass-eyed statue want to blink.

It went on for a few more minutes; Gaara staring at Clay, the Earth Dragon refusing to back down or show aggression.

Gaara finally looked away, walking away from the others and staring out at the moon. The ground under his feet crumbled as he walked over it, crumbling into curling tendrils of sand.

Jarod came out of the shadows from the alley they'd arrived at, tending to who-knew-what, and noticed Gaara's mood. "Something the matter?"

Gaara stared up at the moon, scowling faintly. He looked away and at Jarod; as he half-turned to face him, the sand at his feet stirred, forming clawlike protrusions; they reached out at the warm meat around them before Gaara clenched his fist and they crumbled away.

Gaara spoke, his voice slightly hoarse with effort, and with an inhuman timbre to it. "On nights of the full moon...it's blood..._boils._"

Jarod found his attention drawn to the eyeliner-like marks around his eyes. They were wavering slightly, the black creeping out onto his face before being drawn back in.

Kimiko raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Naruto walked beside her. "What he means," he said quietly. "Is that the demon in him is awake right now. And it wants _out._"

Kimiko stared wide-eyed at Gaara's trembling, tightly clenched fist. A tiny trickle of blood was coming from inbetween his fingers.

"You alright there, partner?" Clay asked concernedly.

Gaara didn't answer for a minute, staring down at the ground, his eyes shut tight.

Naruto, alone of all the people there, really knew what was happening to Gaara. Only he, a fellow container, could know what he was going through. The Shukaku was active, and it was wrestling Gaara for dominance, fighting to emerge and kill. Gaara was fighting it with all his strength. Only Naruto knew how hard Gaara was fighting, and how fast he was slipping. Fighting against his inner demon was always going to be a losing battle; it would always be Gaara's will and determination to prevent the Shukaku from possessing his body and living his murderous fantasies on the world. And only Naruto knew that Gaara had been losing that battle the day the demon was placed inside his body before his mother had even given birth to him.

Gaara finally raised his head, his eyes opened normally; his eyemarks had stopped shifting around and he wasn't trembling anymore. The Shukaku, if only for this night, had been denied.

Omi, Clay, Raimundo and Clay looked at one another awkwardly. They couldn't think of anything to say.

Gaara gave Naruto a glance. Naruto looked at him, his pronounced canines biting his lower lip. Gaara shook his head wearily and brushed his hair aside, throwing the red kanji-scar on his forehead.

For Gaara, it was symbolic. The day he'd been born, he'd killed his mother. He'd been born with his hands stained with blood, the Shukaku already seeking to emerge again, eating away at his psyche as he slept, reducing him to a life of instability, terror and insomnia. He had been, and always would be, a bloodlusting monster, spurred on by the endless screaming of the demon in his heart.

And yet he still had the kanji for _love _scarred on his forehead.

Jarod picked up on Gaara's act. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"I am," Gaara replied, his voice devoid of inflection or tone. "For now."

Jarod felt a momentary surge of pity for Gaara's condition and remorse for his inability to do anything about it.

Any further discussion on the matter what interrupted when the door swung open, held open by Nigel. He looked at the collected people evenly, raising an eyebrow under his sunglasses. "All right," he said slowly. "What's going on here?"

"Hey, _uno!_" Raimundo greeted.

"Hello," Nigel replied, unsure whether Raimundo was referring to his last name or simply using the Spanish word for one. "Raimundo, Clay, Omi, Kimiko," he paused as Dojo lifted Clay's hat up, looking out fearfully. "Dojo." Dojo waved his hand, forgetting he was holding the hat up and dropping it on him. Nigel grimaced slightly as he spoke to the ninjas. "Naruto, Gaara." The tone in which he spoke those two's names was different from the others; Naruto's name was spoken with an obvious edge of irritation and he referred to Gaara with a slight degree of apprehension. If that bothered either of the ninja, it didn't show.

Nigel paused, looking at the last one there. "Jarod. What is this about, then?"

"We got a job for Cyborg," Jarod replied. "He still here?"

Nigel nodded. "He's around the back, going through the inventory. Is this important?"

Jarod raised an eyebrow. "Aren't all jobs important?"

Nigel rolled his eyes, not that anyone could see. He stepped back into the shop, waving at the others and indicating them to follow him. They complied, walking into the shop and following Nigel to the various chairs in the middle of the room. "Wait here, I'll go fetch him." Naruto happily flopped into a bean-bag chair, kicking his legs out gleefully. Gaara chose to remain where he was, standing by the counter silently. Clay quietly leaned back into another chair, Dojo crawling out from under his hat and coiling onto the table between the chairs. Kimiko and Raimundo sat back on the sofa, sitting side by side. Omi, unsure where to sit, took a small cushion from a chair and dropped it on the ground, sitting on it cross-legged, folding his arms together, his interlocked hands disappearing under his sleeves. Jarod sat back on a reclining chair, watching everyone in the room off-handedly.

Seeing that they were seated, Nigel nodded. He disappeared through a door behind the counter.

Dojo peered around nervously, tapping a claw on his chin nervously. "Uh, where's the Gummi Ship?"

Naruto grinned at him. "Ah, I got it handled!"

Dojo blinked. "Uh, what?"

The ninja raised an eyebrow rougishly. "Hey, some of us can be in more than one place at once."

"Hey, what's that supposed to-" he stopped, his eyes growing wide. "Oooh. I get it!"

"Hah!" Omi boasted. "I got it before you did!"

"Oh really?" Raimundo said drily.

"Indeed!"

"If you don't mind my asking, then what's he doing?" Jarod asked Omi knowingly.

Omi kept smiling. "I cannot tell you; it is a secret!"

"Or maybe you don't know."

Omi's smile became strained. "Eh...heh heh...what would make you say that?"

Jarod smiled inscrutably.

Omi twitched. "All right, so I do not know what he is doing!"

Raimundo snorted. "It's obvious! He's using Shadow Clones!"

Omi laughed nervously. "Ah, heh heh, I already knew that! I was just seeing if _you _did!"

Raimundo smirked and was about to say something when Kimiko sharply elbowed him. He looked at her sharply and she smiled innocently.

Naruto grinned. He looked at Clay, who was regarding the scene calmly. "Ease up," the cowboy advised his friends.

Jarod looked at Gaara, who'd refused to join in so far. The sand ninja looked at the others coldly. "You are all idiots."

Naruto scowled. "Be nice, Gaara!"

Gaara scowled. "No."

Cyborg came in the room from the same door Nigel'd went into in time to hear that comment. "Heeey, you getting sarcastic on us?"

Gaara crossed his arms. "Look at me, I have a sense of humor. La de-_freaking-_da."

Naruto and Jarod looked at each other; Jarod raised an eyebrow while Naruto merely grinned widely. They both looked at Cyborg to gauge his reaction: the cyborg smiled, not minding the cruel sarcasm.

Cyborg greeted everyone in the room, getting greetings in return. As he finished, Nigel came up from behind him, sidestepping him easily. "I'm clocking out," he informed Cyborg. "It's _late_." The way he said that suggested that he disapproved of the lateness of the hour. Without another word, he walked out through the open door, closing it behind him.

Cyborg watched him leave, then turned to Jarod. "So! Heard ya got a job for me."

"Yeah."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? At _this _hour?"

Jarod shrugged. "You _have _been keeping this place open for a long while."

"Only until the Elrics finish up whatever they're up to," Cyborg said defensively. "So tell me something, I gotta know: why?"

Jarod looked at him firmly. "It's for the Keybearer."

Cyborg raised his only remaining natural eyebrow. "You mean that Zim guy?"

Jarod nodded, not surprised that Cyborg had already met him. "Yeah. He connected with the King's guys; they're planning to go up into space tommorow. Problem is, their ship's totalled."

Cyborg considered that for a moment. "I got it. They gotta go to the worlds, but for that they need a Gummi Ship. So you need the skills of the greatest mechanic in all Traverse Town, am I right?"

Jarod nodded. "Yeah. But he's out of town, so I had to go to you." He smiled to show he was joking.

"Yeah, yeah, I getcha. So, what kind of job are we talking about? If the blocks were just trashed, it's easy to reconnect and replace them. If the computer was damaged, that's something more serious."

Jarod shook his head. "I don't know; haven't read anything on Gummi maintenance and repair yet. I wouldn't be able to tell."

Cyborg sighed. "Fine, bring it in."

Naruto jumped up. "Right on it!" He ran to the door, slipping on the floor and flying right into it, swing it open. He fell to his feet, unperterbed by his fall. He clapped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "_HEY, GET YOUR BUTTS OVER HERE!"_

Omi raised an eyebrow. "_That _was your brilliant plan! I could easily do much better than that! Even Ra-"

Raimundo shook a fist warningly. "There's a typhoon with your name on it, pal."

Omi smiled nervously. He paused, frowning slightly. His head leaned over as he listened to something intently, finally standing up. "What is that _sound?_"

"Sounds like footsteps," Clay observed.

"A _lot _of footsteps," Kimiko stated.

They all stood up and looked outside. Marching in from the alley they'd landed in(and incidentally where Zim had arrived at)was at least fifteen clones of Naruto, each helping to carry the remains of Calvin and Hobbes' Gummi Ship, holding it over their heads, running over to the shop while arguing amongst themselves.

Cyborg stared unbelievingly as the Shadow Clones set the Gummi Ship down, waving energetically at everyone. His attention was not focused on the clones, now wrestling each other happily, but at the ship before him.

Calling it a ship, Cyborg thought, was an insult to all properly maintained transportation everywhere. The Gummi blocks of the rocketship-styled craft had been horribly burnt, only a few traces of the orignal orange-yellow coloration showing up under the soot. The front was heavily crumpled, throwing the cockpit slightly out of alignment with the rest of it, the underside throughly pressed up to the engines, one of which had been lost. One of the wings had harshly twisted away, looking like the ship was trying to wave at him and the other wing was compressed into the side of it; the fact that the ship was still in one piece after what it had been through spoke of the sheer resilience of the Gummi block.

"Well?" Jarod said after a long pause. "What do you think?"

Cyborg didn't say anything. He slowly walked to the Gummi Ship, moving stiffly and almost robotically, his attention completely focused on the craft. He looked over it, running a hand across it in some places, making the soot chip and fall off, revealing the Gummi beneath. He lifted it up, grimacing at the damage underneath and carefully putting it back down. He continued in that vein for a while, grumbling unhappily as he surveyed the extent of the damage, analyzed the worst of it and generally made himself angry. He carefully climbed over the top of it, lifting up the cockpit, coughing loudly as the smoke flared up and hit him in the face, making the metal on his head rather sooty. Wiping the soot off his face, he rooted aroung in the surprisingly roomy cockpit a bit, looking around. A few minutes later, he came back out, a dark look on his face, holding a large dufflebag in his right hand. He climbed to the top of the Gummi, shut the cockpit behind him and jumped in front of the shop, walking back in.

"_So,_" Naruto said. "How bad is it?"

Cyborg stared at the wall for a minute. "It's not as bad as it looks," he finally said. "Most of the damage is strictly aesthetic. The wings are busted, it's gonna need new engines and the body blocks are gonna need to be replaced, but that's easy. None of that's too bad." He sighed unhappily. "The real problem's the cockpit. Computer's completely busted, trashed and every other synonym for 'ruined' that you can think of. Without that, there's no way it'll work."

"Can you do anything?" Gaara asked.

Cyborg snorted. "Don't insult me, man; 'course I can do it! Thing is, it'll take all night! With all the replacing, programming and general repairs I'll have to do, this thing won't be ready until..." He did some quick calculations. "Twelve o' clock tommorow morning. And that's going if I do an all-nighter."

Jarod grimaced. "So what do you say?"

Cyborg thought about it. "Well...I did tell Zim I'd try to help him out, and he needs to get on his way as soon as possible...stand out the way, y'all. I'm hauling that thing in!"

Everybody quickly stood to the side of the rear wall as Cyborg jumped behind the counter, hitting a sequence of buttons. The entire wall facing the street lifted up, disappearing into the upper story and exposing the shop to the steet. The floor beneath the feet rumbled as the shop slowly rose up a few feet, the floor iteself changing; the hidden platform disguised as the ground under the chairs sank into the ground, leaving a circular hole behind. It came back up a moment later, two long grooves set into it, the chairs absent. The ground leading from the platform to the street sank, forming track-grooves in it. At the perimeter of the shop, a pair of lifting forks emerged from the hidden part of the building that now lay exposed. The forks extended to under the Gummi Ship, rising to the shop's ground leve and lifting it into the air. The forks retracted, sliding along the grooves and fitting neatly into the platform's tracks, setting the Gummi Ship directly on the platform. With a loud hissing noise, the platform sank back underneath.

Cyborg hit a few more buttons; the shop sank back to it's usual level and the wall slid back down, a few securing locks sliding into place at unseen edges. He jumped back over the counter, walking up to the hole in the center of the room. "Well, better get to work then." He glanced up at Jarod, throwing him the dufflebag. "Get this to those guys. Don't think they'd want to lose whatever's in here."

Jarod easily caught it. "No problem. Good luck."

Cyborg grinned. "I don't need luck. I got skill."

"Sometimes luck _is _skill," Naruto commented.

Cyborg rolled his eyes. "Maybe for people who _need _it." Laughing loudly, he jumped down the hole, a platform sliding back over it a moment later.

They left, walking back into the alley. Naruto paused, noticing that his clones were still fighting each other, not noticing anything that was going on around them. He made a gesture that looked like a weird attempt at a cat's-cradle, causing the clones to disappear in loud puffs of smoke, leaving nothing behind. Naruto quickly followed the others, coming to a stop as they stopped in front of the very dead end Zim had awakened in.

Jarod hit a few buttons on a wristwatch. A blindingly bright light broke through the clouds, illuminating them against the alley; the various litter around the alley was spun away by a powerful force generated by the light, clearing their immediate standing point.

Gaara looked up as closely as he dared. There was a large light high in the clouds, looking like a burning eye if you ignored the dim outline of the airship behind it.

Jarod hit another button and they flew into the air, rising high and higer, levitated by the same force that had thrown the litter about until they disappeared into the light. It disappeared after they did so, no evidence of their passing left behind.

Except for the fact that Dojo had been left behind. "_**THIS ISN'T FUNNY!**_" He screamed, shaking his hands out at the sky.

The light lit up again, taking Dojo up into the airship too.

Needless to say, Jarod was extremely embarrased.

-------

"We're lost," Spike said flatly, giving Bloo a sneer as the imaginary friend anxiously dug around in a bush growing through a tall old-fashioned iron fence. "Again."

Bloo took a moment to look back and glance at him in a confused manner. "What makes you say that?"

Spike inhaled deeply and counted to three, exhaling on three. Given that he was technically dead and his atrophied lungs had ceased to absorb oxygen properly about a hundred and ten years or so, it was rather pointless, but undead monster or not, there were some habits that stuck with people. Counting to a predetermined number and exhaling was one of them.

"Do you even know where this house is!?" Zim snarled.

"'House'?" Bloo asked, clearly surprised. "Oh, the _house._ It's right over there," He pointed directly to their left, past the fence. "_I _was looking for my paddleball collection." He jumped into the bush.

Spike's eyebrow twitched. Bloo hopped out of the bush, supporting about fifteen or so paddleballs in his arms. He spoke to the inanimate objects, cooing softly and reassuringly."It's okay, Daddy's here, no, _ssh, ssh, _it's alright. Did you miss Daddy? Daddy missed you." Behind him, Calvin unslung his hammer and ran at him, though Hobbes caught him before he was able to get very far.

Spike's left eyebrow started pulsing convulsively, threatening to shift his entire face into his demonic features, images of brutally mangling Bloo and giving the most agonizing five point two seconds of his life, the last four point six he would actually be alive to experience.

"Urge to destroy blob-thing...rising..." Zim mumbled, alternatively urged on and advised to let it go by his consciences while a misplaced banana spirit floated around his head, completely confused.

"Let me at 'im! Let me at 'im!" Calvin roared, struggling to escape from Hobbes' iron grip on his arms.

"No. You'll pulverize him." Hobbes said, tightening his grip.

"That's the whole point!"

"'An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind'," Hobbes grumbled, lifting the boy in the air so his rapidly pedaling foot couldn't give him any ground.

"Enough!" Zim snapped. "We can beat Bloo up later, but now is the time for...now is the time for..._not _beating up Bloo!"

Calvin stopped struggling, deciding to settle for giving Bloo one of his patented scowls of promised doom. Seeing his charge had given up his current object of wrath, Hobbes dropped him with a small thud.

They turned towards a massive pair of wrought iron gates at least ten feet tall, arcing at the top and formed from an intricate maze bars, the word _Fosters _was formed near the top of it, arcing along the top in a nice floral pattern, the upper line in the first F curving along and forming the T's crossline.

They looked past the gate, down the sidewalk nearly overgrown with tall grass, and down to the mansion that overshadowed everything around it.

Zim imagined there was some kind of main building there, but it was hard to discern underneath all the baywindows, balconies and towers; a good way to describe it was as if someone had taken several large buildings and smashed them together. It gave off a generally luxurious and comfortable feel, looking like the archetypical big house. It had a strong Victorian aspect to it's construction with a bit of a psychedelic touch to it all, from the yellow-brown-red coloration to the odd construction. The roof slates were brown, sloping downwards and framing the primary yellow nicely. There was a prominent tower, rounded with several windows around it and a flag pole placed on the top; the banner was dark red, with a blue stylized F on it, identical to the first letter on the logo on the gate. There was a puzzling strangeness about it that gnawed at Zim's brain, but the more he tried to pursue it, the more the thought scurried away. Eventually he gave up, though it chittered at him still.

"Why are all these vermin related metaphors going through my mind?" he muttered. "I hate vermin."

The totality of the evil part of his psyche popped up on his left shoulder in a puff of smog. "Maybe you need a life? I recommend going on a killing spree, looting everything and pausing occasionally to remind everyone of the futility of their actions to date and how it was all for nothing and sooner or later, everything crumbles to dust-"

He stopped when Zim's considerably larger finger pressed into his face. "Shut up," Zim advised, flicking him away into a wall, whereupon he vanished in a puff of darkness. Zim couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard a faint _whoo hoo! _from the deeper receses of his sub-consciousness.

"Interesting design," Hobbes conjectured, apparently coming to the same conclusion as Zim pushed the gates open, hopped in the gap and left the gates to swing inward. "And you live here?"

Spike grimaced as he jumped ahead, catching the heavy gates before they could crash into anyone. "I've lived here the past two years," Bloo stated, ignoring Spike's predicament.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Spike grunted, glaring at Bloo as Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte took the opportunity to sidestep the gate. Hobbes stepped back, holding the gate open with one hand, allowing Spike to walk in before the tiger closed it behind him. Noting that everyone was walking towards the house, he stepped onto the path and let go of the gate, allowing it to slam shut.

Ahead of them, having already depositing the paddleballs in another safehole, Bloo frowned, wondering where Mac had gotten to. He generally was with Bloo or at home in Foster's at this time of night, unless other business got in the way. He mentally recollected everything he'd done lately, and concluded that he hadn't done anything to get Mac arrested by any of the various groups around that served as local militias in at least two weeks. And he was pretty sure that Mac wasn't in the mood to skip town.

_Hey, I saw Mac on that freak's airship right before Captain Bighead shoved me off! How's he going to get here? Stewie's secret evil base is miles out of town._

Bloo considered the problem and shuffled ahead a few steps. Hobbes frowned, hearing a distant sound that sounded familiar. He looked around for whatever might have made the noise, and stopped when he looked at Bloo's growing shadow, mental gears turning against each other. He looked up, his face becoming dismayed.

Spike, his vampirically enhanced senses detecting the same noise, was also looking around. Hobbes shook him by the shoulder and Spike turned around to glare at him and say something scathing, but Hobbes raised a hand to between their faces, extending a finger directly upwards. Spike frowned, looking up.

When he looked back at Hobbes, they shared a look that spoke volumes. Simultaneously, they grabbed Calvin and Zim, tugging them back, ignoring their yelling.

"Hey, what's with you guys?" Bloo asked, raising an eyebrow. "Not like it's anything _I _have to worry about."

The irony of his statement, being that he spoke this the exact moment before a red-tan blur plummeted from the skies above and broke it's fall by landing on him wasn't lost upon the observers. When the dust cleared, Mac dazedly sat atop Bloo, who was pasted to the ground by the impact.

"Ow." Bloo said monotonously, reforming slowly.

"Thanks, Bloo." Mac said.

"Anytime, Mac."

"He shove you out, too?"

"Uh huh. Wanna do an elaborate revenge prank?"

"Yep."

"Okay then." Bloo paused. "Wanna get off me?"

Mac rolled off his imaginary friend, landing on the ground with a slight _thud_. Bloo grunted, getting off the ground and shaking the feeling back into his body.

Zim raised an eyeridge, looking from Mac and Bloo to the cloudy night sky, seeing nothing in the sky and not aware of what they were talking about. "This town is insane."

"Tell me about it," Mac agreed, sticking his hands in his jacket-pockets. He gave Zim a friendly look. "My name's Mac."

"I am Zim." The Irken said, returning the human's friendly look with a analytical stare. Mac found the sheer intensity of the alien's stare unnerving; it gave him the impression that Zim was looking into his mind, going through his every little thought and not finding any of it very interesting. Mac looked at the others, noticing the way they were staring up at the house, and came to the obvious conclusion. "Let me guess; Bloo's supposed to bring you over to the home?"

"Emphasis on 'supposed to'," Zim said, glaring at Bloo. The imaginary friend huffed and turned away.

"Hey," Mac said cordially, turning towards the new guys, slightly recoiled at the sight of Morte and giving Spike a friendly wave; Spike returned the gesture with a perfunctionary wave of the fingers. Mac looked back and frowned. Zim had disappeared. "Hold on, where's Zim?"

"Right here," Said a voice from directly behind Mac and Bloo; the two recoiled and fell fowards onto the ground, turning over on their backs to see Zim crossing his arms and grinning maliciously at them.

Bloo clutched the area of his body where his heart would have been, pointing weakly at Zim. "What is _wrong _with you?!"

Zim tilted his head slightly to the side, his disturbing grin growing even wider. "Do you want that alphabetically or in order of importance?"

Mac stood up, warily watching Zim closely. "Why did you do that?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Why would I need a reason?"

Mac's face underwent several interesting turns of expression until he slumped slightly over, his downcast face and sigh suggesting surrender in the face of Zim's singular personality.

Morte edged closer to Spike. "All of a sudden, our chances ain't looking too good. Am I right?"

Spike pressed the skin around his temples slowly, relieving tension. "The Powers That Be must be crazy, sending a guy like that to save the worlds."

Hobbes shrugged. "'Much madness is divinest sense.'"

Spike looked at Hobbes in surprise. "Emily Dickenson. Good poet, nice use of rhyme structure."

Zim stopped where he was, watching his miniature counterparts popped out of thin air. "What is it this time?" he said; from everyone else's point of view, he was now talking to the air directly above his shoulders.

"We've got a dilemna on our hands," his good incarnation said seriously.

Zim considered the last few minutes. Not noticing anything particularily good or evil about anything he'd done, he looked around to see if anything important happening. He saw nothing of the sort, so he looked back down at his consciences. "Eh, what dilemna?"

Everyone else stopped, watching Zim loudly talk to people only he could hear.

"Not the moral kind," his evil incarnation said hurredly. "It's more of a...hmm, you could call it a personal problem."

"Why would _you _have a personal problem?"

"What are you-" Bloo started to say when Zim whirled around on him, glaring ferociously.

"Do you _mind,_ blob thing!? I'm trying to have a conversation with things of metaphysical import! Now be quiet before I do things to you, such that thou couldst not comprehend! Thou sounds neat when you use it in a serious context!" He turned back to his consciences. "Now where was I? Ah yes, the problem. What is it?"

"I can think of a few he's got," Spike muttered. Mac nodded uneasily.

"It's a identity problem-" The good one started saying before he was interrupted.

Zim's inner jerk flew up and pointed at his inner altruist accusingly. "He was calling me names!"

The small angel stared at him disbelievingly. "I did not, you moron!"

The devil bounced up and down, pointing angrily. "See? See? See?"

"No-I-ARRRGH! I wasn't making fun of you! I was _pointing out _that we need names! I was just throwing out some suggestions and Senor Overreaction over there took it as a personal thing!"

"You suggested I take the name Agbar The Eternally Repetitive!"

"Oh, don't start throwing things like that around! Who called me Sir Can't-Take-A-Hint? Let me think, hmm, yeah, oh, it's you! Anyway, like I was saying...um, let's see...where was I...oh yeah! So I want a name, and you know what Mister Envy's like; since I want a name, he wants one too."

"Damn straight."

The angel looked at the demon. "Appropriate choice of words," he said dryly, turning his attention back to Zim. "So, how about it?"

Zim tapped his chin, thinking quickly. "Awright, how is this?" he pointed at his altruistic conscience. "You can be Razael," he pointed at his sociopathic incarnation. "And you can be Samael. How's that?"

Samael shrugged. "Eh, so 'kay." He scooted closer to Zim. "Hey, as long as we're talking, I'd like to mention that I'm tired of listening to Angel-Boy's lies."

Razael eyes widened and his jaw dropped to his feet, staring in shock. Then his mouth reasserted itself, and his eyes both narrowed and turned a darker shade of red, the light shining from his skull becoming more intense and flickering around violently. He manifasted his guitar, pointing it at Samael angrily; for some reason, the blades on the lower half looked more like motorized chainsaws than the usual protruding sickles. "Oh, you _ego-bloated son of a sin, you are going DOWN!_" The guitarsaw suddenly powered up, the air around it glowing white and crackling with electricity. Screaming with fury, he leapt at the demonic conscience, swinging the weapon back.

Samael's eyes bulged and he flitted away just in time to avoid the first swing, hurredly flying around Zim's head with Razael in pursuit, the two's cyclical orbit around Zim's head looking like a bizaare halo. "Unholy son of a buttmonkey! He's _gone CRAAZY!_"

"Arglebargle margle fargle!" Razael roared from behind Samael, spraying froth from his mouth and swinging the modified guitar wildly; Samael screamed like a little girl, flying away just before he could be eviserated, flying around Zim's head, the angel in hot pursuit.

Zim watched Razael chase Samael around, amused at the prospect of wanton violence, though he did have one concern. "Heeey, I thought that you were my shoulder angel! This seems overtly homicidal for a shoulder angel."

Razael paused for a moment. "Yeeah...but I embody all in you that is good. Righteous fury probably falls under that category, right?"

"Oh, okay then."

"HELLO!?" Samael screamed. "In case you haven't noticed, HE'S TRYING TO KILL ME!"

"Oh, right." Zim looked at Razael. "Proceed."

Razael grinned in pure psychotic glee. Samael paled at the sight of the angel readying his guitar and bursting into manic laughter. "Guess what time it is? Thass right! It's CHOP-CHOP TIME! AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!"

"Ah, crapshack." Samael said sourly, flying away just as Razael starting flying at him.

Spike raised an eyebrow. "Changed me mind. Hmm...make nice poem, looks like. How to start, though...let me think a bit..._Upon a night considerably dark/it was that in my heart's silence I observed something new/a being sent by the Powers as a Spark/of hope sorely needed, bearing a Key of Destiny./ Only thing was, the bugger was crazier then a sack of rabid Lioonne./I knew not what Destiny saw in him, but I decided to go with it/ I had little else to do./He was considerally smaller then me/not that bright either, juding by his taste in hats/ though he had a nice jacket. I'd like on of those with a longer bottom./His eyes constantly gleamed, not unlike certain wild cats/ and his attitude could be called abhorrent/ by some blokes; won't mention you here, but you know who you are./ His head was as shiny as an orange/and his sword arm didn't suck either-_oh, hell! What was I thinking?! 'Orange'? What am I, buggered out of my mind? Nothing rhymes with orange! Now that damn thing's going to be running through my mind all day!"

Calvin grinned at Spike. "You remind me...of a British Ziggy."

Spike stared at him. "_Who?_"

Calvin smacked his head. "Arrgh, insults are pointless when no one knows who you're talking about."

Hobbes wasn't paying attention to Calvin, instead thinking serious thoughts. _Hmm,_ Hobbes thought. _We've been going around like a bunch of aimless tourists without a clue despite being in the midst of longtime refugees. _He looked at Mac, who was clearly intelligent and resourceful._ It's recon time._ "Hey, Mac!"

"Yeah?" Mac said, smiling pleasantly at the tiger. Hobbes seemed saner than either of his companions, and he was the only one there that hadn't threatened Bloo with violence, suggesting that he was more reasonable then the alien or human.

Hobbes thought for a moment, deciding that he needed to know about the house. "What can you tell me about this place?"

Mac nodded. "When our world fell, the house somehow ended up here too, taking us with it. Since most of the people living there...didn't make it, we've converted it into a place for people to stay until there's more houses for them to go to."

"Go on..."

Hobbes listened, fascinated by Mac's account. Calvin had an extremely short attention span to when something bored him or just on general principle, but Hobbes had the reverse problem; it was fairly difficult for him to tune out things, and unlike Calvin, he enjoyed learning things even when the subject disinterested him. And the house had a fascinating history. According to Mac, the house was considerably old; how old he didn't know, but he was fairly certain it was the family home of the Fosters, the current matriarch of which had converted it into a foster home for a species of creature unique to Mac's home world, a sentient being with a interesting name.

"'Imaginary friends'?" Hobbes repeated. "I'm sorry, we _are _talking about the substitue companions that bored children make up, aye?"

"Sort of," Mac said; as a student in Figmentology, he was somewhat of an expert on the subject. "They're a sort of being from my world that are literally born from people's imaginations."

The human continued. As with the more metaphysical variety of imaginary friend, eventually the child would outgrow the friend, no longer needing them; however, whereas the being that Mac called the fictional imaginary friend faded into the subconscious, becoming little more than a memory, the true imaginary friend would have to leave, making it through life on their own through necessity. That changed when the oldest living Foster, Madame Foster, converted her family home into a foster home for imaginary friends that had nowhere else to go, whereupon they would eventually be adopted by another child.

Something about this was troubling Hobbes. "So...the children of this world simply abandoned their companions once they had no need of them?"

Mac sighed. The tiger didn't know it, but he was echoing sentiments that Mac himself had said before. "I know what it sounds like-"

Hobbes narrowed his eyes. "It sounds cruel."

"I know it sounds bad, and believe me, I know what it feels like," Bloo said, taking an interest in helping out Mac. He glided over to besides his creator, coming to a stop. "But you don't really know the full story."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. He was sensing a philosphical moment.

"See, imaginary friends," Bloo paused, thinking about how best to articulate his feelings. "We need a purpose. We're made for a purpose: protecting somebody, helping them out, giving them a shoulder to cry on or just being a friend. And when we don't have a purpose anymore...when we don't have anyone to depend or need us...when we don't have a reason to exist anymore...it's worse then being dead. Even worse then being nothing at all. Because you're not necessary anymore; you're useless, and you _feel _dead inside. You feel...that your existence is pointless. You're forgotten. And that's worse than death for imaginary friends."

"Exactly!" Mac said, proud that Bloo was able to phrase it so intelligently. He felt proud of Bloo. Bloo wasn't the same person he'd been before the Heartless came. Back then, he'd been wild, selfish, and unapologetically egomanical, uncaring about whoever got hurt in the pursuit of his plans. He'd been a obnoxious self-centered jerk, unwilling to do anything that he found boring or just didn't feel like doing.

There were those who said that Bloo hadn't changed at all since his days at Fosters; that he was still as immature as ever, and unconvinced at Mac's patient attempts to inform them of his friend's true nature. Because through all the insane adventure at Foster's, during all their younger years of being bullied by Mac's malevolent older brother, even during the doom of everything they'd ever known, Bloo had stood by Mac's side as a true friend, a companion who would never had truly deserted him. Okay, there was that one time when they were being chased by insane alien friends, but that was a fluke; Bloo's behavior had since proven that. Throughout his entire life, Bloo had been Mac's best friend, always standing by him, providing him with someone to fall back on or catch should he fall. And few people knew of Bloo's true purpose of being a security blanket; a shield to block the perils of the world away, and keep their little world of themselvesintact, regardless of slings and arrows however outrageous.

It had been difficult for them when Bloo had been forced to leave by order of Mac's mom, and then all their insane adventures at Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, but the greatest hardship of all had been when the darkness came. Three long months of terrible hardship and pain. It seemed that when every day left, it took another friend with it and no one knew how or why. People kept disappearing day after day, the onset of paranoia creeping into the heart of every being. And worse then that was when the darkness broke into the world, attacked their world with all the terrible power the Heartless posessed. They had taken his mother away and his brother had fled like the coward he was after they came to the town, leaving his already broken family utterly shattered.

But Bloo had stayed by his side. He'd saved him from drowning in misery and his own regret and had saved him from himself.

Raising himself from his thoughts, Mac noticed to his surprise that Zim, Calvin and Morte were standing by Hobbes, now paying attention to his discusssion; even Spike, feigning indifference, was listening, if one was to judge by the way he leaned against the tree in Mac's direction.

The human blinked, regained his confidence, and starting talking again.

Madame Foster was, as far as Mac knew, one of those few humans from his world that really cared about the plight of imaginary friends, and turned her house into a foster home for imaginary friends, likely around thirty years ago.

Then, about two years ago, the Heartless came.

The devastation to Mac's world had been terrible; they had washed over his home in a vast storm, murdering everyone in their path and leaving more demons of the dark in their wake. A few weeks later, most of their friends and family dead, the entire species of imaginary friends nearly extinct, when they'd drifted through the darkness and finally emerged in Traverse Town. There, they'd rebuilt another house in the image of the one left behind in their own world, partially to have a place to live but also, in a way, to honor the memory of the friends who'd died defending it and whose sacrfices had, in the end, been for nothing.

Sometime after they realized the extent of the refugees diversity, the inhabitants of Foster's decided that the house should be converted to a new cause; with the amount of imaginary friends having dwindled from over several thousand friends in the house alone to barely fifty, they decided to use the house as a home for new refugees until they either decided to move out or remain there. For the protection and convience of the friends, not to mention Madame Foster's own enthusiam, they upgraded the house with the incredibly advanced technology that the various refugee's offered, making it one of the most advanced and well-protected building in town.

"And that's pretty much everything about the house," Mac concluded.

Hobbes looked at him sadly; Mac had stated all of that almost factually, like a robot. As if most of that didn't meant nothing to him despite the pain reflected in his eyes. Yet he had done so without betraying the true feeling inside.

Mac glanced up back towards the house. "Well, better go tell Frankie about you guys and get you a room."

"One step ahead of you guys!" Bloo bounded in front of them, loudly yelling, "Hey! Weee're HOME!" as he hopped onto the wide porch.

"Right, right. Get this over with," Spike said gruffly. He knocked on the door loudly a few times, looking slightly bored.

The massive oaken doubledoors swung open, revealing an attractive human girl in her early twenties, about Spike's height and a generally friendly demeanor. She was roughly about Spike's height, had green eyes and red hair pulled up in a short ponytail at the crown of her head, the rest of it arranged in a straight and nearly geometric style, flatly laid out at the sides of her head with small purple hairclips. As far as clothing went, he noted a few superficial similarities between her wear and the vampire's, suggesting that they traveled in similar sub-cultures; she wore a green jacket, of a similar style to Spike's own jacket, except for the bottom being around her waist. the way it was a more traditional size; it had seams around the shoulder joint, from the elbow line to the folded back cuffs. There was a large hood lumped around her neck, a seam running along it's neckline through the middle up to the rim. She wore the jacket over a midriff-baring white shirt with a high collar; it had a logo of a sort on it, bearing the image of a purple ogrelike silllouhte to the right, a blue thumblike shadow in the center and a tall red shadow that was almost all legs to the left. She wore purple shorts ending in reinforced knees while two light purple flaps, one attached to the front of the two overlapping belts around her waist and the other to the back of the belts, covered most of the shorts. Her shoes were ankle-high white versions of the boots Spike wore, looking considerably well-worn.

She smirked at Spike and lounged against the door. "Well, well, well. Look who's come crawling back."

Spike blinked. "_What?_ The hell are you talking about, Red?"

"Last Tuesday ring a bell?" She said, almost sing-song.

"Oh, give me a f-"

"What?" She raised an eyebrow.

Spike hissed something under his breath. "Give me a _friggin' _break. Is that okay? Is that better, huh?!"

"Better than what you were _going _to say, Captain Peroxide."

"Oh, sure! Make fun 'a me hair! _That's _classy!"

"Oh, that's funny! The guy who writes epic poetry about-"

"Leave my work outta this, woman!" Spike snarled.

Unimpressed, the woman said, "Oh, Mr. Rockabilly has a _sensitive _side."

Spike broiled in his fury for a brief moment, glaring at her. "You wanna talk about who's ain't got the punk rock spirit, we can go there, you glorified janitor!"

"You wanna go there, we can go there!"

"Bring it on, Red!"

"Fine, we can, jacka-" the girl paused again. "Jerk!"

"Aw!" Bloo whined. "I wanted to hear Frankie swear."

"SHUT THE HELL UP, BLOO!" Spike and Frankie yelled.

"Didn't mean at me," the blob muttered sullenly.

"Where were we?"

"Sniping at each other."

"Ah, right. Same old, same old. 'Sides, what you have against me?"

Frankie snorted. "You throw wild parties that cause disasters worse than almost anything Bloo's come up with!"

"Thought you _liked _wild parties," Spike said snidely.

"Yeah, but every single time you throw one, you get so drunk you do something insanely stupid!"

"Like what?!"

"Last Tuesday alone commandeered the house's migration and defense systems, turned it into a giant robot and wrecked the Western District."

"That only happened twice!"

"What about the time you convinced Grandma to start taking potshots with the primary cannon?"

"They rebuilt that district! Eventually!"

"Lookit that," Razael said nonchalantly as the two continued to argue, munching on Samael's shoe casually. "Dinner and a show."

Samael finished the final stitch on his knee; the limb stopped oozing dark ichor as he took a break from stitching his limbs back together and glared at the two humans. His body was mostly assembled, all his limbs and body parts in their proper places except for the leg slung over his shoulder and there was a great deal of stitching under his clothing. He stood up and giggled malevolently. "Discord, resentment, anger! Soon they'll take the fighting to the physical arena!"

Razael sneered at Samael. "You are a horrible monster."

Samael glared at Razael. "Gimme back my shoe."

Razael held up his guitar, pointing it's wider end at Samael; the guitar sprouted massive jagged clawlike blades, and Razael simply looked at him with heavy-lidded eyes and a lazy smile filled with confidence and the will to undo Samael's stitching. "I returned your limbs. Count your blessings and shut up." Samael growled, taking the conscience's advice; that angel had a particular fondness for 'sectioning', as he put it. Giving his shoe a forlorn look, he resumed his stitching, turning his attention to his other leg, unslinging it from around his shoulder. It would have been a repulsive sight if it wasn't for the fact that it wasn't oozing blood like a normal limb, but simply oozing liquid darkness from it's torn edges, the inky blackness fading away at the edges.

Zim gave a look towards his hallucinatory companions. "You're a violent little angel, aren't you?"

Razael shrugged. "Eh. You work with what you've got, and with me, that includes a surprising proclivity for random homicidal tendencies."

"TENDENCIES!?" Samael yelled. "You hacked me to bits with a _chainsaw _and threw a needle and spool at me!"

Razael looked at him faux-innocently. "Well, how else were you going to piece yourself back together? Get it? 'Piece' yourself back together? Hah, I made a funny!"

Zim slapped his forehead. "I'm starting to think you're _both _idiots."

Samael completed another loop, snapping the thread off with his teeth. "Well, then that'd really be more _your _fault then."

"Hello?" Bloo said, trying to get Frankie's attention. She ignored him, her argument with Spike dying down into a more pleasant conversation about the next party to be thrown in roughly three days, as per Madame Foster's plotting. Bloo gave up, waving them inside. "C'mon; she's outta here." He walked inside, everyone following him in except for Spike and Franke; the one consession they made was Frankie stepping back so Spike could come in and close the door.

Zim looked around the entrance room with interest. The most prominent sight in the room was a large staircase at the back of the room, leading to a wide platform with two higher staircase at either side, leading up to the higher levels. The floor was decorated with small white tiles so obsessively cleaned he could see his reflection in them, though with a notable shine to it. There was a large red carpet rolling out from the doors to the staircase, going up the other stair; it also split away at the ground level, leading to the other doors around the room. There was an old-fashioned elevator door located at the left wall, and there was an abundant supply of classical looking antique furniture around the room, sharply contrasting with the slightly psychedelic appearance of the design. Strangely enough, the numerous doors around the room were absurdly tall and wide, as if designed for things of decidedly inhuman porportions.

Strangest of all were all the creatures moving around everywhere. Some had to be imaginary friends, as their biology was simply impossible to have formed through the course of evolution; Zim had seen many things in his tenure as an Invader, giving him the opportunity to proclaim that there were very few things nature considered impossible with the sort of authoritive tone that comes from first-hand experience. Walking around here were things that made him want to reconsider that claim.

Calvin, on the other hand, was more blunt in his assessment. "Look at the people! And the...things."

"The 'things'," Bloo said with a touch of annoyance. "Are also people."

Zim also noticed a few species that he vaugely recognized from his days as an Invader, and a few that seemed peripherally similar to humans for the most part, and a small number that radically pushed the envelope for the proper definition of _alien_. What seeemed oddest of all was the way they regarded each other peaceably for the most part, which struck Zim as an interesting development.

"Interesting," Zim said by way of commentary on it.

"'Interesting'," Bloo repeated. "That's it? You come all this way, go through all that, have to be brought here by _me _of all people, and all you have to say about the glorious anarchy that is Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends is that it's _INTERESTING!?"_

Zim blinked, staring mutely at Bloo as he processed his outburst and considered his reaction. "Yes," he decided. "That's it."

Bloo's jaw dropped to where his feet would have been if he'd had them. Given that he appeared to be a absorbant blob, it was debatable whether or not he actually _had _a jaw. "That's _IT!?_"

"Yes," Zim said with a trace of irritation. "That's _it._ If I had anything else to say, I would have said it already." _And I don't feel like letting people into the recesses of my mind, blue thing._

Bloo raised an eyebrow. The overly matter-of-fact manner the alien spoke in was begining to creep him out. "You're weird."

Zim narrowed his eyes.

Bloo looked away from Zim, not understanding the danger he was putting himself into. "Coco said you were like that earlier. Before her and Minimoose went out on the town."

The name of the imaginary friend bounced through Zim's mind, meaning nothing in particular until it associated itself with his _other_ sidekick. "That...bird-airplane-plant thing? And..._Minimoose?!"_ One of Zim's red eyes narrowed to a knife-thin slit, the other open to a painful extent, his mouth suddenly spitting forth a guitar-strumming quick burst of alien langauge directed at no one; "_Nur sadanet burakos, chlorbag varblernelk!"_

"Was that Tamaranean?" Mac wondered.

"No," Hobbes replied. "Sounded more like Kroeese. By some astonishing coincidence, they sound almost exactly the same."

Morte twitched, glaring up at Hobbes. "Hey, how would _you _know?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Foreign languages is one of my many talents, including hairdressing."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Sure, the guy with a talent for hairdressing takes his baths in the washing cycle."

Hobbes glared at him, coughing something that sounded suspiciously like _'noodle incident'_.

Calvin whirled around, pointing a finger at Hobbes dramatically. "You can't prove I did that!"

Bloo raised an eyebrow. "Oookay." Not having any more interest in what was going on around him, Bloo pulled out a paddleball and began attempting to hit the little red ball. Unsurprisingly, he completely failed to do so, provoking eyerolling and gleeful snickers from around the room.

Bloo lost his temper, swinging the paddleball around wildly; this caused the surprisingly elastic ball-on-a-string to swing around Mac and Bloo, the string winding around them, stringing them back-to-back and fall to the ground when the ball hit Mac on the head, causing him to lose balance. On the bright side, his fall was cushioned by Bloo. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Bloo was completely immobilized by the double impact of having Mac squashing him to the ground and being tightly held down by a thick string, his mouth was not similarily constricted.

"Auuuugh, why does this always happen to me!" Bloo screamed.

Mac's eye twitched. "You know what a better question is? Why is it everytime you do something stupid, I somehow get strung along with it!"

Bloo winced. "Eech. _Mac._ Bad pun!"

"You know what I mean!" Mac snapped.

"Here's an idea," Bloo said to the people around them. "Why don't you stop staring and _help me!_"

Hobbes looked around. Spike and Frankie were pretty much oblivious to everything else, still caught up in their private moment, now somehow centering on how much heavy metal sucked and he didn't see anyone move. He glowered as he realized what that meant. "Oh, don't everybody just jump up at once," he said sarcastically. Not expecting a response to his comment, he kneeled down and extended the claws of his raised right hand.

Huh?" Bloo said. "Is that that Hobbes guy? What's he doing? What's he up to? Oh no, _he's going to shave us!_"

The entire room stopped. They all stared at Bloo. "What?" Hobbes finally said.

"He's going to try to get us out of the string-net by _shaving _us! _NO!"_

"Bloo," Mac grunted. "He's _not _trying to shave us. And why would you care? You don't even _have_ hair."

"Well, whose fault is that?! And the real issue here isn't me, it's _you! _If we went outside in public with...you..._bald..._I don't even wanna think about it! Mac, have you any idea how'd _goofy _you'd look without hair!?"

Mac rolled his eyes. "I'm sure that's something I spend hours everyday thinking about."

"See, see? If we go out like that, we'll be humiliated beyond compare! I'll never be able to show my face again! The public would condemn and taunt us everywhere we go, torment us at everything we do! _I can't take that kind of rejection!_"

Mac sighed. "If they didn't hate you after that fiasco with the giant bulldozer and the Lawn Gnome Empire, I'm pretty sure they'd be able to get over me being bald in public."

"Mac, you're not looking at the big picture; _this is serious! _This is our _image _we're talking about, man!"

"_What _image?"

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "As brilliant as this conversation is, do you think you could stop moving for five seconds! This is delicate work."

"I can't help it!" Bloo whined. "I get all twitchy when I can't move!"

"Then _stop _being 'all twitchy'. Or someone else could do it." Hobbes stood up, and shouted at the rest of the room. "_Hey! Who here wants to get REAL close to Bloo with a sharp instrument while he's completely helpless?_"

Nearly every other person in the room drew forth some kind of deadly edged weapon.

Bloo paled as he realized what was going on. "_YOU! I pick you! Just hurry up and HELP ME!_"

Hobbes paused for a brief moment, judging where to aim the cut, and slashed his arm out in a quick chop through the side of the string prison, letting Mac and Bloo fell to the floor with a loud _thump_. "Ow," Mac complained, rubbing his sore arm. "I'm going to feel that in the morning."

Bloo grunted. "Yeah yeah yeah, bring on the guilt!" He turned around at Hobbes, pausing. "Wait a minute, where'd the guy with the Keyblade go?"

Calvin and Hobbes looked around wildly. "Now where'd he get off to?" Calvin wondered.

-------

Zim was presently wandering through the house aimlessly, thinking deep brooding thoughts about Minimoose in a relationship with another creature. Was that sensible? Was Coco a good match for Minimoose? Was there, frankly speaking, any actual sense to it? Could a robot even have a relationship with an imaginary friend? And why was it bothering him so much? He hadn't taken as much interest in Minimoose's activities as he had with Gir, perhaps because Minimoose was more autonomous than the defective SIR unit. Then again, Minimoose was a fairly inscrutable being; Zim didn't really know what went through his head.

He resolved to take a better look into the robot's thought processes. Something else was troubling him too; what if Minimoose decided to remain here with Coco? Zim twitched at the thought. He couldn't blame the robot for wanting to remain with new companions that understood him, and perhaps staying around Zim might remind the robot of what he'd lost...but then again, he wasn't sure that Minimoose really missed anything, or took much of an interest in anything that went around him. He'd created Minimoose, but what he thought was a mystery to him.

Zim frowned, realizing that in the course of his thoughts, he'd wandered further into the house then he'd intended to. He wasn't sure how far, but he didn't recognize anything from when he came in. He was presently in a long hallway, a few people milling around. The most prominent feature was a large decorative doubledoor next to him, mostly white and engraved with floral patterns, a large floral H set above the door.

Zim stared at it for a minute. That door reminded him of an executive office; the engravings, while as random-looking as anything else there, seemed entirely superficial and lacked any real creativity to it. They were almost sterile and plain. There was an undeniable utilitarian aspect to it that he didn't like, either.

Grunting to himself, Zim walked off, deciding to find his bearings, the problem with Minimoose nagging at his mind.

He wandered around aimlessly for a while, not trying to find anything in particular, just find something that looked familiar. A few people tried to strike up a conversation with him, but he ignored them all, not in the mood to chatter with completely unknown people.

He stopped again in another of the house's seemingly endless supply of hallways. He felt something familiar. He knew he did; he just couldn't place it.

He heard a loud rush noise and a storm of running footsteps. Recognizing something faintly familiar, he whirled around just in time to see a red-yellow blur at the head of a windstorm; just above the rush of air, he could hear a voice yelling, _"Little buddy!"_

It hit him, propelling the two of them across the room, the wind spiralling across the hallway and throwing the various statues down to the ground; paintings tore free of their frames as the canvases flew into the air, spinning into the walls while suits of armor fell apart as they smashed into the ground.

Zim was aware of an exuberantly happy figure hugging him excitedly and babbling happily. He pushed the figure away and landed on the ground, opened his mouth to yell and his jaw dropped.

_"Aang?!"_

"Hi!" Aang said cheerfully, grinning happily at the surprised Irken.

Standing in front of him was a human male about fourteen, apparantly Tibetian. His face was generally round and slightly pointed downwards at the chin, a sunny grin lighting up his face, his round gray-brown eyes shining happily. He wore a brown helmet that resembled an old-fashioned pilot's helmet, complete with fold-down goggles built into the front, large brown-yellow ear flaps that fastened below his chin, and was adorned with a thick blue line originating at the back of the helmet and culminating in a large arrow-point directly above the goggles, matching the tattoos he wore. He wore a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a high collar under a orange jacket with some rather prominent shoulder flaps and a folded over collar, the jacket's front fastened with a number of straps instead of the usual zipper. The jacket sleeves were long and billowy, ending in loose sleeves. His belt was fairly thick, fastened with a large circular silver buckle with three blue spirals arranged in the pattern of the points of an upside-down triangle engraved in it, a large squarish staff strapped to the back of the belt. His dark brown pants looked like cargo pants with zippers around the knees, pockets closed with zippers and loose cuffs pooling around his footwear, which happened to be strap-on black hiking boots.

Zim gave him a look. "When did you get here?"

"Well...after everything disappeared...me and Appa wound up here. I ran into Katara, Sokka and Toph a while back; some nice monks pointed us this waye and we've decided to stay here for now." He paused. "I ran into Danny a little bit ago and decided to go looking around for anything interesting."

Zim nodded, gratified that his old group of a sort was alive and well, staring at Aang for a moment. "...What is that _thing _on your head!?"

Aang looked surprised. "What? My helmet?"

"_That's _a helmet? I thought it was a brain parasite! Some..._horrible _brain-meat devouring creature disguised as that absurd thing of a hat!"

Aang couldn't tell if Zim was joking or being completely serious. "Hey, _I _think it looks cool."

Zim smacked his head and looked around, frowning slightly. "You wouldn't have any idea where we are, would you?"

Aang grinned sunnily. "Nope!"

Zim sighed moodily. "But of course."

As the Irken sulked, Aang lookd at him and thought something was odd. Zim and Gir were inseparable, or to put it another way, Gir would follow Zim anywhere and Zim wouldn't do anything about it. It was extremely odd for Gir to be apart from Zim at a time like this. And Dib was usually around Zim when he didn't have anything else to do, often finding some way to rope the easily bored Irken into his various schemes. And with the horror that had just happened, Aang thought that the three of them would be together. "Wait a minute...where's Gir? Or Dib?"

Zim sighed. "I don't know, okay?"

Aang frowned, realizing that something was terribly wrong. He didn't say anything for a moment.

Zim considered Aang's happy dispostion despite what had happened. He supposed that it had to do with the majority of Aang's friends being alive and well. He recalled a few of Aang's stories of...wherever he was originally from. "Where's Appa?"

Aang gestured outwards. "They have stables for the imaginary friends that are too big to fit in here. I'm going to sleep there tonight so Appa doesn't panic or wake up thinking it's like his lost days." Aang momentarily scowled, thinking of the traumatizing period when Appa had been separated from him back in their original world.

Zim nodded. "That's good, I suppose. And where'd your group get off to?"

Aang looked slightly nervous. "Up in one of the rooms. I left when Katara wasn't looking; I just had to see all the stuff here!"

Without warning, Aang started talking about the various things he'd learned about Traverse Town since he got here; being a natural tourist, Aang was always fascinated by new cultures, towns and places everywhere. It didn't surprise Zim that despite the world disappearing after being attacked by monsters, Aang was as eager to sightsee as ever.

Aang talked a great deal about things like how Traverse Town was divided into a number of districts, seperated by large wall that connected to two larger circular walls; one at the border of town to guard against the threats of outside and one that surrounded a memorial at the center of town with the names of all the worlds and people who were lost. The districts were named based on their prominent features(such as the Beach District, which was basically a large beach or the First District, the very one they were in, so named for it's relatively high population). The town had a fairly small population, given the low survival rates when a world was taken by the darkness, and even then, not all the survivors wound up in Traverse Town; various explorers had reported several other worlds similar to Traverse Town, suggesting that it wasn't entirely unique and that the Heartless were even farther spread then they realized. Humans were the most common species there, but only in a sixty-forty percentage, making it an extremely diverse population.

"Plus!" Aang announced, pulling a light blue copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide from a pocket. "I got this from a shop a little while ago!"

"Me too," Zim said. "Only mine came in a plastic Easter egg laid by what might happen if a palm tree and a bird-slash-airplane had a lovechild."

Aang laughed loudly. "I just _love _this town!"

"Eh?" Aang's comment caught Zim off-guard.

"I mean, look at it!" Aang put the Guide back in his pocket and gave the room around them a dramatic flourish as he pointed around, accidentally causing a breeze to quickly whip around the hallway. "It's a pretty big place, but there's not that many people, and they've all have horrible things happen to them, but they're so..relaxed about it. Even though they have every reason to be, they're not really upset, or sad all the time. They're just..." Aang took a deep breath to give him some time to articulate his thought. "Most of the people I've met in my adventures would have just kneeled over and let their misery eat them alive, but the people here, they don't let it kill them like that. They don't let the despair keep them back."

Zim considered what Aang said. "Yes," he said softly. "Despair can kill a person."

Aang nodded solemnly. "It might not be as obvious as those...black monster things...but it's just as bad in it's own way. It comes up out of nowhere, and it never leaves you alone. Even if you find a new life, a better life, it bites at you, pulling at you. It'll just keeping digging in and in, clawing into your heart and ripping apart everything it touches, until there's nothing left. It leaves empty inside, more dead than alive. It makes you feel guilty that you're still alive, like it's a betrayal of the people who died instead of you. But the people here...they don't let it get to them. They've found another way instead of misery. They keep the pain away, and they stay alive. They don't let the darkness eat them alive from the inside."

Zim shrugged. "Eh, I suppose."

Aang looked around. "What have you been up to? I mean, you're always doing something...a whole new world that knows nothing about you? That sounds like the perfect opportunity to do your stuff!"

Zim snorted. "I have more important things to do then my usual schemes."

Aang smirked knowingly. "Would this have anything to do with Gir and Dib?"

Zim smacked his forehead; Aang knew him too well. "And Gaz, too. I think. They're lost somewhere out in the worlds, and I'm going to go find them."

Aang looked up into the ceiling. "You're going to the worlds?!" He looked at Zim incredulously. "Why do you always get to do the fun stuff!?"

Zim grunted. "Eh. I have the distinct displeasure of having a few tagalongs."

"You made some new friends?" Aang said with a smile.

"Uh, no, I mean-"

"Where are they?!" Aang asked excitedly, hovering around Zim. "I wanna meet them!"

Zim looked embarrased. "Eh...I...sort of...lost them."

"Then let's go find them!" Aang yelled, grabbing Zim by the arm and dragging him by the arm.

-------

"I don't get it," Morte complained as they wandered through a series of dank and dark catacombs. "How hard could it be to find a short green guy with a giant key thing?"

"The fact that we've yet to find him speaks for itself," Hobbes stated. He sniffed the air for a moment, coughing slightly and glaring at Calvin. "You mind toning that thing down?"

Calvin, his right hand encased in his Pyro Glove and suspending a small fireball above it, glared back at him. "Tone this! Maintaining a floating flame to give off light without burning anything is not as easy as it looks!"

"Yeah, sure." Hobbes sniffed again, trying to ignore the ozone in his nostrils. They'd been looking everywhere for Zim, and going in these catacombs was only the latest in their efforts to find him again. He sniffed again. "Ugh...it's like there's two fires in here."

Calvin rolled his eyes.

Morte clicked his teeth. "Wait a tick, do you see that?"

Hobbes looked up. Down the narrow stone hall was a small flickering red-yellow light. "Hey! There really are two fires! What's someone else doing down here?" He took another sniff. "Aha! That's our guy! And somebody who smells of buffalo."

"Bison!" Someone yelled down the hallway.

"Is there really a difference?" Calvin thought.

The three of them rushed down the stone hallway, stopping in front of the two down the passage; it was indeed Zim, as well as an unknown Tibetian-looking guy, holding a small flame in his open hand.

Hobbes looked ready to snap. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you?!"

Zim thought for a moment. "Yes, and I don't care."

Hobbes growled. "Urgh..." he paused. "Who's your friend?"

The flame in Aang's hand disappeared as he rushed over and excitedly shooke Hobbes' considerably larger hand with both of his own, pumping them up and down happily. "I'm Aang! Nice to meet you!"

"I'm Hobbes and you're welcome?" Hobbes said, unsure how to react. He wondered if hands could get motion sickness.

Aang smiled sunny and let go. He grasped Calvin's hand next; to the mage's surprise, Aang's hand dove right through the fire, completely unharmed by it as he happily shook his gloved hand, repeating his greeting.

"I'm Calvin," he said warily. He firmly believed that no human could possibly be this friendly and Aang was disrupting his view of the universe.

Aang let go of his hand and rushed over to Morte. He stopped, having no idea how to shake his hand when he didn't have any. He settled for grinning at him. "I'm-"

"Heard ya the first time, kid. Name's Morte Rictusgrin, hoya doing."

"Fine!" Aang said cheerfully.

"If you say so," Morte said doubtfully. He eyeballed Zim. "Friend of yours?"

"Yes," Zim said.

"Is _everyone _from your world a freak!?"

Zim glared at Morte and soundly kicked him into the ground.

"Don't do that!" Aang scolded, picking Morte off the ground and dusting him off, setting him back into the air.

Calvin was still staring at his hand. "How the...what the..." he looked away from his glove and stared at Aang. "How'd you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Touch the fire without being burned!"

"Oh. I'm a Firebender."

"A what-bender?"

"Something like a elemental manipular that focuses his skills with martial arts," Zim explained.

"Ah." Calvin said. He looked at Zim. "Why'd you run off like that?"

Zim crossed his arms and glared at him. "I don't need to justify myself to you!"

Calvin walked up to Zim, raising himself as high as he could. "_What'd _you say to me?!"

Aang stood between them. "Guys, guys! Don't fight!"

Calvin snorted. "Yeah, yeah...got any bright ideas about getting us back up?"

Aang thought about, "Give me a minute here." He assumed a stand, standing where he was.

"What's he doing?" Hobbes wondered.

"Earthbending," Zim said shortly.

Hobbes stared at him. "I thought you said he was a Firebender."

"He is. Earthbending, Firebending, Waterbending, Airbending...he does it all. He's like the Swiss Army knife of elemental martial arts." Zim paused. "He also makes July Ann's fries."

"That's julian fries."

Zim rolled his eyes. "I say tomato, you say tomato."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. "Don't you mean 'I say tomato, you say to-mah-to'?"

"Who'd be stupid enough to say it like that?!" Zim demanded.

Aang looked up; he had been utilizing his skills in Earthbending to sense the vibrations around them so he could sense where the most people were, therefore where they could go up. "Got it!! He waved his arms back, air currents flowing around them visibly for a moment before Zim jumped in the air and crashed into him.

"_DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!_" Zim yelled, rolling off the last Airbender.

Aang sighed sadly. "Fine...guess we walk." He rolled to his feet, walking in an apparantly random direction.

Morte stared at Aang. "Where you going?"

"I have no idea!" Aang said cheerfully. "But it's a way out."

-------

Spike frowned, looking over Frankie's shoulder. "Hold on a minute..."

"What is it?" Frankie asked.

Spike walked away from her, looking around the room. "Where'd the newbies go? They were here just a second ago!"

Frankie blinked. "Newbies? You mean those guys that were with you?"

"Yeah, them. Crap, this ain't good, it isn't. They don't know anything about this place!" Spike started to run off when Frankie yelled.

"Wait a minute! If they're new, that means they're looking for rooms! Start up at the upper floors!"

"Gotcha!" Spike yelled back, rushing up the stairs and sniffing for their scents. _I don't get paid enough for this,_ he thought.

-------

Foster's had a lot of hallways. It had been noted previously by the inhabitants of the original house that there were a _lot _of hallways, frequently in a tired and exasperated tone.

It had been suggested by some that the original house had been an imaginary friend. Some of those same people suggested that the original house had survived somehow and intergrated itself into the substance of the current one.

Whether or not that was true, it would go a long way towards explaining why there were so many revolving walls, trapdoors and general disregard of normal archetecture.

One of those trapdoors blew off it's hinges, a powerful gale whistling off the hole, Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Aang blown out in short order. They landed on the ground painfully, the wind around them quickly dying down.

"See? I told you I could get us out of there," Aang said.

Hobbes shook the dust out of his fur. "Yeah, but did you have to do it like that!? I'm going to be windblown for a week!"

Aang shrugged. "Whoops?"

There was a loud flash behind them; they turned around to see Calvin behind the restored trapdoor, holding his hammer in the air.

Aang looked at Calvin's work with interest. "What was that?"

"Alchemy."

"Oh."

Calvin looked at Aang sideways. "What about that bending stuff? Mind explaining?"

As Aang proceeded to do just that, Hobbes rolled his eyes. "So now what do we do? Finding a room seems like a good idea."

Zim nodded. "A surprisingly good idea."

Hobbes' fur bristled. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Zim smiled innocently. "Nothing."

"And that's how I can bend all four elements!" Aang finished.

"Okay," Calvin said. "But this Avatar thing...if you're the incarnation of the planet, how are you still alive?"

Aang shrugged nervously. "I don't really understand it myself."

Calvin shrugged. He pointed a finger at Aang's tattoos. "So those tattoos mark you as an Airbending master?"

"Uh huh."

Calvin waved his hands in a beckoning gesture. "Okay, show me! Prove you're a master!"

Aang raised an eyebrow. "The tattoos aren't good enough?"

Calvin snorted. "Take it from a _real _master: skill is proof enough."

Aang grinned. "All right..." He moved his hands back, holding them close together. Calvin braced himself for what was surely going to be a masterful display of aerokinesis: Aang held his hands in front of him, a small top of tightly condensed wind spinning around between his hands.

Calvin stared at it. "That's it?"

"_AANG!_" a girl's voice shouted across the hallwayroom. The top spun out of existence as Aang jumped in shock. He slowly looked at the end of the hall and smiled nervously as he saw an attractive brown-skinned girl Aang's age and a little less than a head taller than the young Air Nomad, came walking their way, clearly relieved to see him, a slightly exhausted look in her bright blue eyes. Her considerable mass of dark brown hair was carefully styled in a thick braid going past the middle of her back, a pair of large loops around the sides of her face. She was wearing a blue sleeveless jacket, fastened at one side, with matching arm-cloths over her forearms. A white-lined hood hung loosely over her back, flipping slight with each pants were dark blue, the same basic style as Aangs except it didn't have any knee-zippers, a few compartments were clipped to the belt, and the cuffs came down to her mid-calf. Her shoes made no noise against the carpet, black simple shoes with small straps.

For some reason, at the sight of the girl, Aang looked incredibly nervous. "Heh...heh...hi, Katara..."

Katara stomped over to him and crossed her arms, glaring at him. "_Aang_," she said coldly.

Aang gulped loudly. He smiled nervously, the smile faltering when her expression refused to change.

"We have a problem," she said menacingly.

Aang looked around for help; the hallway had suddenly become deserted. He heard footsteps from behind him. He turned around, seeing a long orange tailed with black stripes from around the corner, swiftly whipping out of sight.

He turned back to Katara and laughed nervously.

-------

_About ten minutes later..._

Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and Zim stopped, pausing at the foot of a four-way intersection.. They looked around, each of them looking off in a different direction.

"Let's go this way!" they all said, stepping in a different direction before stopping abruptly, looking back at each other.

"_I said it first!_" Each declared, walking back to each other in a four-way square.

"I'm the leader," Zim said, "And I get to say where we go!"

"I got the most experience adventuring," Morte said. "And this is just another weird dungeon!"

Calvin snorted derisively. "Oh, shut up! We've heard enough of you! I've done _way _more with pan-dimensional pathways than you guys!" He said, not bothering to mention that Hobbes had an equal wealth of experience in that matter, even if he didn't quite understand the super-science behind them like Calvin did.

"Yeah? You ever go to a place of pure chaos just 'cause you were whistling an old tune by an old door?"

"You ever miscalculate a waypoint trajectory and make half a city block wind up inside Mathematician Hell?"

"You ever actually go _to _Hell? One of 'em, anyway?"

"You wanna go back?"

"You're both idiots!" Zim yelled.

"Says the guy with a beret!"

"I _like _my hat," Zim growled.

Calvin gestured at Zim's hat. "Good for you, 'cause the Fashion Police called; they need their Most Wanted back!"

"This according to the one with _shoulder flaps_?" Zim shot back.

"At least I _have _a coherent clothing style!"

"You call that style?" Morte sniped.

"At least we _have _clothes!" Zim and Calvin said, turning on Morte in both senses of the term.

"And a whole lotta good it's done for you! Way it looks, you guys oughta be _drowning _in hangers on and wait, I forgot; you're both so short you'd drown in a sea of gnomes!"

Zim and Calvin balked, looking at each other.

"Did he just call us short?" Zim said.

"Yeah," Calvin said.

"You know what that means?" the Irken said, summoning the Keyblade.

"Yep," the inventor replied, shouldering his hammer. "And he must burn."

"_Look _at you guys!" Hobbes yelled, gesturing at them with his hands palm-up. "We started off arguing about going off in different directions, which _everyone _knows is a adventuring negative, and now you're just fighting each other! Stop being idiots and make a decent effort to actually _work _together!"

"I'll be an idiot if I want to!" Zim said mulishly.

"Me too!" Calvin yelled.

"Good call," Morte said.

The two short people of the group paused. "Wait," the older of the two said. "That didn't sound right."

"Yeah, gotta go with you there."

A moment passed.

"_Let's get 'em!_" Calvin roared, the hammer's alchemic runes aglow.

"I second that emotion!" Zim said, the flames around the Kingdom Key obscuring the metal of the weapon from view. "With a vengeance."

Hobbes was a very patient person. Years of being Calvin's best friend, sole confidant and psuedo-brother had impressed in him a high tolerance for self-indulgent selfishness, short tempers, and an abundance of insanity. His employment as a knight had further increased his tolerance for chaos and drop-of-the-hat violence, leading to his growing skill as a peacemaker. However, the stress of his King having disappeared out of the blue, having to go into the depths of the Greater Universe with only his loudmouth of a charge and a babbling stranger had stressed him out a great deal, and that stress had only been compounded in the multiples by their chaotic adventure in Traverse Town, the discovery of the Keybearer, his attitude problem and unwillingness to cooperate with what Hobbes suspected was a vastly important scheme. His patience, normally strong enough to withstand even some of the mightiest blows from the world's..._worldness_, had been ground from an adamantine wall to a suction cup holding back his fearsome temper, normally held in check by his patience and cultivatedly laid-back attitude. With the declaration of intent to trash a hallway in the process of assaulting another member of their group, that single string finally snapped.

From Zim's point of view, being hit by 250 pounds of feline muscle and carried through the air along with the human technomancer was a bit like being hit by a steam locomotive operated by an escapee from _Pratchett's Home for the Criminally Stupid_ incarcerated for his frequent urges to demolish things with large vehicles.

Hitting the ground and being smashed into the human like an pair of cymbals hurt too.

When the ringing in his head faded, Zim discerned Hobbes standing over them, his arms crossed and his face stern.

"What was that for?" Calvin whined, rubbing his head.

"Why?" Hobbes asked rhetorically, his voice rising. "Why? _Why?_ I was trying to knock some sense into you two, that's what!"

Zim's antennae twitched, half-rising. "Eh?"

"You two are behaving like children. And not the good kind, either; you're acting like the kind of kids that inspired _The Omen!_"

As Calvin got up, Morte cautiously said, "Uh, Hobbes?"

"Not now, Morte," Hobbes said shortly, not in the mood for Morte's antics. To Calvin, he said, "Are we calm now?", his voice more even now that he'd expressed some of his anger, his patience starting to mortar up the bricks again.

"Yeah, yeah." Calvin replied, putting his hammer away.

"Hey, Cal-" Morte started saying again, before Calvin cut it off.

"Stow it. I don't need to hear from you."

Morte clapped his jaws shut.

Hobbes nodded in approval. He was wound tight enough as it was, and he didn't need Morte making him even more tense. He looked away from Calvin, intent on telling Zim off, noticing an absence that made that a difficult prospect. "Where'd Zim go?"

Calvin looked to the spot the Irken had landed after Hobbes had banged their heads together. "I don't know. He was there last time I looked."

"Don't look at me, I was focused on you!"

"Not that I blame you. What about you, bonehead? Why didn't you say anything?!"

Largely because he lacked any other means to do so, Morte's primary means of communicating frustration and anger was with his voice and vocabulary. And he had a great deal to work off. "What do you _think _I was trying to tell you, you piking berks?! He ran off during your little 'Look at you, you're a dumbass' speech down that hallway! Probably already got into a fight with someone he shouldn't have, knowing him!"

"What do you mean, 'knowing him'? You just met the guy," Hobbes pointed out.

"I know his type. Short guy, massive shoulder chip, attitude problem as big as he has to look to get past his height? Tch, I know his type all right. He's probably running around like an idiot, opening every door he sees until he finds an empty one."

"Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?" Calvin wondered.

Morte rolled his eyes. "Look at it this way, kid; you're a refugee. You're a long way from home, which doesn't even exist anymore. Everything you know is gone and shattered to Limbo and beyond. You live in a big house with a bunch of other refugees; the tension level's gotta be up to there. And some guy with an attitude problem slams your door open, acts like you're not even there?" Morte clicked his teeth. "That's practically a recipe for disaster."

As if on cue, they heard a loud array of voices yell "_Get back here!_". They turned the way Zim had suggested just in time to see Zim running their way, looking panicked; he jumped onto the wall, bounding behind the larger mass frame of Calvin and Hobbes, hiding himself from view just as a large crowd ran up to them.

"Hey," said a massive gray-furred friend with a pickle-shaped nose and mean little eyes. "You see a real little guy go this way? He ran into my room and when I told him off, he kicked me in the shin!"

"He said something to me, I don't know what it was, but it sounded insulting!" Someone else said.

"He told me my pants were ugly!" proclaimed a purple-clad female ninja with extremely long blonde hair.

"He set my curtains on fire!" complained a small pink squirrel.

"He tore down my wallpaper and replaced it with the carpet!" yelled a barbarian-hero.

Hobbes felt his eyes sliding back down to Zim despite his best efforts not to do so. _We're off to a great start, aren't we?_ Out loud, he said, "Yeah! I saw he go _that _way!" and he pointed to the left.

The angry mob exclaimed it's thanks and ran that way, vocalising it's intent on pummeling that 'green twerp' once they found him.

Hobbes turned to Zim. "What was that about?"

"Eh...you wouldn't understand."

"Oh? And why not?"

"That's classified," Zim declared, getting to his feet, his composure regenerating now that the evil mob of doom was out of his field of view.

"Oh, really? Is that why that mob was trying to lynch you for rampaging into their rooms, making rude comments and acting obnoxiously?"

Zim's eyes darted suspiciously. "There's a very good reason I did that."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. "And that is...?"

Zim didn't say anything, but seemed inordinately fascinated by his feet.

"Do that again!" Calvin said. "That was fun!"

Hobbes, Morte and Zim gave him a look. Zim's look scared Hobbes, as he appeared to be considering it.

"What?" Calvin said, not understanding their expressions.

-------

"Now I _know _we just went this way," Hobbes said, looking forlornly at a X-shaped conjunction in the seemingly endless array of hallways.

Calvin looked away from a holographic display emanating from his watchlike device. "Spectroanalysis detects our heatwave pattern, so that's a ten-four."

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Yeah. And you 'accidentally' burned a big hole in the floor."

"A guy's gotta keep his way _some_how."

"How?" Morte said blithely. "Trail of underwear?"

"In a place like this? They'd just disappear." Calvin said. Hobbes was having his suspicions about someone secretly monitoring their movement and moving the walls around to make things more difficult, but he didn't say anything.

"What about you, Boss?" the skull said to Zim, who was secretly enjoying the sobriquet. "Any bright ideas?"

"An analytical observation of the local area suggests a complete absence of our bearings, and simple conjugation declares a continuation of the same."

"Which means...what?"

"We're lost," Zim simplified.

"Now see?" Morte said. "You brain-trusts _can _talk common."

"Yeah," Calvin said, "But where's the fun in that?"

Zim gave them a look. "Do you ever stop bickering?"

"Nope," Calvin said, his face growing a satisfied grin at the sight of Hobbes' face, suggesting that he'd just cut off a reply.

Zim gave him a evil-looking smile. "Likely because the amount of energy required to turn on your brain-to-mouth valve is greater then you possess"

"Hey-" Calvin started to say before Hobbes cut him off.

"Y'know, he's got a point."

"What?"

"Yeah," Morte added. "I've been thinking that all day."

"Perhaps it's some sort of familial condition," Zim suggested.

"Nah," Hobbes said. "I was raised with him and I can tell you that neither Mom or Dad ever showed a trace of it. Might be all the sugar he eats like it was a medical necessity. And caffeine. I've known long-distance overnight truckers who take in less caffeine then he does!"

"The horror!"

"And you do not want to see him after he gets a fresh supply of his cereal. Yeesh."

"Well," Morte said. "That explains the hyperactivity."

"Sure!" Calvin yelled. "Everyone savage the Calvin!"

"Is that an invitation?" Hobbes asked, a feral grin on his face.

Calvin scowled. "No. It was _sarcasm!_"

"Ooh, now there's a calm response," Morte said sarcastically.

"And how many people at home would like to take that invitation?" Zim asked, one corner of his mouth open and revealed his jigsaw-teeth.

"Most of the people in my departments, anyone within fifty miles of the testing range, almost everyone I ever knew in school, my PR agent, that one guy whose name I can never remember, probably about sixty percent of the population, and those animals from that one farm Hobbes hates." Calvin answered honestly.

Zim and Morte looked surprised, both due to Calvin's answer and the manner in which Hobbes was grumbling about some farm back home, using unkind words.

"Gee, you must be real popular back home," Morte said sarcastically.

"What?" Calvin said. "All great geniuses deal with their detractors."

"True, true," Zim said. "In your case, however, that would require genius."

"Hey!"

Hobbes wasn't paying attention to them. His grievences against U.S. Acres voiced, he'd settled for moodily staring at the wall until Zim and Calvin finished their argument.

His plan was interrupted by an incredibly loud blast of air and sound that roared from his left.

"OW!" Hobbes yelled, falling to his knees. He looked up dazedly, seeing Zim standing next to him with a large foghorn in his hand. "What did you do that for?"

"Mostly to get your attention. And boredom, can't forget the boredom."

Hobbes glared at him. "Tell me something, and be honest here: is there something wrong with you?"

Zim looked innocently at Hobbes. "What would make you say that?"

Hobbes groaned, shaking his head in his hands. "Just...ugh. I'm going to have a migrane." He lowered his hands from his eyes, noticing that everyone had gone. "Hey!"

He whirled around to his feet; behind him, his small group was ascending a staircase, apparently oblivious of his absence. He ran off after them, sprining into the air, springboarding off the handrail and turning in the air, landing in front of them on all fours. "What are you guys doing?"

"Going up the stairs, duh," Morte said.

Hobbes struggled to keep his eyebrow from twitching. "And...why aren't you just looking down here? We haven't checked all the rooms yet."

Calvin scratched his chin lazily. "Well...all the rooms seem to be occupied...we haven't had much luck on this floor...plus Zim decided."

"What?" Hobbes directed his stare to the Irken.

Zim shrugged. "I don't like this floor. The carpetry offends me."

Hobbes groaned. He suspected that he was going to do a lot of that in the near future.

"Hey!" The quarter turned towards the intersection; it was occupied by the small mob Zim's attitude had garnered, and it seemed they'd added some members to their number during Zim's room hunt. "LET'S GET 'EM!"

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte looked at each other.

"_Run!_" Calvin, Hobbes and Morte yelled.

"_Bacterial disinfectant!_" Zim yelled.

The mob and his happenstance group paused. "What?"

Zim's eyes darted back and forth. "I happen to be concerned about the dangers of disease. _The microscopic menace plagues us ALL!_"

Contemplating that for a moment, the mob charged again.

Needing no further motivation to move, Zim's group ran off.

-------

_Some time later..._

"Well, that worked well," Morte said dryly.

"Make silence now," Zim said moodily as he walked out of a room with a large mark over his eye.

"No, no, no," Morte said, feigning innocence. "I mean, sure, it's a good plan. Running in and out of every room you see in a town full of people that I bet are just _waiting _to blow up, insulting them when they yell at you and let's not forget the attitude problem; yep, that's a _great _plan! Can't possibly see what's wrong with that one, nuh uh!"

"Finally," Hobbes said. "Someone sees the truth."

Calvin sighed. "It was fun while it lasted."

Zim crossed his arms. "I don't see what was wrong with my plan."

"You break and enter, aggravate probably very angry people and in the process incite a mob that's probably still on a manhunt for you," Hobbes said pointedly. "And you need us to give you a reason?"

"The plan is foolproof," Zim said stubbornly. "They are merely small bumps in the road of the road of pain and misery that is life."

"For that to count, it'd have to be a plan. This is more of a 'I-Hope-This-Works' kind of deal."

Zim glared at him. "And you have a better idea?"

"Actually, I do," Calvin said.

The other three turned to him.

"You do?" Zim asked, a little surprised.

"You _do_?" Hobbes said, his expression more suited to someone who'd just been informed that their body was a walking time bomb.

"_You _do?" Morte said. In his experience, the boy was an oddball who just shot his mouth off, and occasionally some highly destructive spells. Aside from that, he hadn't seem him do much in the planning department.

"Yep," Calvin said to all three. "I went to the liberty of procuring us a map!"

"You found a map?" Hobbes said. "That's...actually intelligent."

Zim was more suspicious. He didn't trust this town's maps, suspecting them to be a common product of an insidious beast of pure malevolent thought energy that infected the minds of the town's business models, forever cursing all who dwelled within the town to wander about it's endless alleys forevermore. "Where'd you get that map?"

"Hey!" Frankie yelled from somewhere ahead of the corridor they were in. "Who broke the Foster's Display Map?!"

The other three looked away from the direction of her voice to Calvin, who hastily hid the rather tattered map behind his back. "From an area completely unrelated to that event," he lied.

"Uh huh," Hobbes said suspiciously. "And the Noodle Incident had nothing to do with you."

"I told you never to bring that up! Stop using it against me already!"

Hobbes let his retort die in his lungs when he noticed Zim skulking about, looking around suspiciously. "What are you doing?"

"Searching," Zim said shortly.

"Ah, 'searching'. For what?"

"Evil."

"Evil," Hobbes repeated.

"Yes. Evil."

"I'm probably going to regret this...but _why _are you searching for evil?"

"Because he found a _map_. That is far too convenient for my liking."

"How is that bad?" Calvin wondered, waving the map around.

"Because _something _is bound to happen to prevent our room discovery. That map is some sort of evil trap. Just like the last one I found."

Hobbes was about to ask when Zim found a map when Calvin felt he had to ask the obvious question. "Who honestly cares enough about what we're doing to stop us?!"

"I don't know," Zim snapped. "Possessed garden gnomes. Middle management-based lawyer demons. Sentient clusters of pure _stink_. That kid from Skool who always makes fun of my version of a Scottish accent."

A long pause followed his statement. "Don't you think that maybe you're being a _little _bit paranoid?" Calvin asked sarcastically.

"Perhaps," Zim said. "But a little paranoia never derailed a hovertrain."

The other three stared at him.

"Ah," Morte said. "The ever present rambling of the barmy. How I haven't missed it."

Zim glared at him. "Mock me now, animate skull thing, but wait! Just you _wait _until the carnivorus tumbleweeds are chewing on your collective heads! Then you'll be sorry! Oh, how you'll be sorry!"

Morte stared at Zim. "Eh...how likely is that going to happen?"

"In this town? Probably in the next five minutes," Calvin said.

"Nah," Hobbes said dismissively. "I say fifteen. Gotta give 'em time to prepare."

"I wager fifteen on five!"

"Me too, but vice-versa."

Zim turned around. The rooms here looked too small to be of use, but he remained optimistic about their eventual goal. "Let's try the next hallway."

"Get them before they're gone!" A voice behind him yelled.

"No," Zim said, a little confused. "The rooms in this hall are not suitable."

"Uh, Zim?" Calvin said, tugging on the Irken's sleeve.

Zim turned around, ready to berate Calvin for uninvited physical contact when he saw the mob, standing just around the corner, glaring menacingly at him. And several cells of the mob were holding large cages containing what appeared to be bundles of thistle with large fang-filled mouths, narrowed gleams of red light staring at them malevolently.

Morte's jaw dropped, and Hobbes reluctantly handed Calvin three fivers. "You have got to be kidding me."

"Hah!" Calvin proclaimed, ignoring Morte's outburst. "I finally _won _something!"

"Hmph," Hobbes said. "Are you forgetting that the _only _games you ever win against me are games of chance?"

"A-_hem_," the large imaginary friend said. "Angry mob here; you could follow standard regulations and pay some attention to us before fleeing in a panicked fashion."

Zim waved a hand at his colleages. "So sorry; proceed."

"Thank you. In accordance with the Vigilante Justice Article of The Traverser Town Amnesty Agreement in the town's official founding, we, the mob, present you with our grievances in the form of this bunch of highly aggressive Traversian Carnivorous Thistle."

"Uh huh," Zim said slowly. He stared back at the mob. "Is that it?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Okay then. Please don't proceed."

"Sorry. We're real pissed at you."

"Eh, I'm used to it." Zim said indifferently. "Go on, go on."

"Good." The mob opened the various cages; the tumbleweeds, pleased to be free, leaped out while snarling ferociously and foaming at the mouth.

One jumped further ahead of the rest, snapping Calvin's ill-acquired map out of his hands and gulping it down. Before Calvin could do anything stupid, Hobbes smacked into him, hoisting him on one shoulder and running away, Zim and Morte in close chase, the Irken supported by his spider-legs.

"My map!" Calvin yelped.

Hobbes gave him a look. "Forget about it!"

"Do you know what I had to do to get it?!"

"The same kind of thing you do whenever you get even slightly bored?"

"I'm not saying yes!"

"Quick!" Zim said, dashing in front of them, opening a strangely cubist looking door. "In here!" He ducked in, the others following after a brief pause. Zim slammed the door shut, the others pinning themselves against it in a last-ditch attempt at saving themselves from an angry mob. They waited tensely, bracing themselves against the door as they heard the bouncing-scratching sounds of the tumbleweeds, followed by the stomping sounds of the mob.

The sounds passed with no incident. After a brief moment of stressful tenseness, they relaxed and looked up at the room they ducked into.

It was, to speak bluntly, an architectural impossibility. It appeared to be another hallway, this one completely gray and white, consisting entirely of staircases going in every possible dimension, and from Calvin's art studies, he felt certain that a few went in some dimensions that weren't geometrically possible. Stairs going up, down, sideways, facing upside down, to either side, spiraling around the walls, intersecting with others, and branching into the vaulting hallways high above them, themselves obeying equally absurd laws. It looked like something out of a surrealistic painting.

"You know," Hobbes said dryly. "I should probably say something about how impossible that is...but I don't know whether it's sadder that something like this even exists or that I'm not surprised it does."

-------

_Even later..._

"We're lost," Morte said.

"What a big surprise," Calvin said sarcastically. "That's absolutely brilliant! I mean, it's a testament to observational genius! I don't know how anyone would have noticed if it wasn't for the fact that _we've been lost for the past fifteen minutes!_"

"Don't gotta be snippy with me," Morte said, offended.

"I can be whatever I want to be," Calvin snapped. "It's one of the bonuses of playing puppet master with the laws of physics."

"And an apparent side-effect is a constantly running mouth," Zim grumbled.

"No," Hobbes said. "That's more of a personality inclination."

"You know what? It's not just Morte. All of you guys suck. Like mosquitoes."

"You mean mosquitoes in general, or those mutant ones you made on accident?"

"You're never going to let that go, are you?" Calvin asked sourly.

"Come on, you know me. You're practically a wealth of blackmail material."

"Some friend you are."

"Hey, look at it this way; would _anyone _but a true friend have stuck besides you this long?"

"Would a true friend file up blackmail material?"

"You do that too."

"Fascinating as this completely pointless conversation is," Zim said. "I must interrupt it to inform you that I see an open room over there!"

"_What?!"_

"Follow me!" Zim commanded, rushing off towards the open door. The others followed him excitedly as he slid to a stop in front of a spacey looking room, the door clinging to the wall.

"Finally! Our search is over," Zim proclaimed, triumphantly walking into what he thought was the border between greater house and room and turned out to be a highly convincing solid space.

The sight of Zim suddenly crashing into seemingly empty space, one leg stuck out behind him as a result of his odd gait while the 'room' crumpled around him, the highly convincing painting falling onto him and revealing only a wall. He fell down, the painting covering him like a shroud.

"Oh, _come on!_" Calvin yelled, throwing his hands up in the air. "This is getting ridiculous!"

"'Getting'?" Hobbes mocked. "We're way past that border."

"Man," Morte said sympathetically. "I haven't seen a place this nuts since Rubikon. That place was like a cuckoo clock. I mean a cuckoo cuckoo clock!"

The canvas pile started to twitch violently.

"Hey, Boss!" Morte said, floating down to Zim's level. "You, uh, feelin' alright there?"

"I HATE THIS HOUSE!" Zim screamed, ripping out of the canvas like a Xenomorph Chestburster out of it's hapless host. "It's _INSANE!_ Everywhere there's nothing but the depths of madness cowering at every turn, and that stupid _MOB _won't stop chasing me! What I said was a long time ago, GET OVER IT! And this!" He gestured at the remains at the canvas. "What _is _this!? Who in their right mind would paint over a solid wall to create the illusion of an empty room?!"

-------

_In Traverse Town's Guild of Pranks, Mischief and Amusing Annoyances..._

A Smergle sneezed. As it turned out, he'd recently used Sketch to copy a Whirlwind attack, and destroyed most of the hall. Everyone thought it was funny.

------

After about five minutes of yelling, shredding and stomping, he finally quieted down, panting with his back hunched over.

"Feeling better now?" Morte asked cautiously. Assuming Zim was still in a mood to lacerate anything that invoked his considered ire, he wanted to be close enough to be a voice of sympathy but far enough to flee at top speed should Zim be inclined to commit acts of great destruction.

"Yes." The reply was delivered in a toneless voice, suggesting Zim's temper tantrum had run itself out.

"You sure?"

"Uh huh."

"Not about to go around comitting acts of great chaos and destruction on, I dunno, me, for example?"

"No."

"_O-_kay then!" Morte said brightly.

Zim took a deep breath. And he looked around.

"_You!_" he suddenly shouted, whirling around the spot and pointing at Hobbes.

"Me?" the martially artistic anthropomorph asked, taken aback.

"Yes, _you_! How can you be so calm in the face of such maddening..._madness?!_ It's ludicrous!"

Hobbes looked at Calvin. "I've developed a bit of an immunity to insanity over my life. Doesn't bother me that much any more."

Calvin scowled. "I don't like the way you were looking at me. Why were you looking at me like that?"

"No reason."

"No reason," Zim said, happy to have a distraction from their impending screaming fit. "Or _some _reason?"

"No. It's nothing."

"So much nothing that it is, in fact, _something_?"

Morte wished he had eyelids so he could blink. "Wait, what?"

Zim jabbed a finger at Morte's forehead. "Aha! You're in on it, too!"

"In on what?"

"You're in on the conspiracy to deny Zim his sleep by forcing him to wander around this house _forever,_ alerting the hall monitors of his every move to drive him mad!"

"Bit late for that," Calvin muttered under his breath.

Morte's jaw dropped slack to the left. "I'm a what-what in the who-hey on the what now?"

"In on it. The Zim-going-crazy conspiracy. Right now,"

Morte looked at Zim for a long moment. "Don't take this the wrong way, Boss...but you're in desperate need of an appointment with the men in white coats."

"This is news to you?" Calvin muttered. Unfortunately, Zim heard him and expressed his displeasure by swiftly swinging his fist sideways, the back of his arm catching the side of Calvin's head and knocking him to the floor.

"Ow!" Calvin squealed as he went flying and smacked into the ground. He groaned loudly, furiously looking up and planning to issue some sort of retaliation when he noticed the nimbus of fire playing around Zim's clenched fist. Getting the message, Calvin gulped and backed away.

Zim nodded approvingly as the fire faded away; he let his arms drop into a crossed position as he gave Calvin a sardonic look. "Now what have we learned?"

"Don't insult someone when you're in hitting range of that person?" Hobbes suggested.

"Don't piss off a cutter who earned the name?" Morte offered.

"Make sure to save your insults for when your target can't hurt you?" Calvin said.

Zim pointed at Calvin. "Bingo. Now, let's get moving. There's no point in wasting valuable rest time remaining lost in these cavernous catacombs of...of...hallway things."

"Ooh," Calvin muttered under his breath. "Great grammar. You should teach English at a university."

Zim's head snapped to him, a sharp frown plastered on his face.

"What?" Calvin said with a false note of innocence. "I didn't say anything. Look at me, look at me; I didn't say anything. You must be hearing things." A moment passed, what with the awkward silence and all. "You gonna get moving or what?"

Zim rolled his eyes, electing to let it go; like he said before, they didn't have time for this. The thought of vengeance for future infractions cheered him up a bit, and his brain started busily constructing appropriate scenarios immediately.

He paused at a fork in the halls, unsure whether to go down the stairway in front of them or turn to the other hallway in front of them. He leaned a hand against the wall as he made up his mind, elicting a small squeaking noise as the others gathered around him. Zim raised an eyeridge, not liking the way his hand was recessing into the wall slightly.

There was a loud clicking noise from directly underneath them.

"_Naart,_" Hobbes said.

A square outlined in the floor beneath them suddenly swung open, dropping them into a tunnel.

"Was that another trapdoor!?" Morte yelled as the four of them tumbled around wildly, all rendered blind by the absence of light anywhere.

"What was your first clue, the tunnel?!" Hobbes yelled back.

"I hate this house!" Calvin yelled.

"I fail to see how destroying several planets on accident earned me this fate!" Zim screamed.

They fell (or rose; in the dark of the tunnel and amid all the bouncing around, gravitational orientation was a nebulous constant) through the darkness, wildly bouncing around a winding dark pathway that seemed to obey no rhyme or reason, distractedly hitting each other as they collided with the walls and bounced off again, their various cries and yells cut off and echoing as they bounced around, giving the impression that they were bounding around the mind of a madman.

It went on for a long time. It was hard to tell how long; given their personal point of view on the whole thing and the subjective nature of time, it felt like hours but was probably only ten minutes, if even that.

The darkness suddenly brightened in a flash of light, though they only had a moment to notice this before they crashed into the ground, landing in a heap of tangled limbs.

Zim distangled himself away from the dogpile, rubbed his head and sat up, taking in the sights. They were lying in a fair-sized dimly lit room, a few electric wall-mounted lamps lighting the room, though not well. Aside from the wall they'd just flipped in from, there appeared to be only one way out: a door leading into a down-staircase, it's entrance shrouded in the dark. There were a few scattered tables around the room and some small cabinets built into the walls, making it look rather utilitarian in nature. He stood up, grimacing as Morte pushed himself out from under the dogpile, bobbing around Zim with a note rather remnisciant of a mother hen. Hobbes brushed off the person on him, sending Calvin flying across the room, smacking into a wall and falling back down, his shoulder flap snagging on the hook of a wall-mounted lamp. Hobbes took note of this, shaking his his head wearily as he delicately stood up.

Zim looked around the room warily. "Perfect," he grumbled to himself, now how are we supposed to get out?" The room had no apparent exits or entrances, the trapdoor they'd descended in from closing up behind them.

He heard a creaking nose. Zim flipped around, Hobbes doing the same while Calvin and Morte at least faced the appropriate direction as part of the wall at the other end of the room slowly fell back into the wall, sliding away from sight. A few moments later, a young human stumbled out of the resultant gap in the wall, yelping loudly.

He hurredly scurried to his feet, giving the others a clear view of him: he was a fair-skinned male that was probably about seventeen. He looked to be about five six and on the slighter side of the male build spectrum. His hair was a little darker then Calvin's, but not as spikey, though no less messy. His face was rounded, with a small spattering of freckles, slightly fuzzy large ears and light brown eyes. He was wearing a large black jacket with loose wrist length sleeves and a high collar. He wore a sleeveless red vest over it, it's neckline a hole for the collar of the jacket to come through. It had darker red seamlines going around the armholes, shoulder areas and chestline, and ended just above the bottom of the jacket, his belt concealed from sight. On the back of the vest was a large logo consisting of the letters TP in a circle outlined in purple, rendered in a stylized shape with the P a bit lower than the T. His charcoal gray pants were baggy, the cuffs spilling over the tops of his shoes and looking well-worn; the pants were covered with number of overlapping dark red material that looked like armor plates; they started somewhere around the belt, judging from the way they came from under the jacket and down to about mid-thigh, another larger piece covering most of the lower half of his legs. He had a small pouch strapped to his right leg, the flap pushed open by the small head of a curious naked mole rat; it was strangely unwrinkled and smooth-skinned for a mole rat, in Zim's opinion. Curiously, a long tail covered with fur the same color as the boy's hair protruded from within the back of his jacket, drooping down to a light coil around his feet. His strapped-together shoes, their tops lost under the loose legcuffs, were white with gray soles.

He blinked, seeing the others stare at him like he was about to sprout tentacles and devour their heads. "Uh, hey?" he said nervously, raising his hand and waggling his fingers in greeting.

"Ron?" said a girl's voice from behind him. "Who are you talking to?" A girl stepped in from the gap, walking to behind the boy. her skin tone a little lighter then the boy's, looking to be roughly around the same age as the male and about five four. She had long red hair going down to around the small of her back, the long bangs mostly combed over to one side framing her intelligent green eyes and an attractive rounded face. She wore a zipped up black jacket with a high collar, elbow length dark purple sleeves with darker cuffs, a wedgelike pattern marking off the black from the purple on her shoulders. Her jacket had purple seamlines in roughtly the same areas where the boy's vest had red ones. Her jacket had the same logo the boy's did on the back, except outlined in red. Her pants were almost identical to the boy's, except for the pants being olive green and the overlapping parts being black. The cuffs of her pants covered most of a pair of black designer combat boots; they were in the town's style, meaning that they were tied with three straps across the leg, all but one of the straps obsured by the pants. Covering her arms from the middle of the forearms on down was a pair of long black combat gloves with reinforced knuckles.

She warily regarded Zim and his company, noting Zim and Hobbes' defensive readiness. She wasn't sure why, but the tiger and alien seemed somehow dangerous in a vague but indisputable way. She placating waved her hands at them. "Whoah, amp down, guys."

"Kim? Ron?" A third voice said from behind them, followed by several loud crashing sounds and a lot of screaming by the same voice. Kim and Ron jumped, whirling around and yelling, "Father Nightroad!" They disappeared back into the gap, dragging one of the singularily oddest figures any of Zim's group had seen yet.

The man Kim and Ron helped to his feet was another human male, this one with very light skin, appearing to be in his late twenties at most. He was also unusually tall, standing at about six feet five inches. He had a pleasant-looking thin face, framed by the chin-length winglike bangs of his almost girlishly long gray-white hair, the rest of it combed back into a flowing shoulderblade-length ponytail, tied with a small dark piece of cloth. He wore a large black knee-length bulky jacket styled after a cassock with a tall collar bracing his neck, the interior, sleeve cuffs and seams on it a ivory white. Under his jacket, he wore a loose short-sleeved white shirt with no collar, and looped over his muscular neck was a peculiar heavily stylized and nearly skeletal golden cross on a chain-necklace, resting over his heart; the cross's central conjunction had a fanning shape around it like a metal spiderweb with extensions at the edges, some bladelike, some blunt. His pants were completely black and mostly plain, with a series of looping belts on the thighs and the cuffs of his pants were tucked into a pair of simple ankle-high black boots.

Adding to his already strange figure was the fact that he wore what appeared to be a large cross high on his back; it appeared to be slightly wider than his shoulders and about four feet tall as his shoulders. It was tightly bundled in what, judging for the text and elaborate illustrations, were Bible pages completely concealing the object underneath from view. An absurd amount of belts criss-crossed over the pages, clasps keeping them together and placed with no discernable pattern; many looped under his jacket and into his shirt, a few going through his jacket, the clasps placed strategically on his front to counter the obvious weight of the mummified-looking article of faith, even though it didn't look like the weight bothered him at all.

Father Nightroad looked at Zim and Hobbes tensely, his gaze retreating to Calvin and Morte for a moment; _Noncombatants_, he thought. The alien and the tiger, on the other, most certainly weren't. "Wait!" He said, waving his hands around anxiously. "Calm down, we're not enemies!"

Zim twitched an eyeridge. "You're not with the mob?"

Ron blinked. "Mob? What mob? We don't have anything to do with any mob."

"Aha!" Zim yelled, pointing a finger at him. "That's _exactly _what a mobber...mob...person would say! Admission by sterotype confirmation!"

Kim blinked. "Then...he is with the mob?"

"AHA!" Zim yelled again, this time pointing a finger at her. "You admit it! I smell guilt! Such horrible guilt it is?"

Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad stared nervously at the clearly insane alien, slowly backing away, freezing when the wall slid back into place, cutting off their escape.

"...Ah," Father Nightroad said unhappily. "Oh no."

Zim pointed a finger at them, yelling maniacally. "Come on! You'll never take me alive for your twisted vengeance-cy vengeance of...pain! I'll take you all on!"

"Er...yeah," Morte said uneasily. He wasn't sure about the priest, but he knew adventurers when he saw them, and if the boy and girl weren't adventurers, he didn't know what was. "You do that. I'll just stay out of your way." He floated off to the side, chattering his teeth.

Zim faltered, realizing that no one else was saying anything. "Back me up, will you?" He said, nudging Hobbes with an elbow. He got no response. "Eh? Hobbes?" He looked at the tiger, noticing that the tiger was sitting in a relaxed quadrupedal fashion, staring at Kim with something like rapt fascination. "Eh? Hello? What are you doing?" He waved his hand in front of Hobbes' face, the tiger's gaze remaining steady. "Oh, come on! Don't leave me to fight them on my own!"

Calvin smacked his face. "Oh, for the love of the One Man Band! They aren't with that mob, they're just a bunch of lost idiots!"

"Idiots?" Kim snapped, bristling.

"Yeah, that's not very nice," Father Nightroad said indignantly.

"I don't even know you and you're already insulting me!" Ron said. The naked mole rat pointed at Calvin and chattered something angrily.

Calvin groaned. "I hate public relations..."

Zim paused. "Wait. You're not after my precious _gut-meats!?_"

"Uh, no," Kim said shortly.

"Then _what _are you after?" Zim said suspiciously.

The priest twitched. "_A WAY OUT" _He suddenly screamed, clutching his head for a moment.

Morte stared at him for a moment. "...Does this town snap your crank or is it just 'cause you're all Primers?"

Father Nightroad paused. "Wait, what?"

"Never mind. Berk."

Father Nightroad frowned. "That's not nice."

Morte gaped at him. "Wait, you understood what I said?"

"What do you expect? I'm British!"

Seeing that Zim had been set at ease somewhat, Ron walked over to the tiger, peering at him thoughtfully. "Is something wrong with him?"

"Perhaps his brain has finally succumbed to the rampant insanity that dwells with everywhere?" Zim hypothesized.

"No," Calvin snapped, irritated that no one was paying attention to him. "He's just enamoured again!"

Kim blinked, flushing slightly. "He's _what?_"

"'Enamoured," Calvin said, emphasizing the syllables. "'Verb. To be charmed, captivated, unduly fascinated in a romantic sense.'"

Ron twitched. "Urk."

Zim looked at him sharply. "What was that about Irk!?"

"He's just snapping a crank," Morte said dismissively. "Nothing to do with...whatever you're talkin' about."

Calvin stared at Morte. "Will you _stop_ saying that? What, were you a mechanic in another life?"

"Pike it, twerp!"

Calvin narrowed his eyes. "Pike _this_, bonehead!" He closed his forefinger and thumb in a small circle, holding it off to his mouth and loudly breathing into it. A short burst of flame jumped away from him, blasting into Morte and sending him flying.

Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad stared unbelivingly as Calvin let his hand drop, grinning malevolently. _Okay,_ Father Nightroad said to himself. _So he _is _a combatant_.

Hobbes finally looked away from Kim, his eyes narrowing at Calvin. "Huh? You exercising your firebug again?"

"Shut up!" Calvin snapped. "Stop sightseeing and _help me!_"

"Do it yourself," Hobbes said lightly, ignoring Calvin's yell of frustration. He glanced at Ron, suddenly freezing. His tail started thrashing around rapidly as his eye twitched, watching the way Ron's tail was gently swaying from side to side...from side to side...from side to side. His teeth bared tensely, his claws boring into the floor.

Ron paled. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

Calvin eyes widened. "Listen, you! If you want to keep it, _stop moving your tail!_" He paused. "Wait, why _do _you have a tail?"

Ron grabbed his monkeylike tail defensively. "Long involved story!"

At the stop in movement, Hobbes relaxed, scooting back, his fur fluffing out. Zim thought he looked tremendously embarrased. Looking for something to take everyone's mind off his brief lack of control, Hobbes walked over to Calvin, a grin forming on his face. "What's the matter? Hanging around not your style?"

"That's funny, real funny. It'll be even funnier when I rearrange your face!"

"Flattery may get you somewhere, but threats will only get you humiliation. And a good fist to the face."

"Why...you...when I get down from here, you are taking a one-way trip down the evolutionary ladder, you hear me! You see how well you flirt after you're a paramecium, you hear me? A _paramecium!_"

"I think I like you like this. You look like a door knocker." Hobbes pulled on Calvin's shoe, easily pulling him away from the wall and letting go, letting Calvin's free weight swing him back onto the wall. "Ding dong."

"Hey, knock it off!"

Hobbes did it again. "Ding dong!"

"Quit it!"

"Ding dong."

"I said quit it!"

"Ding...dong!"

"QUIT IT!"

"Ding! Dong!"

"AARRRRGGGH!"

"DING-A-LING DONG!"

The mole rat chittered something nervously, probably something to do with Calvin and Hobbes' sanity.

"That's...kind of scary," Kim commented.

"Just smile and nod," Ron said in an aside, his tail pointing at them along with his index fingers. "Don't be too obvious."

Zim slapped his face. "Oh, Gir. Oh, poor, poor Gir. Your rescuers are naught but complete idiots!"

"Hey!" Morte whined. "What about me?!"

"...Right," Zim said slowly. "You're not a complete idiot. You're a _perverted _idiot." Zim walked away, fuming at the unfairness of being alone in a strange world with only three idiotsfor aid.

Morte shrugged in his own way. "Eh. I can live with that."

Father Nightroad spoke up. "Erm, maybe we should check the map again. There must be another entrance to the higher levels that won't require us wandering around the catacombs for hours."

"A map?" Zim, his spiderlegs extending and clinging to the ceiling, dropped down between them, hovering around their heads and scaring them. "A map, you say?"

Ron jumped in surprise, falling to the ground. "Y-y-yeah!"

"Is it cursed?" Zim said sharply. His spiderlegs detached from the ceiling and he flipped in midair, landing on the ground softly. He narrowed his eyes, advancing on Ron, who nervously scooted back as far as he could, the Irken still coming.

Uh...I don't think so..." Ron said nervously, hitting the wall and looking up in fear as Zim stopped in front of him, looking down at him sternly.

"Is it possessed by malevolent spirits that feed off of mortal confusion and frustration?" Zim demanded, his eye twitching slightly.

Calvin and Hobbes stopped yelling, staring at Zim.

Calvin looked at Hobbes. "Is it just me, or is the life of the King in the hands of a guy who's flipped his lid?"

Ron stared to say no to Zim's question, then paused. That explanation made a lot of sense to Ron. He put his hand to his chin, frowning slightly. "Don't think so."

Zim stood up, crossing his arms. "Is it part of some extradimensional conspiracy to trap us all within the bowels of this house forevermore, sent down to us by unnamable horrors the like of which man was not meant to know before his morning coffee?!"

Father Nightroad blinked. "That is both the longest run-on sentence and the most overly floral words I've heard all day!"

Kim stared at the strange priest for a moment. "...That's not what got my attention."

"I...don't know," Ron said slowly. "It'd explain a lot."

Zim grabbed Ron's collar and roughly pulled him to his feet. "Let us take a look at it." Ron and Zim hurried back to Kim and Father Nightroad, who stared at the two of them.

"K.P.!" Ron said. "I have it on good info that this map could be-"

"We heard him," Kim said, giving Zim an uneasy look.

He was staring off into the distance, his eyeridge and antannae twitching ever so slightly. He suddenly shook his hands in the air and yelled, _"STOP TELLING ME TO DO THINGS!"_

"So, who are you guys?" She asked, trying to be nice.

Zim didn't see any real reason to not tell her. "I am Zim," he gestured behind him to Calvin and Hobbes, who had watching them curiously. "Calvin and Hobbes are those idiots. Perverted idiot otherwise known as Morte Rictusgrin, cowering in the corner like a cowering coward that turns cowering into a postmodern artform."

"Postmodernish doesn't deserve to be called _art!_" Calvin yelled. "Taking a failed masonry project and calling it art does not _work!_"

Morte snorted. "Feh! I don't have to take this! I'm a highly-skilled guide to the multiverse, I don't need insulting from a berk with a Napolean complex!"

"Then go somewhere where I don't have to listen to you," Zim replied.

"Well, fair's fair in the introduction game!" Father Nightroad said brightly. "I am Father Abel Nightroad and these are Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable and Rufus of Team Possible."

"Right, Fath-"

"Oh, come on!" The priest said loudly. "Call me Abel!"

"...Right, Abel." Zim said, momentarily wondering who Rufus was before he realized Abel must've been refering to the naked mole rat currently sitting on the arm of Abel's back-worn cross and watching them with concern. "Let us examine that map, then!" He frowned at the way everyone was staring at him again. "Don't make _gesticulate! _I mean it!"

Abel and Kim looked at each other, then at the way Ron was taking Zim completely seriously, then just decided to go with it. "Alright, then," Abel said. "There's a table over here." He pulled out a map from the depths of his jacket, unfolding it several times until it concealed his entire upper body and a bit of his lower half as they came to a medium-sized round table, laying it flat against the table as the other three assembled themselves around it and Rufus hopped onto the table.

"Okay!" Zim said, cracking his knuckles. "Does anyone here have expertise in paranormal matters?"

A long silence followed his words.

"Sorry, don't really do the whole mysticism thing," Kim said apologetically.

"I do have some training in exorcisms, basic demonology and the like," Abel said. "But not anything like curses or the like. Ron, don't you have some kind of magical power?"

"Yeah," Ron said, his tail curling around his leg self-consciously. "But the Mystical Monkey Power isn't really that reliable. Sometimes I just, y'know, _know _stuff I shouldn't, but I'm not really getting anything right now." he paused thoughtfully. "Doesn't usually happen unless it's a bad sitch, most of the time." He looked into space dreamily, thinking of one such exception to this rule; that one time he'd suddenly become aware that the town had become infested by werefleas. That had been unpleasant for everyone.

Rufus chattered away in a series of squeaks and sounds that approximated human speech; Abel just looked at him curiously, Kim looked as if she was struggling to catch every other 'word', Ron simply nodded, apparently understanding it all, while Zim's language translation module didn't understand it a word, causing him to miss the brunt of what he said. "What'd he say?"

Hobbes took a moment to answer him. "He just said that he's no good there, either."

Ron blinked. "Wait, you understand Rufus?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Sure; I'm an animal, he's an animal. It's not that complicated."

All the other people looked at Zim.

"Alright, alright!" Zim snapped. "I'll admit to having picked up a few things here and there, but I only know enough real magic to set you all on fire." There was a long, very awkward pause. "Okay, that came out wrong. My _point!_ Is that I don't know about this sort of thing. However," his eyes slowly glided to Calvin. "I _do _know someone who does...I hope."

Calvin looked at them uneasily. "Okay...I don't like the way you're looking at me."

"You!" Zim said commandingly to Hobbes. "Get the loudmouth over here."

Hobbes snorted huffily. "Try that with a little more respect."

Zim glared at him. "Orders are orders."

Hobbes crossed his arms. "My orders were to stand by you. Not slavishly obey your every random whim."

Zim stared menacingly at Hobbes, the tiger returning the gesture for every iota of dislike.

Ron propped his elbow on the table, holding his head up with his hand. "You could cut the tension in this room with a knife. Not one of those good daggers; I'm talking plastic little butterknives that snap if you sit on them."

"Yuh huh!" Rufus agreed.

Zim crossed his arms. "Fine. _Please_ bring Calvin over here," he said slowly, the sheer venom in his voice contrasting the filial politeness of the statement.

Hobbes smirked cattily. No one could smirk cattily like Hobbes could. "All you had to do was ask." He plucked Calvin off the hook, tucking him under one arm and sauntered over to the table, ignoring Calvin's indignant demands as to whether he was luggage, cut off when the tiger roughly dropped him in front of the table.

"Ow!" Calvin yelped, standing up. He was about to say something when he noticed the various people around the table looking at him strangely. _Well, _he thought nervously, _that ain't good. I'm in a strange place, I'm completely out of my element, I'm faced with people who, from what I've already experienced, probably want to kick my ass or at least make me eat my shoes. This is like being back in high school!_

"Which is a weird thing to say, seeing as how I've never actually _been _to high school," he muttered to himself.

"You aren't missing anything," Ron muttered, having sharper.

"Never went to high school," Abel said musingly. "I was, huh, could say home-schooled? Yeah, that's not really a lie..."

"Guys," Kim said patiently. "We're getting off-track again."

"Sorry!" Ron and Abel both said. Rufus rolled his eyes.

_Weird,_ Hobbes thought. _If I didn't know any better, I'd say this town was full of people like, well, us._

"Okay..." Calvin said slowly. "So what do _you _people want?" As Kim began to speak, he held up a hand. "And just to get things straight, if it's a human sacrifice so you can harvest my organs to make yourselves more powerful in the name of some unknowable tentacled horror, I'd like to point out that I've got more then enough ordinance on my person to reduce this entire house to a smoking ruin in the next five and a half seconds."

Kim blinked. "Uh, _no._"

"Oh, okay then!" Calvin crossed his arms behind his head, raising an eyebrow at her challengingly. "So, what is it?"

Abel cleared his throat. "Well, we've a map, but we've also a theory that it's cursed, and you're the only one here with any actual experience with this sort of thing, so..."

"You want me to check it for you, that it?" Calvin finished. Abel, Ron and Kim nodded. Calvin shrugged. "Fine. I'll see what I can do. And maybe get us into a friggin' room," he added in an undertone.

He again underestimated Ron's hearing ability. "Oh, we could help you guys there!" Ron said. "Y'know, assuming we can get _out._"

Calvin started, a little surprised Ron had heard him. "Alright, let's see what we got here." He walked closer to the table, scowling when it became clear that he was too short to see over it well enough. Grumbling to himself, he dragged a chair over to the table and hopped onto it, to see better.

"Okay," he said after a careful moment of observation. "According to this map, we're presently somewhere in a sub-catacombs level of the house. Judging by the lack of readily accessible exits and entrances except for that one I presume you guys came through," he pointed to a descending staircase within a stone-rimmed open door at the other end of the room. "I'd say this is a panic room or safehouse of some sort, designed to give the inhabitants a place to recuperate before fleeing into...the sewer system? That's weird. Anyway, I think there might be a stone in this room that triggers a revolving up-ladder in one of the walls-"

"I don't think that's what they meant by checking it out," Hobbes interrupted.

Calvin's reading trailed off. "Oh," he finally said, his cheeks going a bit red. He looked at the map a bit more keenly, not looking for escape routes this time, but searching for any tell-tale signs of it being cursed. After a long minute of him not seeing any signs of seemingly innocent rows of evil numbers, a lack of sulphuric smells from the paper, the first letters of a row of paragraph spelling out the name of a demon, evil mage or random corporation or even suspicious alignments of paper thread, he realized he had only one recourse.

He flexed the fingers of the Pyro Glove, activating it. Those members of the now substantially larger group who hadn't seen him in action watched him curiously and, seeing Hobbes' worried face, anxiously.

"Wh-what's that for?" Ron asked, noticing the red-orange glow emanaing from the palm. Rufus, not liking the look on the human's face, dove into Ron's make-shift pocket.

"The penultimate test," Calvin said with an evil grin.

"Pen..?" Hobbes wondered before his eyes went wide. "_No!_ You better not be doing what I think you're-!"

"Too late!" Calvin cried, stepping back as far as he could. He snapped his gloved fingers; a thin line of red-orange alchemical energy flickered away from his fingers and onto the map, igniting into a small burst of fire that reduced the map to ashes almost immediately, fading away just as quickly.

"Huh." Calvin looked at the ashes disinterestedly. "No wailing spirits, no discorporation of negative energy, no spiraling trail of dark magics...looks it wasn't cursed after all." He laughed loudly, enjoying the horrified looks on everyone's faces.

"Did...did...did you just _set _our map on _fire!?_" Abel demanded.

"Yeah, so?"

"And you call that a _penultimate _test?" Ron asked shrilly.

Calvin shrugged. "Yeah. Destruction of a cursed object always results in the release of whatever magics were used to make it cursed. That was the best I could do with the tools on hand, anyway; for the ultimate test, I'd have needed a priest."

"But I _am _a priest!" Abel yelled.

"Oh," Calvin said. He shrugged. "My bad."

"Your bad? Your _bad?_" Kim yelled. "And setting a map on fire to see if it's safe to use it doesn't seem really counterproductive to you?!"

"Nope!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Besides, I can fix this."

"Fix it? _How?_ It's a big pile of ashes!"

Calvin raised a finger. "And therein lies the reconstructability!"

"That's not a word, you know," Zim said with a grin.

"Shut up! I'm a genius, I don't need to pay attention to grammar!" Calvin pulled out his hammer, readying it over his head. "All-ll-ll-riiighty, then! Behold the power of the Silver Bullet Alchemist! No wait, the Vermillion Alchemist! Hold it, the Gadgeteer Alchemist! Can I get back to you on this?" He turned the hammer in his hands, displaying it's transmutive striking edge and swung it directly onto the center of the table.

Unfortunately, he mistimed his swing, the force of his blow splitting the table in half. Zim was halfway across the room before he was aware of his reaction, Hobbes had jumped six feet straight up into the air, hanging onto the roof, and Ron's panicked arm-flailing had accidentily knocked both Abel and Kim down, to the girls discontent, knocking off the priest's glasses but not ruffling his composure, and giving Rufus good reason to stay in the makeshift pocket he'd retreated to ever since Calvin pulled out his glove.

His fur slowly flattening again, Hobbes clung to the roof tightly. "Smooth move, monkey boy," he hissed.

"Hey!" Ron said from the floor.

"Don't call him that!" Kim said indignantly.

Abel looked up at Hobbes. "That's really cruel! I have half a mind to come up there and hurt you until you are sad!"

"...I wasn't talking about Ron," Hobbes said lamely.

"Oh, okay then," Ron said amiably, standing back up. He almost toppled backwards, but Kim caught him before he could and pushed him up. Noticing Abel's glasses, he picked them up and gave them to the priest, who quickly affixed them back on his face.

Calvin awkwardly stood up on one of the table halves. "Well, that could have gone better."

"You think?" Kim said sarcastically.

Calvin glared at her. "I'll take my dues, but insult me and you're an art project."

Kim said nothing, but crossed her arms and turned away.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Calvin said arrogantly. Kim had to forcibly remind herself of her rule of only using her considerable skills on the evil and villainous.

Abel sighed. "Well, now what do we do? We don't have a map or guide of any sort-"

"Ahem!" Morte said loudly. They looked at him. "Oh, right. Forgot I don't like you guys."

Ron looked up and frowned. "Hold it. What happened to Hobbes?"

Calvin jerked his head up. "No one better be sneaking up on me!" he said loudly as his shadow suddenly started growing larger.

He really didn't like the way everyone high-tailed it away.

And then Hobbes dropped directly on Calvin, shattering the table even more thoroughly.

The dust cleared around revealing Hobbes pinning Calvin to the ground by virtue of larger muscle mass. "Get off me!" Calvin mumbled from underneath the mass of tiger.

"Sorry, can't hear ya." Hobbes grinned evilly. "Cat got your tongue?" Laughing loudly, Hobbes rolled away, leaving Calvin free to sit up.

"Why you do you do that!?" Calvin demanded, wiping dust and splinters off his clothes.

"You had it coming!"

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"Did _not!_"

"Did not!"

"Did too-ooh, you little!" Calvin jumped up and tried to throttle Hobbes, who simply held a hand against his head and kept him at arm's distance.

"Show's how smart you are, calling someone bigger then you little!" Hobbes laughed as Calvin's legs motored away pointlessly at the ground.

Calvin shoved his hand away. "Well, you're stupid!"

"Well, you're stupid-_er!_"

"Stupider isn't a word, moron!"

"You see how dumb you are? I have to invent words to explain how your idiocy surpasses all known forms of unintelligence. Like omnidiocy. Hah! That's good one. Or maybe ultimadumb. No, wait, that's stupid. Like you!"

"Well...well..." Calvin stumbled over himself, struggling to think of a comeback. "I know you are, but what am I?"

"An idiot!"

"I know you are, but what am I?"

"Two steps up the evoluntionary ladder from a diseased baboon, rolling around in the stench of it's departed brethren!"

"I know you are but what am I?"

"A retro phrenologist!"

"Psst!" Ron whispered to Kim. "K.P.! You following all this?"

"I'm...not sure I want to," she said slowly.

"This is _fascinating,_" Abel said, scratching their replies down on a notepad. "Wait 'till I bring these to the next Illuminus Diem Seminar! Hee hee, the Psychology Department won't get itself untied for weeks!" He grinned evilly. "Oh, how I hate the Psychology Department! Always making fun of my rock and roll playlist! I'll show them, oh, I'll show them!"

Morte gave him a curious look. "Disregardin' the stupidity of using _those _two for research, how can you bend over like that with that thing on your back?"

Abel paused in his writings and stood back up, considering the question without exposing secrets he _really _didn't want anyone to know. He happened to notice Kim and that gave him an idea. "...My name is _Abel_. As in, able to do anything? Even walk around with this all day!"

Kim crossed her arms, looking amused. "You borrowed my motto for that, didn't you?"

Abel's eyes darted back and forth. "Well...I can do things you _can't!_"

"Like what?"

"Ummm..." Abel could quite easily mention a few things that only he alone could do, but he _really _didn't want to tell anyone here about them. "Could _you _get into a heavily guarded papal conference without a pass?"

"Give me five minutes to scrounge a disguise and we'll see!" she replied confidently.

Abel slumped over on the ground miserably. "You guys do everything better then me! You make more money, you have your own mottos, you have a fully functioning team not built on _politica!_ You have brothers that aren't insane and evil! You have an actual relationship that isn't built on happenstance resemblances to your true love, you have a cute mascot, you have actual _UNIFORMS!_" Abel continued ranting about Team Possible's various advantages over him, making Kim and Ron glance at each other uneasily before he finally fell to his knees and screamed at the sky, "Oh, Lord, _why have you FORSAKEN ME SO?!_" He then curled into a fetal ball, whimpering and twitching.

Zim looked at him uneasily. "Is he...feeling well?"

"Yeah," Ron said, nudging Abel with his foot. "He does something like this every few weeks. Good thing he got it out of the way; worried he was going to do something _really_ crazy like tying ten boxes of puppies to himself and running around the town's outer wall, yodeling limericks in Russian for ten hours straight...again."

Kim patted Abel's shoulder; from the looks of it, the hysterical priest wasn't aware of her in the least. "He should get over this in a bit. Doesn't usually take him long to get out of it when he gets all histronic like this."

"We should have brought doughnuts," Ron said, noticing Abel twitch less stressfully at the mention of doughnuts. "He likes doughnuts."

"We did bring doughnuts," Kim said. "You ate them on the way here."

"_Kiiiim!_ No pointing fingers!"

"Is everyone in this town insane?" Samael wondered as he popped into view. Zim flicked him away, noticing that Calvin and Hobbes were _still _fighting.

"You're an nerd! Hobbes yelled.

"I know you are, but what am I?" Calvin shot back.

"You're an idiot!"

"I know you are but what am I?"

"I know you are, but what am I?" Hobbes mimicked.

They both started yelling at the same time. "I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I? _I know you are but what am I? I know you are, but what am I? I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?!"_

"I know you are but what am I _infinity!_" Calvin yelled.

"You can't call infinity, that's cheating!" Hobbes protested.

"Tough luck, fair's fair in war! And you called it last time!"

"You're mangling metaphors and that's a lie! You _always _call infinity!"

"You always pounce me! That's cheating too!"

"What, jealous I'm using my natural talents?"

"At least I have natural talents that don't relate to dissertation on ethics!"

"Yeah? You're short!"

"Why, you-!" Calvin angrily lept at Hobbes, who quickly stuck his foot out, kicking Calvin in the chest and launched him into the air; he took advantage of his air time and spun around in the air, landing on Hobbes head and knocking him to the ground, where they both immediately began to wrestle furiously, rolling around on the ground with no appreciation of the stares they were getting.

"Is this...normal? For them?" Kim asked Zim.

Zim rolled his eyes. "I just met them! How the hell would I know?"

Ron watched the angry duo anxiously. "Uh, K.P.? Zim? Abel?" He looked down, noticing Abel was still being histronic and gave up on that end. "Am I the only one that thinks it'd be a really good to get away from...from..._that_?" he gestured towards the whirling mass of orange-black-red that was Calvin and Hobbes.

"Muscle head!" Calvin said.

"Dead head!" Hobbes said right back.

"You're stupid!"

"You're ugly and smell bad!"

"You ever smell yourself!? That could kill a yak at thirty paces!"

"You look like a baboon!"

"Monobrow!"

"BIG HEAD!"

"Sure, make fun of my head! I'll see how much fun you make of me when you're a RUG!"

"I'd like to see you try!"

"Oh, I bet you would!"

"No argument here," Kim said to Ron's question, struggling to move Abel somehow so he wouldn't be injured. Unfortunately, while she was preoccupied with Abel, Ron was distracted with ensuring that she didn't do it by herself, causing him to not notice Zim's warnings. Calvin and Hobbes' wild fight literally ran Ron over as the two tumbled over him, contining on their course with the hapless boy in tow. They continued their fight, wildly flailing out at each other while tumbling across the room, not aware of Ron's accidentally being hit by most of their hits and being dragged around. After a moment Rufus came flying out of the dust cloud and hit the ground with a sharp thud, squeaking in confusion.

Needless to say, Ron wasn't particularily pleased with being tumbled around the floor and constantly hit by an angry kid and a irate tiger. "K.P., HELP! SIDEKICK IN TROUBLE HERE! RUFUS! SAVE YOURSELF! YOU TWO, STOP BEING CRAZY! ZIM! HEEEEELP!"

Kim looked up, and upon realizing where Ron was, her eyes dilated. _"RON!"_ she yelled, immediately chasing after the dust cloud enshrouded moving mass that was keeping Ron captive.

Zim was hanging off a lamp, staring at the girl chasing the dust cloud "That's...not normal." Morte suggested from a safe distance.

"And you're the height of normalcy?" Zim asked, clinging tighter. He'd already been in that situation once and he had no desire to go back.

Abel said nothing, only sobbing to himself. His disjointed ramblings were becoming slightly more sane, though.

True to form, Kim ran flat-out and dove directly into the rolling ball of antagonism that was Calvin and Hobbes, sending the tussling two into the air for a moment; the airborne dogpile rolled into the ground. Hobbes came flying out of it, rolled around in midair and landing on his feet perfectly. The dust cleared, revealing Kim with Ron crouched into a ball behind her, his face hidden by his hands. Calvin was somehow hanging on to her head, maniacally chewing on her hair, unaware of what he was doing.

Ron opened his fingers slightly, noticing he wasn't being hit anymore. He stood up, about to express his gratitude when he saw what Calvin was doing.

Kim had noticed it too. It gradually dawned upon Calvin exactly where he was, his chewing slowing down. He stopped, looking around with his face reddening. He glared at Kim, Ron and Rufus. "Tell anyone about this, and I mean _anyone,_ and I will inflict such pain upon you that your plebian minds could not comprehend." He hopped off to the floor, walking a short distance before whirling around and making a gun-gesture with his hands. "Fire! That's the main thing. Fire. _Lots _of fire!"

"Hmm?" Abel said, gradually emerging from his histerics. "Did you say something?"

Kim looked at the priest disbelievingly as Ron fussily smoothed out her split ends. "You _can't _tell me you didn't notice all that."

Abel blinked cluelessly. "Notice what? I was a bit occupied bemoaning my miserable lot in life. Oh, cruel Fate, why must I be your whipping boy? What did I do to deserve thi-oh, _that._" Abel looked strangely evasive for a minute. "Never mind then." He looked at Kim's increasingly depressed look. "I'm sorry, what was I talking about? It involved bacon, didn't it? I'm sorry, that was insensitive, wasn't it? Wait, does Ron keep kosher? I can never tell."

Kim liked Abel; it was impossible not to. Disliking Abel would be like nailing a kitten to a wall. But sometimes, she wanted to hit him on the head. "Never mind..."

Calvin suddenly charged from across the room, launching himself at Hobbes, starting the fight anew as they rolled around, ignoring the panicked yells from Ron as his badly tuned danger senses detected the return of the beatings. Not wanting to get pummeled again, Ron jumped into Kim's arms, yelping in terror as Rufus scrambled onto Kim's other shoulder.

Abel coughed. _At least it's not as strange as the last meeting of the Order of the Illuminus Diem,_ he thought to himself.

Clearing his throat, Abel attempted to stop the relentlessly furious friends. "Um...excuse me...could you...wait, now...that's...I mean..."

"Nice to have you back, but I don't think they're listening, Abel," Kim said. "And Ron? Don't take this the wrong way, but you're kind of heavy-"

"Don't drop me!" Ron wailed. "For the love of all that's good and cheesy, DON'T DROP ME! Being in that thing was like being hit by a truck!" The girl turned her head to look at Rufus; they both sighed at the same time.

Abel stood there for a good five minutes, waiting for the storm to blow itself over. Then he decided to resolve things on his own.

Calvin, in the middle of his 'fight', bit into Hobbes shoulder, pulling his fist back. He was about to launch it when an enormously strong hand bit into his arm, another grabbing Hobbes' arm, pulling them both completely off the ground and apart from each other, boy and tiger fell apart on the floor with a hard thud. Abel stood inbetween them, looking pointedly down at the two. "Please stop fighting. There is a time and a place for fighting, but never one for senseless in-fighting."

Calvin and Hobbes gave each other an echoing shrug and got up. "Alright then."

Abel looked over at Kim and Ron, who was already warily watching the unpredicable Calvin and Hobbes. "You can put him down now."

Abel smiled happily, pleased at resolving the situation so well. "Well then, that's better!" Abel adjusted his glasses and righted the cross on his back; Zim gave him a side look, inwardly thinking that the rather odd-looking human had to have some impressive strength, given that the strange object on his back was by all appearances insanely heavy, particularly if the cross was as realistic as possible. Given it's unwieldy shape and the way he was carrying it, it had to be incredibly awkward, if not outright painful, but the priest seemed to have no trouble carrying it around.

"Is that not heavy?" Zim asked him.

Abel followed his gaze and smiled. "Oh yes. All burdens are heavy."

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Eh, _why_ is it so heavy?"

"Because it's filled with God's mercy." Abel smiled mysteriously, knowing something Zim didn't.

The priest paused. "Do you hear someone yelling?"

Hobbes looked up. "Yeah, sounds familiar and coming from..." He paused and made a few quick calculations, recalling how and where everyone in the room had moved around. "Same way we came in!"

Abel frowned. "How _did_ you come in?"

Calvin started to say something to the effect that they'd accidentally activated a trapdoor shortly before Abel's group came in when the same trapdoor he was about to mention flipped open; moments later, a snarling mass clad in a duster smacked into the ground with a sharp _thud_, the trapdoor shutting closed with a small _click_.

There was a long moment as everyone watched the lump get up, the duster it was wearing shoved up by the freefall to the point that it's face and identity were concealed.

Finally Morte spoke. "Y'know, this is just my opinion here, but it's _rainin'_ freaks today!"

"Hey, Morte?" Hobbes said. "You remember that blessed period when you weren't talking? Let's revise that. Let's give us all a hint of what true Paradise might be; a glorious place of freedom and beauty, devoid of offensive and idiotic chatter."

"But that's the best kind!" The skull objected. "Wait, you're doing that highbrow thing again, aren't you? Quit doing that. It's scarin' the crap out of me. Big, mean tattooed warriors-"

"_Knight,_" Hobbes interjected sternly.

"Knight, right. Big, mean tattooed _knights _shouldn't go around spilling the dark about arts and craps like blue-bloods with so much jink you could drown in it. It just ain't right."

Hobbes growled menacingly. "First off, these are _not _tattoos, they're...they're...it's too complicated to get into right now, so just accept they're not tattoos! And second, _I'm_ the the big mean tatooed-with-non-tattoos knight here, and I'm the one who gets to evalutate what I'm supposed to do and not supposed to do, so if you don't stow it, I'm putting my foot-claws up your ass!"

"I don't _have _an-"

"_Shut up!"_ Almost everyone in the room yelled.

Except for the mysterious new guy who still had the duster crammed over it's head. "The hells goin' on?" It wondered aloud.

Zim recognized that voice. "Oh, mighty Irk. _You!_"

The figure turned to him. "Hold on a sec'..." It tugged it's duster back to it's proper place, revealing it as none other then Spike.

"_Spike?_" Abel, Kim and Ron said aloud. "What are you doing here?" Abel asked, speaking for all of them.

Spike snorted at Abel. "None of your damn business, Nightroad." He adjusted himself, getting out some kinks in his back. "Ow! I _hate _this bloody domicile! Damn trick floors hurt like a rabid monkey on something illegal!"

Abel smiled. "And you still retain your unique take on the English language."

Spike scowled at him. "You better not be insultin' me as a writer. That's just _asking _for a Boxer Rebellion-scale ass kicking."

Abel's smile didn't change. "I'm sure that it is."

Spike looked away huffily, glancing at Zim's group for a moment. He noticed that they had evidently ran off from Bloo, which was probably a good thing; Bloo knew this place like he knew the back of his fingers. He muttered something to himself that sounded suspiciously like 'all present and accounted for', then looked at everyone with his usual game expression.

"...Hey," Ron finally said, getting Spike's attention. The vampire looked up, recognizing Ron. Zim realized that while Abel and Spike had been speaking, Kim and Ron had been watching Spike with familiarity tinged with wariness, suggesting that they knew each other, but didn't like each other much.

"Bloody hell," Spike finally said. He looked from Team Possible to Abel for a moment, then burst out laughing. "You've got to be kidding! Don't tell me; _you're _the gits they got to pull Nightroad out of whatever rathole he disappeared into?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kim asked defensively.

Spike smirked at her. "What the hell do you think it means? I'm insulting your abilities, I be casting asperations on your capacity to do anything right, I'm insulting you for being in the business a _lot _less than me, take your pick. I got more."

Kim fumed silently for a moment, finally snapping, "Yeah, you were in the business for a long time. _On the wrong side!_"

Spike laughed harshly. "Dragon Girl, when you don't have a soul, the wrong side is what comes naturally, if you get my meaning."

Kim glared at him some more. "Yeah, and your life really set you up for being one of the most sadistic and vicious serial killers in your world's history."

Spike smirked, ignoring the looks he was getting from Calvin, Hobbes and Morte. Zim was looking at him uneasily, reevaluting his thoughts on him. "Look at it this way, Princess; take a blood what don't fit in too well with his times and circumstances, lay all the insults and mockery and genial hate you can think of on him for being different, see what a thing like removing his soul does to him. Only needed to lose my conscience to become a monster." Spike spread his arms out, smirking even wider. "And thus does personal evolution, and one _hell _of a love moment, lead me to the bloodsucker I am today!" He pauised. "Had to get my soul back in the meantime, but hey, as I said before, 'I might be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it'. Hey, I just quoted meself. Ain't that a kick in the nadgers."

Ron looked at Spike in confusion. "Okay; pretty sure that first part was a dig at me, and I had _no _idea what else you were going on about."

Spike snorted. "Try taking a few courses in British Dialects. Do you a world of good, dumbass."

"Hey!"

"Oh, right. _Monkeyboy._"

"That's _worse!_" Ron yelled, grasping his tail self-consciously.

"_Spike!_" Kim said dangerously. "Knock it off!"

Spike gave her the one-fingered salute and grinned maliciously. "Bite me. Better yet, howsabout I bite _you?_"

Ron's eyes bulged. "_What._"

Calvin raised an eyebrow, looking aside as he heard Hobbes growling ferally. "Down, boy," he muttered to the increasingly incensed tiger. Hobbes swatted the boy away, knocking him on the ground.

Morte 'grinned'. "Thank the Powers, I just found my spiritual other!"

Zim's eye twitched. He was never particularly fond of crudity, physical or vocal, and Spike was already near the top of his 'People I Want To Maim' list. He was strongly considering the idea of teaching Spike some manners by beating them into him.

Abel didn't react like the others; he still stared at Spike with a dreamy half-smile, apparently viewing the world through a misty cloud of serenity. "Spike," he said pleasantly. "If you don't stop heckling everyone, I'm going to have to break you in half."

Zim looked sharply at Abel. The priest was still smiling in that odd manner, yet he had every indication of being perfectly serious. Despite the superfluousness of the threat, Zim thought that Abel might well be perfectly capable of doing such a thing. This was confirmed by the sudden nervous looks Kim and Ron threw Abel. Hobbes blinked, the comment throwing him off balance momentarily, while Calvin watched Abel with interest, wondering if he would follow through on his threat.

Even Spike was thrown off-center. He swiftly recovered, though. "True what they say, then; you paladins really are all a bunch of homicidal maniacs bearing crosses."

Abel's smile didn't change. "A warrior priest I am, but a madman I am not."

"Speak for yourself," Spike grunted. "Priest that thinks all good religions are branches of Christianity can't be sane."

Abel frowned. Surprisingly, Zim came to his defense. "A priest with exceedingly libertarian spiritual views seems saner than a man who freely admits to being chained by the winds of _eros._" The Irken said, almost quietly.

Spike and most of the others in the room stared at him. "By Browning," Spike said. "That was almost poetic. Screwed it up by mixing similes, gotta say."

"It was?" Ron said.

Calvin slapped his face. "You plebian!"

"_Eros?_" Hobbes said helpfully. "As in the third kind of love referenced by C.S. Lewis in _Mere Christianity_, better known as romantic love?"

"_Oh!"_ Ron said. His brow furrowed. "Wait, what?"

Hobbes gave Kim a sideways look. "Why do you like this guy again?"

Spike covered Kim's mouth before she could reply. "Bloody hell, _don't _get her started! We'll never hear the damned end of it!"

Calvin frowned. "You're overusing certain words. A _real _artist would use the thesaurus of his mind to supply appropriate words instead of using so-called 'sentence enhancers' to fill the work end of his speech." Calvin paused. "Damn it. That is how you say it, right?"

Hobbes slapped his forehead. "Oh, Totem-Spheres! Good work, you Billy Idol wannabe! You taught him how to swear! That's...that's...that's _fantastic._"

The vampiric poet-gone-punk smirked. "Always ready to spread the _philia _around, aye?"

Abel shrugged. "I'm really more of a _agape _man, myself. Part of the job, really." Abel paused, starting to get weepy again. "And also because everyone thinks I'm too much of a freak to be around for more then five minutes of meeting me!"

As Kim and Ron went to comfort Abel before he could spiral into another bizarre period of histrionics. Spike laughed. "Any wonder why?"

"Not helping!" Ron said.

Spike snapped his fingers suddenly. "They say hunger can drive a man mad. That reminds me." He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small pouch filled with a thick dark liquid, tossing it at Abel off-handedly. It bounced off Abel's head, landing in his open hands with a slight _slooshing_ noise. The surprised priest looked down at it and recognized what it was almost immediately; before Kim, Ron or anyone else for that matter could get too good a look at it, he stood up and backed away a little and reached between one of the bandages of his cross, pulling out a blue bendy straw. He flipped it into the air, catching it between his teeth and flicking his head to the side, flexing the straw out and partially bending it. He maneuvered the straw around in his mouth until it pointed outwards and quickly inserted the straw into the nozzle of the pouch, hurredly drinking the contents lustily, unaware of the looks he was getting, his manners forgotten; he was dribbling a little of the liquid on himself, though it didn't seem to manner. Where the liquid fell, whether on bare skin or clothing, it melted away, absorbed into either fabric or flesh.

Calvin blinked. "Well. That's one of the freakiest things I've seen all day, and believe you me, that's saying something." Zim ignored him, cocking his head and raising an antennae as the priest drank.

Morte clicked his teeth. "Ain't this a sight."

Hobbes sniffed the air, frowning slightly. There was a familiar scent in the air, but he couldn't quite place it. The tiger looked at Kim and Ron, hoping for a clue; they seemed unnerved, but not surprised by whatever it was the priest was drinking, so Hobbes thought that whatever was going on, it wasn't anything suspicious. Strange, maybe.

Kim looked at Abel uneasily, as Hobbes noticed. "Uh, Abel? You're, uh, getting some of it, uh..."

Ron raised one shoulder. "Don't think it's really a big with Abel, K.P."

Calvin stared at Ron, abruptly yelling at him. "Now they're intentionally dropping words from sentences for uniqueness! This is George Orwell's nightmare come to life! Words are losing all meaning! Civilization will crumble with no means of proper communication! A twisted form of doublespeak is becoming the norm! When will the atrocities against the English language end, dammit!?"

Ron stared at Calvin. "...I think you've been reading too much English Literature!"

Calvin pointed a finger at Ron dramatically. "You can _never _read too much literature, freak-monkey!"

"_WHAT?!"_

"No...not like that."

Spike grinned, watching the passing drama but focusing on what he thought was the real issue. "Getting messy, Nightroad. Not very becoming of a warrior priest."

Abel paused in his noisy drinking. "Hmm?" He abruptly realized what he'd been doing and had the dignity to look tremendously embarrased. Flushing red, Abel backed away into a nearby wall and huddled into himself, apparently working on the theory that if he shrank down hard enough, he'd disappear from sight and escape the burning loathsome stares. Satisfied with his apparent lack of presence, he resumed drinking.

Spike considered Abel to be taken care of, and he decided that he only had two jobs left: getting Zim to a room and annoying Team Possible until they couldn't take anymore. The second one wasn't a job _per se,_ more of a duty he took upon himself. "Soo," Spike drawled out. "Not doing that well, are we? Knew I shouldn't 'ave left you lot on your own, but get late catching up with a girl, and look what happens. Typical."

"Use that tone with me again and I'll put my foot up your ass." Zim said warningly, putting weight at the toe on his foot. "It's not my fault we couldn't find a room."

"Maybe," Spike said, leaning back on the gargoyle. "But if you'd gotten me, maybe you'd have managed to avoid running into _this _sorry lot."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kim snapped.

"Nothing; just they couldn've hit better company than a semi-schizophrenic priest with serious denial problems, a jumped-up cheerleader that plays at the hero game and her pet monkeyman who stays alive via sheer dumb luck, emphasis on the dumb."

"Hey!" Ron said. "First off, major minus points for calling K.P. that! And I'm not a monkey. I just kinda look like one. Three, Abel's not in denial; he's in Traverse Town. Also? It's dumb skill. Dumb _skill._ I cannot emphasize this enough, people!"

"Psh," Spike said. "That's the best you can do? I've had better retorts from the prats at high society." He looked down at Zim. "What's the matter? Going to let your whole rampant insanity go out the window and allow the Dragon Girl and her Monkeyboy steal the scene?"

"Shut up, you crude-talking malcontent," Zim snapped. "Or I will..." Zim paused, trying to articulate how best to threaten him. "Hurt you. Yes, _huuuuuuuurt _you!" Zim suddenly stuck his arm straight out, his knees slightly bent. A large flash of white light radiating other colors appeared around his right hand, illuminating the room and momentarily banishing the shadows, the remaining ones looking even darker by comparision. A pulse of bluish light moved through the light, flattening it out and streamlining it as it became more defined, the form of the Keyblade appearing in his hand, the light fading away to reveal the Kingdom Key in all it's glory, a few traces of light flickering around it. He stood back up, shouldering the Keyblade and letting the mystical weapon speak for him.

Kim and Ron, their argument against Spike forgotten, gaped openly at the sight of the Keyblade. Kim was the first to snap out of it, Ron still just staring at it with obvious admiration. Abel looked at it from the corner, his mouth agape and dribbling red liquid.

"Didn't bother telling them anything, eh?" Spike said. He rolled his eyes. "Feh, might as well get you filled in as well. You're hopeless, you are." He walked past Zim, ignoring the evil glare the diminutive Irken was giving him. Spike hooked his arms into Kim and Ron's, dragging them across the room as he walked over to Abel, who hurriedly drank the rest of whatever was in his pouch and stowed his empty packet away in a pocket, standing up and dusting himself off.

Spike dropped Kim and Ron on the ground unceremoniously. Rufus chittered up at him angrily as the two teenaged adventurers stood up. Spike glared at the mole rat, baring his teeth and waving him away. Scowling fiercely, Rufus scampered off.

Ron eyeballed Spike. "Okay, we missed something, what's going on here?"

"Right," Spike said. "Gonna explain it nice and neat for you lot. Zim's the Keybearer, he's out to get some people from his world back, the tiger and kid back there are top agents from the Comic Kingdom and sent by King Garfield, the skull's just kind of there, they ran 'round town like idiots, They ran into each other and whaled on a Guard Armor. You want more in-depth? Talk to Naruto or Gaara. Or you can get me a beer, I ain't picky."

There was a long pause.

"That _was _a thorough explanation!" Abel commented. "Granted, I still don't know half of what you're going on about."

"Zim's the Keybearer?" Kim said, cocking an eyebrow. "As in the master of the Keyblade Jarod told us to keep an eye out for a few days ago?"

Ron glanced back at Zim. "That's...kind of cool." he looked back at Spike. "What's this about Naruto and Gaara? What do they have to do with this?" Ron knew both the ninjas as friends, and he wasn't sure how they fit in.

Spike rolled his eyes. "The Keybearer ran into your's truly earlier; he wasn't a mood to cooperate and I was bored and Naruto showed up after. Put it together, yeah? Little sucker's tougher then he looks, too; moves like a soldier and fights like a lunatic with a chainsaw. The Comic Kingdom lot were picked up by Numbahs Three and Four; got into a fight scene with some Heartless, then the Sand Reaper showed up." Spike chuckled. "That'll take the bit out of anybody."

Kim frowned at Spike. "Don't talk about people like that," she said angrily. "It's not Gaara's fault he's messed up."

"Yeah, but it _is _his fault he's a homicidal candidate for the Ratchett Center." Spike quipped, enjoying the indignant look that came over the other's faces.

Ron scowled. "Do you have to _try _to be such a jerk, or does it just come naturally?"

Spike grinned malevolently. "Learned from the best, I did."

"Wait!" Abel said, remembering a few key points of their conversation he didn't understand. "I'm confused. What are you all going on about?"

"Right, you've been out for the last few days," Spike said. "Few days ago, Jarod said to keep an eye out for a new refugee that'd have a big weapon shaped like a key, and King Garfield of the Comic Kingdom would send two of his best down here."

"Which would be Zim, Calvin and Hobbes, in that order," Ron concluded helpfully.

Kim looked back at the people behind them thoughtfully. "I'm still not sure how everything fits together...you know how Jarod likes to keep things to himself and all."

"They seem nice," Abel said, gesturing at them. "A little odd, certainly, and definitely at odds with each other...but they mean well, and they're seem the sort to do well."

Kim and Ron nodded, sharing his sentiments.

"Speaking of him, here's the plan from the big boss man," Spike said. "Don't be overt in anything. Nothing that might make 'em feel...pressured or anythin'. Nothing that might make 'em feel obliged to burn the town to the ground."

Ron looked worried. "No one told me that was a possibility. Is that a possibility? 'Cause you gotta tell me if that's a possibility!"

Abel thought about it. "Spike probably made that last part up. Again."

Kim grinned maliciously. "Like that one time he said he once got a chip stuck in his head that made him harmless?"

"Or what about the one time he mentioned that he got incinerated when he saved all mankind on his world, but he got turned into a ghost-type thing after?" Ron added.

Abel grinned. "Oh, wait! I got one, I got one! What about when he claimed that he was in a physical relationship with a mechanical replica of a girl he was obsessed with?"

"Hey!" Spike snapped. "All that was actually true! And sex with robots is more common than people think."

Kim, Ron and Abel stared at him.

"Okay," Kim finally said. "That? That last part there? That was just...that was just sick and wrong."

"I don't even want to know how you figured that one out," Ron said flatly.

"Personal experience," Spike replied. "I _was _obsessed with the girl-"

"I said I didn't want to know!"

Oddly, enough, Abel seemed to be the least bothered. "Huh," he finally said. "You think you know a guy, and you find out he's a pervert."

Spike rolled his eyes. "We done here?"

"I can't think of anything else to say." Abel said. "Not that I said much..." he added sadly.

"I got nothin'." Ron said.

"That's for sure," Spike muttered.

Kim gave Spike a sharp look. "Yeah, think that's everything."

"Right," Spike said. He walked away from the others, aware that Kim and Ron were still giving his retreating back repulsed looks.

Hobbes looked up from his, Morte, Calvin and Rufus' highly profitable poker game. He looked up from the increasingly wealthy mole rat, raising an eyebrow. "Hey, your pet humans are back."

Rufus looked up, chattering happily. He scooped up his earnings and scampered back to Ron, leaving Morte to complain, "Hey! Where you getting off too?! That...that...pink hairless _whatever _it cleaned me out!"

"That's your problem," Ron said flippantly as Rufus jumped back into his pocket. "Hey, your cheese budget is restocked for the next month, little buddy!"

Rufus poked his head back out, starting to drool at the prospect of all the prime on-demand cheese he could buy.

Kim and Ron kept walked, stopping by Zim. Ahead of them, Spike jumped on the wall, landing out on a stout gargoyle, he had already jumped back onto the gargoyle thing, assuming his previous pose, an arm hanging loosely over the side.

Calvin sat up, mumbled unhappily about how much he now owed one mole rat's debt collectors. Behind him, Abel wandered against the wall, sad that no one seemed to be very interested in him. "Okay...I'll...uh...just stand over here, then. No one mind me, I'm just a starving lost priest."

Zim raptly stared at the wall, observing an angry conversation about meatcakes between Razael and Samael. Ron once again got a weird feeling, but passed it off as gas. Seeing that Zim was a little out of it, he roughly shook him by the shoulder. Zim snapped out of it, falling backwards and accidentally flinging the Keyblade into the air. He sat up, blinking a few times before the Keyblade came back down, bopping him on the hand and bouncing off on the floor. He dazedly stood up, walking around like he'd been hit with a book the size of a small country.

Kim came over to him, gently shaking him by the shoulders. He started to fall backwards when she steadied him, holding up three fingers. "Zim! Zim! How many fingers am I holding up?"

Zim's antannae twitched as his eyes focused. "Look!" He said with a confused giggle, blowing at her fingers. "Fishies!"

Razael hovered around Kim's head anxiously. "Ah, that's not good! The last thing he needs is more concussions!"

Samael glared at Ron. "That's it. When he gets out of this, he's going have to kill that guy with the tail. Nice little pig-smellie barbeque!"

Razael smacked his forehead. "Oh, for Irk's sake! Murder does not solve all your problems!"

"So you admit that it can solve _some _problems?"

"...I loathe you. Greatly." Razael punctated his comment by manifasted his guitar, extending the blades and decapitating the anti-conscience in one quick move, the head hitting the ground with a wet _thump_.

Samael's headless body, the edges of his stump of a neck like wavering smog, cautiously felt around the space where it's head should've been. On the ground, Samael's head rolled to atop the stump on it's bottom, taking note of the darkness spilling around it's bottom. "Oh yeah, end an argument by cutting my head off. Yeah, that's real mature!"

Razael extended his leg, a steel-toed Kodiac grip workboot manifesting. "And this is going to be even less mature."

Samael's eyes widened as Razael flew down at him, the angel's boot-clad leg winding back. "Oh...unholy fu-"

_THWACK!_

"OW!" Samael's head wailed as it flew through the air.

Razael ran around on the ground in a circle, victoriously pumping his arms up and chanting to himself. "And theeee crowds goes _WILD! Yeaaah! YEEEEAH!_"

Unaware of any of that, Calvin came running from behind Kim, roughly pushing the girl out of the way. She rolled in the air, landing on her feet in time to see him yell, "Snap out of it, you idiot!" and soundly punch Zim in the face.

Something in her mind told her that it would be a very smart thing to get out of the way as soon as possible. She hurredly ran off, stopping by Abel, watching the scene intently.

Zim rocked back two steps and a half, his 'dazed and confused' look replaced by something very like shock. His eyes focused and his slack mouth formed into an angry snarl, and then he grabbed the Keyblade off the ground, swinging it directly into Calvin's stomach, launching him off the ground.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing off once and landing on his back. He rolled to his feet, gloved fist already glowing with flames. He ran at Zim just as the Irken started running too; they drew close to each other and Zim swung the Keyblade back as Calvin drew back his flaming fist.

Abel started to move and stop them, as did the teenage adventurers there. Altogther, they would probably have been able to do so, but they were beat to the punch by what they saw as an orange-green blur; Hobbes jumped onto the Keyblade; his weight throwing Zim to the ground, the Irken's feet flying into the air as he dropped on his back. Hobbes flipped into a handstand, balancing on the Keyblade with one hand, a foot flying out and slapping through Calvin's legs, knocking him away and sending him spinning around the floor and into a wall. Not in the mood to play peacekeeper, Hobbes grabbed them both by their collars and lifted both of them up into the air. He swung them around in a circle, building up their momentum and smacked them into each other. The Keyblade dropping from Zim's hands and disappearing in a flash when it hit the ground and they both lolled, slightly dazed by the impact until Hobbes roughly shook them.

"Enough of that," he growled, holding them side by side directly in front of them. "Either you two declare a temporary truce or I declare open warfare on every part of your bodies that's capable of feeling pain."

Calvin growled something affirmative, but Zim just scowled at Hobbes and said, "_Fabricatim diem, pvnc!"_

Hobbes narrowed his eyes and dropped Calvin roughly on the ground. Ignoring the _thump _of impact, he glared at Zim fully, the Irken returning the gesture. They stared at each other for a moment before Hobbes dropped him on the ground; the Irken snorted, turning aside with a twitch of his antennae.

Ron raised an eyebrow at Zim, amazed at his sheer bravado; this, clearly, was a person who would never back down to anything. He was also impressed with Hobbes' sheer speed and agility, but Zim just had a faculty for grabbing someone's attention. He looked at Spike, raising an eyebrow. "You picked a fight with a guy like that?"

Spike folded his arms and growled. "What's it to you?"

"Were you drunk?" Ron said plainly. He reconsidered his words. "I mean, you're drunk a lot, so it's hard to tell-"

"Shut up before I shove that tail up-" Spike started to yell before Ron interrupted him, improbably angry.

"Again with the tail! What is everyone's obsession with my tail!? If it's not Kim flipping it around-" the girl looked embarrased, going slightly red at this. "-Or cat pirates attacking it then stealing my wallet, my glasses and my _pants_, it's something else! What is _with you people!? It's just a tail! Stop obsesssing over it!_"

Spike walked over to Ron, an eyebrow arched. "Are you done?"

Ron shrugged. "Yeah, pretty much."

Spike nodded. "Good." Then he kicked Ron in the shin.

"Ow!" Ron hopped on his good leg, clutching his leg in pain. "What was that for?!"

"My foot slipped, Monkeyboy!"

Ron visibly twitched. "I thought you didn't like reusing insults, _Will,_" he said.

Spike glowered at the diminutive form of the name he'd dropped long ago. "I don't. But a good nickname is a good nickname. 'Specially when it grinds your girlfriend's gears like that, Monkeyboy."

"Don't call him that!" Kim said harshly, glaring at Spike with all the fury she was capable of; if looks could induce moleculer excitement, Spike would have burst into flame on the spot.

"Or what?" Spike replied flippantly. He waved his hands at her in a _bring it on_ gesture, grinning malevolently at the prospect of violence. "Come on then!" Kim glared at him and started slowly walking over to him, her eyes narrowed dangerously.

Abel looked worrIedly from her to Spike. He glanced at Ron, who seemed a bit tense, ready to move at any given time. His finger curled, not unlike someone grabbing hold of a sword. His tail was thrashing dangerously, which wasn't a good sign.

Calvin looked on with interest. "This oughta be good." Hobbes rolled his eyes.

Zim watched the two stare each other down; where Kim's face was a simmering image of outrage, Spike was grinning excitedly, constantly shifting weight from side to side, his fingers tapping together almost constantly. Zim raised an eyeridge, remembering a few times in his past where he'd been just this eager to fight someone, though hardly in the same circumstances; for one thing, he wouldn't go after a being's most sensitive spot to entice them into a fight. Maybe while he was fighting, to give him a psychological edge, but not to egg them on.

Spike laughed loudly, shaking a hand pulled into a clawlike position wildly. "Come on, come on, come on! Bring it on, Dragon Girl! Come on, defend your Monkeyboy! You only gotta take on one of the biggest badass vampires there ever was! Come on, damn it,_ come on! _The night's still young, and I am so _freaking bored!_"

Kim found her composure again, not appearing peturbed by Spike's thirst for battle. She drew her right side back, her posture looking like someone about to charge; Spike tensed with a huge expectent grin, half-expecting her to throw a punch right there. Instead, she looked at him and copied his confident smirk. "Whatever you say, _mama's boy._"

The look on Spike's face was the same as if she'd swung a baseball bat upside his head. He narrowed his eyes dangerously. "The hell did you just say!?"

Kim smirked at him. "You heard me." She'd heard that Spike had issues with his mother; she didn't know the story entirely(or at all, really), but she knew for a fact that whatever it was, it was a massive sore point for Spike, to the point where he'd attempted to exorcise an epic poem about he'd titled _The Wanton Folly of Me Mum_. Ordinarily, she wouldn't even come close to picking at such a sensitive area, but Spike had gone where only the dumbest of foes had gone. Spike was, at best, a nominal ally, but given that he had recanted his old ways, not to mention the Amnesty, he wasn't a villain. By her own ethics, she couldn't fight him over words. But she knew how to use words the same as the vampire did; she knew how words could bite and wound.

Oh, yes. Words could hurt.

Spike stared at her, his eyes flickering from blue to yellow as long-seated hurt became churning rage, one of the most traumatic experiences in his life burning in his mind. Kim's smirk started to falter as she noticed the way his fist was trembling and his knuckles seemed to be growing tiny spurs. Her faint worry focused itself as his eyebrows furrowed together so tightly it looked like his face would split in twain. He growled tensely, his face shifting with a sound like leather sliding across wet meat; his eyebrows arched inhumanly over his eyes and bulged out, his ears lengthened, his nose curled up, his eyes turned bright yellow and all his teeth lengthed to sharp needlepoints. Numerous small indentations pressed among his face, particularly around his bulging brow; the impression was that a number of small horns were trying to force their way out from under his skin, but weren't having much success. The back corners of his jaws pushed out, becoming quite recognizable hornlets. The spurs on his knuckles lengthened and judging by distensions at his pants and duster, similar extensions were forming at his knees and elbows as his nails became proper claws.

Kim flinched, but stood her ground. She'd seen this before, but never focused at her. _Must've touched a nerve,_ she thought tensely as Spike snarled animalisticallyat her, baring his fangs at her, forcing Kim to recall that though Spike possessed a soul, he still was a vampire, with the heart of a demon that had killed scores of people almost nightly for a little over two hundred years.

Ron saw all this. He was thinking the same thing Kim was. And he knew what it meant when Spike put what he called his 'game face' on. Quite simply, it meant you were dead. He was already begining to move, the vague outlines of a plan in his mind; keeping Spike down, moving Kim out of the way, something with one of the tables when Abel placed a hand on his shoulder. Not in the mood for pacifism, he started to push the priest aside; Abel responded by tightening his grip to vise-like porportions, giving Ron the impression that if he tried a little harder, Abel could have ripped his arm out of his socket. Ron's snapped his head at Abel and he thought someone must have installed refrigration coils in his spine when he wasn't looking as he saw the look on Abel's face.

Abel ordinarily was a goofy priest; a little klutzy, seemingly determined to cause all sorts of accidental havoc everywhere. And then, he showed the face Ron saw now, a face that eclipsed all definitions of serious face. Abel was looking down at him coldly, his brow slightly furrowed, his eyes narrowed and his mouth set in a thin line. This was a face very people saw twice; this was the face Abel wore when he killed monsters, sometimes with weapons of his own design, sometimes with his bare hands. This was the face Abel wore when he assumed the age-old duty of judge, jury and executioner to those who he had seen to have gone too far. This was the face Abel wore when he strode into places claimed by evil, invoked ancient rites of cleansing and forced evil spirits into the world and killed them on the spot.

This was, in short, the face that Abel wore when he was carrying his duty as the most dangerous warrior priest in town. It could also be described as a 'holy son of a sundae, he's _SCARY!'_ face.

Faced with that expression, Ron's resolve melted and he backed down, his body almost moving by itself, the idea that Spike was going to be serious hurt working it's way into his mind.

Spike lost all restraint and dashed off at Kim, his lengthened arms brought to bear. He leapt into the air, one arm swinging into the air, his mouth opened wide in a wordless howl of rage and pain and confusion that was going to be ameliored by directing all the previously mentioned at Kim. She hopped back a half-step, alarms ringing in her head. _Went too far, Possible!_ She thought distractedly, readying herself to fend off Spike until he could be calmed down. He had his tantrums, but they always wore off shortly. The real difficulty was making sure that by time it was over, everyone still had all their limbs. She'd never seen him progress his demonic transformation this far before and she seriously doubted that that was a good thing.

She was about to act, begining to swing a leg into Spike's mid-section as he raised a fist that could dent reinforced steel when he looked human when the ground around them turned as pitch-black as a starless sky at midnight at the new moon. A bulge of blackness pushed up at Spike, rising off the ground and slamming into Spike in a large amorphous bulge, knocking him off-center and swallowing him, pulsing disturbingly as the lump in it slowly came to the bottom. The shadowy bulge twisted, writhing around and shifting almost organically, the vampire within moving around. Several bulges pushed out as Spike frantically slammed his fists into it, struggling to free himself. The shadowy mass contracted, the lump in it's center rising up and the image of Spike's face appearing near the top of it. It shifted around somemore, langourously shifitng aside and revealing Spike's head, the shadows lingering over the sides of his head and the top of his hair almostly hungrily, pulsating as if they were possessed of their own life. The shadowy mass throbbed a few times, emanating a spiraling mist of darkness that imprinted on the walls, moving around crazily before slowing into bizarre patterns on the ceiling and the walls. The shadowy mass moved again, pushing Spike up and onto his feet, and gradually, more of Spike became visible; patches of clothing, sections of arms and leg, the darkness still clutching at him.

Kim took an involuntary step backwards. The ground she trod on, while recognizable under her feet as the stone floor of the room, was overlaid with the slightly spongy mass of animate shadows now partially curled around Spike and keeping him prisoner. That alone was a bad sign; she had seen Spike punch through a wall, tear through reinforced steel and snap a man's arm, making whatever this was unbelievably strong. As she moved, she disrupted the constantly moving darkness under her; she felt it move under her boots, making an eerie sussuration at her soles and causing some of it to shift onto her shoes and the cuffs of her pants, the black-purple-blue mist of the darkness painting eerie markings on her pants that vanished after a moment.

Spike's eyes rolled; he was completely unable to move his head at all. Though the thing holding him captive wasn't hurting him, it was exerting enough pressure to keep him from moving a muscle, impairing his ability to see what was going on. "The hell is this?" Spike grunted as his face shifted back to human, his violent impulses forgotten.

"Me," Abel said simply.

A long moment passed.

"What the fook?" Zim said, summing up everything that could be said.

"What?" Spike said. "Oh, don't tell me, you're playing hero again! Damn it, Nightroad, _stay the hell out of this!_"

Kim, unlike Spike, was in a postion to see the area around them; to her credit, she didn't panic, but she couldn't repress a shudder that had nothing to do with the temperature. The ground around them had become covered in pitch black shadows, highlighted by purple and blue here and there, churning with eerie life. It fanned out at the edges of the 'pool', spiraling into lazily shifting amorphous shapes. The exception to this was at one point of the mass; a single thick plane of shadow, stretching past the others despite the light that should have obstructed it. At the end of it was Abel's shadow, the bottom portion of his shadow-cross forming the long shadow that terminated at the shadows holding them hostage. Eerily, the shadows directly around him seemed to have thickened, swirling around him with a life that was somehow different from whatever it was that the Heartless were composed of.

"A-Abel?" Kim asked, her feet shuffling back slightly. "What are you doing?"

She tried not to flinch as she saw the sudden but very real glare of red light in his eyes, turning the glass of his eyes into crimson stoplights momentarily, his hard expression never changing. "What I must."

"Yeah, it's freakin' _creepy!_" Spike yelled. "What kind of a priest does _this?!_"

"A very unique one."

Spike stared at him for a long time. "Right, we get that a lot here. How about we build up on that and you let me go? Most jailers don't let go of their prisoners, be right abnormal of you."

"You will remain where you are as long as you let the rage in your heart goad you." "Abel said dispassionately.

"I'll let it go soon as I beat some sense into her! Break a few bones, maybe introduce her to a few walls; it's all good!" Spike broke off to snarled at Kim, almost growling ferally.

"No, it's not. Whatever issues or grievences you have with Kim-"

"It's nothing personal," Spike said flippantly. "Just enjoy a good brawl, I do. But no one brings up the issue of me departed mum in me presence!"

"You know, I think your accent gets thicker when you're emotional," Morte commented.

Abel continued on like neither Spike or Morte had spoken. "-It doesn't matter. This is _stupid_; fighting each other like this is following the same path of those who's inner darkness brought our worlds to ruin. Do you really want that, Spike? Do you want to be just like them?!"

Spike looked at Abel, his brow wrinkling. "You've any idea how corny that sounds?"

Abel didn't bother replying. He simply stared back at him. Spike thought that compared to him, the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island were downright jittery.

Spike tried to stare back, but couldn't hold Abel's gaze; he looked away, pressing his lips together tightly, reluctantly considering Abel's words. _Maybe Nightroad's got a point...crap, he's doing that thing he does, isn't he?! Damn priest! Isn't there a contradiction in that statement? Arrgh, I'm getting side-tracked! Damn test tube baby, he's right, this ain't the place for brawling. That's what the Stadium world's for! _He let his body go limp, assuming Abel would be able to tell the difference. _Regardless, I have other ways to settle buisiness like this._

Kim, for her part, was more receptive to Abel's words. _He's right, you know, _she thought solemnly. _You shouldn't have reacted like that. You should know better then to just go at someone's sensitive points like that. You went and did the exact thing he would have done; hit him where it hurts the most. You goaded him into doing that! I can't blame him for reacting like that. Abel's right, as usual; you should have found some other way._ As if on cue, Ron walked up; he quietly braved the eerie pool of shadows, proving as he walked through it that it wasn't the semi-liquid substance Zim had percieved back on his island before everything went black, but was more mistlike in nature, juding from the way it parted and flowed around his foot steps. Disturbed as Ron looked, Abel was certain that Ron was thinking about the Heartless' essential nature as creatures of darkness and destruction, and admitted that this didn't look good for him. Abel also didn't care.

Biting down on his fear, Ron trudged through the animate dark and placed a hand on Kim' shoulder, hoping to provide a means of comforting contact.

"How sweet," Spike said dully.

Abel looked at Spike coldly. "Either resolve this issue in some other way, or I will have to take more extreme measures."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Ease off, Nightroad. I'm good, we're good, we're all bloody good."

Abel stared at him for a long time. "Fine," Abel said calmly. "I'm going to let you go now, and I trust you'll be able to behave yourself."

The shadows melted away from Spike's immobile body, falling away like a fast-moving liquid and disappearing among the shadow-mass on the floor; as they did, the large mass rapidly shrunk, falling into the shadow of the cross Abel carried on his back, the shadow itself shrinking back to it's normal size, leaving no physical indication that anything eerie had happened.

That was cool," Calvin muttered to Hobbes, who nodded agreeably. He hadn't smelled the strange smell that accompined the Heartless, but he wasn't sure that it was magic. "Indisputably eerie, but cool."

Ron looked back at him and grinned. "That's Abel for you."

Zim regarded Abel with an odd half-grin. _Isn't this interesting?_ he thought. _So very...interesting._

_And yet one more sod gets pulled into the weirdness that is Father Abel Nightroad,_ Spike thought with a smirk, guessing what Zim was thinking; he had to admit, Zim was quick to adapt. He heard a sound from behind. He turned around to see Kim with her hand extended in the traditonal symbol of goodwill and benevolent greeting.

"Well? Still...allies?" Kim asked.

Spike sighed, slapping her hand without any of the force he could have. She let her hand drop, her face suggesting she accepted the gesture as acceptance. Spike couldn't resist one more jibe, and made a pistol gesture at Kim. "Forget it, _Princess,_" he said flippantly, smiling in a way Kim didn't like. Spike gave her a jovial wave, walking off and squatting in a chair, plucking a cigarette out of a pocket and lighting it.

Abel sighed. Getting Spike involved in almost any situation wasn't always the brightest idea, given Spike's like for verbally assaulting nearly everyone he met on a constant basis, needling them until they couldn't take anymore, sheerly out of amusement or to see what made them tick. Kim was a favorite target of his, as even her considerable self-restraint didn't seem to apply in issues of self-esteem or when people she liked were insulted or demeaned in any way, and Spike knew all of the ways to get at her through them. Abel had heard that when the two had first met, Spike had nicknamed Kim Little Red after her passing resemblance to a few red-haired women he'd known over his long life. After seeing the defensive way she reacted to Spike calling Ron Monkeyboy in regard to his more simian characteristics, as well as because of his very slowly receding monkey phobia, he'd started referring to her as Dragon Girl, delighting in the apt title everytime he gave her cause to come closer to the brink of snapping.

"That is a vile habit," Zim commented, looking with dislike at the vampire's lit tabacco product.

Spike looked at Zim, the left corner of his mouth turning up satirically. "What's the matter? Feeling a little sore over the beating I handed you earlier and can't think of anything else 'bout me to attack?"

Zim gave Spike a sidelong glance, the corner of his mouth turning up dangerously as he summoned the Keyblade again. "If I remember correctly, _you _were the one with his legs kicking the air in the trashcan."

Spike's face threatened to warp into it's monstrous visage again, but he held it back, both to avoid getting tackled by everyone else in the room and for politeness's sake. "I went easy on you. Talk to me again when you want a _real _fight, midget."

Zim scowled fiercely and tightened his fists, his anger making them ignite with him being aware of it. He frowned and crossed his arms, noticing the heat. "Why is it warmer in here? Does this mansion of irrefutable madness have faulty air-conditioning?" He didn't notice his flaming hands lighting his sleeves on fire.

Being a generally charitable person, Abel couldn't exactly let this go unnoticed. "Uh..."

Spike beat him to the punch. "Hey, Lord of the Flame! Your jacket's on fire."

"Eh?" Zim looked down, raising his arms as he observed that they were burning. The flames on his hands went out as he lost interest in Spike; the fires on his sleeves continued to burn unabated, however. He stood there for a moment, staring at himself blankly. "AAAHHHHH!" He screamed, waving his arms frantically as he turned his head towards the others. He looked back at himself and screamed again, proceeding to run around the room and scream some more.

"Ah!" Abel said, as he chased after the panicking Irken, followed by his accidental friends. "Hold still! I think I have something here!" He started reaching in-betweeen the tight pages that covered his cross and pulling out random items, including a small Tazer, a tracking collar, a comprehensive map of the First District's sewer system, a few spark plugs, a pack of razor sharp exploding playing cards with a _Famous People of Traverse Town _theme, a small vaccum cleaner, a coupon for three free meals and a song at a kareoke bar called _Caritas,_ and a copy of Alphonse Elric's _Exorcising Your Inner Rage Through Intense Kitten Snuggling_; for some reason, Spike found it imperative to catch each item as Abel threw them, making embarrasing comments about them.

Unnoticed by everyone(except possibly for Zim, but he was a bit occupied with the whole 'being on fire' buisiness)the two consciences finally resolved their problems.

"Right," Razael said. "You stop insulting the validity of my arguments, and I stop chopping you to tiny bits."

Samael nodded. "Right, but only 'till tomorrow. Then all bets are off."

Razael shrugged. "Fine by me."

"Okay, good." Samael frowned. "I'm getting that 'I-missed-something' feeling again." Razael raised an eyeridge and looked behind Sammael. He grabbed the uncomprehending anti-conscience's arm and pulled him straight up into the air several feet. "Hey, the hell? Look, I don't know 'bout you, but I don't really swing that way-" Samael started to say before Razael shook his fist threateningly.

"Shut up! You know I know you know I hate your metaphorical guts! Look down there!"

Samael glanced down, noticed Zim running pass where they'd been floating. "Oh. He's on fire. Again. Wait; if you hate me so much, why the save?"

Razael had a very strong urge to take a holy book and smash it into Samael's face until he could come up with something besides _I don't need a reason to help people._ "Because I'm the shoulder _angel_, you half-wit composition of metaphysical ethical essense!"

"Good alliteration."

"Thank you. Now do something!"

"Why me?!"

"Because," Razael said impatiently as they floated down to where they'd been hovering. "If he dies on third-degree burns, we both fade into the obscurity of oblivion, or join with his mind after returning to our former state of being or what it is that happens to whatever the heck we're becoming."

Samael's jaw dropped down to his feet; Razael did him a favor and set it back into place with a sound that sounded strangely like _blagoonga_. "Twenty burping crapshacks, I don't wanna die! Come back, _you!_" he shouted as he flew after Zim, forgotting that Zim's panic would make it a pointless venture, not to mention Samael's inability to affect the physical world.

"Woo!" Razael said. "That's got them distracted. Now maybe I'll have some peace to myself, heh heh." He took a large soda out of nowhere, sucking away at it contentedly until Kim and Ron ran right through him, his hallucinatory body not impeding their bodies in the least. The experience of them running right through him and passsing through their stomachs shocked him enough to make him drop his soda, his jaw hanging slightly ajar. He floated in exactly the same position for a few more moments, an extremely disturbed look on his face. "Well, _that _was one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. Who eats hot dogs with marshmallows and how can a man eat that much fast food and still be alive?! It's times like this I'm glad most of my entrances into the outside world are mostly limited to moral quandaries and stuff like that."

Ignorant of the fact that there was a possibly imaginary being of impure evil squatting on his head and saying cruel things about his hygiene, not to mention question his paternity, Ron yelled out at Zim, "Slow down a litt-" Ron tripped, throwing Samael through a wall as he slammed into Zim's back and bouncing off the floor. They quickly jumped off the floor, taking a moment to consider the fact that both their shirts were now on fire and quickly spreading to both their entire outfits. They both started screaming in terror, flailing their arms around in an eerily similar fashion as they ran around in blind panic.

"_Ron!_" Kim yelled.

"You take care of your boyfriend!" Hobbes called out, gesturing to Ron. Calvin glanced up from his spot on the floor, where he was attempting to deal with the other fires Ron and Zim were spreading. "I'll get Keyboy!"

Kim nodded gratefully, switching targets and chasing after her panicking partner. Though he had the benefit of mysterious magical powers, trained with her almost daily and a few significant other factors, it didn't change the fact that she was indisputably stronger and faster then him, a point proven as she jumped into the air and tackled him in the back, immediately slapping the fires out, trying to put aside Ron's yelps of pain mixed in with the pleas for help.

She soon stopped, the fires put out and his jacket-vest combo showing no traces of the fire that had plauged it. "You all right?"

"Yeah," he said, getting up. "Only thing hurt was my pride, but that gets stomped on a daily basis."

"_Hold still!_" Hobbes roared; Kim and Ron looked up to see Zim running their way, leaping over Ron, followed closely by the irate tiger; as the two passed, a few stray sparks landed on Ron's shirt, lighting it anew.

Ron grimaced. "The timing on that just really tanks." Then he started running again.

"Ron!" She yelled, chasing after him. "Hold still! Do you _want _to be warm for the rest of your life?!"

"My head hears sense, but my feet don't care!"

"I don't believe this!" Abel said, rummuging through his surprisingly roomy jacket. "I brought a flashlight, a bag of fries, a spare pair of glasses, even a scraping of pigment from Da Vinchi's _The Last Supper_! Why didn't I think to bring a fire extinguisher!?"

"Technically, you did," Spike said, waving around Abel's personal Bible around. It was a small feat on Spike's part, considering the tome was the size of your averge _Ye Olde Grimore What Doubles As A Method Of Execution._ "But it's of the metaphysical variety."

"You're not being funny! And treat that _nicely!_"

"Guess you can take the Crusnik out of the pulpit, but you can't take the pulpit out of the Crusnik." Spike said, faking a wise tone.

Calvin looked up curiously. "What's a Crusnik?"

"_Nothing you need to know about!_" Abel yelled, attaining a curious resemblence to a small girl. He paused. "Wait, how are you holding that without burning yourself?"

"I found gloves." Spike heard a small sizzling noise; he looked down, realizing that his gloves were frying to crisps, effected by his vampiric aura. His hands immediately started smoking and he dropped the book; as luck would have it, it dropped directly on foot. "_DAMN IT!"_

"ARRGH!" Zim yelled, grabbing everything he could lift and trying to douse the fires. He tried a tabletop cloth; it lit on fire. "No!" He beat himself against the walls; it left some sparks that lit a nearby chair on fire. "_No!_" He rolled around on the floor, but only spread around the fires. "_No!_" He wrapped himself in some heavy curtains, which not surprisingly, lit on fire. "Oh, _come on_! Is everything in this room combustible!?"

Morte backed away into a small corner of the room the furtherest away from the chaos, Rufus riding on his head, the mole rat having panicked earlier and retreated to the skull's cranium to evalulate the situation. "So...eh...this kind of thing happen a lot, Redless?"

Rufus nodded.

"Riiight. So, how's about sticking here and let the raving lunatics do their own thing?"

Rufus considered the question, crossing his small arms and observing the scene. Abel had given up looking for a extingusher and was simply looking for something to put the fires out, Spike was pointing and laughing at everyone, Calvin was jumping from fire to fire, putting them out as he went, occasionally pointing and laughing, and Hobbes had joined Kim in trying to catch Ron, who was proving to be surprisingly fleet of foot. He scampered off the skull's head, seeking to help out.

Morte snorted. "Suit yourself."

"Hey, you!" Hobbes yelled at Calvin, trying and failing to hit Zim with a pounce.

"Huh?"

"Stop messing about with the little fires and take care of those two!" the tiger shouted.

"Oh, right!" Calvin said, raising his gloved hand as Zim stumbled around on the floor, trailing burning drapes behind him and babbling inchoherently.

Kim had taken advantage of the very slight drag in Ron's step as he switched direction, slide-kicking into him and interlocking his legs with her own, pinning him to the ground as she sat up and beat the fires out, trying to ignore Ron's yelps. Kim raised her hand to slap out the fire again when the fire jumped up, abandoned Ron's shirt and rose into the air in a thick, almost greasy flamecloud. The fire on Zim and the drapes flew into the air too, leaving him sooty but unharmed. Behind them, Calvin stood with his glove open, the mystical design glowing the same red-orange as the fires racing towards him. The flames melded together into one large stream in midair, flowing into Calvin's open hand and forming into a large chaotic ball of fire. He kept it there for a minute, all the stray fires in the room flowing into the fireball; he slowly focused his attention on it, the flameball growing smaller and less chaotic, shrinking from the diameter of a bowling ball to the size of a softball. After a short tense moment of pyrokinetic demonstration, he squeezed his fist shut, the fireball spurting out between his fingers before sputtering out into dark smoke. Calvin opened his hand again, revealing that it's interior was thickly covered in a dense wreath of smoke. Raising it near his mouth, not bothered by the heat, he blew it off in a flourish.

Abel examined the room and sighed contently, deciding that the whole thing had been resolved with a minimum of chaos. He looked back down, realizing that everyone knew about the absurd state of his jacket. Blushing slightly, he begun hurredly stowing everything away again. Spike pushed Abel's Bible towards him without actually touching it; Abel easily scooped it off the ground without looking up, solemnly placing at back in his jacket.

"Look at the bright side," Spike said, catching Abel's slightly gloomy look. "Least it didn't get as insane as it usually does."

Ron, lying on his stomach, issued his view of the feat he'd just barely seen. "That was _cool!_"

"Yeah," Kim agreed. She looked back down, the fact that she was pinning Ron down by the legs with her own registering itself properly into her mind now that the threat of imminent burning was gone.

Ron had noticed it too. "Uhhh..."

They became aware that the heat of the fire had disappeared and been replaced with a different but not entirely unwelcome sort.

"This is awkward," Kim stated.

"Yeeah," Ron said slowly. "Awkward. Yeah, _that's_ the word I was thinking of."

They both stayed where they were until Morte floated on by. Morte being Morte, he couldn't resist the oppertunity in front of him. "Aha, _now _they're getting into it!"

He didn't get the reaction he was hoping for; instead of the both of them panicking and scooting away from each other as if they had the plauge(or opposing ideologies), they simply fixed Morte with identical dirty looks and said, "_Shut up._"

"Hmm. Now they're finishing each other's sentences. Must be one of those mind-meld type things. Eh, if you're _into _that kind of thing-"

"Check previous sentence, please and thank you," Kim said moodily, disentangling herself from Ron, helping him up once she was on her feet.

"_Freedom!_" Zim yelled, finally tearing himself free of the drapes where he'd previously escaped everyone else's attention. "Zim is free! _Zim is free!_ The flames of madness shall not consume me yet! AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH!" He started running around again, remembering his previous predicament and unaware that he wasn't on fire. He ran right into a wall and jumped back up again, resuming his fit of victorious laughter.

"Um," Kim said slowly as Zim ran by her, wailing to himself about the flames of the all-cosuming chaos envoluping all and devouring all within their tenebrous grasp, occasionally shouting something about the Canadian government owing him one for some reason. "You...do realize that you're not on fire anymore, right?"

Zim looked down at himself and screeched to a stop, his jaw hanging open. His eyes quickly darted from side to side. "I knew that! Yes, I was...practicing my dramatic skills for...eh...the Tantalus troupe!" He said quickly, recalling a poster he'd seen in town. "The rumor that I wasn't aware of the flames being not-there has absolutely no validity to it! Like those rumors of there being no spacecraft at Roswell."

"The Roswell thing's just an urban legend," Kim stated skeptically.

"Pssh!" Zim said. "Six months ago, on my world, me and a friend with a _freakishly large head_ conclusively _proved _that aliens had been at Roswell!"

"And?" Ron encouraged him.

Zim looked sheepish. "...I found out there was a reason I turned up in an intergalactic Alchoholics anynamous with a dent in my space-vehicle with a bad case of short-term amnesia."

There was a long awkward moment. The kind of long awkward moment in which there's probably a lot going on in the background with everyone else, but due to the focus not being on them, goes unnoticed.

Ron finally spoke. "You were the alien at Roswell. _You._"

Zim scratched the back of his head off-handedly. "Weee-eee-llll, not the Roswell from _your _world, and there wasn't any alien autopsies, just a permanently angry Furon with a dependency complex I forgot on the way back...but yes." There was another long awkward moment. "There are many dangers to being drunk at the wheel. Learning that I'd been to Earth some time ago and forgetting about it taught me a few of them. Including never accept gifts from strange aliens." he scowled. "Damn flowers gave me a rash that didn't go away for six months! Have you any idea how _painful_ detoxifaction is! It's _how do you like having your skin tissue nearly scraped off _painful, that's what! What was I talking about again? I don't care, I'm too busy yelling!"

Ron was still stuck on one detail. "But if you were at Roswell...that was, what, sixty years ago? And you look younger than me!"

_Well, not everyone looks their age,_ Abel thought wryly.

Zim snorted. "Just because I'm-" Zim visibly contorted, as if he was having a seizure as he tried to say whatever it was he was trying to say was causing him to have a brainstorm. "..._not-tall _like you people! Doesn't mean that I'm young. In Irken years, I'm roughly about your age, perhaps, but in Earth years...I'm old enough to have..." he paused. _What's an impressive example, WHAT'S AN IMPRESIVE EXAMPLE!? Aid me, brain-meats! I command you! Why am I being imperious in my own head?_ "Caused the Chicago fire!"

"Riiight," Spike said drily, interrupting the spell of interested surprise. "And I like Barry Manilow."

Zim smiled vacantly. "Zim's wrath has been averted by the end of the accidental burning. Do not invoke his wrath again." He paused, looking at Kim and Ron. They were looking at him like he'd walked by them from the direction of an asylum, carrying a fantasy trilogy's worth of blades while drenched in blood and bearing a sign that read _Caution: I Will Stab You. _On the other hand, he was used to it by now. "And stop staring at Zim like that. It disturbs him...me...Zim...that is...guy, he that is...me...I think that..._oh, _you know who I'm talking about!"

"Why are you talking in the third person?" Calvin wondered.

"Because it is Zim's particular idiom," Zim said calmly. "To do as he is warranted."

"Really?" Ron asked. "I thought you just liked doing whatever random thing jumped into your head."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Semantics is another word that Zim lives by."

"And they call me crazy," Calvin muttered.

"You got 'em there," Morte commented.

Everyone in the room backed as far away as possible from Morte. "What's this about?" the skull wondered; Hobbes and Rufus pointed directly behind Morte. Morte turned around, his jaw dropping when he saw a stern-loooking Zim standing directly behind him.

"Hello," Zim said simply, his red eyes flashing dangerously.

Morte laughed uneasily and hovered down to the ground. "Eh, heh heh...you do know that crack back there was just some friendly ribbing, right, Boss? Right!?" Morte looked desperately around for help, his desperation growing greater as he observed everyone whistling and making a point not to look directly at him.

Zim leaned over, scowling darkly. "When I want an opinion, I'll _ask for it._"

"D-duly noted, Boss," Morte said timidly.

"Good," Zim said menacingly. He turned away, facing everyone else as best he could. "Alright then! Enough standing around here; we need to find a way out of this room. Clearly, coming to this house to escape the madness was a _bad _idea!"

"You came _here _to get away from insanity?" Kim and Ron said simultaneously with similar expressions of incredulity.

Their heads turned to each other, Kim moving marginally faster then Ron. "Jinx, you owe me a soda!" She declared.

"ARRRGH!" Ron yelled. "One of these days...I swear, one of these days, K.P., I'm going to call it first!"

"And people call us weird," Calvin muttered to Hobbes under his breath.

Hobbes raised an eyebrow. "I pounce people at high-velocity, you throw around superscience like a high-quality bludgeon and you're calling other people weird?"

"Oh, fine! No one else is weirder then us! Happy?"

"No. I'll be happy the day you grow some common sense."

"You wish! Wait, that came out wrong!"

Abel shrugged. "This is funny and all, but we should really focus on finding a way to get out of here and go home."

Calvin paused in the middle of what he believed to be a brilliant comeback. "'Homes?' Wait a minute. If none of you live in this place, what are you guys doing crawling around here?"

Abel looked horribly embarrased as his eyes darted back and forth supiciously. "Er...that's...um...I...er..."

"Oh, he got lost in the catacombs under Foster's a few days ago!" Ron said cheerfully. "And me and Kim got hired to go rescue him earlier today, so...that's why."

"Ooh," Abel said sadly. "I really should know how to navigate cavernous places by now. I used to know Rome like it was my backyard!"

Hobbes came up from behind him, patting his shoulder awkwardly. "Well, I remember this one time me and Calvin got lost in our own closet."

Abel looked curiously at him. "A...closet?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Due to the magical energy distilled by Calvin's little expiriments, it got turned into a portal to another dimension that consisted of several worlds inhabited by sentient digital programs, but...you know."

"See? You don't have anything to be upset about," Kim said encourgingly; behind her, she sensed Ron's slightly flustered look. She had the distinct feeling he'd been about to mention the time he'd burrowed the Changing Chopsticks from the Xiaolin Dragons and accidentally shrunk himself to the size of a grain of rice and got himself trapped in his room for six hours while being harrased by dust mites.

"So," Abel said to Zim, now in a mood to be helpful. Then again, it was that mood that caused him to get stuck under Fosters for three days. "What you're saying is, you three haven't found a room?"

"_Yes,_" Calvin, Hobbes and Zim said blandly. Morte started to say something before he got a roomful of dirty looks.

"Hmm. It would seem you wound up here at a particularily bad time; tonight's the last night for the Town Assembly Meet. All the important figures in town are staying in the house for a week-long meeting on government things."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Typical," he muttered. Then he realized something. "And 'government things' is the technical term?"

Abel scratched his head in embarrasmenty. "Well, I did get my start as a priest in a world where the Vatican was a major world power, but politics...me not so good with the politics!" Abel got the vauge feeling that hundreds of years worth of ancestors were now screaming at him somewhere in Aristocrat Heaven for being so unsophisticated in his speech patterns.

"How nice for you." Spike snarked. "So tell me something; does the priesthood _make _you crazy?"

"No!" Abel said hotly. "Some of us just start out that way!" He realized the flaw in his sentence. "That's not what I meant and you know it!"

Spike snickered loudly. He flicked his stub of a cigarette on the ground, watching Abel panic and stomp it out and throw it away. Abel stomped over to Spike and started lecturing him on proper enviromental responsibility and being concerned for everyone else and just because Spike didn't use his lungs didn't mean that everyone else around him couldn't afford to and why Spike liked rock and roll but made a point to stay away from Abel's church group and things in that vein. Spike, as per his idiom, zoned out, his eyes glazing over as he fantasized about a troupe of beer bottles doing ballet and getting into a street fight, after which Spike drank the survivors.

"Is everyone always like this?" Zim asked Ron.

"Nah, not really." Ron said flippantly. "Spike just kind of brings out the angry moralist in you."

"Small wonder," Kim grumbled.

"Like how my brother here can construct a slinky that works in mid-air, but he couldn't be bothered to do five minutes worth of mathematics if it killed him?" Hobbes said, gesturing at Calvin.

There were a few long moments as Kim, Ron, Zim, Rufus and Abel put it together. Spike looked up and figured out what was going on, quickly joining the ranks of the five that were piecing one more oddity together.

They looked from Calvin to Hobbes several times.

"You guys are _brothers?!"_ Zim finally said.

"Well, yeah," Hobbes said, grinning deviously. "Is that odd?"

"Is that..." Zim closed his eyes, his fingers digging into his forehead while his antannae beat flexed in a manner that reminded Abel strongly of the stress-relieving actions autistics took that were collectively called 'stimming'.

"Uh..." Kim stammered, not wanting to say what she felt would be extremely rude.

"Eh..." Ron muttered, his mind flashing to thoughts of interspecies relations and what he thought of people who disapproved of them; given Traverse Town's diversity, the number of humans and human-derived species were only slightly greater than those that weren't, strictly speaking, human, so nonhuman and human marriages were fair common, if disapproved of in certain quarters, making them the Traverse Town equivilant of interracial marriages.

Abel cleared his throat nervously. "You...er...don't look like brothers," he said quietly.

"I'm sorry?" Calvin said acidly. "What was that?"

Spike, on the other hand, didn't truck with temporary mouth paralysis, politeness, a mind so open you could park a jumbo jet in there or good sense. "_Look at you two!_" he yelled, standing up and gesturing at them with his palms down, ignoring the glares he was getting.

Calvin and Hobbes looked at Spike and then at each other. They jerked away in mock shock, pointing at each other dramatically.

"I don't believe this!" Calvin said sarcastically. "You don't look anything like me!"

"Me too!" Hobbe said with an identical degree of sarcasm. "I can't believe I didn't notice all these years! Now I knew why we always got those stares! This...I can't believe this, it's absolutely mind-blowing! I think we're going to need to talk to people about this!"

"Oh no! This is much too big for that! I just realized my big brother slash best friend is a tiger! I'm...I'm going to have to have my head examined! Maybe get a good CAT-scan! Get it, a CAT-scan!"

"Wait!" Hobbes said, scooting around and looking in Calvin's ear. "Yup, your brains a big pile of gears that got stuck!"

"Let me see!" Calvin said as he crawled up Hobbes' side, peering into his ear. "Yeah, we should have guessed it."

"What?" Hobbes said, gasping loudly. "What is it? Tell me now; I can't take the suspence!"

"It's bad," Calvin said gravely. "There's a big screen behind your ears. We'll have to clean it out."

"What, again! Oh, tragedy! Oh, horror! Oh, for the love of Krazy Kat and the King-Sponsored Eighteen Man Comedy Brigade!"

"All right," Spike snapped. "We get the point! Enough of the theatrics already!"

Calvin dropped from Hobbes' shoulder, landing back on the ground with a _thump._ "Long as you get the point."

"They say that humor is the most entertaining way to extrapolate the truth," Hobbes mused. "And they also say that sarcasm is the cruelest form of humor." he ruffled Calvin's head. "Perfect for you!"

Calvin scowled. "Shut it, tuna breath."

"So this kind of family arrangement is common back on your guy's home?" Kim asked, curious as ever. "I mean, you see it everywhere in Traverse Town. Lots of orphaned kids from different species...good natured people who want to be parents or lost their kids in the Heartless attacks..."

Calvin shrugged. "Yeah, pretty much. In the Comic Kingdom, you get a lot of species and humans are slightly rarer than the other kinds. You see a lot of interspecial families." He raised an eyebrow at the fascinated look on Abel's face. "We're good and wacky that way."

"That's _cool!_" Ron declared; Calvin and Hobbes uneasily turned around, not sure what to expect.

"Uh...what is?" Calvin asked, looking at the mole rat for help. Rufus shrugged at them, rolling his eyes at his pet boy.

"You two!" Ron yelled, gesturing at the two. "You guys, brothers? It's like you two are living signs of interspecies marriage! You guys are like signposts for supporting two people in love, but different species! Man, I can see it now...all those jerks milling around, protesting a human-nonhuman union, all their ugly signs with their stupid slogans on there...but then people like _you _guys show up, living testaments to love ignoring shape and form, and shut them up! Ah...it's beautiful, really."

Calvin and Hobbes shared a glance, looking at each other a little nervously. Hobbes twitched his whiskers, smiling unsteadily. "Uh...Ron, is it?" Hobbes finally said, a reluctant look on his face.

"Yeah?" Ron asked, a happy smile on his face, his eyes closed and his arms behind his head.

"I'm adopted."

"Huh?" Ron said, uncrossing his arms and letting them drop to his side.

"We're not biological brothers," Calvin explained, spreading his arms out. "My mom and dad were human, but they adopted Hobbes when I was about six months old and he was two."

There was a long pause.

"Oh." Ron finally said. "Okay then. I'll just stand in the corner over there and feel stupid, okay? Okay." He shuffled off, his tail drooping shamefully.

"Get back here," Kim said, grabbing his arm as he walked past; she grabbed him a little too hard, making him trip and fall on his back, his arm still held.

"Okay, fine, me not going anywhere," Ron said from the floor. His brow furrowed and he sat up, frowning. "Does anyone hear anything? Kind of a-"

"Rumbling!" Rufus finished.

"Rumblin'?" Spike said, jumping to his feet. "I hear it too. Lot of heartbeats, too." Spike frowned. "Either a good lot got pissed or the caffienes been thrown around a bit much."

Hobbes' ears twitched, the fur over his mouth shifting as he frowned. His ears suddenly flattened back over his head, his healing eyes going wide behind his sunglasses as he focused on the rightmost wall. Seeing where he was looking, Zim narrowed his eyes and flipped to the back of the room, his spider-legs extending in the air and giving him several feet in height. Pointing the Keyblade at the wall, Zim mustered all his powers of leadership and shouted, "_BACK OF THE ROOM, __**NOW**__!"_

In a whirlwind of movement, the people in the room followed his order, most of them without thinking about it, clustering around him.

The wall exploded.


	6. The Unexpected Rudeness of Mister Lyle

Sorry; this took longer than I thought it would. I've also got a bit of a problem: does anyone think I should change this story's category from X-Overs to Kingdom Hearts, just for the sake of clarity? I think that this is a Kingdom Hearts story proper, discounting the different characters, that is. Still, your input would be helpful. That's what reviews are for...that, and making me feel like people actually care about what I'm doing. I've also come to the conclusion that, for me at least, the difference between serious writing and wacky writing is this: wacky writing is the kind that I just breeze through, whereas serious writing feels gives me the impression that I'm beating my head against a brick wall. Sad to say, I can claim that as a metaphor drawn from actual experience.

In good ol' Calla Bryn Strugis fashion, I say thankya to Ri2, RoseofPhilly410, BloodSkye, GuessWho and Evil Riggs! To paraphrase Black Mage; only a madman who spends his time writing this stuff would enjoy receiving the words of those who read it and send their words of commentary to him, whether it's critism or mentioning things he missed or sending praise-oh mighty archangels above, _THE PRAISE! IT'S THE ONLY TIME I FEEL ALLLIIIIIVE!_

Well, now that I'm done being completely insane, I abjure ye all to this: never ask what hotdogs are made of. I'm serious. Don't do it, man! _Ever._ Not if you know what'd good for you. And if you do, please tell me, 'cause I sure don't.

Disclaimer: I own nothing except for Zim's consciences. Characters and concepts in thsi chapter belong to Craig McCraken, Joss Whedon, Square-Enix, Disney, Masashi Kishimoto, Jhonen Vasquez, Bill Watterson, Twentieth Century Fox and anyone I forgot to mention.

-------

_So many things seem faraway now, cast away and gone forever._

_But the one thing that I can't forget is the absence of your presence._

_And to think I once thought you'd always be by my side._

_But the fact remains, and it does hurt, worse then anything yet and I fear the worst may come._

_I want you back, to see you once more, but the worry still tears at me, and this pain won't stop._

_It steals my attention and turns my worried mind to thoughts of you, and that frightens me so._

_I fear that I'll never find you, and that thought fills me with such misery._

_And the worst thing of all: your light has been taken from me, and I'm fear that it's left me dark._

_I see many things to distract me, and for that I am grateful._

_In those rare moments of peace, my mind invaribly comes back to you and your absence._

_I don't hear the words you should speak, I can't sense your presence and all the other evidences_

_of the senses that you exist and that the universe is worth something aren't there._

_Yet, the despair this fosters is supplanted by a greater need:_

_To find you, no matter where you have drifted._

_And this mission is as a radiant light in this dark place, guiding me to you._

_Nothing shall impede me or delay me and I shall find you, no matter the cost._

-------

The wall exploding, Zim thought some time later as he sat cross-legged style on a bed not unlike the one he'd awoken in earlier, was when things gotstressful.

Thankfully, that part of the too-long day was long gone, and one of his worries had been resolved, as he and his party were finally in a room. Zim considered the thought that they'd be gone tomorrow morning and probably never see this room again, making him wonder what the point really was.

He growled some of his native Irken at himself. Zim knew full-well that he was just trying to distract himself from the real issue at hand.

The night had been busy, and all the things going on around him had distracted him from that very issue, but now, with nothing happening, he couldn't simply sit back and try to ignore it. He just didn't know where Gir was or if he was okay and that distressed him terribly; even going through the O.O.P.S. again would have been preferable, at least compared to this new pain.

There was no point in skating around the issue: he missed Gir terribly, and not knowing what had become of him made him feel like his squeedily-splooch was eating itself. He wondered if Gir was as scared for his master as Zim was scared for his robot sidekick, lost somewhere in an unfamiliar world, surrounded by hostile figures and fleeing from abyss-born nightmares hungering for his light, running, running, searching desperately for his absent master as what must seem like Hell itself descending upon him-

Zim stopped that thought right there. He shuddered uncontrollably, unwilling to think of Gir in that situation. Try as he might though, now that he had thought of it, the idea wouldn't leave his mind. His fist tightened until it hurt, echoing the pain he felt deep within, gnawing at him and burrowing deeper and just _not leaving him alone_.

"Why does it hurt so much to care?" Zim wondered to himself, huddled up against headboard he'd thrown his jacket over, grasping his knees while his bare toes intertwined. He frowned and wiggled his toes. He was certain that his toes hadn't been opposable before.

Across the room, Hobbes rolled over in his sleep, muttering to himself. He rolled over again, growling fairly loudly.

Zim's eyes narrowed, feeling indignation that Hobbes could have the effrontry to be so easily asleep when he, Zim, was so distressed and horribly afraid. A slightly saner thought flitted across his mind: it was stupid to get angry at someone for not being as miserable as you are.

Zim didn't care. The hot flash of anger he felt took the edge off of his...what was the word for it? Good as they sounded, misery and sorrow didn't quite cover what he felt.

Zim looked out the window, at the radiant full moon. He groaned, wondering if perhaps there was something to that karma thing, whether this chain of events was a punishment for the myriad sins committed during what he collectively referred to as 'The Stupid Years'. He'd done so many stupid and terrible things during that time that he certainly deserved to suffer in one form or another.

_No,_ he thought. One thing he'd learned during his pilgrimage was that people weren't necessarily punished in this life for their misdeeds or rewarded for their good works. Punishments or crimes, he thought, came after. The only times you suffered or paid for your misdeeds was when other beings reacted to them and paid you as fit their idiom. Or perhaps _that _was karma?

That still didn't make him feel any better.

His eyes narrowed to slits over the low noise coming from the table. His annoyance over Calvin and Hobbes' bizarre sleeping habits lessened his despair very slightly; enough to alleviate it, but not enough to keep his mind from getting angry at them for not be irritating enough to forget his troubles.

Hobbes was sound asleep in a bed across the room; he had simply fallen into the bed. Zim had expected him to at least remove his vest or something, considering his somewhat feral mindset and his apparent disregard for unnecessary clothing; he supposed that Hobbes was less wild then his appearance let on. Odd as it seemed, he was probably the most civilized among them.

Calvin, on the other hand...

The boy was sitting at the lone desk separating his and Hobbes' beds, slightly hunched over some arcane semi-spherical thing Zim had gotten a few glances at, but otherwise was as mysterious to him as a ham radio would have been to an Aborigine Bushman prior to the colonial period. Calvin's hands were blurs as they moved over the object, grabbing tools and using them and switching them with other tools with lightning fast speed, showing no delay as they went about their work. Even stranger, the boy's eyes were shut and his mouth was slightly slack, a slight trail of drool at the corner of his mouth. He made some sleep-noise from time to time, frequently a slightly modulated mumble that would go on for about half a minute every so often. Zim also heard the sleepworking boy laugh nonstop for about five minutes before breaking off to yell about communism being the tool of the rodeo clown-hammer head shark-and dime cent store stuffed animal production conglomerate; through it all, his hands continually worked, inserting, replacing, setting and building up the mysterious device.

Zim himself was awake now, not because of insomnia or his disturbed emotional state, but because Irkens didn't sleep as much as humans, requiring only six hours on average every few days. He had slept about three hours since he'd arrived, his sleep interrupted by both his increasingly numerous nightmares and the sounds of the boy at work. Zim glanced at Hobbes. _Funny,_ he thought. Hobbes was the alert one. You'd expect the tiger to be wakened by the boy's work just as Zim was being set on edge by it. Either the slightly feral knight was a deeper sleeper than Zim realized, or he was already used to nights like this.

Zim looked back out the window, leaning back onto the bed, his hands behind his head, thinking. He didn't feel like going to sleep again, doubting that he'd be able to for a few hours more, given his current pace of mind. He let his mind wander as he stared at the ceiling.

It eventually settled on thoughts about what had happened after the wall exploded. His slight frown became a grin.

_Heh,_ he thought._ The Dib-beast would find this all veeeeery amusing._

-------

_Some three hours earlier..._

The dust gradually faded away, revealing to the exasperation of Zim's party and the surprise of everyone else, the mob glaring menacingly at them all, without regard for the fact that at least five of those there had done nothing to them this night. Why they shared enmity for the hapless priest, the ensouled vampire, the two adventurers and their naked mole rat made no sense, but Zim supposed that a band of people bound together into a nearly mindless coalition by blind hatred and senseless vendettas was a band of people bound together into a nearly mindless coalition by blind hatred and a senseless revenge trip, and therefore stupid.

It occurred to Zim that he could probably have phrased more sensibly.

He took a look at the mob, noticing that they seem to have shrunk in number. He thought they'd probably lost a few people in their mad search, or the missing people had just gotten bored and left. The thing about angry mobs, he'd learned, was that they were basically multi-celled organisms, and none too bright ones either; if fact, if you thought about it, pretty much any society was just a proto-mob, and one that caught a lot of flack for that matter. Most mobs, he knew, generally owed all their strength, drive and confidence from their leader; a strong leader was the difference between overthrowing a tyrant and being beaten to pulps by a bunch of poorly paid watchmen. Unfortunately, this mob was one of the ones whose closest cousin to a leader was their collective wrath.

Ron looked at Zim's group. "Okay, in case Abel doesn't know what's going on...?"

"Hey!" Abel squawked indignantly. He put a finger to his chin, his brow slightly furrowed. "Wait, I don't know what's going on. Do tell."

"You know," Zim told them. "Random victims. Things were done and said that won't be taken back. Angry mob results."

"It's his fault!" Calvin said, pointing at Zim. "So if you get beaten up, you know who to blame!"

"Hey!"

The mob rumbled that rumble that was the unintelligible end result of a large amount of people saying things sourly at the same time. Kim knew that that was an incredibly bad sign and nudged Hobbes. "Mind giving a sitch report?"

Raising an eyestripe at her senseless massacre of the word 'situation', Hobbes quickly complied. "Remember the mob Zim was rambling about when you guys came in?"

"Yeah?"

Hobbes pointed at the offending mob. "That's the one."

"Hmm," Spike said. "Eight of us against an entire mob ranking in the dozens." He grinned, cracking his knuckles with a loud popping sound. "I like those odds!"

Abel's eyes narrowed. Summoning up all the charisma he'd accumulated over his long life, he stepped up, flung his arms out and commandingly said, "Stop this! We don't need to make fools of our-"

"Hey," an angry blob monster yelled. "I heard of you, Nightroad! You killed my brother!"

Abel crossed his arms defensively. "I did _not _kill him! All I did was cut him in half."

A long pause followed his statement.

"He got better." Abel amended. "He's a Gelatian, you'd need a sunlamp and a magnifying glass to kill him."

"...Yeah," the blob admitted, scuffling the floor with an extended psuedopod for a moment before looking back at Abel hatefully. "But I still don't like you!"

Abel sighed. "Everyone has it in for warrior priests. Is it the white hair and my slightly effeminate good looks? There's no need to be bigoted, you know. Sometimes I hate being man-pretty."

"Hate to break your run of chrismatic banter," Spike said, "But you're not man-pretty so much as you're just pretty."

Abel's eye twitched. "That's not true! I do _not _look feminine!" He whirled upon Hobbes suddenly. "We're friends here! Come on, help me! Tell him I look masculine!"

Hobbes looked startled at being dragged into the matter. Being perfectly honest, he replied, "Sorry, but I have to agree with Spike on this one."

"Eeeeeegh!" Abel squealed. He rounded on Kim. "HELP ME!"

She shook her head. "Jarod is man-pretty.Ron is man-pretty." Morte snorted extremely loudly at that, apparently none too convinced with the old thought about reality being largely a matter of personal perception. "You...you're just pretty. You're prettier then most girls I know, actually."

Abel backed up against the wall, starting to twitch violently. "Urge to dump myself in tar, cover myself in pillow feathers and run through town naked while proclaiming that I am bacon...rising..._rising_..."

"Hey, you!" A two headed humanlike alien yelled, pointing at Ron with the third arm protruding from under his left arm. "You blew up my starship!"

"Yeah, there were a lot of buttons on that thing and sooner or later, someone was going to trip and hit the self-destruct button on accident." Ron said, scratching the back of his neck nervously.

Zaphod Beeblebrox looked unconvinced. "I'm still going to hurt you."

Ron shrugged. "Join the club, they got jackets." He pointed to several other members of the mob, who were wearing bright red jacket with a logo that looked like someone whacking a miniature Ron emblazoned on them.

_"YOU!_" A large number of people howled at Zim.

"Pssh," said Zim dismissively. "That's the best you can do?"

A small rat popped out from the crowd, shaking it's fist angrily at Rufus, chattering furiously.

Rufus looked shocked for a moment, then returned the guy, chattering just as angrily.

Kim had had enough. "Look," she said plantatively. "We can argue all night about who wronged who-"

"Pssh," A brown-haired tanned girl around Kim's age said dismissively. "You're hanging with those guys and that makes you guilty by association, K."

Kim stopped in the middle of her nice-making speech, her eyes twitching in an expression that was decidedly less then sane. "YOU!" She yelled, pointing at the girl malevolently.

"Me," Bonnie said sarcastically.

"What are _you _doing here!?" Kim demanded.

Bonnie glared at Zim. He grinned madly at her, the look making her retreat a few steps, her expression faltering. Zim chose to explain. "I set her wallpaper on fire, drew amusing faces on the stupid posters in her room and rearranged her music CDs in alphabetical order. Oh, and I poured itching powder on all her clothes." He frowned, unnerved by the slightly manic look Kim had at the thought of Zim's random acts. It was a look similar to the one he had when contemplating horrible, _horrible _revenge. Revenge involving flesh-eating land piranhas that breathed plasma.

The girl glared at him. "Why'd you do all that?! Do you know how much those-"

"Oh, stuff it, Bon-Bon. No one cares," Ron said lazily, yawning profusely and turning to Zim. "Hey, why _did _you do all that crazy stuff back there?"

"I am easily bored." Zim replied, suddenly grinning like an insanity gremlin had just tipped the scales in his increasingly unstable mind.

"Oh, okay then," Ron said, grinning back at Zim.

"Hey! You killed my great-great-great-great grandfather's uncle!" A rather husky human yelled at Spike.

"I did?" Said Spike, looking thoughtful. "You're going to have to narrow the list a bit. Killed a lot in my day, I have."

"He was that vampire you staked last Tuesday!"

"Help a Brit out here; 5'5, a few hundred pounds, real husky, jackass on a for-hire basis, didn't know how to take 'no'?"

"Yes! Hey, wait-"

Spike shrugged. "Staked that sucker like it was Vigilante World Tour."

The complainer looked at the heroes plaintively. "Come on, you're heroes! Help me out!"

Abel looked at him disapprovingly. "I'm a _warrior _priest. That's the kind of thing I do."

Calvin looked thoughtful. "Hey, Hobbes? Got any room for vampire teeth on any of your necklaces? Might be more of those types around."

Hobbes considered it. His current necklace was one one of many he had; he was considering switching to one of his more varied ones tomorrow. "Nah, already got vampire teeth from at least..." he calculated. "Twenty-two distinct sub-types. Haven't seen a new one in this world yet."

Zim cackled menacingly. "Vigilante justice? Heh heh heh heh...I like this town already!"

Ron cocked an eyebrow at the guy. "If I had a relative like that, I'd have pulled a Stephen Townsend."

He frowned. "Of course, be nice if I _had _relatives at all..." Kim sidled over to him and hugged him comfortingly.

The speaker twitched. "You guys are nuts!"

"Runs with adventurers, y'know!" Morte said knowingly. "Live it up today, run into the nearest dungeon of ill-repute and hack all the nameless horrors to little bits tomorrow! Ah, those were the days...finding the truth 'bout the Chief, grabbing our rewards and women like there was no tomorrow!"

The mob looked at each unsteadily, like a blob with a lot of eyestalks and a self-consciousness problem. Reaffirming themselves to the task at hand, they started approaching the heroes warily, with unmistakable menace.

Zim examined the situation. The heroes were outnumbered nearly ten-to-two, in a small room with little room to maneuver and no visible way out. Therefore, by the laws of action-adventure narrative, they had a sort of metaphorical tactical nuclear device in their odds. Being used to scenarios like this, the Traverse Towners got into a fighting position, ready to stun and disable while Rufus looked around and paused. "Hrk, where little guy go?"

His question was answered when yellow alchemical energy flowed into the ground around the mob, flowing within the very molecular structure of the stone. The energy rushed up, the ground transmuting into a large metal cage trapping the mob.

Needless to say, the mob was not pleased with this. "Come on!" someone howled. "That's not fair!"

Hobbes snarled at them, baring his impressive teeth. "All's fair when the alternative is your skin on someone's mantle piece."

Zim narrowed his eyes as the mob started banging away at the bars, which were ominously bending under the repeated blows. "That won't hold them for long."

"Course it won't," Calvin said, walking over to a wall. "Too bad I blocked off the way they came in...oh well. Can't find a door, make your own."

Calvin stopped in front of the wall and closed his eyes, making an odd gesture with his hands; the two front fingers of both hands interlocked in a rough knuckle-to-knuckle shape, the ungloved fingers resting atop his Pyro Glove. He held it for a minute, focusing his power; the circle on his glove lit up again, followed by several more previously unseen ones going all the way to the tips of his fingers. They were roughly similar to the ones on his palm, hard to see but clearly more intricate, with smaller circles on the tips of his fingers. The pinky of his gloved hand rose up, his other pinky meeting it at a loose angle. His ungloved ring finger slid down to his palm-circle while the other ring finger covered the knuckle in front of it; the red-orange energy flickered, becoming more intense, suddenly wrapping around his hands, swirling ethereally, the nearly invisible circles on his sleeves brightening and becoming clearly visible, the archaic looking circles going around his arms, the light tinting his skin a ruddy color, the circles on his gloved hand went all the way to his shoulder, while the circles on his other arm only came down to his elbow.

Calvin brought his hands together with a sharp clapping sound, drawing his gloved hand away. The fiery energy went with it, focused around that arm and brightening as he raised it high, hand slightly clenched. The energy on his left arm had disappeared, apparently focused on the right arm; this was supported by the fact that the red-orange energy had brightened significantly, rendering the complex circles around his sleeve almost invisible, his arm looking like it was sheathed in flame. His eyes opened and focused on the wall, his tightly pressed lips opening into a broad grin.

Calvin slammed his glowing hand onto the wall; the red-orange glow flowed from his hand into the wall, spreading into an irregular circle about the size of a large round table. The glow sunk deeper into the wall, the metalwork underneath becoming visible by the shifting of the energy, waves of power pulsing away from it and rippling around the room; loose dust blew around the room, longer articles of clothing fluttered, hair waved around and light bulbs brightened suddenly, their fuses so lose to burning out that they were nearly white-yellow. The glow brightened under Calvin's hand, the wall underneath changing subtly.

The glow suddenly flared and the wall exploded, sending up a small smoke cloud around the room.

The smoke quickly cleared around the heroes as they blinked in surprise. Calvin gave a mock-bow. "Lady and gentlemen, I give you...your getaway." The exploded part of the wall was a hole only slightly smaller then the glow had been, it's scorched edges severely fragmented and chipped in some places. The explosion appeared to have gone inwards, providing an escape hole for them; through the hole was an upwards going stone staircase, no one insight. The steps were a little burnt and broken in some places, but there was surprisingly little damage.

They quickly ran through the hole in short order, Calvin pausing to seal it behind him. The mob's more sensitive constituents coughed and sputtered as the gray smoke passed over and blinded them for the moment. By the time it faded, they were unsurprisingly annoyed when they realized that their intended victims had disappeared, though their was a notable discolored patch of wall.

They quickly got to work attacking the bars keeping them back. True to Calvin's words, they wouldn't be held back for long.

However, they were unaware that Calvin was counting on them to get away so that the traps he'd laid down would do some damage.

-------

Dojo, currently wearing a small light blue pilot's uniform specially fitted for his smallish frame, stuck his head out from the pilot's seat as he heard the hiss of a door opening. He looked over and saw Jarod walk in and silently stroll into the co-pilot's seat. The human slumped back, showing no intention of any piloting work as he looked blankly out the windshield.

The small mystical dragon observed that Jarod had a notable resemblance to someone who'd been hit with a number of bats on the head in the same exact location over twenty dozen times but had still retained consciousness somehow. "Hey, what's the matter?"

The Pretender stirred. "Just...thinking," Jarod muttered distractedly, not looking at the dragon. The small group of the Keybearer and the King's chosen warriors had been weighing on his mind for a while and try as he might to embroil himself in his friend's random attempts to pass the time, he couldn't manage to chase the troubled thoughts on his mind; his windblown hair from Naruto and Raimundo's contest over whether Naruto's Spiraling Sphere or Raimundo's Crashing Hurricane Palm was more destructive, the dust on him from Clay and Gaara's argument over which of them was the more powerful sand manipulator and his wet singed clothes from Omi and Kimiko's attempts to resolve both of those instances when they got out of hand spoke volumes about Jarod's ability to focus on a single issue regardless of distractions.

Dojo raised an eyebrow. "Uh huh. You've been doing that a lot lately. Ya need a friendly mystical dragon to talk to or is this one of those sit around and mope cases?"

"Neither," Jarod replied. "Just trying to get some perspective on the whole thing."

"Uh huh." Dojo looked at Jarod for a moment. "Is it the whole team-up thing that's bothering you? They did seem kinda ticked at each other, but I can't really see them at each other's throats. Course, you're the psychological mastermind, not me."

"It's just...I'm worried that they might have gotten into trouble by now." Jarod frowned faintly.

Dojo rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on; you sent Spike and Bloo with them to Foster's! You sent an egomaniac and a punch-happy punker to guide three tense newbies to one of the craziest places in town! Of course they've gotten into trouble!"

Jarod winced. "You think I made a bad decision?"

Dojo scratched his chin and gave Jarod a pointed look. Given the shape of his face, it was hard to picture him giving any other kind, but the little dragon had a surprising range of expression. "It's been a long day for everyone; the jerks've been more active lately, Heartless have been popping up like crazy, we've been stretched to the limit and then the Keybearer finally shows up, but we don't know if he wants to help seal the Keyholes or not. Anyone'd get stressed out."

Jarod smiled. "Yeah. You're right. It's just...it's been hard to plan it out. I have to consider everything and put it together...there's so many variables...I just worry, that's all."

"Well, that ain't good," Dojo said reprovingly. "You gotta just unwind and relax, buddy. Like, try some of that herbal tea or beat some of the idiots up. That always makes you feel better."

Jarod tensely pressed his forefinger and thumb against his temples, tweaking the tension away. "I wish I knew where Abel was. He's someone I can really talk to about everything. Nothing personal, it's just...some things you're better off not knowing. But Abel's a guy who spends his worktime finding things that go bump in the night and bumping back. He _knows _what I'm going through."

Dojo waved a hand, not insulted. In troubled times, people did a number of things, three of them including starting riots, falling to pieces, and seeking out their religious leaders. The third seemed healthier then the other two. "Besides the slight insult, don't worry, I already got someone on that case."

"Really? Who?" Jarod was worried about the eccentric warrior priest. Abel was one of his better friends, but he had no sense of direction and there was his laid-back attitude that often worked against him. It never exactly lended confidence in the paramilitary strike force Section Thirteen Mattias, populated by warrior priests with grudges against the armies of darkness, when it was lead by a man who was as known for his habit of tripping on the street and crashing into the sewer system when he wore the cross on his back(possibly inspired by Father Nicholas D. Wolfwood, another priest in Section 13). Then again, there was always the possibility that Abel did it all on purpose. Make yourself a joke and people regard you as a subject of fun and amusement, never as a threat.

Dojo scratched his chin. "Hmm...let's see, I asked Kimiko to look up one of the people on the Heroes For Hire webring, find someone cheap but good at rescuing. She got back to me this morning, said something about finding one of the teams that worked _pro bono_. Team Impossible or something, personal friends of hers, she said. Kind of weird, she said, but with the people we know, who aren't? Heck, in this town, who isn't weird?"

Jarod frowned. He hated not knowing every part of a situation. He was also getting a very strong suspicion that something weird was occuring right now. He stood up and walked over to the doorway; the door, looking like a part of the wall with a simple window in it, slid away with a pressurized _squeak_, rolling into the wall.

"Hey, big guy! Where ya going?" Dojo called after him.

"Do me a favor: take everyone home without me."

"Huh?"

Jarod shuffled around in his increasingly uncomfortable clothing. "I'm going to change into something less annoying, then I'm taking one of the Butterflies. My pez senses are tingling."

"You do not have pez senses." Dojo said snidely.

"You don't know that."

Dojo rolled his eyes. "Seriously, what makes you say that?"

Jarod smiled knowingly, stepping over the door's threshold. "Let's just say, I'm pretending to be a busybody."

-------

After they had temporarily escaped the mob, the randomly assembled band of heroes had thought themselves free until they had literally ran into the malevolent mob once again (though considerably more singed from Calvin's traps). There had ensued some frantic running, an unpleasant encounter with a sack of carnivorous bacon and a brief argument over their various military ranks, honorary and otherwise (which ended when Spike wondered if the time he ate a Nazi and stole his victim's uniform counted).

After more running and a temporary escape from their rampaging pursuers, they found themselves in another hallway, by a pair of double doors, pausing for a few moments of rest.

Ron leaned against the wall, tensed for a sudden burst of speed. Rufus popped out of the pocket and scampered up his boy's side, coming to a stop on his shoulder and looking around. His weak vision noticed the familiar-looking pair of double doors, planting the seed of an idea in his mind that quickly germinated and bloomed.

Thinking quickly, he loudly squeaked. Calvin half-turned, looking at the naked mole rat quizzically. "What'd he say?"

Hobbes translated as best he could. "He wants us to wait. I think,"

Rufus shook his head quickly, squeaking out a stream of speech-like sounds that Calvin couldn't quite catch. "He's got a plan to get us out of this mess!" Ron translated.

Rufus nodded furiously. "Hnk, uh huh!"

Morte bobbed around anxiously. "C'mon, out with it!"

Rufus chattered away in his odd manner, Ron and Hobbes alternating between translating, the tiger somewhat bemused by the rodent's overuse of Massively Multiplayer On-Line RPG metaphors(Hobbes reflected that perhaps Rufus was, in fact, the Tunnel Lord he sometimes partied with on Everlot from time to time as the Wild Knight). It effectively came out to a diversion plan: Rufus and one other member of their group would split off while the rest of them hid away and waited for them. Rufus knew this particular floor well, owing to a brief feud between him and a band of highly intelligent laboratory rats that lived on this floor; he was certain that he'd be able to navigate better than a furious mob, espically one without a real leader: a mob with no leader was a like a headless chicken with blades strapped on it's body.

"Okay," Abel said, looking furtively at the turn corner where the mob was going to come from. "But who'll go with Rufus?"

Ron cocked an eyebrow. "That a question? It's obviously gotta be-"

"Spike," Zim said flatly, interrupting Ron's attempt to declare himself the distraction.

Spike looked surprised. "Why do I have to be the diversion?"

Ron looked surprised. "Yeah, why is _he _the distraction? That's my job! You're seriously messing with our group dynamic."

"What group dynamic?" Calvin demanded. "We barely know you people!"

Spike tensed up, his ears ringing with the approaching footsteps of the mob. "Ah, hells, I don't have time for this! Come on, you little...whatever you are. Nude albino midget meerkat, right?"

"Hey!" Rufus said indignantly, hopping from shoulder to shoulder until he made it to Spike's. Getting the vampire's attention, the naked mole rat frantically pointed at the large double doors directly behind the remainder of the party.

Realization dawned on Spike. Smirking as the stampeding footsteps increased in volume, he sauntered past them, throwing the doors open with sudden force, nearly knocking the others down if not for their being smart enough to move out of the way. As they huddled around the doorway, Spike then backflipped up to the ceiling and kicking off, landing right behind them. Their momentary pause at his acrobatics was enough time for him to forcefully push their collective mass through the doorway and slam it behind them.

Spike grinned in satisfaction at the sounds of discomfort from what was probably a pile-up. Rufus peered up at him and said things that were probably rude in nature.

Spike gave the mole rat an irritated look. "Oh, come off it. What was I 'sposed to do, ask the stubborn lot of them to back up all nice and neat?" Spike received a voltric helping of angry noise that was spoken too fast for him to entirely understand, but he knew defensive insults when he heard them. "Back off, ya little-wait, I can see getting all riled up 'bout your 'pets', but what you getting concerned about the others for?"

Rufus decided to articulate how he felt he had a duty of sorts to help the Keybearer, his glee at knowing another being that understood him as easily as Ron did or that he found Calvin amusing. He added a bit about Abel.

"Nightroad gave you a nacho cheese dispenser? 'Spose that qualifies as a clerical favor-"

"SPIKE!" The mob roared, having unexpectedly snuck up on the two of them.

Spike whirled around, not bothering to face any specific member: as far as he was concerned, it was just another faceless mass.

"Oh, it's just Spike," One person said disinterestedly.

"'Just Spike'?" Spike said indignantly. "Hate to sound like some trumped-up show person, but have you any idea who I am?!"

The crowd collectively shrugged. "One of the guys at Angel Investigations?" Bingo ventured.

"Hold on," an orange, winged female version of Bloo said slowly. "Doesn't the Guide say something about him being one of the worst serial killers across the worlds?"

Spike took a mocking half-bow. "There you go."

The crowd murmured. "Didn't he massacre an entire orphanage once?"

"Just once!" Spike said. He frowned. "Wait, I think." Rufus said something that came out to how slaughtering orphanages was the sort of thing you should remember.

"Didn't he torture people to death with railroad spikes?" Said Bonnie again, looking fearful.

Spike's eyes turned bright yellow as he assumed his 'game face'. "Why'd you think they call me _Spike_?" He asked with a malevolent grin that showed off his sharpened teeth, his eyes glowing slightly in the hallway. "Got a better ring that William the Bloody, don't you think?"The girl's eyes widened and she involuntarily recoiled, recalling all the tales she'd heard of Spike's legendary capacity for violence.

Spike then realized that it was vital that the mob be moved away before someone pieced it together. Rufus saw the sudden gleeful grin Spike gave, realized as the vampire hit on a solution. "Uh oh."

Moving with supernatural speed that reduced him to a blur, Spike violently thrust his boot directly into someone's stomach. It wasn't much of a kick, but it still knocked the unlucky victim into the air, flailing away into some of the others.

Spike immediately started running, fully aware that the mob was now chasing after him, howling for revenge.

------

Having already extricated themselves from their brief pile-up, the party stood against the wall in one manner or another, waiting impatiently for the sound of footsteps to fade. Hobbes braced himself against the wall, a nervous growl passing through his teeth every now and then, his bared claws gouging dents into the stone. Calvin strategically hid behind a wall, partly to hit the mob with something destructive if they came through but also so that if they did come through, he wouldn't be in any immediate danger. The corner of Abel's jacket had been caught on the door when Spike slammed it and he was busily crouched against it, working it free. Kim was bent low to the ground, her ear near to the door, a serious look on her face as she listened for the footsteps to fade away to a dull roar. Ron slumped against the wall, his face tense as he worried for his small pink friend. Zim, losing interest in the whole thing, walked off from the others, taking a brief look around the room.

It was a spacious and elaborately decorated circular room, the ground was laden with interlocking square tiles colored a light yellow color that reflected the light pleasingly and three levels to it: the ground floor they were at and two upper stories in the form of the circular balconies lining the room in rings, accessible by a winding staircase just to the left of the lone doorway. The balconies themselves were made of the same substance as the floor, with large floral-style guardrails and supported by many large stone Greco-Roman style pillars going through the floor all the way to the ceiling, as finely polished everything else in the room.

In fact, Zim noted with some appreciation, the whole room was elaborately decorated, like the rest of the house, but with more of a feel for what Almighty Tallest Purple called Post-Utilitarianism or what he himself called 'pretty for the sake of pretty'. The ceiling, a beautiful stained glass dome surrounded by the pillars around them, was a prime example of this: it appeared to be a take on the Sistine Chapel's famous dome ceiling, decorated with images of imaginary friends, humans and the various other species they'd seen in Traverse Town so far, and quite a few he hadn't seen before. He recognized a few species here and there, but most of the creatures there were completely alien to him. At the center of the painting was a relatively small disc that supported the chain holding up the obligatory oversized Gothic chandiler.

It looked a lot like a ballroom to Zim before he thought that it might have had a less obvious military application: it was easily the most defensible room he'd seen yet. The balconies seemed to be arranged in such a way that long-range fighters could hide in the depths while picking off the enemy at their leisure, ducking behind the pillars to escape return fire. There was only one way in or out, excluding any potential secret entryways he wasn't aware of yet. The floor was wide open, making it perfect for a melee or to gather the enemy together and wipe them out in one fell swoop. The chandelier looked like it could handle that part quite nicely. And there was the way everything looked built not merely to last, but to withstand tremendous damage.

Making sure that the people behind him were occupied, Zim activated his communications device; his Pak morphed slightly, producing a long beige limb similar to one of his spiderlegs, only ending in a small magenta ball. The limb extended down, the ball stopped just in front of Zim's face. The ball split apart into four equal halves, long metal rods extending and keeping them connected; they spread out until the empty square was about the size of a large computer monitor, the ball pieces forming the corners.

The empty square flashed blue; a blue-tinted screen appeared, though what it displayed was impossible to tell under all the static.

"Minimoose!" Zim proclaimed. "Minimoose, come in! Minimoose!"

The screen cleared; Minimoose appeared on-screen, squeaking a greeting as he saw Zim, a thin rod extending from his back, leading up to the communication screen he was speaking to Zim on.

"Ah, good!" Zim tried to keep his relief that something was finally working hidden from Minimoose. "Give me a status report, Minimoose!"

"Squeak!" Minimoose quickly described his situation to Zim; Coco was giving him a tour of the district and explaining to him a number of interesting details. Zim stopped him before he could go into detail on anything.

"Listen closely." Minimoose assured with an affirmative _squeak!_. Zim quickly outlined his current situation to him: he was currently within the bowels of Foster's, evading the attention of a mob while traveling with six others, two of which claimed to be responsible for helping him find Dib and Gir. Realzing that Minimoose wasn't at all up-to-date on anything, he then informed him of his meeting with Calvin and Hobbes and how they were to supply him with a mode of transportation. He detailed his plan to Minimoose: search the surronding worlds for Gaz, Dib and Gir, followed by settling on this world permanently and taking things from there.

"Squeak?" Minimoose wanted to know what Zim wanted him to do.

Zim paused a moment before answering. He still wasn't entirely comfortable with Minimoose forming a relationship, but he still knew what the safest thing to do was for his _other _sidekick. "I want you to remain in this town, Minimoose, while I am gone. Establish allies, keep an eye out for any familiar faces and make yourself comfortable. That is your mission: adjust to things in town and compile data archives that may be useful to us! Apart from that, do as your better judgement suggests."

Minimoose looked surprised momentarily. He squeaked again: Zim was fully aware of the uneasy and slightly disappointed tone in it, but he pretended not to notice. Going into the worlds was dangerous enough for just him; he wanted Minimoose to stay safe among friendly people, not in danger with him. "Squeak?"

"Don't worry, Minimoose," Zim said confidently, doing his best not to let on his worry. "I'll bring Gir back, as safe and unsound as ever!"

"Squeak!" Minimoose squeaked again, clearly relieved.

"One more thing, my loyal sidekick!"

"Squeak?"

"I will contact you again tomorrow. I know not if I'll be able to contact you tonight or even where I shall be staying. In the meantime, do not worry about me. Tend to your mission!"

"Squeak!"

"Good! Zim out!" The communication screen went blank again and folded away into his Pak, the biomechanical device shifting back into it's default configuration.

Zim felt better, now that he knew that Minimoose was doing fine and doing something productive as well as enjoying himself. He vowed to advise him in the matter of appropiate mates, however; he found himself eager to investigate Coco further and decide whether or not she was an appropiate partner for Minimoose.

He then wondered how to get out this current situation. He had already decided what to do; once the threat of the mob was gone, he and his part of the group would depart for a floor more likely to have available rooms, after questioning the others here. He felt inexplicably reluctant to break the group up, which he put down to a need for solidarity from the shock of the world's disappearance finally hitting him. Until then, he decided to investigate the room he was in further.

Back at the door, Hobbes let out a breath in a loud _whoof_ and stood up, stretching himself. "Ease up, they're gone."

Abel looked up at him for a moment. "At least that's over, then." He jerked away from the door, his jacket free at last. He stood up, dusting himself off and walked away, trying and failing not to look embarrassed.

"Are you sure?" Morte asked dubiously. "This Spike guy, he reliable?"

"Spike, reliable?" Kim said, laughing suddenly. "Is the sun cold? Is the ocean wet? Is Ron normal?"

Morte rolled his eyes completely up into his head once, an action that Kim took to imply a blink. "Take that as a 'no', then."

"Buuut," Ron said importantly. "He's really good at art-of-distraction! If it was Rufus' idea to get him away, then that mob ain't coming back!"

"If you say so," Calvin said doubtfully. He turned around, looking for Zim. He didn't see the Irken anywhere, and figured he'd probably gone looking around the room. "Come on, Hobbes. We need to confer with the Keybearer." He got no response; irked, he turned around, not seeing the tiger in sight. "Hobbes? Hobbes? Come on, not now!"

Calvin leaned back against the pillar grumpily, crossing his arms. "I hate when he does this." He didn't notice Hobbes stealthily emerge from the shadows, tightly clinging to the pillar above him and silently approaching him, crawling downwards. He stopped, just a few inches from Calvin's spiky hair.

Abel nudged Kim. "He's good!" He said in a stage whisper.

Getting a sinking sensation, Calvin sharply looked up; seeing the minute signs of this, Hobbes agilely rolled sideways across the pillar before he could see him. Frowning again, Calvin looked back down, unaware of Hobbes quietly descending onto the ground just to his left. Getting the feeling that he was getting stalked again, Calvin looked to the left just as Hobbes jumped over his head and behind him, avoiding getting seen. Calvin then looked the other way, the tiger doing the same thing again. A few moments passed in this fashion as Calvin looked around for Hobbes, the tiger agilely moving around just out of his sight with a number of athletic feats.

Ron whistled. "He _is _good."

Calvin groaned, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. "What are you whistling at?" he said angrily.

Hobbes, standing to Calvin's side, leaned over the boy, his presence still unnoticed. "_BOO!_" He suddenly yelled in the boy's ear.

Calvin stumbled down out of sheer fright, screaming in terror while the tiger pointed at him and laughed. Realizing Hobbes' trick, he sat up, propping himself up with his hand and glared up at the tiger. "How do you do that!?"

"Shh," Hobbes said, bounding to a crouch just in front of him, gently flicking his forehead and knocking him back a few more paces. "Top secret."

Abel looked at them, shaking his head while smiling oddly. "_Brothers."_

Kim and Ron exchanged a mutual look, wondering exactly what Abel meant by that. Mulling it over momentarily, they both shrugged.

"Zim!" Hobbes called out. "Where are you?"

"Right behind you," Zim said from right behind Hobbes, hanging upside down in midair, suspended by the four spiderlike appendages clinging to the bottom of the second floor.

Hobbes jerked back a few steps, saving his dignity by not falling on the floor. Zim presented him with an amused grin.

Calvin walked over and gently kicked Hobbes in the side. "Now you know how it feels."

Hobbes rolled his eyes and stood back up.

"It's time we were leaving," Zim said abruptly, his spiderlegs retracting to his Pak and letting him drop to the floor.

"Leaving?" Abel repeated with some concern. "Why?"

"We have buisness to attend to tomorrow," Zim said, "And it's vitally important we find somewhere to stay as soon as possible."

"Oh," The priest said, looking unaccountably disappointed.

A thought occured to Zim. "Hold a moment. Do any of you know of the floors around here?"

Ron shook his head. "Sorry, none of us live here. Rufus knows the layout, though, and Spike knows it _really _well, so he'd probably be able to show you where to go?"

Zim mulled over it for a few moments. Morte summurized the situation for him. "So let me get this straight; we're going to have to wait around for your pet...whatever it is and that vampire with a rockabilly theme before we can do anything?"

"Pretty much," Abel said, trying to call attention away from Ron's uncharacteristically sharp look.

Zim gave it more thought. On the one hand, they could simply leave now and avoiding wasting time for Spike and Rufus to get back. But then they'd still be back at square one: lost in unfamiliar territory and clueless once more, with the added threat of that mob running into them again. On the other hand, they could stay here for them to get back. It would undoubtedly take a great deal of time he'd rather not lose, but then they'd have a nearly certain chance of getting to their destination with no more ill occurences.

The Irken decided that it really wasn't much of a choice. "We'll remain here for the duration," he said to Calvin and Hobbes.

The boy and tiger duo glanced at each other and shrugged. "Fine by us," Calvin said. Hobbes nodded in assent.

Zim looked at Morte sharply. "Do _you _have any objections?" He said this in the precise tone of voice used to imply that answering in the incorrect way would result in a large object being shoved up a very uncomfortable place.

Morte gave a half-bob that conveyed a motion somewhere between a shrug and a nod. "Hey, this is your show, Boss. I'm just here for the ride."

Zim smirked. "Don't forget that."

Calvin looked around the room. "Where are we, anyway? This looks like a place for practicing combat."

"Or a danceroom," Hobbes said pointedly.

"Psh!" Calvin said dismissively, sticking his hands in his pant's-pockets. "That's boring."

"Actually," Abel said. "It _is _a danceroom."

Calvin sagged. "Oh."

Abel looked around the room again with interest. "I like this room; I think it's the same one they had that one dance party at." He gave Kim and Ron a significant nod."It kind of reminds of the way they built things in the Vatican from my world. The ceiling's even like the Old Sistine Chapel."

Zim paused. Given some of Abel's remarks over the past hour, he suspected that he was far from an ordinary priest. Some of what he was saying was starting to sound vaguely familiar, too. But he was certain he'd never met Abel before; he was the kind of person that was impossible to forget.

Abel began to get lost in his own thoughts, remembering the soaring heights of the advanced Vatican City he had known before his world fell into the darkness almost fifty years ago. It's beautiful architecture, the deep belief he had that it was something that would last even through another of mankind's Armageddon.

Abel's mouth faintly turned downwards, his mind trenched in the bleak certainty that sooner or later, this last refuge of the lost would disappear as well. The refugee's lives would end as they lay dying in this world, cast far away from the homes they should've had by right. He considered how long this town had been here; Kim and Ron had actually grown up in the town since they were twelve, their old world only a vague memory for them. On the other hand, he'd wandered all over the worlds and stranger places before he came here a year and a half ago. And he considered Zim and those who had called his world home; they were surely newly acquainted with the terrible reality of the heart's darkness made manifest.

_All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass,_ Abel mused sadly._ Because the grass withers and the flower falls. _It wasn't right that it should be this way; dozens, hundreds, thousands maybe of worlds lost upon the tides of darkness, their inhabitants cast adrift among the cosmos, some few drifting through the dark to this world and others. Abel didn't know what was worse: that such a place as Traverse Town had to come to exist, or that their new friendships and bonds existed only because they'd lost almost everything dear to them.

"Is there a problem?" Abel heard from behind him; he turned his head to see Zim with a look that might well have been concern. Abel realized to his chagrin that some of what he was feeling must of shown up on his face, despite his best efforts to conceal it.

"It's nothing," the priest said quietly. "Just the past, that's all."

Zim got an overwhelming sense of age from the priest; he looked to be young, at most in his early twenties if even that, but the priest's demeanor suggested that he was older than that, far older than his somewhat random personality suggested.

Feeling sympathetic, Zim said, "Yeah, I know what that's like."

Abel smiled sadly. "You sound like someone who's experienced with this."

Zim shifted around. "More than once," he said quietly.

Abel looked surprised at the alien's admission momentarily. He half-closed his eyes, giving him a paternal look. "I'm sorry to hear that."

Zim shook his head dismissively, his mouth a firm line. "Never mind, it was a long time ago."

Abel gave Zim a long look. "But time isn't really the best medicine for emotional wounds."

Zim was startled; not just because of the profundity coming from Abel, but the words themselves. "Wait a minute...someone told me that before."

Abel looked puzzled; underneath the puzzlement, though, was a swell of excitement. "Really? When?"

"A few years ago. After some...unpleasantness, I left with my sidekicks to get some perspective. I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up in the American Southwest and-"

"Hold it!" Abel said. Zim was taken aback by this sudden outburst, thinking he'd done something offensive, then realized that Abel didn't sound upset but almost excited. "The American Southwest? A few years ago!? You must tell me, what world did you come from?"

"Eh..." Zim was confused. "Nicktown?"

"Nicktown...Nicktown...has an orange sky from orbit because of the defensive shell in the outermost atmosphere?"

"Yes," Zim said slowly, bewildered and unsure how Abel knew about that.

Abel slapped his face, laughing loudly. "I don't know why I didn't recognize you! I mean, you're not easy to forget, not that I'd want to! I have to say, you've improved some since then, but, you know, that's not to say that you were a bad person then! People change over time, it's stupid to expect you not to, so-"

"Wait!" Zim said, interrupting Abel's babbling. "We've met before? Impossible! I've never seen you before tonight!"

"Technically, that's true..." Abel untied his ponytail and wildly shook his head, causing his long hair to spill over his shoulders, down to his elbows. Abel adjusted his jacket so that it bunched up over his head, given the impression that he was wearing a cowl. Finally, he took the cloth he had used to tie his hair up and wrapped it over his eyes, giving the impression that he was wearing a blindfold. "Because we never exchanged our names."

Zim's jaw nearly dropped. He babbled a stream of alien-sounding words. An image came to mind: a tall priest wearing a full-body black robe secured with a number of straps, his flyaway white hair gleaming in the desert sunlight, his eyes covered by a thick black bandage and most of his face obscured by the shadows of the hood he wore. "You're that blind priest I met then!"

"Welll," Abel drawled, removing the blindfold, setting his jacket right and shaking his hair back before retying his hair back into a ponytail. "I was never blind...I just wanted to see what it was like to be blind."

The others had gotten wind of the conversation. Ron scooted right by them. "Hold it! Hooooold everything! Are you telling me that you two _know _each other!?"

"...Yes!" Zim snapped, rather irked. "Were you not listening!?"

"Yeah, but not very well?"

"Mind filling us in, Boss?" Morte inquired. "You and this goofball cleric, tromping 'round the desert all buddy-buddy? Doesn't click."

"Tell us, tell us, tell us!" Calvin whined.

"Come on!" Kim joined in.

Hobbes pointed at Kim. "What she said."

"Oh, fine!" Zim said resignedly, still pleased to have so many people's attention without first giving them reason to label him criminally insane. "It was a few years ago, like I said. After some...things I don't feel like telling you people about, I went off on a voyage of self-discovery across the North American continent."

"Like a pilgrimmage," Abel said.

Zim glanced back at Abel, wondering how he'd hit on the exact term he'd used for it. "Well, yes. At one point, I was separated from a band of elemental martial artists from another world I was traveling with and ran into Abel."

"Imagine!" Abel said brightly. "Five days we wandered together in the wilderness and we never bothered to find each other's name out! Of course, I can see how we didn't recognize each other: Zim wore a disguise in those days and I dressed differently, this during my wandering days, you understand." He smiled lopsidedly. "Back when I was in a transition of my own, much like Zim is now."

"Riiight," Zim said with an obvious note of dubiousness. "I remember getting lost and almost getting killed in a sandstorm. Abel saved me then, helped me escape from the desert heat and told me how to find a way out.. During our five day trek out, me and him spoke a great deal. It...gave me much to think about."

"And act upon, I hope." Abel said conscientiously, crossing his arms in such a way as to make his hands disappear into his sleeves.

"Yeah, that too," Zim said, wondering what Abel meant by that. It could have been the usual priestly advice, but knowing Abel, it could have been something else entirely. "I...suppose we became quite accustomed to each other. Then, on the fifth day, we reached the border and I saw the group I had been traveling with, looked aside and he had gone." Zim looked disgruntled. "I assumed that you felt you made your point and had made a dramatic getaway."

Abel looked embarrassed again. "Actually, when you weren't looking, I was hit by a runaway hover train that carried me some dozen miles away."

There was a short stunned silence.

"I'm very durable," Abel said, as if that explained anything.

Hobbes walked over to Zim, looking rather tense as he did. "Not that I'm casting any aspirations on your ability to discern things around you, but..." Hobbes suddenly leaned over Zim and bellowed, "_HOW DO YOU MISS A HOVER TRAIN RIGHT BEHIND YOU!?_"

Zim, a little windblown from the force of Hobbes' roar, shook his antennae and clothes back to normal. _How do I tell him I have notoriously poor powers of perceptions without looking a fool?_

_The answer: I do not!_ "None of your business, beast of fluff and questionable choice in partner!"

"That was a shot at me, wasn't it?" Calvin complained.

Ron gave the whole thing a moment's thought. "Then this worked out pretty well for you guys!"

"It did?" Zim asked, nonplussed.

"Yeah! Two long-lost semi-friends, seemingly seen the last of each other forever, suddenly thrust right back into each other's faces!"

"I wouldn't be that dramatic," Abel said sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck.

"And," Ron went on, waving his arms wide. "It just goes to show at the vast, vast, _vast..._complicated-thingy of the universe...multiverse...whatever it is that we exist in! It's almost like destiny or amazingly interesting coincidence that works out like narrative!"

"Wait," Zim said, hours of completely random philosophic musing on the nature of the universe coming to the forefront. "Is there really a difference?"

Ignoring him, Ron continued to rant. "It's just so _cool _that stuff like that happens, right out of the blue-"

Morte made a few grunts of effort, then gave up. "Look, would you just shut the hells up before you embarrass yourself again?"

Ron stopped. "Heeey, what's _that _supposed to mean?"

"You want a repeat of that whole 'I'm adopted' thing?" Morte asked.

Ron's compusure abrputly deflated and he sank to the floor, surrounded by his own little cloud of gloom while his tail wrapped tightly around him. "I rue the day misery started dogging my every step, hounding me wherever I went and hunting me down like a fox after a clockwork mice..."

Kim sidled over to him, saying comforting things in his ear and shooting Morte looks that would have made a sane person want to run very far away and hide somewhere for about sixteen years. Morte felt his job was done, fortunately, and merely floated in the air, watching Kim comfort Ron and steadily rouse him from his gloom, either due to an honest curiousity in interpersonal relationships or out of some prurient interest. Moments later, the tension went out of Ron's body and his legs and tail flopped down. Kim wrapped an arm around his side and stood up, pulling him to his feet.

"Feel better?" Kim asked, gently letting him go. Ron stumbled a bit, shrugging slightly. "I'll take that as a yes."

Ron smiled weakly.

"Well, isn't this nice?" an unfamiliar voice said from somewhere above them.

Zim looked up sharply. "Who's there?"

"Up here!" The voice said again, coming from the second story.

Abel frowned and moved to the center of the room; the others followed him quickly. Kim came over to Abel's right, Ron following her lead and standing behind her, his depression at Morte's obnoxiousness forgotten. Calvin walked to Abel's other side, trying to look serious while Hobbes took up a spot a little behind the rest. Zim, with Morte in tow, walked a little in front of Abel, glaring up defiantly.

All their gazes were directed at the second floor balcony at the opposite side of the room where, standing in the shadows, was an fairly pale human, evidently in his early thirties and of average height. He was fairly good looking, with pleasant boyish features, a slim athletic build and neatly styled brown hair, but his smile didn't reach his blue eyes: the look in those eyes belied his easy smile and seemed eerily reptilian, like a good-humored lizard. His clothes were a professional looking version of a Traverse Town business suit; he wore a bright red shirt under a buttoned-up black coat, seams around the sides and shoulders and large decorative cuffs around his wrists. He wore a prominent red tie, long black dress pants and a pair of seamless black loafers. His hands, encased in tough-looking red leather gloves, were deep in his pockets.

The human grinned personably. "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name."

"Who are you?" Zim asked, settling into a combat position. He didn't know why, but he disliked this human intensely, loathing everything about him from his neat suit to his almost obsessively groomed appearance to his insincere smile. And there was his statement just now; he recognized it as the first line from _Sympathy For The Devil._

The person chuckled. "You get right to the point. I like that." He raised his left hand out of a pocket; to their surprise, the hand was missing it's thumb. He was holding a small white card between his index and middle fingers. With exaggerated care, he raised it and threw it at them; the card flew faster then it should have, cutting a whistling path through the air. Abel snatched it out of the air, holding it in the same manner that the stranger had. He brought his hand down and everyone turned to see it, without actually leaving their positions.

"My business card," the human said by way of explanation.

Abel looked at it quizzically. "This card is blank."

Hobbes frowned, thinking that there was something not quite right about the situation. He was sure that no matter what, he would have heard anyone come in and he hadn't, yet he hadn't been aware of this guy's entrance until he showed up just now.

"Try the other side." The guy suggested, twirling his thumbless hand around in a circle.

Abel did as he advised, revealing more white marred by two small words in black ink. "Mr. Lyle?" Morte finally said.

"Now that we're on equal terms," Mr. Lyle said and jumped out of the shadows, moving so fast he was nearly a blur, smashing into the ground in front of them with a loud crash. The dust quickly cleared, revealing him to be untouched by any of it. "Why don't we get to know each other a little better?"

Mr. Lyle walked to them, smiling the whole way. He brushed past Hobbes, brushing his left hand against the tiger's cheek. Hobbes' nostrils flared and he frowned, revolted at the overpowering smell of the cologne Mr. Lyle was wearing. Mr. Lyle just smiled and kept on walking, well aware of everyone turning to face his back.

He stopped, well away from them. He folded both his hands behind his back, his thumbless hand cradled in his whole right hand. "So!" He said brightly, turning to face them, still smiling. "This is a bit out of the way for you guys, isn't it?"

Abel frowned, dropping the card. "Do you...know us?"

"Not personally, no," Mr. Lyle answered, giving a half-shrug. "I'm not friends with your friends, nor do I actually know any of you except peripherally. At best, I know some acquaintances of yours. Heck, I don't even live in this town like you guys."

Kim quirked an eyebrow. Mr. Lyle was polite and friendly enough (if anything, _too _friendly for a total stranger), but there was something about him that seemed wrong. "Then what _are _you doing here?"

"Buisiness." Mr. Lyle smiled, spreading his arms wide. "That's all."

Hobbes scowled faintly. "You'll have to forgive me for being blunt, but in my experience, people who talk about something being all buisness are very rarely interested in anyone else's good fortune."

Mr. Lyle shrugged. "Like they say, every rule has an exception, and I'm an ever-constant exemption." He looked pleased at this wordplay. "Besides, this house is neutral territory. There's no call for suspicion."

"You'll have to forgive us," Abel said, turning his hands out palms-up. "But this _is _rather suspicious."

Mr. Lyle smirked in a way that rubbed on Zim as being incredibly irritating. "Most things are, in the wrong light."

Hobbes growled softly. "Hobbes?" Calvin asked loudly. Hobbes ignored him, narrowing his eyes at Mr. Lyle. He slowly advanced upon him, his teeth bared slightly and his tail brushed pasts legs as he left the others, approaching Mr. Lyle, who moved half a step back as Hobbes kept coming, the tiger's tail now whipping around violently, his fingers flexing, his claws continually retracting and extruding. Hobbes suddenly stopped, his face a few inches away from the human's: he was so close to Mr. Lyle that the human could identify every varying shade on the tiger's mostly white muzzle.

Hobbes smelled him. It wasn't the protracted snuffling of a dog, but the more tentative nose-whiffs unique to cats. His whiskers briefly danced around the human's face, whose composure was being worn away by the second if his slightly twitchy hands and faint scowl were any indication. This went on for a few more tense moments before the tiger broke away, growling musingly for a moment. Hobbes frowned at the sudden look of brief disgust on Mr. Lyle's face before the man's usual insolent geniality reasserted itself. It was like watching a lid slide away from an old dish, revealing something moldy, rancid and crawling with insect life before someone hurredly pushed the lid back on. Hobbes paced away, his fur still fluffed out.

That look of disgust hadn't escaped the notice of the others, and it disturbed them. Kim, in particular, watched Hobbes skulk past her, noticing the tenseness in the tiger and felt taken aback. For the short time she'd known him, Hobbes had been almost alarmingly laid-back given the circumstances and had possessed enough cool that, if it was parceled out to the entire town, would be enough to make an entire population of Ron-imitators. The moodiness he was in seemed uncharacteristic to her, and she couldn't keep back a faint frown as Hobbes assumed his original position.

Ron looked at Mr. Lyle for a good long moment, taking in his good looks, his clearly well kept suit and his relentless smile and he concluded that this man was trouble. Chancing a whisper, he quietly said, "This guy is nothing but bad road." Kim narrowed her eyes at Mr. Lyle suspiciously; she'd learned to trust Ron's seemingly random hunches in events like these, because he'd never yet been wrong.

"Explain yourself," Zim said tensely, his eyes narrowing.

Mr. Lyle looked highly disconcerted for a minute, then he simply looked smug, but with a blatantly dark undertone. Without a word, Mr. Lyle brazenly walked right by Zim, pushing Morte aside and not noticing how Morte snapped at where his fingers had been. He stopped in front of Abel and leaned very slightly to the left, disappearing with a _whoosh_ing sound.

They heard a sigh, reminding them of a teacher dealing with particularly annoying toddlers. "Too bad for you guys. You really have no conception of what's going on, do you?" They followed the sound of his voice, seeing him standing to their left, but in an odd way; he was somehow standing on the underside of the second-story balcony, just next to the party. What made it really strange was the way his clothes were blatantly denying gravity; not single hair was out of place and his coat was falling down towards the ceiling, making them feel like they were the ones that were defying gravity.

"How are you doing that?" Calvin asked, feeling more suspicious by the second.

"Wouldn't you like to know." Mr. Lyle said, smirking cruelly. "You know, you're kind of paranoid."

Calvin snorted. "What do you know?"

Mr. Lyle smirked. His thumbless hand, the same one he had raised in a 'ah ah ah' gesture now moved in to a slowly moving forward crook, the index finger loosely pointing. "Interesting detail. I know everythingabout you people, you overrated pyromaniac. _Everything._"

Kim bristled, not liking where this was going. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Mr. Lyle smirked and pointed at her. "You tell me, Subject zero-five-three-five." Kim jerked, her mouth slightly agape as she took a step back, staring up at the human with incredulous shock. Clearly alarmed, Ron stepped next to her, supporting her from the side and glaring disbelievingly at Mr. Lyle, who found his stare incredibly unnerving.

"How...how do you know that?" Kim said, her eye narrowed angrily.

Mr. Lyle didn't answer her. "They say the thing that really makes a person what they are is their scars. Extensive psychological research worlds-wide have indicated that the most powerful experience a person can undergo is the kind that scars them for life." His smile tighted slightly, becoming a dark expression of bitterness and sadism. "I hear you're always going on about how you can do anything, that nothing is impossible for you. So tell me, have you moved on beyond the memories of your cell in the fortress of gray nothingness? Have you really forgotten what happened there? What you saw there? What was _done _to you there? And who did it?"

"Stop it right now!" Ron snarled, his eyes flashing ice blue for a moment. Kim bit her lip softly, not looking at Mr. Lyle or answering his accusations.

"_Some-_one's a little bit sensitive," Mr. Lyle said, grinning wickedly. "What's the matter, don't want Kimmie's dirty little secret getting out?"

"I'm warning you..." Ron said dangerously as the blue glow intensified, his tail lashing around. Kim leaning into him, a disturbed look on her face as she scowled at Mr. Lyle.

"Oh, you're _warning _me?" Mr. Lyle mocked. "If I know you, and I do, you're not much good at protecting the people close to you, are you? You can help all the faceless masses you want, put your life on the line for them even if they can't remember your damn _name_, but that doesn't mean anything if you couldn't save the ones that were actually related to you." Mr. Lyle paused thoughtfully. "Or maybe you wouldn'tsave them. Not exactly close to your family, now were you? Hmm, your little sister, though...I guess she's important to you."

Ron stared at Mr. Lyle, his look of rage vanishing behind an expression of pure incredulity, as if he couldn't believe what Mr. Lyle was saying.

"But!" Mr. Lyle held a finger up. "It's not like you did the stupid thing and got yourself killed over a father that was too wishy-washy to pay attention to you and a mother that just didn't care. Not when the alternative was getting torn apart by Cain Nightroad, alright." Zim recognized the surname and look aside, seeing Ron's and Abel's eyes widening at the name Abel's eyes narrowing in purest loathing. "Yeah, Abel's crazy brother didn't just kill what the Heartless left of your family, he _slaughtered _them. Ripped them apart like limp little ragdolls-"

"Stop it!" Kim said sharply, her eyes flashing dangerously.

Mr. Lyle went on, ignoring her. "He completely tore them apart before he took your little sister away before you tried to do something about it." He smirked. "Heh, not many can say they've gone _amano-a-mano _with Cain Nightroad and only got every single bone in their body broken three times for it, but you just set records everywhere you go, kid! Couldn't save your sister, but hey, who cares?"

Zim's eyes narrowed at this flagrant display of callousness. "Be quiet!" Zim yelled, the Keyblade flashing into his hand. Ron's attention snapped to Zim, as did Kim's, and they both regarded him gratefully for speaking in their defense, their opinion of him rapidly shooting up. Abel's attention remained focused on Mr. Lyle, his eyes narrowed in hateful fury, a thin red dot at the center of his eyes.

"Reee-lax," Mr. Lyle said, quite unconcerned. "You'll get your turn." He smirked at Abel. "You know, there might be something to that whole 'good and evil' twin thing after all. I mean, Cain _is _your fraternal twin, right? And you really hate him. Hate hate hate hate. Can't blame you, though; he's the reason you two are damned to play out the story of the two you were named after forever. Cain and Abel. The first murderer and his victim, brothers destined to hate each other forever. Okay, maybe it's just you doing the hating. Who knows what goes through Cain's head?"

"I wouldn't expect you to understand what goes through my brother's mind," Abel said tightly, longing to let the darkness out, to tear Mr. Lyle off the wall and smash him down, to let the black daggers of his hand grow out and plunge them into this disgusting man's body and _twist, _twist until he screamed like a stuck pig.

"You know, you really are a pair of brothers," Mr. Lyle said. "One of you a being of destruction, the other a model priest But you know something, _Father_? Cain's not entirely to blame for his acts of destruction before he saw fit to kill your precious Lilith and make you and little sister Seth shove him out an airlock. I mean, your chosen nickname says it all, doesn't it? 'Angel of Darkness'. Let's not forget that it's Cain's real form that looks like the angel; white wings and glowing with light, the whole feel-good thing. But the way _you _look...it's almost..." Mr. Lyle paused, savoring the words. "Like a _fallen _angel. Fiendish, really. But then again, let's not forget something, you glorified alter boy." Mr. Lyle shook his head knowingly. "Once upon a time, you were a monster, too"

Abel stared at Mr. Lyle mutely, his eyes emitting a red radiance and the rage on his face doing nothing to contradict Mr. Lyle's statement.

Hobbes snarled ferociously. "Enough already!" He bellowed. "What sick game are you playing!?"

Mr. Lyle ignored him, looking at Calvin. "What about you? Does your little trauma keep you up at night? Mind if I tell?"

Calvin looked slightly bored at the prospect. "Go ahead," he said, trying to sound indifferent. "Everyone from back home knows that whole sordid story. What's a few more details?"

"So, we got us a tough guy!" Mr. Lyle said with a humorless chuckle. "Okay, I can go with that. Or maybe you really don't care about anyone but yourself. Maybe anything that happens to anyone else doesn't bother you at all?"

"That's a lie," Calvin said. "I care about Hobbes! I care about a lot of things!"

"Really?" Mr. Lyle smirked again. "Then why no detail? You're the guy that makes all _kinds _of lists. So why can't you make a list of the things you care about?" Calvin said nothing, glaring at Mr. Lyle furiously.

Mr. Lyle raised an eyebrow. "What about your friend and..." He paused for a moment, looking like he was chewing on something unpleasant. "'Brother'?"

"What about me?" Hobbes challenged, wondering what Mr. Lyle knew about him.

Mr. Lyle smirked again. "Oh, not much, just a little cross-culture trivia. It's interesting, really. Not many people in this town would, if they had the idiocy to go back to their people again, would be branded race traitors."

Hobbes' fur stood on end and his ears flattened back. He gulped, unable to stop his shaking hands or his violently thrashing tail. "How do you know about that!?" He demanded, his fists balling up. "No one outside the Kotirrim Nation knows about that!"

"Simple," Mr. Lyle said. "But the details of how _I _know are none of your business."

"Where you get the temerity to call me a race traitor-" Hobbes started to sharply retort before Mr. Lyle cut him off.

"Easy; it's what you are." Mr. Lyle cast a knowing glance at the others. "See, Hobbes' people, the Striped People of the Kotirrim Nation, have a strict policy about not messing around with, well, everyone else. They'd consider you, a cat of their own flesh and blood, one who willingly went into a family of humans and thought of their child as his own litterbrother, one who regularly employs his people's martial secrets for them, as nothing more than the scum you scrape off your claws. So go ahead and lie. Tell everybody that when you tried to reconcile with your clan, they didn't brand you as a pariah and outcast, they didn't exile you from your homeland forever. Or maybe it still stings."

Hobbes said nothing, looking down at the ground, his face fixed in a frustrated grimace.

"Is this a thing people like you do?" Morte said loudly. "Or is it just a bit of free-spirited sadism?"

"Ah, Morte Rictusgrin." Mr. Lyle looked askance at the skull. "You are inconsequential. I'd tell you to go to Hell, but you've been there, done that, had your flesh rot away until only the bone was left. Have you told them about the Nine Hells of Baator? Have you told them about that giant tower of rotting living heads, each one a liar, cheat or sage who told a lie that got someone dead? Have you told them why you _stink _of the realm of the devils?"

"_That,_" Zim snarled, his thin string of patience frayed to a single frail thread. "is _enough_!"

Mr. Lyle turned to him, almost speculatively. "And now, lest you feel left out, I come to you. Zim...no, _Invader _Zim." Zim raised an eyeridge at mention of the now defunct rank. "You used to be famous. Or should I say infamous? Infamous because you were the biggest disaster Irk ever knew. From day one, you were nothing but trouble; taking out the power to your entire planet into darkness because you weren't smart enough to figure out what was going on!" He shook his head sadly, then turned to the others. "See, ol' Zim's culture has a habit of attaching biomechanical devices to the newborn infants as a means of fullfilling a long-lost biological need." The others found their attention wandering to the device on Zim's back, wondering if that was the thing Mr. Lyle was referring to. "But sometimes, the data is corrupted and as the Irken grows, you get the kind of Irken that Zim is: a Defective. An Irken that wasn't ever supposed to exist, and one that shouldn't even exist at all." He raised an eyebrow. "In your case, it blew your normal personality traits out of proportion, making you into a self-centered narcisstic megalomaniac."

Zim said nothing, mutely staring at this appalling specimen of how twisted a human could be. He'd mulled over ideas much like this before, during his darker days, but to think of this human speaking them so blandly, to people he wasn't even sure he could trust yet, was a profoundly disquieting one.

Surprisingly, the others came to his defense. "What makes you think you have the right to say things like that?!" Ron demanded hotly, his eyes blazing with blue-white light for a moment.

"'Defective'?" Kim said dismissively, glaring at Mr. Lyle, who seemed less certain then he did before. "What is that supposed to mean, anyway? It's just another word people like you use to justify what you do. If there's any such thing as a defective person, it's people like you!" Zim knew perfectly well that what Mr. Lyle said was technically correct, but he didn't bother to inform her of that fact.

Hobbes' hunched posture, wild eyes and loud growl said everything about his feeling about this matter, in a way that mere words couldn't suffice for what he, and everyone, felt.

"You know," Calvin said, pointing at Mr. Lyle, the air heating around his finger. "If there's one thing I really hate, it's people like you. Always using excuses for everything they do, using everyone like they have a right to do say, always causing pain and misery wherever they go because they think that no one can do anything about it." His eyes flashed. "Y'wanna test that?"

"Stop _now, _Mr. Lyle," Abel said warningly, his face twisting in an uncertain but very definite way. It was like something was pulling his facial features outwards. "Or you will _know _what wrath really means." His jacket flapped back suddenly; a single black feather drifted out from under, dissolving into mist as it hit the floor.

Mr Lyle mockingly replied, "Touchy bunch, aren't you? You'd think you were _ashamed _of what happened." As he said this, Ron and Calvin exchanged an annoyed look. "But I believe I've made my point."

"And what point is that?" Kim said, her eyes glaring.

Mr. Lyle smirked. "There's this old story about the Keyblade...it says the Keybearer is destined to attract others who are tormented. Like iron to a lodestone, but instead of metal, people just like him...in one fashion or another."

"You could have just said that when you got here," Morte said icily.

"True, I could have." Mr. Lyle shrugged. "But where's the fun in that?"

"I see..." Calvin said quietly. "And that was the point of this? Telling things that don't need to be told, just to prove this pointless theory?" He unslung his hammer, pointing it at the human. "And because of everything you said, had _no _right to ever say, all to get to this point...what makes you think you're going to get out of here without a trip to the emergency ward, huh?"

Mr. Lyle closed his eyes; he blurred once more, reappearing some distance from them on the ground floor, his back turned to them. "You guys can complain all you want, but the thing is, you're shout-and-pouters. You won't do anything about me." He regarded them with a slight turn of the eyes. "Abel's the only one of you who's got the guts to take out his problems on the guy responsible. Like, I don't see Possible hunting down the doctor, or Hobbes proving his worth to his people like the old traditions say. Heck, I can't even see Stoppable having the guts to kill Cain. Sure, he'd be wiped out in an instant, but a little solidarity might be nice is all I'm saying."

Ron rolled his eyes at him."What would you know about solidarity?"

Mr. Lyle raised an eyebrow. "Not that it's any of your business, but it's a fool's game. One that morons like you go for." Ron gave him a look that suggested that he personally though Mr. Lyle to be a complete idiot.

"You aren't in the best place to be making insults," Zim reminded Mr. Lyle, pointing the Keyblade at him. The air in front of him flickered slightly.

"Oh, I know!" Mr. Lyle said brightly. "Fortunately for me and _un_fortunately for you guys, I have no interest in getting this taken out on me. See, I wasn't sure how you'd react. I was wondering what would happen if I did, and I gotta say, you've surprised me, at least a little. But, that's not the real point. Y'see, _this _is the real point." He snapped his fingers: the card Hobbes had tossed aside stirred, flapping around and landing back on the ground, the name on it standing out.

The edges of the name 'Mr. Lyle' shifted; thin hairlines of ink spread out to the edges, disappearing from sight as they spread out over the unseen side. The ink changed in depth, turning from black marks to a deeper darkness, various other hues mixed into it, like the card was a seal covering the entrance to a realm of malignancy, and one that was breaking. The hairlines widened, spreading across the cards surface, though the name on it remained intact: it was clear from the way they spread that they weren't overtaking the white of the card, but that the card itself was changing substance somehow, the darkness it was radiating spreading away from it's surface and spilling onto the ground around it, the card a raised rectangle on the center of a three foot wide puddle.

The darkness thickened and the name on the card finally disappeared from sight. A wild, black-purple tangle shot away from the card, whirling over their heads and landing on a pillar, creating a similar pool like the one it had come from. Another tangle spread away to the ceiling, making a comparatively minuscule pool, as did at least three others, seemingly vanishing in the shadows. More such tangles spun away from the pool, landing at completely random areas in the room, one after another until about twenty such pools that they could see were spread around the room.

The pool they were positioned around stirred. A number of sharp points broke the surface, rising up, their metal surface shining as the darkness swirled away from them, revealing a metal claw-hand. Another hand broke the surface near the other side of the pool, rising out as an arm appeared under them. They braced against the ground, pushing against the ground and pulling it away from the pool, showing the darkness shrouded form of a Soldier. It shook the darkness off, leaping over their heads and dancing into the shadows. Behind it, the pool dissolved, leaving no trace of the card or pool. Around them, Heartless were coming out of the pools everywhere: generally Air Soldiers, Soldiers with a few Red Nocturnes here and there, many of the pools becoming several Shadows. Strangely, all of them seemed reluctant to fight and jumped into the shadows.

Mr. Lyle smirked, a blue-black aura engulfing his form. "And now, what will you do, what _will _you do? Run away from my dark friends, or fight a battle you'll probably lose?" He laughed loudly. "That's the problem with people like you. I don't have to deal with questions like 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'. See, if you run away, you'll be leaving all the people here at the mercy of the Heartless. And if you fight them, you'll all die and be reborn as Heartless." He faded away from sight, his voice still echoing from around them. "_Have fun!_"

The Heartless around looked at them and slowly started to move at them; the ones at the ground stayed where they were while the ones above them crawled down the pillars, flew down or simply jumped to their level. There was about thirty or so in the room, but more still could portal into the room.

However, there was a further concern on Abel's mind. "How could he even summon them here? Foster's is protected from the Heartless!"

"I dunno," Ron said, eying the Heartless, his mind already drifting away from what Mr. Lyle had said and focusing at the problem at hand. "Maybe he figured out how to get past it?"

"I hate not knowing what's going on," Calvin whined. "I have no idea what any of you guys are talking about?"

"Okay," Morte said brightly. "Bunch of freakish shadow monsters all around! How's this for a battle plan; You guys take the fifteen crawling down from the ceiling, my guys can take the fifteen right around us and I'll handle whatever's left."

Zim suddenly broke into excited laughter, twirling the Keyblade in a few circles before balancing it behind his head, his free hand resting near the prongs. "Now _this _looks like fun!"He grinned maniacally, clearly looking forward to the coming fight.

Morte looked at Abel appraisingly. "Are all you guys this nuts?"

Abel shrugged. "Pretty much, yeah."

Hobbes heard a shuffling noise from above; he sharply turned to the left as over half a dozen small pairs of glowing yellows eyes appeared in the unnaturally thick shadows near him. He quickly hopped back three times, each small jump carrying him five feet, coasting on the ground on the last jump, his claws scoring marks in the tile floor.

Morte hovered by Zim nervously. "So, uh, want do you want me to do, Boss? Don't know if I'll be any good against things like this."

Abel came up to him. "Relax, I have a plan!"

"Oh, goodie." Morte said blandly, doubting that Abel could do anything effectively.

Abel suddenly unstrapped the buckles binding the cross to his back with amazing speed; most of it's support gone, the cross leaned back ominously, taking most of Abel's considerable strength to keep himself from falling over. With sudden lightning-fast celerity, Abel opened the remainder of the buckles, causing the straps to slip out through the tiny slits in his jacket, fanning out over the mummified cross before retracting into the folds of the wrapping. The cross started to fall off his back before Abel swiftly caught it with one arm, nestling it in the crook of his arm.

Abel dropped it. A dustcloud blasted around Abel, completely concealing him from sight. When the dust cleared, it was evident that the ground under it had shattered and cracked, no less then if he had dropped a wrecking ball there.

Calvin's jaw dropped. "How heavy is that thing?!"

"_Really _heavy," Abel said evasively. The wrappings around the top section slithered into a loose bundle, revealed an incredibly complicated system of arcane-looking metalwork. Abel placed his hands into two exposed, pushing them aside and revealing an impossibly deep dark space. He gestured at Morte. "If you would..."

Morte's jaw dropped to the ground. He took a moment to snap it back on before turning to Abel and saying in his driest tone possible, "You _can't _be serious."

"Can and am!" Abel said hurriedly, grabbing Morte and shoving him into the open hole; as he did, Morte's loud yells suddenly became echoing and distant. Abel quickly closed it, shutting it with a loud slamming noise. He then pulled at some other grooves, moved a few panels and pushed some disguised buttons, causing two corresponding slats to slid out of the sides of the top section, a number of odd-looking weapons resting on them. Abel quickly chose two slightly oversized white handguns with glowing energy capsules for ammunition, attached their holsters to his belt, and upon a few moments thought, grabbed two odd swords encased in sheaths that he quickly strapped to the the sides of his jacket: they appeared to be either socket bayonets designed for personal combat or oversized straight razors.

Closer inspection would reveal that they were closer to the former: they had thick rounded black handles, some form of Aramaic or Latin inscribed around them in gold lettering, a thick piece of crooked metal connecting to the thick single-edged blades some four feet long and four inches wide, mostly straight except for the angled tips at their ends.

Abel gently set the cross aside; as he did, the cross' shadow moved, encircling the T-shaped artifact at it's base, swirling hypnotically. The cross silently sank into the ground, disappearing from sight as the shadows writhed around it.

There was a brief moment of stunned silence. "That was incredibly strange," Zim stated, speaking everyone's mind on the subject.

Sensing their lapse in focus, the Heartless moved faster, dropping down with alarming suddenness, staying in the gaps between the pillars, staring at them with an alien intent that was more terrifying than any demonic roar could have been.

Everyone tensed, loosening up slightly when the Heartless made no move, simply remaining where they were.

"Why aren't they attacking?" Calvin wondering, strapping on his Blizzard Bracer and unslinging his hammer.

"I don't know," Kim confessed. "This is weird."

"It's like they're...waiting. For something." Abel said slowly, waiting for the slightest flicker of movement. As far as he could tell, the Heartless army consisted mostly of Air Soldiers and Soldier, Shadows falling just behind them and a smaller number of Red Nocturnes. He counted himself lucky that he saw none of the stronger kinds of Heartless, but this many at once could be a difficult matter.

"They might not react quick enough to stop us from making a getaway," Hobbes said, his mind marking off tactical ideas.

"_You _run away," Zim said with a grin, "If you're scared."

"Oh, no, I'm not scared. I'm only facing down a small army of monsters spawned from the very essence of darkness that want to eat my heart. What's to be scared of?"

"Is this that 'sarcasm' thing you people do?" Zim asked. He'd always had trouble with that sort of thing.

"Yeah," Hobbes said drily. "Yeah, that's that sarcasm thing we do."

"We can't run!" Kim said in response to Hobbes' earlier statement. "We'd leave all these Heartless running loose." Her fists tightened. "We'd be putting the people here in danger."

"I know it's not an option, _mignonette._" Kim tried not to blush or anything embarrasing in reaction to the term, which she understood to be French slang for a pretty girl, much like 'darling' or 'miss'. She wondered why Hobbes was calling her that and simply took it as a term of affection. She then thought that was odd in itself, as they barely knew each other, then thought she might be overanalyzing again. Hobbes continued talking, well aware of her feelings but choosing to say nothing. "But a knight should always examine every aspect of a battlefield before acting. These guy's refusal to act yet could be a sign of something."

Zim laughed. "So, you know the basics of war! That might make my job easier. All of you," he called out to the others. "Get ready."

Kim smirked. "I'd say I was born ready, but I'm not sure that I could have roundhoused an incarnation of darkness as a toddler."

Ron laughed. "Good call!" He almost lazily swung one of his arms out, the hand loosely cupped, a radiant blue light forming around it. The blue light grew stronger and longer, lengthening out past his knee, solidifying into the form of a finely crafted katana. The blade was about two and a half feet long, gleaming a translucent blue except for the beautifully forged single-edge on it. The katana was unusual in that it wasn't ornate at all; it was utilitarian in it's looks, giving it an artistic elegance from it's lack of unnecessary ornamentation. The square bit of metal between handle and blade was made of some form of brass, with no evident carving on it. The handle itself was black, with a grip that seemed molded for Ron's fingers, down to the brass on the pommel.

Ron grasped the Lotus Blade in both hands, holding it before him defensively. As this happened, a similar blue glow spread around his right shoulder, creating the form of a long squarish blue sheath for the katana. It was considerably more modern looking then the sword it was to carry, with a number of deep squarish grooves in it's sides, and had a large strap looping over his right shoulder.

Calvin whistled. "Neat trick. What do you do for an encore? Pull a tank out of your shoe?"

"Har har har," Ron said sarcastically.

Abel said nothing, watching the Heartless. At the summoning of the Lotus Blade, a wave of movement went through the Heartless army, but none of them attacked.

"Well," Calvin said, "Time to show you guys a professional at work." He threw his arms out, the arrays on his bracer and glove glowing blue-white and red-orange respectively; a brief burst of cold and flame flared up around him briefly, an electrical current flickering around him in it's wake from the energy of the two opposing elements. Frost formed around the ground around him, melting away as heat washed over it. His hair also stood on end, but no one noticed because it normally looked that way.

"'Professional'?" Kim and Ron questioned at the same time. They looked at each other. "You owe me a soda!" Kim said just as Ron opened his mouth.

"Come on!" Zim called out to the Heartless hordes, moving around restlessly, anxious to get started. "I thought you were supposed to fight me wherever I go! Why are you standing there!? Come on, I'm standing right here, clear as the Pak on my back! Come on and _FACE ME!_"

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Come on, you don't really expect them to-" The Heartless stirred again and Hobbes stopped talking. A Soldier suddenly broke ranks and charged, one of it's arms held back, claws glinting in the artificial light. "Oh, okay then."

Abel swung his right arm out, his gun pointing at it, and squeezed the trigger. There was a small discharging sound and a round burst of energy shot out from the barrel, crossing the room and burying itself into the Soldier's head, tearing through it like an anvil falling on an overipe watermelon. The headless Soldier stumbled, crashing into the ground and collapsing into thick black-blue smoke a moment later.

Evidentally emboldened by the example of the destroyed Soldier, the other Heartless abruptly rushed at the small group, separating into small troops as they did.

In what seemed like a shockingly short time, the ground floor was covered with Heartless, a large number of them rushing at the heroes. "_Scatter_!" Calvin called out, pulling a yellow grooved capsule out of one of his pockets, twisting the top of it and throwing it to the ground.

Everyone jumped out of the way just as a mass of Heartless slammed into the ground where they'd been standing. The Heartless struggled to get up, watching their would-be victims running off and tearing into their fellow Heartless. On the ground below the Heartless, the capsule glowed bright yellow, runic sigils glowing all over it's surface, a rapidly series of beeps sounding from it's vicinity.

A small dome of yellow-white energy blossomed out, swallowing the Heartless pile-up as it expanded in a spiralling burst, illuminating the room brightly. It quickly faded away, vanished from sight. At it's epicenter, where the capsule had been, there was a rounded burn mark and melted ground making a half-inch indentation in the ground. Of the Heartless that had been there, the only trace remaining was some fading wisps of smoke.

Calvin looked at his mess he'd made with pleasure and a trace of disappointment. "There goes my last Bomb-In-A-Can. Don't even know how I'm going to make more with the stuff I have on hand."

Across the room, ignoring Calvin's theatrics, Zim rapidly back-pedaled, suddenly sticking his Keyblade behind him, impaling a Shadow that was pouncing at him. Grinning excitedly, he jumped in the air as a Soldier dove at him from a balcony; he flipped in the air, narrowly avoiding it, landed a foot on it's head and jumped up into the air, kicking it to the ground. A moment later, a fireball streaked down from above and incinerated the Heartless. Zim laughed, his spiderlegs extended and holding him between two pillars.

Standing a comfortable and safe distance from Calvin, Hobbes scooted back a bit, standing in a near-crouch and claws extended, growling menacingly at the Heartless surronding him. A Soldier rushed at him, swinging it's claws; Hobbes swung his shield, the claws of his attacker bouncing off harmlessly. He ducked under it's follow-up overhead swung, thrusting his free hand directly into the Soldier's midsection, brutally ripping free a large hole as he pulled his hand out. The Soldier stumbled back, leaving Hobbes free to swipe his shield right under it's shoulder and under it's neck: the blow was so clean, the Soldier didn't even register it until it moved and the struck area toppled off, the rest of it disapating into smoke.

As a Soldier Heartless ambled in their direction, Kim looked at Ron, jerking her head over his shoulder; he hopped in the direction she indicated in a manner similar to Hobbes, with an odd grace he hadn't possessed before, spinning around to face her, grinning at her. Kim nodded, then whirled around to face the Soldier swinging a clawed hand at her, violently kicking it in the knee. As it stumbled, she jabbed two fingers into it's wrist, knocking it off-balance as it continued on and crashed into the ground behind her. It turned around jerkily, facing her just as she kicked it in the face, denting it's metal helmet and launching it at Ron; he roundhouse-kicked as it flew at him, knocking it to the ground. Ron quickly dashed forward and swung his sword through it; several large gashes appeared in it, some dark fluid gushing from it before it disintegrated.

Abel came to a stop, surronded by Heartless at all sides, two Red Nocturnes slowly coming to him. He twirled his guns, slammed them into their holsters, pulled his bayonets from their sheaths and brandished them in front of him in a single fluid movement. A Red Nocturne flew at him, fire flaring around it; Abel dashed forward fearlessly, swinging an overhead cut. The blade went right through the flames, cutting right through the Nocturne; the fire went out, darkness billowing out from beneath. Abel turned around to face the other, the darkness on his bayonet boiling away into sickly-looking mist. The Red Nocturne generated a ball of fire, whirling it around it's body before firing it at the priest. Abel agilely flipped out of the way, throwing the surprisingly aerodynamic bayonet at the Nocturne while still in the air. The bayonet impacted the Nocturne right between it's eyes and the Heartless dropped to the ground, exploding into smoke. Abel quickly retrieved his blade, twirling it around in his fingers, a calm and cool look on his face while his glasses flashed.

Zim took off at a run and shot a fireball off at a Soldier, unpleasantly surprised when a Red Nocturne redirected it back at him. He jumped backwards, covering more ground then he thought he should have been able to. Shaking off the thought, he jumped onto a Soldier and jumped off, bounding from Heartless to Heartless, his leaps taking him directly over the Red Nocturne. It slowly turned up at him, fire shimmering around it. Zim descended, the Red Nocturne throwing a fireball at him. He swung the Keyblade through the fireball, blowing it out and then jabbed his weapon into the Red Nocturne; he pushed his feet against the Heartless and twisted the weapon, bounding away as the Heartless imploded in a blast of darkness and fire.

He hit the ground fairly hard, unbalanced by the unexpected implosion. Zim quickly flipped back to his feet, knocking back a Shadow that came to close. Destroying it with a fireball, he looked around and noticed a Soldier coming at him, a number of Heartless surrounding it. Grinning madly, he broke into a run and jumped, landing his boot right into it's chest, knocking it down and sending it sliding while he stood on it. He was aware of the others staring at him in astonishment as he rode a flailing Soldier like a surfboard across the ballroom floor, going right into a group of Heartless: black mist quickly surrounded the area as he broke into a series of rapid slashes, jabs and thrusts, all while avoiding their various attacks with a series of flips, air rolls and other such tactics while still riding the Soldier.

He came out of the cloud, blasting a fireball to take care of any remaining Heartless; the recoil of the blast sped them up, straight at a pillar. Thinking fast, Zim jumped off the Soldier, letting it skid directly into the pillar in a blast of dark mist.

Zim took a quick look around and laughed loudly. "Bwahahahahaha! This is even more fun then it normally is!"

At the other side of the room, Calvin took a few tentative steps back as Shadows advanced upon him; he wasn't afraid, just curious to see how they'd react. They kept coming after him, using that odd half-hop they seemed to favor for movement. He raised his hand, quickly forming a fireball. He thrusted the hand at a Shadow, the fireball spiraling into a small red-orange beam, obliterating the Shadow.

He confidently blew the smoke from his palm, pausing when he noticed some more Shadows materialize from the ground. "More keep coming, no matter how many I kill! I swear, it's like I'm stuck in some RPG or something! And not even the main character!"

Grumbling inaudibly to himself, he touched the alchemist circle at the front of his bracer; blue-white light shone from the various circles on it, the air around him looking curiously heavy. He slammed his hand onto the ground just as the Shadows pounced. White mist billowed around him, hiding him from sight. It congealed into large icicles nearly twice his height, spearing the inattentive Heartless. The mist clearly, showing a ring of the icicle around a hollow area, where Calvin had been stand. The icicles glowed blue-white again, dissolving into mist under Calvin's feet and bearing him into the air, suddenly reforming into a rather craggy pillar of ice. It moved suddenly; Calvin collected ambient air moisture and froze it directly beneath him, causing an ice slide to appear beneath him, providing him a mode of transport similar enough to flight. From time to time, spikes would sprout to impale any flying Heartless that got too close for comfort, but overall, Calvin felt he'd hit upon a good battle plan.

Still keeping an eye on Calvin, Hobbes backflipped a few times, avoiding the fireballs flung at him by a Red Nocturne. His last flip carried him halfway up a pillar, where he clung tightly for a moment. He jumped off just as a fireball exploded at where he'd been resting and let the momentum carry him to the Nocturne, getting him close enough to smash his shield right through the Heartless, killing it in a single blow. He landed on an unaware Soldier, thrust his claws into it's shoulder in a handstand, spun around and smashed his feet into several other Soldiers around him, and flipped in the air, ripping his claws through it's head and dispatching it, landing on the ground smoothly. Seeing Calvin surrounded by enemies, he flung his shield, the discus cutting an arc around the boy and slice through several of the Heartless in question, flying back to him and caught with a quick movement.

Abel stood atop the second balcony, his weapons sheathed as he took a quick look at everyone's progress and concluded that the battle was going quite well. He heard a clicking sound behind him and swiftly turned around, drawing his bayonets and thrusting them into the neck of an Air Soldier that had been sneaking up on him. Around his blades, the Heartless' body began to boil and twist; he slashed out, tearing the Air Soldier apart in the process.

Abel frowned; the Heartless weren't usually this weak. Having another suspicion, he looked out and noticed that Heartless were warping in, but almost randomly. Normally, they attacked in waves of two or three, more showing up as all the nearby Heartless were defeated. Yet, the numbers he saw in the room outstripped what he normally saw. He frowned. Something suspicious was going on here.

"...And that's why everything the government says to you is nothing but a bucket of fiiiilthy _lies!_ Filthy like the thousands of horrible germs infesting the Earth fast food industry!" Zim said to Ron, their weapons temporarily stowed away as the two stood atop one of Calvin's ice slides, enjoying a temporary respite from the battle. Hobbes and Kim briefly stared up at the two of them, wondering when they'd got there and _what _they were doing there at all.

Zim started laughing madly. Ron joined in after a moment with a loud _"Booyahahahahahaha!_". Hobbes and Kim looked at each other, quirking an eyebrow at the same time. Ron said broke off his mad laugheter in order to write everything Zim said down on a notepad he'd apparently been carrying on the belt hidden under his jacket. He paused with a discontent frown, looking up at Zim. "Hey, don't diss the Tex-Mex, alright?"

Zim stared at Ron blankly, unaware that his lack of experience with Earth fast food was showing. "What is this...'tech-mech' you speak of? Is it some form of battle robot?"

"No!" Ron yelled, throwing his arms in the air and accidentally losing his notebook. "You don't know what it is? _You don't know what it is!?_ Oh, the...what are you again?"

"Irken." The notebook fell on his head and bounced off. "Ow!"

"Sorry." Ron resumed his rant. "Oh, the Irkenity of it all! That is how you say it, right? How can you not know the glory that is Tex-Mex?! What is Tex-Mex? _What is Tex-Mex?!_ It's only the greatest from of eating known to _mankind!"_

"It is?" Zim said with the air of someone who'd just been told that two plus two equaled eight hundred and sixty-nine, and had no frame of reference to disbelieve it.

Ron gasped. "You can't be serious! Oh, my loud green man, you don't know what real eating is until you have tasted the transplanted joy of Tex-Mex! Words can't describe what this manna truly _IS!_"

Zim could have sworn that that was _exactly _what Ron was doing. "It can't?"

"Of _course _it can't!" Ron yelled, flailing his arms around, either because he was having a sudden seizure or was trying to accentuate a point. "So how about it? You, me, some friends? We hit a place sometime?"

"Okay?" Zim said, completely confused and having absolutely no idea of what he'd just gotten himself into.

"Ah boo-_YAH!_" Ron yelled, making Zim accidentally jump off the ice slide. "You will not regret this! You know what? You will..." He paused a few moments, noticing Zim had disappeared. "Hey, where'd you go?" He looked down, noticing Zim dazedly staggering about on the floor below, not to mention a Zim-shaped impression in the ground. He winced. "Ouch."

Zim felt a sudden pain in his arm. Snapping out of it, he realized that a Soldier was attacking him. Wiping away the blood under his torn sleeve, he pulled the Keyblade off his Pak, jumped at it and violently struck at it, grinning malevolently as some more Soldiers portaled around him.

-------

"Persistent buggers, ain't they!" Spike yelled over the stampede of feet.

"Uh huh!" Rufus said back, tightly holding to Spike's collar, wishing that the vampire'd had bigger pockets or been a little warmer; Spike's clinically dead body produced no body heat, making him uncomfortably cold to the touch, at least to Rufus' sensitive skin and instinctive need to huddle up against another for comfort.

"WE HEARD THAT!" The mob yelled from behind them.

"Was banking on that!" Spike yelled back, pushing himself to run faster and silently cursing Zim as vehemently as possible; given that he'd been 'alive' for two-hundred plus years, most of them in the company of his grandsire, a vampire that was even more vicious and savage then him, he had quite a repretoire of insults to use.

He sharply turned a corner and ran off as the mob skidded to a stop, a large number of them crashing into each other and lying on the floor. Ignoring their moaning and groaning others, the remainder of the mob continued chasing Spike.

Spike grinned as he glanced back, pleased to have at least trimmed their numbers a little. Looking ahead, he kept running, noticing that this area of the house seemed slightly familiar.

He turned another corner, nearly running directly into what looked like a red pair of stilts; Spike dove inbetween them, rolling off the floor and bouncing off once. He sat up, realizing a small weight wasn't there. "Rufus? Damn it, that Zeppo's going to stake me if I lose you here. Where'd you get-"

The single friendliest voice he'd heard all day said, "I'm sorry, are you okay?"

Spike raised a hand in greeting, getting to his feet. "Oh, hullo, Wilt."

The red imaginary friend he was speaking to was an perfectly even ten feet tall, most of that height being in his long stiltlike legs, his small rounded body accounting for three feet of that, while his wide head, the three slightly curved growths on his cheeks and his eyestalks made two additional feet. His right arm was extremely long, drooping down past his knees like a flexible red tube, ending in a large three-fingered hand with suction cups for fingertips. The only clothes he wore was a pair of retro basketball shoes, though the large blue number one on his front looked rather decorative. He looked rather beaten up given the way one of his eyestalks was bent, it's contracted pupil eye staring up sightlessly, his left arm ended in a ragged stump barely a foot past his shoulder and a number of crudely stitched scars went around the shapes on the sides of his face. Despite this, he looked rather cheerful and pleasant, though concerned for Spike.

Spike noticed Rufus sitting on Wilt's hand, looking as though he much preferred it there. Wilt's one functional eye blinked politely. "I'm sorry, but what are you doing here? You aren't usually here at this time of night."

Spike started to answer but froze at what he saw behind Wilt. "Never mind it, and _run!_" He immediately took off down the hallway.

Wilt's eye swiveled towards the direction Spike had indicated. "What the-WHOA!" Wilt yelled alarmedly as he saw the mob turning the corner behind him, shouting furiously. Rufus chittered frantically as Wilt took off, his long legs helping to put some distance between him and the mob.

Wilt quickly caught up with Spike despite the vampire's inhuman speed. "_SPIKE! _I'm sorry, but what's going on here!?" Wilt demanded, keeping step with Spike.

"Long story! Tell you later!" Spike said hurriedly.

"_Okay!_" Rufus climbed up Wilt's long arm, coming to a tense rest aboard his small but surprisingly strong shoulder. "You okay there, little buddy?"

"Yuh huh!" Rufus said agreeably, trying to hold on without hurting Wilt.

"You can dig your claws in if it makes you feel better!" Wilt assured him. "I don't mind as long as you feel comfortable!"

"_Nuh uh!_" Rufus said, shaking his head.

"Okay!" Wilt said, continuing to run but careful not to upset the little rodent's balance.

"Will you give the whole 'good Samaritan' thing a rest for five seconds?!" Spike yelled.

The three of them kept running until they came to a dead end. Immeasurably frustrated, Spike said a synonym for copulation.

"I'm sorry," Wilt said, looking down at Spike, his eyes narrowed, Rufus' arms crossed as he looked down at Spike sternly. "But that's not very appropriate, Spike."

"Bleh!" Rufus squeaked, sticking his toungue out.

"Stuff it," Spike said savagely. "This ain't the time."

"But it is time for your beating!" The speaker was someone in the mob, speaking just as they turned the corner.

Wilt's eye widened. "Beating? Isn't that a little mean?"

The mob considered this, mumbling to each other. "We don't care!" Zaphod Beeblebrox finally said.

"I'm sorry, but that's really not very nice."

"I said we don't care!" The mob started menacingly coming towards them.

Wilt's eye darted between the vampire at his side and the naked mole rat perched on his shoulder. "Do you guys have any idea what to do? Because I don't even know what's going on!"

Rufus glowed bright blue, chattering angrily.

"I'm sorry, but I'd really rather avoid that kind of thing."

"Relax," Spike said assuring, stepping in front of him. "Got it all handled."

"I hope so," Wilt said despondently. Rufus stopped glowing, nodding glumly. They both knew what Spike's idea of handling a situation was.

"You lot!" Spike said loudly; the mob came to a stop near an oddly colored patch of carpet. "Lemme tell you somethin' about..." Spike made a convincing pretense of someone thinking hard for a moment.

"Love!"

The mob stared at him in blantant surprise. "What?"

Spike shook a finger. "Listen close, mates! I'm only sayin' this once! Those of you with paper, start writing. If you don't think it's good enough, feel free to cut my hands off." He brandished his wrists up, the thin scars lining his wrists thrown into clear relief. "Already been there. Ahem: 'Without love, what worth have a man? When he has not the loving administrations under the moon's eldrich light, shall he be of value? With not a loved one's fav'ring smile, is he anything but a beast laboring under the day's beating pathway? Without the know of love's eternal mark, dare he soldier on in uncertain Fate's road? If he knows not the Truth of love, does he really bear truth at all in the face of a cold world's condemnations? Without love, is not pain all he knows and brings?'"

A short stunned silence followed.

Wilt started to get a little teary eyed. "I'm sorry, but that was beautiful, man!"

Rufus shrugged. "Hnnnk, s'okay."

Spike growled. "If your owner wasn't liable to squash me if I did, I'd beat the crap out of you."

Rufus stuck his tongue out at Spike.

The mob stared at Spike, still stunned by his poetry. "What the hell was that!?" Someone finally yelled.

"A distraction?" Someone else suggested.

The mob yelled angrily at this, not liking the idea of being played for fools. "You think you can't fool us that easily!?" Someone yelled.

"Oh no," Spike said dryly. "They've figured me out. Oh no, heavens forbid that I shouldn't be able to outwit a bunch of crazed gits."

As he expected, this incensed the mob. "Why, you-"

"A little to the left," Spike instructed, stepping next to a bust of the much loved imaginary friend, Levery, long since lost in the Heartless attacks. To Spike, he just looked like a lever with a pair of eyes near the top of the handle.

The mob stepped to the left, putting them in perfect alignment with the oddly colored patch of carpet. "Now, we're going to-"

"Go away," Spike said, pulling the lever cunningly disguised as a statue; the ground swung open underneath the mob, sending them screaming to somewhere below. Spike moved the lever back up and the floor swung back up.

"I've seen some clever ideas, but that was really good!" Wilt said admiringly. Rufus nodded, giving his own somewhat unintelligible commentary on the subject.

Spike made a half-bow. "Go on, get out here. Seriously, get out. I've got work to tend to."

Wilt blinked, as did Rufus. "What?"

"Come on, Redless," Spike said, walking past Rufus. The mole rat looked up at Wilt and squeaked a farewell, hopping on Spike's shoulder.

Wilt sighed. "I'm sorry, but I'm confused. What happened just now? Why were you running from an angry mob? What are you doing here? Why is Rufus with you? And..." He frowned. "Why is your hand burnt?"

"Plenty of questions, all of 'em will have to wait," Spike said, turning around and going back in what he hoped was the right direction. "Hopefully, by the time we get back, the knight and mageling won't have set the room on fire."

Wilt scratched his head as the two of them disappeared around the corner. "I'm sorry, but now I'm _really _confused!"

-------

"Where could they be?" Jarod said to himself, his eyebrows knitted together in an expression of supreme frustration.

He stood alone in a small cockpit that was barely big enough to hold him, even sitting; except for the windshield in front of him and the airlock-styled door behind him, all of it's space was taken up by technology of varying levels.

In his search for the Keybearer and his companions, Jarod had gone over a considerable distance of the district; he doubted that Bloo would have taken Zim out of the district, even for a 'shortcut', but given that he hadn't seen a trace of them anywhere, he was considering expanding his search area.

In the windshield before him, which may or may not have been a holographic representation of his surroundings, he saw the gray-red-brown in front of him slow down to the buildings they were. Feeling discouraged, Jarod tapped a display screen near him; the green disc it shone from shimmered slightly and the display became a three-dimensional scale-model of the district.

Jarod looked it over, his discouragement growing by the moment.

After taking the small ship he had termed the Butterfly-Model for their slightly unwieldy qualities, he'd flown through the town unseen and undetected, passing through the air and solid object with equal facility, in search of Zim and his companions. Thus far, he'd had no luck in finding him, his companions, or any trace of them whatsoever.

"Where are you?" He asked softly, looking the map over as his ship came to a stop in the air. Since it was matter-negative at the moment, he had no fear of anyone crashing into him; crashing _through _him was more likely. Sighing expansively, he pressed at a few buttons randomly, no real ideas left.

It was probably accident, but the model of Foster's came up, the map focusing on it. The model of the house became transparent, and zoomed in on a danceroom he knew of.

Jarod frowned, looking closely at it. He couldn't see much, but he could clearly see a large pool-like collection of energy around the general area.

"That's odd." He pressed a few more buttons on the display; the image of the house disappeared entirely. The energy-shape came into sharper relief and what looked like long coils of colorless energy came into sight on the map screen. They were all flowing into the pool there, and it didn't look like a natural progression either; the lines looked like they'd been pulling into it, producing the pool-shape. "A pooling in the leylines..." Jarod frowned, looking closer at it. "What would cause something like that-"

An idea hit him. "Ishbalan alchemy!"

He remembered Calvin had used alchemy during the fight with the Guard Armor. It was possible that he was drawing energy from the leylines for it, dispersing as soon as he used it. Doing something like that would cause the pooling effect on the screen, invisible to everything except those attuned to mystical energies and his own rareified devices.

Jarod pressed a few more buttons and the screen zoomed out onto Foster's again. He placed his hands on a wide panel-like device in front of him and his ship took off.

It wasn't much of a lead, but at least it was something.

-------

_Back at the battleground formerly known as the unnamed danceroom..._

A Soldier fell to the ground, a large smoking hole in it's shoulder. It's detached arm hit the floor and burst on contact. The Soldier stared at the Irken pointing the Keyblade at the Heartless, the tip of the weapon still smoking from the fireball it'd just fired.

The Soldier slowly got up, shadow matter bubbling up from the interior of the hole in it, gradually filling it up. Several thick black strands emerged from it's stump of a shoulder, stretching outwards to around it's waist. They snapped out to the left, twisting together in a thick braid and flowing together, forming a joint in the midddle. At the knobbly end of the braid, five metal points poked out, growing outwards and forcing themselves into the pattern of fingers as the spikes grew longer and larger. The spikes creaked several times as they flexed, revealing proper joints and bending into true claws, the rest of the braid forming musclelike bulges and armorplates. It's arm regenerated, the Soldier flung it's arms back and ran at Zim, leaping into the air at an incredible speed.

Zim sidestepped it as it landed on the ground, quickly swinging the Keyblade around and neatly tearing through the Soldier's midsection, cutting it in half. It's lower half stumbled to the ground, quickly unraveling into threads of darkness while it's upper half flew farther, it's two bounces off the ground announced with wet thuds. It maneuvered itself around with it's claws, clumsily pulling itself around to face Zim, small tendrils starting to trail away from the ragged tear in it's midsection. The Soldier's limbs blurred as it pulled itself at Zim, it's eyes glowing with some alien need.

Zim simply blasted it with another fireball; the fireball burned it to ashes and kept going, rolling through the floor and impacted with a pillar, leaving a sizable imprint in the pillar and a burn track along the ground. Zim grimaced. "I think my control needs work." He'd only intended to put enough power into it to incinerate the weakened Soldier.

Alone by himself but feeling confident in his abilities, Ron brandished the Lotus Blade, staring down a few Soldiers. They charged at him, one of them flying into the air, dark energy swirling around it like a discus. Acting instinctively, he jumped back into the air, the Soldier's Cyclone attack meeting the defensibly held Lotus Blade, dark energy smashing into the katana with a shower of sparks until Ron slashed out, cutting through the Heartless' attack and knocking it off-balance. Ron quickly swung the Lotus Blade four times; the Heartless' limbs fell to the ground and Ron knocked it to the ground with an overhead kick, the limbless Heartless disappearing in a puff of darkness as it hit the ground.

Ron stepped back, the sapphire glow of the Lotus Blade matched by the blue aura pulsing around his body. Seeing the Air Soldiers slowly advance on him, he held his sword arm out, Lotus Blade pointing into the air. The Lotus Blade's blue glow deepened, obscuring it's form as it grew out, becoming wider and considerably larger. The glow faded away to reveal that it had changed into the form of a nearly six foot long single-edged blade, supported by a two foot long segmented hilt. Ron balanced the Lotus Zanbato against his shoulder, showing no strain from the oversized sword.

One of the Air Soldiers started to flutter back; Ron was suddenly on the move, savagely swinging the Lotus Zanbato into the Heartless, the massive size of the sword meaning that the swings were considerably slower then normal, but the fact that he was cleaving through them making up for it. He twirled it up to block more than a few diving Air Soldiers, then dashed and executed a spinning swing into the air, finishing the circle around the ground, leaving a trail of black mist to mark where his enemies had been. Still airborne, he pulled the zanbato up in front of him, bringing it down through the head of an unwary Soldier, swinging freely on the hilt as it sliced through the Heartless and gouged into the ground. He dropped to the ground, his weight pulling the Lotus Zanbato out of the ground.

Ron frowned as the battle raged around him, balancing the sword against the ground. It seemed weird, the way the Heartless kept rushing at them, even the Soldier-types; they were among the most cautious of Heartless and usually preferred to attack in a flurry of attacks and them run like there was no tomorrow. And then there was the fact that they weren't using their sheer numbers as they usually did; they were gathering in groups and homing in on each one of them, rather then scattering and attacking the weakest among them, occasionally retreating for no apparent reason. It showed group tactics, if not very good ones, and Ron had seen many time that Heartless were basically creatures of destruction; they didn't think very well, or as far as anyone had seen, at all. Attacking with forethought wasn't something they ever displayed on their own, only when being commanded by someone else.

He saw Abel, facing off against an Soldier; the priest was holding both his guns, and the Soldier's claws were obscured by transformed Red Nocturnes. They stared at each other for a moment, forcibly reminding Ron of the old 'Mexican stand-off' in many a classic Western. Both of them jumped into action, jumping backwards as they fired; Abel's guns blazed white as the bullets streaked into the small fireballs spat by the Red Nocturnes on the Soldier's hand. The fireballs disintegrated and a further bullet found it's mark, slamming right into the Soldier's shoulder, knocking it back into the air. The round entry wound glowed white as the Soldier flew back, it's shoulder and arm blasting off with a sudden explosion. It hit the ground hard, but had the presence of mind to aim with it's remaining arm and shoot Abel in the leg with a weakened fireball.

The priest rolled to the ground, ignoring the hot pain in his leg and jumping; he landed in a crouch just in front of the Heartless, it's arm already regenerated. The Red Nocturne on it's hand opened it's glowing jaws while the Soldier brought it's free hand back; Abel swung one gun up just below the Soldier's head and brought the other up, it's barrel resting against between the Red Nocturne's eyes and fired both guns. A large portion of the Soldier's blew away, black dust staining the ground behind it while the Red Nocturne disintegrated in puffs of roiling ash. Abel stood up abd walked away, the Soldier's body envoluped in white fire and withering away.

Ron frowned again. And now the Heartless were working together? He looked up at the top of the building, wondering if that obnoxious guy without a thumb was still around, maybe controlling them fomr out of sight. As he did, he noticed Kim fighting in midair, bounding from Heartless to Heartless, dispatching one and using it as a springboard to another, repeating the process over and over again. As he watched, she flipped backwards away from a clawing Air Soldier, landing atop one of the chandelier's chainlinks, sliding down gracefully. Determined to assume his role as her partner in all things, Ron hunched over on the ground, his eyes flashing blue-white again as blue energy swelled up around him, encasing his body in a flaming blue aura and throwing his hair back.

He suddenly took off at a bounding run, his speed easily outstripping anything he'd displayed earlier, making large dents in the tiles as he hit the ground and took off again; any Heartless that had the bad luck to be in the way of his beeline was swiftly obliterated, whether it was a flying first to the face that smashed right through it, a spinning kick that tore through it and how many fellows were around it or being cleaved through by the sword he carried, his methods of dealing with them were swift and brutal, using them to further his momentum and eliminate at the same time.

Abel dispassionately observed Ron as he moved, considering the notion that some people believed that there was no meaning in anything, that what happened was just what happened, that there was no destiny or fate or anyone remotely approaching narrative forethought. Watching Ron Stoppable tear through the Heartless, moving in a straight line and plowing through any obstacle in his way like it was wet tissue paper before the path of a rampaging bulldozer and resembling more a force of nature than the laid-back, good-humored and somewhat random boy he usually was seemed to suggest otherwise. Given that his name sounded quite a bit like the word 'unstoppable', Abel thought that sometimes, destiny really did land upon you like a sack of bricks. Zim, for his part, thought that Ron was doing was eerie; not because he was glowing bright blue and charging through the room like a human juggernaut, but because Ron's blue-white eyes were inexplicably similar to the way Aang's eyes looked during the Avatar State.

Ron springboarded off a downed Air Soldier and slammed his glowing hand into the chest of a Soldier as he flew through the air, carrying it along with him as he went. He landed on a pillar, the force of his impact dissipating the Soldier instantly. He didn't pause for even a moment, jumping right through the dark cloud and scaling the pillar like a monkey would a tree, not even thinking about handholds or weight dispersement; his hands flew to where they needed to be and his feet propelled him upwards, his sword held by his tail. He came to a brief stop as he saw Kim take notice of what he was doing; emboldened, he suddenly hurled himself the rest of the way, the force of his jump cracking the pillar. Flying through the air like a human bullet trailing a blue spiral, he came to the chandilier and caughting one of the structure's outlying spurs, his remaining momentum turning him around in a circle; he tucked one leg in and stuck the other straight out, tearing right through an unwary Red Nocturne as he did. He rotated completely around again, letting go as he reached the apex of his swing and swinging himself high into the air, landing next to Kim in a simian crouch before he stood up fully, the blue glow receding slightly.

"So," he said, sounding remarkably unwinded. "Gotta give me credit, I know how to make an entrance!"

Kim nodded, a hint of a smile crossing her face. "Yeah, yeah, that was cool." She had initially found the times when he had used the Power unnerving until they both became accustomed to it, though she was always at a loss to entire define the blue aura that covered him when he accessed the Power: people tended to describe it as being flamelike, but that didn't quite capture the visceral reality of the transparent aura. She'd always thought the blue energy was eerily beautiful, flowing across him like a Ron-shaped field of blue light, catching light and turning it into scintillating patterns across it's surface, mesmerizing the eye. Unlike most displays of this sort, it didn't hang lazily around him like a shroud, but had an almost forceful quality to it's flow, giving the impression that it was continually pulsing outward from his body.

Ron pumped his fist into the air victoriously. "Ah-booyah! The Ron-man shoots, he scores!"

Kim turned aside, noticing several more flight-capable Heartless flying up to them. "Heartless at two o' clock!"

Ron took an exaggerated look at the brushed-chrome wristwatch under his sleeve. "Thought it was ten-ish. What do we do 'till then?"

Across the room, Zim stared down a Soldier. Or at least, he thought he might just be staring at it; the Heartless might be so stupid that it was just waiting for him to move and prove he wasn't a statue or something. He held the Keyblade up two-handed, light glinting off it's silvery shaft and it's golden handguard. At the noise of the links of the Keychain clinking together, the Soldier jumped at him, as did two Air Soldiers from above and a Shadow from below, materializing out of the ground.

Zim pivoted around and kicked the Shadow at the Soldier, knocking them both to the floor. Zim then jumped straight up, shoving the Keyblade through an Air Soldier's midsection, using his own body weight to spin around at a three-sixty degree angle, slicing it in half; he spun up and away as it fell apart, coming up at the other Air Soldier, slamming the Keyblade right down on it's head, the mystical key-shaped sword going right through it's body down to between the middle of it's legs, spraying Zim in shadow matter. Still airborne, Zim flipped in the direction of the Soldier and Shadow, bringing the Keyblade to bear: he focused his burgeoning magical abilities, fire flickering around the Keyblade's hilt and running up to the tip, the wavering fire collecting into a ball. It fired, the recoil flinging Zim away into the air as the concussive fireball struck the two Heartless dead-center, blasting them apart and leaving a slightly scorched indentation in the ground.

Zim's spider-legs unfolded, slamming into the ground and catching him, the momentum still carrying away until the spider-leg's firm grip ripped into the ground, gouging the floor tiles. He dropped down with a grunt, the mechanical appendages still arched around him.

He was still having trouble with his abilities; though he'd figured out how to at least use them, he still had little control over them: for one thing, he couldn't control the fire's strength the same way Calvin had, or manipulate their shape. From what he'd seen, the fireballs he was using seemed to be mostly concussive force with an obvious combustion element, but he was having little control over his ability to actually control the fireball's strength, nor was he sure how to manipulate fire like Calvin could. _That little..._ Zim growled under his breath. He was not going to be outdone by an immature loudmouthed human worm-baby.

Hobbes yawned, easily evading the barrage of slashes from the Air Soldier he was facing off against kept throwing at him. For him, it was incredibly easy; the visual cues he was getting from it were like signposts warning him of what it was going to do next, making it a simple matter to dodge it, block and evade it's weak attacks. To anyone watching, he looked like he was lazily weaving away from it's frenzied strikes, making only the most minute movements possible, occasionally raising his shield when he didn't see it worth the effort of moving away. Hobbes was merely enjoying making a show of it, even if no one was watching him, but he was also just plain curious; he'd always been like that, ever since he was a small kitten watching a smaller child with the attentiveness that later became his quiet sense of duty. More specifically, he was curious to see what would happen if he did this, to see if the Heartless would react with some kind of fury or anger at it's ability to so much as scratch him.

He wasn't annoyed, surprised, shocked or anything except faintly interested to see that he saw no signs of emotion from it, at least none that he could see. It _had _increased it's efforts to break through his seemingly impenetrable defenses, but that could just have been an attempt to match his skills and one that was failing miserably. He wasn't entirely sure what these Heartless really were; he'd heard that they were incarnations of the heart's darkness, but he wasn't quite sure what that meant exactly, and he was certain that knowing more about them could be helpful in their mission.

Hobbes easily evaded more of it's attacks, thinking that something was a bit odd; the Heartless he'd fought earlier had been tougher than these, particularily that Guard Armor. There were more of them here, but they seemed a lot weaker, which struck him as extremely strange. Tiring of his 'fight' with the Air Soldier, Hobbes leaned back, letting it's slash go wide. Taking the opening he'd created, he reached out with one hand and grabbed it by the throat, pulling it in and punching it straight in the face while letting go; his punch carried it to the ground, his fist going deep into it's face. The Air Soldier bulged grotesquely, it's limp jerking around weakly as strange discolored lumps swelled all over it's body until, in a final body-wide swell, it burst into ashen smoke.

Back at the chandelier, Kim sensed that it was time to rejoin the fracas on the floor. "Ron! Think it's time to hit the floor!"

"Huh?" Ron looked up, having crouched at the edge of the chandilier and busily watching the others fight with all the obsessive glee of someone who regularily watched the stadium battles on that one nearby world. He stood up and nodded. "Yeah, got ya!" He glowed blue again and jumped to the other side of the chandelier, kicking it hard. It lurched, laboriously swinging the other way. Kim and Ron used the momentum it made as it swung back as they jumped off, bounded off a number of nearby Heartless and jumped back on the third-story balcony. They ran down the staircase, back on the ground floor in short order.

Kim paused, her eyes narrowing slightly as she examined the oversized sword Ron was balancing on his shoulder. Ron was definitely the creative person she just wasn't, though from time to time she wondered if his creative ability was a side-effect of the strange ways his mind worked; one of those ways might well explain why he had chosen to morph the sword he was destined to wield into a sword that no normal human could have even been able to pick up. "Isn't a sword like that kind of unwieldy?"

Ron shrugged, not having put much thought into it. He looked with interest behind her; Kim turned around, noticing a large number of Heartless approaching her. "Need any help with this one?" Ron asked, already knowing the answer.

"Nah," she said confidently, stepping up to them. "I got this one." Ron watched, planting the sword into the ground for balance as Kim fought. She jumped over an attacking Soldier, grabbing the ground in a handstand and kicking the Soldier in the back as she flipped to her feet, using the momentum to throw herself off the ground and plant a foot into an Air Soldier, jumping away again as it grabbed at her.

She spun around in the air, landing on the pointed hat of a Red Nocturne, jumping off and spinning away just as the fireball it shot hit an incoming Shadow. She flipped in the air, smashing the heel of her boot through an Air Soldier's head, falling down; as she did, she grabbed a nearby Red Nocturne and grabbed it as it charged up, pointing it in the direction of some others; it released it's fireball, blasting it's fellows apart. Kim threw it into the path of a Cycloning Soldier, both disposing of the Nocturne and temporarily blinding the Soldier; it fell to the ground helplessly, it's fall interrupted when Kim slammed her foot into it's stomach, grabbed it's shoulder, flipped herself onto it's back and jumped off, leaving it to plummet to it's doom. Kim struck the Heartless again and again, though not lethally; she maneuvered them below her, tangling them against each other hopelessly. After a long time of near-constant dodging, attacking and counterattacking, they were almost to the ground. Kim struck out, flipping in the air and smashing her boot heel against the Heartless pile-up, simultaneously cushioning her fall and killing most of the Heartless there.

She flipped away from the resultant shadow matter cloud, landing to her feet. Kim huffed a little, not due to being out of breath, but out of exhilaration from both what she'd just done and the adrenaline rush she was feeling.

Ron clapped a few times, grinning broadly. "_Niiice, _K.P., niiice!" Kim smiled a little sheepishly, flicking her hair around in a practiced brush garreunted to catch Ron's attention. Ron watched her, his eyes slightly glazed and propping his head up with one hand.

Noticing that his tail was flicking about from side to side, Kim smiled evilly and moved to his side; still 'hypnotized by the flippy', Ron took no notice, still smiling slightly. Kim reached down and gently flicked his tail a few times, forcefully enough to get his attention. Ron didn't jerk up in fright as he might have if someone else had, but he did turn around, looking slightly embarrased. "_Kiiim!_"

"Oh, come on, Ron!" Kim said playfully. "It's just so..._flippy._"

Ron gave her mass of auburn hair a longing look. "I knew that'd come back to haunt me, I knew it would. One innocent little comment during the time we switched bodies, just _one!_ And I can't help it if it's true."

"Me neither." Kim smiled in the precise manner necessary to make Ron feel incredibly nervous, standing closer to him and leaning in.

"Uh, uh, uh, uh!" Desperately trying to think of something to distract Kim from her sudden romantic mood swing(which seemed improbable, given her usual single-minded focus when on a mission, not to mention the swarm of darkness all around them, even if they were currently avoiding them), Ron focused on the sword he was using as balance. He willed it to change; the Lotus Zanbato's glowed blue again, it's shape fluidily changing again. Kim abruptly forgot her playful intentions at what she saw the sword become, her eyes widening as the glow faded away to reveal that Ron was now clutching a wider-bladed version of the Lotus Blade's default form, a chain going from it's pommel to the pommel of another sword embedded in the ground, this one's thinner blade curving out in a flamboyant swoosh and ending in a hooked tip.

Kim gaped at the chained swords, her vauge romantic ideas completely vanishing from her mind. "You...I...that's not...I mean..." she broke off, staring at Ron helplessly. "You _can't _be serious."

"Can and am, K.P.!" Ron said cheerfully, grabbing the cleaver by it's comparatively short hilt and swinging it around, the other sword flailing around dangerously in the air. "The swordchucks are making a comeback!"

Kim stared in shock a little more before she palmed her face. "Not again..."

Steathily moving across the top floor, Abel glanced over at the two and shook his head, grinning like an idiot. "Heh, Ron's a lot like me, isn't he? I remember when _I _invented the swordchucks way back when...Lilith wouldn't stop making fun of me for a week after I accidentally cut Cain's arms and legs off. Ah, but that was back before Cain turned into a homicidal psychopath and killed Lilith..." Abel sighed wearily, brightening as he had another thought. "Huh, come to think of it, Kim's a lot like Lilith was!" He jumped to the floor near the doubledoors, somehow completely uninjured from the distance he dropped. He looked at Kim and Ron, his face solemn. "May theirs turn out better then our's did, Lilith..."

The doors opened behind him; reacting instinctively, Abel whirled around and flung the bayonets. There was a loud of metal pointing impacting marble followed by a stunned silence broken by a loud squeaking noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter and a louder "_WHAT THE HELL?!"_

Abel blinked uncomprehendingly, his brain translating the sensory details he'd been provided with while his mind refused to acknowledge the sight of Spike pinned to a wall by the bayonets going through the shoulders of his duster while Rufus rolled around on the ground, pointing and laughing at the sight of the vampire, who was unharmed except for his mortally wounded pride. To say that he was embarrassed when he finally realized that he'd just pinned Spike to the wall would be an understatement.

Behind him he heard several concealed snorts. He glanced backwards, seeing the two teenagers desperately struggling not to laugh at the same sight that mortified Abel. "Ah...heh heh..." Abel said nervously as Rufus, still squeaking in amusement, trundled past him in a bee-line to Ron. He turned and ran over to Spike, timidly saying, "Ah...hello..."

"Oh, you call this a greeting? I'd hate to see how'd you react to seeing someone you _really _like!" Spike yelled as Abel approached, the vampire struggling futilely; while neither bayonets had so much as marked his skin, they had gone completely through the shoulders of his duster, suspending him in the air. Too impatient to wait for Abel to get him down, he reached up for the one on the left.

Abel's eyes widened in horror. "_Wait! Don't do tha-_"

Spike's unburned hand closed around the handle; there was an immediate sound of something burning and Spike screamed in pain, his fist reflexively curling around the handle. Smoke billowed up from between his fingers, his flesh turning bright red tinged with the gray normally associated with decay. The laughing around the room stopped, replaced by a kind of horrified silence.

Abel rushed over to Spike in a flash,quickly ripped Spike's hand off the handle, leaving small black burnt pieces of skin sticking to the handle, still burning to crisps while a fine wreath of smoke rose from the letters. There was also the fact that Spike's hand was burnt fairly badly, acrid smoke rising from his palm.

Ron winced, closing one eye as he turned his head aside. "This has just _not _been his day." Kim said nothing, horrified at the sight of Spike's hand.

Spike swore fairly badly as he flexed his pained hand, turning it over; as the smoke started to fade away from it, it was clear that the lettering of the bayonet's handle was burnt into his palm, looking as clear as if he'd scarred them into his flesh with acid stencils, somewhat blurred and out of focus from the awkward way he'd grabbed it. His incredulous eyes danced from an embarrassed Abel to his hand again. "You had to use damn _blessed _bayonets, didn't you!?"

Abel squirmed uncomfortably. "Um...I think that's a contradiction in terms."

Spike was about to say something, then was struck by a horrified realization. He turned his head as best he could, his worst fears confirmed: the vampiric aura of his body was applying his innate weakness to holy objects to his clothes, and his duster was smoldering around the blades. "_SON OF A-_"

Abel quickly pulled the bayonet's out, letting Spike hit the ground. Glaring at him for a moment, Spike eyed the room. "What happened here? Looks like I missed the party!"

"Actually, erm," Abel decided to skip the whole ugly buisness with Mr. Lyle. "Heartless are attacking."

"What?!" Spike asked, clearly surprised. "I don't see any-" About fifteen more Heartless portaled into the room. "Ah. Never mind." Drawing his sword, Spike glanced back at the bayonets. "Anderson should sue you for copyright infringement."

Abel smiled sheepishly. "That's a compliment, right?"

"If you want it to be. I got a fight scene to attend to!" Spike drew his sword. "Dunno why you use things like that; you've got terrible aim, you do."

"I do too have good aim!" Abel protested. To prove it, he took a bayonet and flung it in to exact opposite direction he was looking; Ron yelped sharply. Spike snickered. Abel turned around; Ron was clearly surprised but unharmed, though the cowlick on the back of his head was missing; directly behind him, embedded in a pillar, was the bayonet Abel had thrown, a few blond hairs against it's tip.

Abel gestured at Ron. _See? My aim is so good I can hit a target dead on while looking the other way._

"Well, that's one way to deal with a persistent hair problem," Spike admitted, conceding the point to Abel. "Though if you aimed a little lower, you could have given him an instant lobotomy. Aimed a _lot _lower, you could've made Possible's love life very boring." Grinning, he disappeared into the shadowed pillars.

Kim crossed her arms, looking at Abel darkly. "_Father Nightroad!_"

Abel gulped. "Oh, look at the time, I must aid in the battle!" He quickly ran off, tripped once on a Shadow, got back up and resumed fleeing, which was his basic reaction to an unpleasant social encounter.

Ron scratched the back of his head awkwardly. "This has been a _really _weird day for me. I've been set on fire, chased by a mob, had one of my worst experiences exposed, got that stupid cowlick chopped off and I got a feeling none of it's over yet."

Kim's anger at Abel abated at Ron's words, his joking manner cooling her temper as it always did. "All in a day's work, right, Ron?"

At the other end of the room...

Behind some more shadowed pillars, two Soldiers, three Shadows and a Red Nocturne huddled together in the darkness under the balcony, as close to confused as Heartless could be; there had been a heart nearby. They were certain of it.

Among the six pairs of yellow eyes, they were joined by another, altogether more demonic pair, these one positioned on the ceiling.

A weight dropped from the ceiling, and a cloud of Heartless remained billowed out; Spike strolled out from between the pillars, his sword slung over his shoulder nonchalantly, his face in it's demonic 'game face'. Grinning fearsomely, he extended the sword out, his yellow eyes widening in glee at the sight of Heartless. "Come on, then. Let's _dance._" He dashed across the room at speeds only Abel had reached, bringing his sword to the Heartless and jumping, cleaving right through them, spinning in mid-air through some Red Nocturnes and bringing his sword down upon a hapless Soldier, slicing right through it and smashing the tiles around his blade.

He pulled his sword off the ground, swinging it around in time to ward off a descending Air Soldier, knocking it to the ground. Reacting quickly, he cut through it before it had a chance to move, turned around and swung again, his sword smacking right into the disclike shape of a Soldier's Cyclone. His sword shook and sparks flew as the whirling dark energy fought against his inhuman strength, the both of them stuck in a stalemate. He pressed his foot against the ground and moved foward, pressing his sword down; it forced the Soldier into the air, where it righted itself quickly and came down at him, it's claws bared. Spike simply stuck his sword straight up, the plummeting Heartless impaling itself on the blade.

He turned and faced a small group of varied Heartless, staring at him hungrily. Seeing that no one was even close to him, Spike smirked confidently and raised his sword; the air started to vibrate and swirl around it, making it look like his sword was enshrouded in a lunar aura, his duster billowing from the force his sword was giving off. Spike slammed his sword into the ground; the energy in his sword smashed down the ground as he released it in a wave much like the one he'd hit Zim with earlier, crashing through the doomed Heartless, obliterating them and continuing on, smashing into the wall and disappearing, leaving behind a massive crater trail, the crushed tiles around Spike and the large crevice in the wall as evidence of the wave of raw destruction that had just passed through.

Still tending to his own battles, Zim smashed the Keyblade through the head of a Shadow, rolling away as a Soldier came crashing down from above, sending up a small dustcloud. It peered around in confusion as the dustcloud faded with no Zim in sight. Starting to back away, it sensed movement from behind it and turned around as Zim jumped up, the Keyblade raised over his head. It started to open it's claws, about to launch a Cyclone, before Zim smashed his weapon right onto it's head: the Keyblade sliced through the Heartless and exited from between it's legs in a spray of shadow matter, smashing into the tiles and leaving a sizable impression. The Soldier remained where it was for a moment before falling apart in two uneven halves, imploding upon contact with the ground.

He looked aside, gauging the situation; the number of remaining Heartless, while significantly lower than before, was still considerable. He looked down at the weapon he held in his hand, the light making it's gold handguard gleam that special gleam unique to gold. Except he doubted that it was actually made of gold, as gold was softer than whatever supernaturally tough metal this was. He raised the Keyblade in front of him with both hands, the silver main section shining brightly in the artificial light. Affirming himself to the task at hand, he looked back at the various Heartless in the area. Picking a Soldier entirely at random, he ran towards it, tried to concentrate the power and getting a sudden surge of inspiration, yelled, _"Fire!_"

The change was immediately apparant; the flames, previously whirling around the Keyblade, tightened around it, focusing into a small fireball directly at the tip, almost balancing on it for a split second. The fireball blasted away, smashing into the chest of the Soldier; it exploded immediately, blasting a large hole through it's body and alighting the rest of it on fire. It looked down at itself in confusion, it's body crumbling in large chunks and falling to ash as they hit the floor. Zim looked at his Keyblade, feeling that he was getting a handle on this.

Hobbes strolled across the room, eyes closed as he hummed an old tune that he remembered from when he was a kitten. Heartless upon Heartless descended upon him, and if they'd had voices, he was sure they'd be shrieking with all the mindless malevolence of those who knew only need and hunger. Hobbes' step slowed as he slightly opened his eyes, acknowledging the Air Soldiers coming from behind and in front. Without missing a beat, Hobbes flipped into the air; the two Air Soldiers crashed into each other, unable to stop their flight. The tiger came down, slamming his shield into them in a cloud of black mist. It swiftly dissapated, allowing him to see the Soldiers now rushed at him in a similar manner that the Air Soldiers had.

Hobbes never had been one to reuse strategy; as the Soldiers neared, he suddenly leapt at one, seizing it's arm and pulling it into the air. The other Soldier slowed to a stop; Hobbes rushed at it, swinging the Soldier like an incredibly creepy bludgeon. The Soldiers slammed into each other and Hobbes let go, throwing the both of them across the room, disintegrating as they slammed into a pillar and cracked it.

He jumped over a fireball shot by a Red Nocturne, his reflexes well-honed from years of having to dodge sudden gouts of flame. Flipping high into the air, he plummeted towards the Nocturne and flung a leg up, slamming it right through the Nocturne and landing on the ground in a half-crouch.

Around the room, the battle raged on. It continued for a few more minutes until the Heartless retreated from their individual fights, crowding back and pushing the various fighters back into a defense circle. Without warning, the Heartless were suddenly surronded by a veil of misty black shadow, briefly hidden from sight until they disappeared, the room brightening slightly.

"Well, that was anticlimatic," Calvin said, slinging his hammer back and breaking the moment of temporary silence.

"Anticlimatic, or really convenient?" Ron said, holding the swordchucks out by it's long chain and willing it reform into it's usual shape. The bizarre weapon glowed bright blue and the chained-swords snaked off the ground as the chain silently contracted, bringing the swords closer together. Both swords gently tipped into each other, side to side, glowing brighter for a moment before the blue faded away, revealing the form of the Lotus Blade. Ron sheathed the katana, the blue aura around him fading away.

Spike sheathed his own sword and looked oddly disappointed. "I get to the fight and this happens. Typical."

"Hey, it could be worse?" Hobbes said, rolling his shield back up. "I mean, that Mr. Lyle guy could always show up agai-"

"Aw, you make me feel unwanted." Up on the second floor, a man-sized pillar of whirling shadows stood, fading away to reveal Mr. Lyle once more.

The heroes below turned around, staring up at him with various forms of annoyance, shock and irritation, except for Spike, who was simply staring up at Mr. Lyle speculatively. Mr. Lyle smirked at them, leaning against a pillar. "Not bad, not bad. Of course, the Heartless I summoned weren't particularily powerful, but that's besides the point."

"You were directing the Heartless, I presume," Kim said cooly. "That'd explain why they were so weak."

Spike peered up at Mr. Lyle, frowning slightly. "Who's this git?"

"He calls himself Mr. Lyle," Abel said evenly. "And he isn't a friend of ours by any means."

"Well, isn't that interesting," Spike said, one of his hands lazily falling to his sword's sheath. "I heard of a Mr. Lyle, somewhere."

Mr. Lyle held up his hand. "No need for introductions, Spike. I know who _you _are. Formally known as William the Bloody from both your lousy poetry and your savage serial killings, earned the name Spike through your penchant for torturing people to death with railroad spikes-"

Spike's eyes narrowed, his brow growing huge over his suddenly yellow eyes. Mr. Lyle stopped, aware that something misfortunate was about to occur but not understanding what exactly.

Kim and Ron exchanged mutual glances. "Oh-" Kim began.

"Snap," Ron finished.

Zim thought their combined statement, while probably used to express dismay, had a slightly smug aspect to it. As if they knew exactly what happened next.

Without warning, Spike started running, his movements blurred as he jumped to the second floor right next to Mr. Lyle. Mr. Lyle stumbled back as Spike rushed at him, his mouth opening to say something; the vampire roughly grabbed his thumbless hand. Mr. Lyle's startled surprise became agony as Spike grabbed his thumbless hand, violently twisting it down and kneeing him in the stomach.

Spike pulled him into the air and violently squeezed the human's hand, putting on more pressure as he angrily growled, not bothering to say anything.

Mr. Lyle had, perhaps intentionally, given off the sense that he was something more then human. His inexplicable awareness of their various distressing pasts had boredom on the omniscient, as had his knowledge of exactly which words would have the most dibilitating effect on them. His impossible abilities had only furthered that impression, as well as keeping him out of harm's way. But as Spike's inhuman strength caused Mr. Lyle's hand to break with a loud _crack_, it was certain that he was only human after all. Those on the ground felt little pity for him. Surprise at the sudden violence, but no one thought that he didn't deserve it.

Mr. Lyle tried to speak; his mouth opened wide, but only a small squeal came out. Spike held him in the air, grinning viciously, blood streaming from between his fingers in thin rivulets. "Here's something you might not know 'bout me," Spike said, speaking loud enough for the others to hear him. "Might not show it too well, but I like these guys, gits they might be. Lost their world just like me, fight evil just like me and they know what torment is, just like me. Way I see it, that puts us in the same boat. So when you try to hurt them, you get personal. And that was a really stupid mistake." Spike suddenly kicked Mr. Lyle between the legs; the human's mouth opened wide, his eyes tearing up in pain. With his free hand, Spike then punched him in the solar plexus and threw him to the wall.

Mr. Lyle bounded off the wall once, sliding to the ground in a heap. He slowly stood back up, cradling his broken hand tenderly, glaring at Spike with abject fury and fear; it was an odd combination and struck Spike as rather stupid. Unimpressed, Spike looked from him to the whole hand cradling his broken one; the bloodflow had stopped trickling through his fingers, replaced by a steady sream of a blue-black light.

The others couldn't see what Spike could, but they could see that something in the situation had changed.

"What the hells-" Spike started to say, stopping when Mr. Lyle moved his hand away; his broken hand was covered in a chintinous lump of blue-black grooved plates that looked weirdly organic, as if it was somehow alive. Supporting that notion was the way it was pulsing and twitching in several places, like strange organs just underneath were beating and working. It looked roughly like a glove, covering his broken hand, and if the slightly hooked fingers were any indication, serving as a surrogate hand. Spike didn't like the look of the thing at all, but couldn't resist a jab. "Doesn't look healthy, you oughta see a qualified physician. Dunno if you got the cover'ge for it, though." Spike sighed, tapping his forehead with a sadistic smirk. "Problem with all you 'dance with the devil' types, you never even think about getting a decent health benefits package. Me, I'm a vampire, don't need coverage. Wouldn't recommend having your soul ripped out and replaced with a demon, but always keep your options in mind, right?"

"Don't you morons ever shut up?" Mr. Lyle asked, showing no sign of pain despite the beating Spike just put him through; either he had inhuman recuperative abilities or was a talented actor. The black hand continued throbbing and changed, elongating into a foot-and-a-half long twisted shape that was very remnisiant of a gun. A tiny pod at the back, like an ammuntions load and shining with dark energy, flared for a moment and a small slightly pointed dark bullet shot out of the end of the protrusion, striking Spike with a loud cracking noise, throwing him back. The vampire stumbled to the ground, looking down at the smoking hole in his chest. "Bullseye," Mr. Lyle said, smirking cruelly.

To his surprise, Spike stood right back up and judging by the sore-looking mark on his chest, relatively unharmed. To his terror, Spike's face shifted into the demonic visage he'd unleashed earlier. "My duster! You bastard!" He tugged at his ruined coat furiously, growling as his sharpened teeth scraping against each other. "Do any of you loadweights have any idea how much it costs to get these things patched?!"

"What's going on up there?" Calvin said, his eyes narrowed.

"Don't know," Ron replied, Rufus on his shoulder. "But I think that Lyle guy just did something to his jacket."

"Well, he's doomed!" Abel said brightly.

"Get him down here!" Zim yelled. "We have superior numbers!"

"What?!" Mr. Lyle yelled.

"Have it your way!" Spike yelled back at Zim. Moving again with inhuman alacrity, grabbing Mr. Lyle by the arm and lifting him off the ground, spinning around once before launching him over the rail. Mr. Lyle hit the ground hard, screaming as he hit the hard tiles. Spike immediately jumped off the balcony after him and Mr. Lyle rolled to his back, pointing the odd gun straight up and shooting. Spike rolled away from it, hitting the ground hard and rolling away and springing to his feet, his sword in his hands.

Mr. Lyle stood up. The various heroes were surprised by the weird gunlike weapon he had and quickly resolved that it couldn't be any good. "Quick!" Kim called out, rousing everyone to attention. "Get him!"

Everyone was suddenly on the move, running at Mr. Lyle. The human was already on his feet, shooting blindly around him; most of them dodged out of the way, coming to a stop when Abel didn't bother, simply taking a hit directly in the shoulder. The priest rolled to a stop and stood back up. Abel started running again at Mr. Lyle, his heart pounding painfully in his chest, a grim determination pushing him while he fought back the electricty he felt behind his teeth. Mr. Lyle panicked and fired again, wildly shooting off another dark bullet, this one hitting Abel in the chest hard enough to knock him off the ground; he came to a rolling stop at Mr. Lyle's feet.

"Abel!" Zim said, grasping the Keyblade and getting ready to run at Mr. Lyle and severely hurt him. Mr. Lyle scowled and put the gun to Abel's head as the priest started to rise.

Zim's eyes narrowed dangerously. "You cruel coward," he hissed, but didn't move.

Kim and Ron glanced at each other, similar grim expressions of disgust on their faces. There was, however, a look of smugness there.

Spike growled bestially. "What, can't fight without a hostage, you pathetic bastard?" Mr. Lyle's widened and he resisted the impulse to shoot right there.

Calvin and Hobbes, having been through their share of hostage negotiations, started to move. "_Don't!_" Zim shouted and they stopped, willing to wait for an opportune opening.

"What's the matter?" Mr. Lyle said to Zim, smiling crookedly. "Never think a guy like you'd ever go soft."

Zim sneered at Mr. Lyle. "'Soft', you call it? '_Soft'?_" He laughed sourly. "One such as you could never understand why I choose to aid another. All one such as you understands is gratification."

Mr. Lyle's eyes narrowed, widening in surprise when Abel spoke, his calm and even tone shocking under the circumstances. "The problem, Mr. Lyle, is that you are incapable of understanding how someone can come to learn from their mistakes and wishes to avoid the taking of life whenever possible."

Spike laughed. "Nice way of phrasing it. I got a way of saying it in a way he can understand; he's too stupid a bastard to understand why."

Mr. Lyle swallowed and rapped Abel's head with the gun. "Not smart, insulting the guy in a position to kill someone."

"Is it?" Abel said. His eyes narrowed in open contempt. "Or is it because you are such a low and despicable being that all we have to do is endure these scant few minutes with you to know how corrupt you really are? You only threaten me because you know that we will easily overwhelm you and you fear that. And you use our compassion against us like a weapon, so soon after using our pain like a twisting dagger!" Abel made a low disgusted noise. "And you wonder why we taunt you? It's because we know that you have no bargaining chips here! You know as well as I do that this will do nothing!"

"Shut up!" Mr. Lyle said, the gun shaking slightly. "Shut up! Just-"

"Do _not _tell me what to do," Abel said dangerously. "You are a cowardly parasite, filled with a false sense of your own grandeur! Instead of standing around and posing, do as you say and _SHOOT ME!_ If you won't, then stand down!"

Mr. Lyle froze. For a moment, his gun started to drift away, him apparently swayed by what Abel was saying. Then he abruptly changed his mind and fired.

Both the back of Abel's head and his forehead seemed to disappear in a mingled burst of darkness and blood. He hit the ground with surprising suddeness, his body unmoving as blood welled up around him. Then he stood back up and slammed the back of his hand into Mr. Lyle's jaw, knocking him back a few feet.

Abel adjusted his glasses. The spot where Mr. Lyle had shot him looked weirdly pinched, ridged flesh standing up in twisting patterns around the concave dimple that had been a bullet hole. His hair had already grown back and the flesh was already smoothing out, assuming it's normal appearance, his head completely healed. "Huh," Abel said, brushing his bangs out of his eyes and gently poking the spot where he'd been shot, wincing slightly at the soreness. "You should learn to relax. You'd be much better for it. Perhaps these acts of callousness are an ill-advised attempt to excise strain, hmm?"

Calvin, Hobbes and Zim were stunned, needless to say. "He's a regenerator?" Calvin said, plainly amazed.

"Oh, yes," Abel said brightly, not looking away from Mr. Lyle. "I heal extremely fast from almost any injury! Not to brag or anything, but I'm not entirely sure that I _can _be killed again."

"That would have been helpful information about five seconds ago!" Hobbes said, somewhat snappishly.

Zim rolled his eyes, feeling slightly embarrased. "You _think _you know a person. And then you find out they can survive a point-blank blast to the head!" He frowned. "Wait, what do you mean 'again'?"

"I have to say though," Abel said cheerfully, pointedly ignoring Zim's question. "It's been a long time since someone tried to blow my head off. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like." His grimace was almost comically exaggerated. "_Almost_. Oh," he added, almost as an afterthought, unsheathing one of his bayonets. "Let's avoid another shoot-out, shall we?" He threw the bayonet with alarming suddeness and it was suddenly stuck right through Mr. Lyle's gun; it sizzled loudly, bubbling up like a cancerous protrusion before the bubbles froze and the shell became a light purple, cracking in a number of places before falling off Mr. Lyle's injured hand, crumbling to purplish dust even as they fell through the air. The bayonet hit the ground too, bouncing off with a clattering sound.

Mr. Lyle stared down in shock, realizing that the deck was not only stacked against him, but had exploded in his face. "Oh, _shit!_"

Zim's mouth curled up in faint annoyance. "Come on. Surely an intelligent person like you could use less vulgar synonyms to express yourself."

"Hey, I got an idea!" Spike said excited, cracking his knuckles. "Let's all beat this wastelock until he squeals like a stuck pig!"

"Sounds good to me!" Calvin said, grinning frighteningly.

Mr. Lyle's eyes widened, his limbs shaking slightly. He immediately started moving backwards, all sorts of horrific vengeance scenarios going through his mind. _This has gone S.N.A.F.U. in the worst possible way _was pretty much his one rational thought amid the terrified visions he was having of them taking their revenge upon him. Of all of them, though, none of them scared him half as much as what Zim might do. Sure, Hobbes was a barely civilized wild animal that was notorious defensive of his adopted brother and Spike was a barely reformed mass murderer with a homicidal streak a mile wide, but Mr. Lyle knew that Zim might do the worst out of all of them. When you were talking about a person who put someone through an elaborate virtual reality simulation that had ended up nearly breaking the victim's heart simply to discern if they had hit him with a muffin at lunch and not understanding that the simulation was torture enough, no form of retaliation was out of hand, even if he called himself a hero.

At the thought of what Zim might do, provided he was able to jury-rig something elaborate and painful, Mr. Lyle's back-pedaled even faster, not even stopped when he stumbled backwards and kept scooting backwards, nearly hyperventilating. Kim scowled down at Mr. Lyle with both loathing for his earlier cruelties and his repulsive cowardice, her slightly narrowed eyes and the tight line of her mouth suggesting she was strongly considering Spike's proposal. "_Kiiim,_" Ron said from behind, putting a hand on her shoulder, shaking his head slowly.

Rufus looked at the helpless human and shook his head. "Nuh uh!" Kim looked at both of them and stepped back, standing just off to Ron's side.

Abel looked down at him, his mouth turning up in a faint frown, watching Mr. Lyle scuttle away like the human cockroach he was; Abel had known many people like Mr. Lyle in his time: people who seemed like reptilian demons wearing the stolen skin of a likable human, but once the execution blade was at their necks, all of their guises fell away to reveal that they were less like crocodiles then they were like squirming insects before a pin needle. Abel's frown became sympathetic in nature as he noticed that Mr. Lyle's hand was crusted with blood and his fingers were bent at odd angles: the effect was much like a worn-out red pincushion.

Mr. Lyle had told that Abel could heal quickly, but he hadn't been told that he could do so _that _quickly. His plan had been to take Abel out, at least temporarily, and use the confusion to buy himself some time to get away. "By the Partners," Mr. Lyle managed to say to Abel, his heart skipping a few breaths as he realized that what just knowing what Abel really was hadn't been sufficient. It was one thing to read the reports; it was another matter entirely to see the terrifying reality right here, especially with his knowledge of what Abel could do when his wrath was truly roused. "What the hell _are _you?"

Abel gave him a forboding look. "A human. Like you."

Mr. Lyle's mouth opened slightly as Abel's eyes narrowed slightly. The priest grabbed the bayonet off the ground, plucked the other one out of it's sheath and started to slowly approach him. Abel's face was stern, but not fixed in the nearly insane leer of indignated wrath he'd expected. This reminded him rather forcibly of a teacher that had caught his students misbehaving badly and needed to be quickly corrected, but gently so. "It's over," Abel said quietly, but not quietly enough so that neither Mr. Lyle or the others couldn't hear.

"What?" Mr. Lyle repeated, already starting to plan. He thought that maybe, just maybe, he might get out of this encounter alive. He quickly decided that the best thing was to kill time, at least until he reccuperated enough to summon his guns again. Then, Mr. Lyle was certain, he'd make good his escape. Kim narrowed her eyes, recognizing the veiled smug look: he was already planning a way out of his predicament, and while she hadn't expected anything less, it still annoyed her.

Abel stopped in front of Mr. Lyle and looked down at him. Mr. Lyle didn't understand what the expression on his face meant. It made no sense, given the circumstances, but it looked almost...depressed. Disappointed, nearly. "I wish you hadn't done this." He sighed wearily, like a man who'd seen every act of mean stupidity, hateful cruelty and human evil that had ever been committed. He sounded extremely old there, putting Zim in mind of someone who'd been alive for so long that he intimately knew of all the senseless acts of horror that a man could do and keep doing time after time and had grown sick of it. "What was the sense of bringing up bygone hurts and forcing us into a senseless fight?" Abel's eyes narrowed. "Or maybe you're one of those who has no care whether he wins or loses, and only cares for the process?

Mr. Lyle frowned, having no idea what Abel was going on about. "Look, I don't mean to be rude, but what the hell are you going on about?"

Abel continued on his tirade, completely ignoring Mr. Lyle. "You may look human, you may be able to play the part, but you are still only actors, knowing only self-love, envy, vindictiveness and hatred for everyone around you." Abel twirled his bayonet almost thoughtfully. "I could kill you," This statement brought a fresh surge of panic in Mr. Lyle's heart, and it chilled Zim to hear the way Abel said it. It was thoughtful, speculative, almost questioning; the same tone could have been used if he had asked someone whether they liked doughnuts or doughnut holes better.

"But what would it solve?" Able continued, putting his bayonet into it's sheath. "Rage never saved anyone, anger never brightened a dark heart and murder never solves anything." He looked down at Mr. Lyle, a hint of the apocalyptic rage lurking in his heart showing in his glower. "Even if I did kill you...even if I tore you asunder, even if I broke your body until you lost all ability to feel pain, even if I sundered you with the spilt blood of the innocent, I doubt I could ever make you understand the pain you inflicted tonight, the pain you no doubt take pleasure in and inflict everyday. No," Abel went on, looking more irate by the moment. "The destruction of even you, a loathsome _thing _that shows perfectly well just how far a man can fall into the darkness, would be futile and pointless."

"Glad to know," Mr. Lyle said as he stood up, Abel's speech meaning nothing to him. "Gotta give you this, you're more eloquent then your brother."

Abel frowned, wondering what dealings Mr. Lyle might have had with his malicious brother. He decided that Mr. Lyle needed another good shock and Morte had been cooped up long enough. Abel stuck his hand out, just in front of the ground in front of Mr. Lyle.

Mr. Lyle regarded that patch of ground suspiciously, even moreso when the ground darkened, shadows appearing in a hazy semicircle. He didn't like the way it had a vertigo-inducing sensation of depth. "Picked up a few new tricks, huh?"

"I can't let Cain get ahead of me, can I?" Abel replied. A metal square, wide enough for Abel to stand on, even with the uneven surface of it's manifold grooves and odd designs, breached through the center of the pool; it was hard to say whether or not the shadows were a simple gateway or had a substance of their own, but the way the metal square's appearance caused the shadows to shift around sluggishly like water that had had something dropped in it suggested the latter explaination.

Abel's hand shifted slightly. The metal square rose up with alarming speed, revealing itself to be Abel's cross, though it was temporarily obscured by the thick shadows slowly evaporating from it. There was something quietly iconic about the way it rose up, dripping misty darkness around it and fogging the tiles around it before it rose to it's full height, it's base touching ground level without the support of the shadows and standing about a head shorter than Abel, still in the state of unveiling it had been it when they'd last seen it. Abel's hand dropped to his side and the shadows quietly vanished, leaving no evidence of their passage except for the eerie device standing there.

Mr. Lyle was stunned, but recovered himself quickly. "I heard you were carrying around a pocket space armory. Pretty clever, disguising it as a cross. Who expects a cross to contain weapons of mass destruction?" Abel coughed politely, thinking momentarily of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, a friend of his from another world who had inspired the use of what Mr. Lyle had termed a 'pocket space armory'.

Zim cocked an eyeridge. He'd had suspicions about it ever since Abel had withdrawn weapons in it and stowed Morte within it's apparently infinite depths, but he still found it surprising that Abel's cross was a more elaborate-looking version of his Pak; glancing to those around him, he surmised that this wasn't news to the residents of Traverse Town present there and that the two of the Comic Kingdom had come to the same conclusion he had. He wondered how they could have thought of it so quickly and wondered what sort of lives they'd led before coming here for them to be so easily acquinted with such possibilities.

Mr. Lyle cocked an eyebrow, wondering what Abel was up to. Now that the attention had shifted to Abel, he falsely assumed that the others had lost interest in incapacitating him before he could make an escape. In reality, Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Spike, Kim, Ron and Rufus were simply curious about what Abel was doing; his summoning of his cross suggested that he was planning something.

Abel proved them right by opening a particular opening in the top section. He swiftly turned it around, a combination of an odd echoing yell and the ringing pitch noise it produced as it turned making the hair on the back of Mr. Lyle's neck stand up.

Mr. Lyle braced himself as he realizing that Abel had partially opened it; the opening on the top section wasn't very large, only big enough to fit your head into, but he still thought something weird was happening. The weird yell suddenly grew louder and more distinct as an ivory speck appeared, growing larger as the yell became louder.

With alarming suddeness, the speck was Morte Rictusgrin and was flying out the opening, screaming, _"FREEDOM!_" and flying in a line, straight at Mr. Lyle; the human screamed in horrified fright and fell backwards just at Morte flew over him, talking loudly. He stopped in midair and pivoted, leering down. "Oh, it's you. You're like the fiend in Moridor's Box; always coming up at the worst possible time." He floated over to Zim, bobbing happily as he did so and steering well away from Abel. "From the look of things, you guys got this handled, right? Tell me I'm right, I need to know what happened!"

Calvin smirked. "Oh, it's done with, that's for sure."

"So!" Zim said loudly, grinning down at Mr. Lyle. "That statement does beg the question; what will you do now? You have but few choices remaining for you, oh foolish stinkbeast."

"'Stinkbeast'?" Mr. Lyle repeated, his mouth settling into a lopsided grimace and raising an eyebrow. "May I suggest a few lessons in English?"

"You're being e-_vaaaasive!_" Ron said in a lilting, almost singsong tone.

Spike tilted his head and smirked. "Never thought I'd be of the same mind as a Zeppo, but the Zeppo has a point."

Ron turned to Spike. "Why do you keep calling me that? Stop calling me that."

"Can't help it. I mean, look at you." Spike gestured at Ron with a pointed 'gunfighter' gesture. "You're useless."

"Am not!" Ron cried at the same moment Kim did.

They started to speak again when Spike loudly said, "If either of you says what I _know _what you're about to say, I will wipe the floor with the two of you right here and now." Kim and Ron looked at each, somewhat startled, then Kim raised her hand into the air energetically. Ron crossed his arms and fumed at being ousted from a free soda once more while Rufus snickered.

"Ignoring that bit of insanity," Hobbes said, the corner of his mouth threatening to lift up in a smile, "The fact remains: you're helpless and at our mercy."

"What make you think I'm helpless?" Mr. Lyle retorted, trying to play for time. _Just a few more minutes, and I'll have my getaway._

"Because," Hobbes said almost gently. "If you could summon more Heartless, you would have done so. I know your type. And I'm guessing that gun trick of yours take a lot out of you, or we'd be in another fight by now. Am I right?" Mr. Lyle said nothing. Hobbe smiled broadly. "Am I right?" Mr. Lyle turned his head, refusing to look directly at the tiger. "Your silence speaks volumes."

"Hnk, out of it!" Rufus said loudly.

_This is a new low,_ Mr. Lyle thought moodily. He'd had plenty of painful days in his life; the time he'd been reduced to a paranoid wreck after Jarod had almost shot an assault rifle into the back of his head, the botched dealing with the Yakuza that had resulted in the loss of his thumb, the time his ascendence to the top of the first organization he had joined being stifled when Jarod had stolen and blown up every car he'd bought and mailing the license plates and steering locks back to him, and of course that unforgettable inspection trip to the Nine Hells of Baator with a meeting with one of the Senior Partners, but having his weakness pointed out by a rodent that was barely capable of speech was definitely a new low. "So now what?"

"Now we bring you in, Lyle," said Jarod, striding from behind the others, deciding at last to reveal himself. Everyone except Lyle turned to him, various expressions and ranges of surprise on their faces. His sudden appearance disregarded, he'd also changed clothes since they'd last seen him: he was now wearing a long black coat over a light blue shirt collarless shirt, the loops of a complicate design formed of thin white lines peeking over from the shirt's right side. His pants were tan, with a tougher light gray material over them that was similar to the overlying covering on Kim and Ron's pants, but made of a single long piece instead of two separate pieces. He was wearing dark loafers, the shoes making soft footsteps against the ground as he walked. His right hand was clutching a long riflelike weapon: it was built like a futuristic weapon, with a great deal of rounded curves around it and an unusually large barrel. On the sides, in a low-caps computerized font was written the weapon's name on a read-out screen: _Sharpshooter_.

Calvin looked like someone had hit him upside the head with a baseball bat. "Whuh? Huh? You? When did...I mean, _how _did...how come none of us...ugh." He rubbed his forehead, turning to Hobbes. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I _do _need to cut down on my sugar intake." For the most part, the party's reaction was similar to Calvin's, though not as overblown.

Lyle's eyes widened and he pointed a slightly shaking finger at Jarod. "_YOU!_"

"Me," Jarod replied, looking uncharacteristically tense as he spoke.

"Oh, it's just Jarod," Zim said indifferently; behind him, Abel quietly placed his weapons back into the proper places, judging their fight to finally be over. After he did that, the rolls of bandagelike parchment lying around the cross-section snaked back up, tightly winding around the exposed sections until they were covered once more. With that done, the straps moved out from under the bandages and over him, snapping into place again. Zim quirked an eyeridge, something suddenly occuring to him. "Wait, when did _you _get here? And...why did none of us notice?"

"'Just Jarod'?" Ron repeated incredulously. "'_Just Jarod'_?! Do you have any idea who this guy is?" Ron paused. "Wait, come to think of that, I don't really know either."

Spike rolled his eyes and made a low growling noise. "Would you kindly shut up and stop embarrassing yourself?"

"Never!" Ron shouted, throwing his hands into the air defiantly. He frowned. "Wait, that didn't come out right."

Jarod kept walking. Zim felt annoyed, thinking that Jarod was taking the situation away from under him. He started to say something along the lines of this being his fight and it was his right to end it, then caught sight of Jarod's face. His mouth was set in a thin line, his brow furrowed and eyes narrowed. It was not only one of the most forbidding looks Zim had ever seen, it also underlined an unnerving intensity that disturbed Zim rather greatly. He stepped away, deciding that it wasn't a good idea to get in Jarod's way; frankly, it seemed safer just to stand back and watch the proceedings.

Jarod stopped in front of Mr. Lyle, the Sharpshooter's barrel tapping against the ground with a dry _click_. "We haven't had the displeasure of each other's company for a while, Lyle."

Mr. Lyle's mouth tightened into a thin line, but he didn't say anything back.

Scowling at the defenseless agent, Jarod started to speak in a low, steady, sing-song voice. "'Lyle, Lyle, Mr. Crocodile. What's that I see in your smile? You say it's something from the Nile, but I think it must be something vile, for you see, I don't trust you, not by a mile'."

"Crappy poem, Jarod," Mr. Lyle retorted. "That's the best a supergenius can come up with?"

"It says the point well enough," Jarod replied. "And isn't that really the point of all tales? Everything else is just window dressing."

When Lyle didn't say anything, Jarod started talking again. "You haven't been playing nice with the others again, have you?"

"You make it sound so unaccountable," Lyle said with a slight grin.

"At least unlike you, I'm honest."

"Honesty is really in the eye of the beholder. If you truly believe that something is the truth, then it is."

Jarod shook his head disagreeably. "Moral relativitism. I should have expected no less."

Lyle laughed sourly. "Figures that I'd run into you in this junkyard of a town, running around with the losers who got off lucky." He quirked an eyebrow questioningly. "Playing the Good Samaritain to a whole world's probably a first for you."

Jarod ignored the cruel jab at Traverse Town. "You wouldn't know. You haven't darkened my doorstep for a few months."

Lyle smirked. "I've been meaning to pay you back for that."

"As I recall," Jarod said, tapping a finger against the Sharpshooter. "You were nearly eaten alive by a sandworm cult."

"Got it in one, like always." Lyle frowned, wondering about something. "When'd you get here, anyway?"

"None of your business," Jarod said, a flat tone of satisfaction coming into his voice.

The two of them regarded each other for a moment; Jarod with quiet intensity and Lyle with a kind of fearful loathing.

Finally, Jarod spoke. "You're not here for me, are you?"

Lyle snorted. "Don't flatter yourself. I've got bigger fish to fry then _you_. Besides, I'm running with a new crowd these days. You're not a great priority for me anymore."

"Really?" Jarod's hand tightened around the Sharpshooter. "Is the Centre just not lucrative enough for you anymore?"

"Psh!" Lyle rolled his eyes. "Centre's old news, Jarod. I'm working for Wolfram and Hart."

Spike quirked an eyebrow at the name.

"Hold it, hold it, hold it!" Morte said suddenly, floating inbetween them. "You two know each other?"

There was a long pause. Jarod and Lyle stared at Morte slightly incredulously. "We've met," Jarod said, somehow investing those two simple words with indescribable menace.

"Jarod, Jarod, Jarod," Lyle said scathingly, hoping he could make him squirm with a few tentative revelations. "It's time you got rid of this ridiculous notion of being your own man and got it into your oversized skull: the Centre _owns _you. Anything I did in pursuit of that was just business."

Jarod's eyes narrowed and his hand tightened aroung the Sharpshooter so tightly it might have dented it if it were made of a flimsier material. He said nothing but the hateful glare he directed at Lyle said enough. It spoke of a long, painful history between the two, of the fury of a innocent man who'd been tormented by this callous victimizer and, not least of all, of the rage twisting through him at the very sight of Lyle.

"'Buisness', huh?" Abel said slowly. The others simply stared at Lyle, digesting this sudden and odd statement.

Lyle turned to the others. He knew full well what to do to escape, but he thought it'd be in his best interests to sow the seeds of discord while he could. "Don't listen to Jarod. He's not right in the head."

"Oh, and we're supposed to believe you are?" Calvin said scathingly.

"_Trust _me!" Lyle said almost desperately. "This crazy bastard almost hollowed my skull out with an assault rifle!"

Kim looked up sharply. "He did?" She looked at Jarod; not accusingly, as Lyle had hoped, but questioningly.

"Not that I blame ya," Spike said to Jarod, asking the question for the others, "But why?"

Jarod didn't answer directly. Instead, he glared down at Lyle and quietly said, "'I decide who lives or dies'."

His words had an eerie and slightly crazed aspect to them. Creepy as they sounded, they had an odd effect on Lyle; he paled slightly and he drew back, looking uncommonly like a puppy that had just been hit with a billy club and had good reason to expect another hit was forthcoming.

Zim regarded Jarod almost warily. "What does that mean?"

Jarod didn't look away from Lyle, even as he said, "It's something my brother Kyle used to say."

Lyle realized that he had lost the situation right there. "Look, mistakes were made. Heat of the moment, things happened, you don't need to overreact!" His hasty, scared tone turned _overreact_ into a semi-squeal that was a little painful for those with sensitive hearing.

Jarod's hard look didn't change. "'Overreact'? _You killed my brother._"

Behind him, eyebrows shot up, glances of surprise were exchanged and they regarded Jarod with looks of surprise and pity, not to mention a little solidarity. The 'We-Hate-Lyle' quotient went up by a few more notches, too.

"Look, Jarod," Lyle said hastily, feeling his heart pound in his chest like a misplaced jackhammer. "I was just doing my job-"

"Your job?" Zim repeated, stomping right next to Jarod as a fresh stab of anger directed itself at Lyle. "_Your job?_ _YOUR JOB?! _How is that _ever _an excuse, you lowly parasite?!"

Lyle stared at Zim incredulously. "How can a guy like _you _judge me?! These guys might not know everything about you, but I do. Oh, believe me, I do." He managed a cruel smirk, despite his fear. "Seems you weren't always such a knight in shining armor, now were you?"

Calvin frowned and looked at Zim, wondering what Lyle meant by that. Morte clicked his teeth once, twice, thinking about both his own tormented past and of the man he'd called Chief.

Zim said nothing for a moment, his mouth set in a hard line. What Lyle said made him think of the days in which he'd wanted nothing more than to destroy the Earth or just conquer it, depending on his mood that day. Sometimes, the memories of those days were apt to induce nostalgia at the thought of a time when things were so much simpler; there was none of the gray thinking he had to ponder these days and frustrate himself over whether or not an action was _right_. Back in those days, he had a clarity he rarely saw anymore. There was only himself, the Empire he charged at the forefront of, the Tallest he served and the will to succeed that was birthed by his drive to be recognized as someone important, someone worthwhile, someone that all Irkens would have to acknowledge. Beyond that, no one else mattered. It wasn't really a question of selfishness or a conscious refusal to care about anyone else; he'd simply been blind to everyone else around him, and in that blindness the kinder concepts of life had never really mattered much.

But, Zim now knew all too well, clarity wasn't everything. More often then not, the memories of the old days aggravated him, filled him with revulsion at his total self-absorption and of course, the now familiar self-disgust. Sometimes, there was musing over what led him to become what he had been. Certainly, there had been a progression to the nearly sociopathic persona that had made him infamous; his Pak's corrupt data had only been a factor in that backwards evolution, not the root of it. The plain and simple fact was that he just hadn't cared. He had _refused _to care about anyone but himself long before he came to Earth. And look where that had led him: a existence that was an utter lie, a mission that was just an excuse to keep him from destroying everything Irkens long dead had given their lives to build up from a scattered collective of nomadic proto-Irkens.

He was different now. That was truly something of value; to know just how much of a despicable defect you'd once been and how far you'd come from being a person you were ashamed to even remember. Lyle, no doubt, had no conception of that sort of progression, and he wasn't sure if his new allies (he wasn't prepared to think of these strangers as _friends_) would entirely understand that strange gulf between who he was and who he had been.

"Things change," Zim said, summarizing all his months of personal reflection in two simple words, his tone a calm that was downright eerie coming from a person whose ordinary mode of conversing what yelling and communcating whatever random thoughts came into his mind. His eyes narrowed to crimson slits glimmering with great dislike, his mouth set in a resolute line.

No one else said anything. A few glances were exchanged, their givers aware that something of great import had been said, though they didn't know the reason why.

"So," Lyle said calmly, with the air of someone coming to an inescapable conclusion. "I have lost."

Zim's glare softened, his anger dulling away. His mouth curved into a smirk. "Yes, you have lost. We have beaten you at your every trump card. The shock of what you know has faded. Your minions have been vanquished. Your powers have deserted you. _You have lost._"

Lyle sighed expansively and half-smirked; it was the look of a game player who'd been trapped in a stalemate and had chosen to admit to it. "So what happens now?"

Jarod stared at him heavily for a moment. He raised a hand, making a 'come-hither' gesture at those behind him. Calvin and Hobbes exchanged glances, then came up behind him, as did the others, forming a half circle behind him. "We bring you in for questioning," Jarod said simply.

"We could do that right here," Spike said, grinning. "Won't be too hard to get screams, a few fluids, some information."

"Tch," Lyle said disgruntledly. "Talking about torture? You're moving around with some real _winners_, right now, Jarod."

"Enough with the insults!" Calvin said in a tone of supreme exasperation. "You're completely beaten and helpless and surrounded by people that would love any excuse to redefine pain for you." He frowned. "Come to think of it, why would you come up and talk to all of us about things we _don't _want talking about? Are you reckless or just born stupid?"

"So!" Ron said with false cheer, dropping on one knee, crossing his arms and grinning. "Feel like talking or would you rather do this somewhere more comfortable?"

"We can do uncomfortable!" Hobbes said, pointing a claw at Lyle. "We'd _love _to do uncomfortable!"

Lyle rolled his eyes. "Well, as far as business opportunities go, imprisonment and interrogation aren't very viable. So, _sayonara._" Darkness flared around him suddenly in a turbulent blue-purple-black capsule, vanishing a moment later and Lyle along with it.

The group stared in stunned disbelief at the spot where Lyle had been standing only moments ago. "Well, I can't exactly say I'm surprised," Jarod said disgust, breaking the silence.

"Ugh!" Zim said angrily. "He got away! I don't believe it, he got away!" He kicked the ground angrily. "And I thought we had him deceased to privileges!"

"That's 'dead to rights'," Kim corrected.

"Whatever!" Zim made a low noise that sounded like a dying moose. He stood there, twitching for a moment before he ran over to a pillar and started furiously kicking it. "Stupid house! Stupid town! Stupid darkness! Stupid Lyle! _Stupid idioms!_"

Hobbes watched Zim's tempermental outburst, his ears drooping. "And I thought _you _had a short temper," he said to Calvin.

"Yeah," Calvin agreed, suddenly realizing what he'd just said. "Hey! What's that supposed to mean?"

"What do you _think _it means?" Morte said.

Zim stopped attacking the pillar, turning around and slumping against it moodily. Ron came up to him and asked, "Feel any better?"

Zim gave an indifferent half-shrug. "Eh."

Ron thought of something to say. Kim walked next to him and said it for him. "So, your first day here has been pretty wild, huh?"

Zim looked surprised for a moment, and then suddenly laughed, He settled back, grinning slightly, looking more at ease. He looked up at the destruction around the room and tapped his forehead once thoughtfully. "Now, where do we go from here?" He said, mostly to himself.

Rufus took it as a question instead of the statement Zim had meant it as. "Hnk, home." Zim's antennae twitched slightly irritably, but he didn't say anything.

Jarod silently walked up behind Spike, somehow completely evading the vampire's notice. "We're a destructive bunch, aren't we?"

Spike jumped and turned around, his eyes wide. "Don't _do _that! You trying to give me a heart attack?!"

Jarod looked at him, clearly surprised. "Wouldn't your heart have to be beating for it to have an attack?" Spike said nothing, settling for glaring at him. Jarod looked back at the devastated danceroom around them, putting a finger to his temple moodily. "This is _not _going to be a good place to be when Herrimen gets up here..."

"What's a Herrimen?" Morte wondered. His head cocked to the left, peering at Jarod intently. There seemed something somehow...familiar about him. Something about him that Morte had recognized almost immediately, but couldn't readily define.

Not knowing or caring who Herrimen was, Zim said, "All the more reason for us to get out of here as soon as we can. Of course," he added, "That begs the knowing of how _you _got in here without any of us noticing."

Jarod looked back at the shaded area behind the pillars around them. "Sometimes, questions answer themselves. Listen," he said suddenly, addressing everyone around him. "We have to get out before anyone comes looking. The last thing we need right now are more complications."

The ones who'd been trapped in the house for one reason or another stared at Jarod disbelievingly.

"'Get out?'" Abel said wonderingly. "As in, leave and go home!?"

"Yeah," Jarod said, trying not to grin at the sudden looks of enormous happiness at the looks on their faces. "I'd need a few things cleared up first, like how all this happened or what Lyle was doing here, but I can take all of you where you want to go."

Calvin, Hobbes and Zim exchanged annoyed glances. Morte spoke for them. "Hey, what about us!? We still need a place to set up kip! Let alone those cutters." Morte nodded towards Kim, Ron and Abel, who got the distinct sense that Morte had just payed them a compliment.

-------

_Excerpt from the Hitchhiker's Guide_

_"Sigilian slang is a funny thing. Not funny ha-ha, but funny weird, somewhat like the difference between a bunch of clowns slapping each other with giant boxing gloves and a row of faceless dolls facing an old rural road._

_"It is commonly considered to be similar to old variations of eighteenth century British slang, though linguists are unsure how this might have come around. Some Planewalkers believe that some Primeworlders who accidentally came to Sigil in it's earliest days might have spread their dialect among the inhabitants, thus evolving into the terms you see today._

_"There are many variations on it across the Planes, but there are some widely used terms. Among them follows; berk, which is a generic insult. Cutter, a compliment for any sufficiently skilled, intelligent or cagey individual, often applied to adventurers, believed to have it's roots in the activities of the usual hack-and-slash lifestyle of adventurers. Kip, a term referring to a camp in the roughest sense, generally referring to a temporary refuge such as a one-night stay at a inn. Jink, a term for gold or any other widely used currency. Graybeard, an old person(though one Morte Rictusgrin typically applies it to animated corpses that have decayed to skeletons). _

_-------_

Jarod understood all of what Morte said, having a passing knowledge in the odd slang Morte spoke in. "As soon as we have everything sorted out, I'll get everyone where they need to be."

"Oh, okay then," Morte said, mollified. Zim was a little miffed that Morte had just made a decision without bothering to discuss it with him, but decided that there was no harm in getting Jarod up to speed with things. Besides, he thought that making an ally out of him could be helpful later and nodded to show his approval.

The others voiced their approval, except Spike, who shrugged. "You lot do what you want. My part's done."

Hobbes looked at him curiously. "You're not coming?"

"Hell no! I did like I was paid for. Found Keyboy, got him here and helped out in a fight. That's all I'm doing for you lot tonight." Spike raised his arms wide, gesturing at the world around him. "You can all head off and do whatever it is Captain Forehead has in mind, but I've got better things to do."

"Suit yourself," Jarod said amiably, not at all bothered by Spike's usual half joking, half insulting manner. He pulled one of his sleeves back, revealing a light blue wristwatch with buttons on it's face that were similar to a rough display of planetary orbits, which made no sense to anyone else. He clearly knew what they meant; he pressed a few buttons on it, producing small beeping noises and a single loud _boop_. "Stand back," he advised them. "The Butterfly's coming."

"Why-" Morte started to say before he was interrupted by the sound of something moving towards them. Something pretty big. And they didn't just hear it, they felt it move towards them. A large shape moved towards them, shimmering into visibility as it approached. Zim regarded it with interest. "Why would you call it a Butterfly?"

The bulky blue ship approaching with an almost cautious haste was about the size of a truck, hovering just off the ground, two large glowing discs on it's underside producing twin waves of rippling force that kept it off the ground, generating a gentle wind around them. The ship had a distinctly utilitarian aspect, seemingly all swept-forward squarish shapes. On the rounded front there was a wide dark windshield, probably hiding the cockpit. At the lower half of the front was a pair of long hatches that Zim thought had concealed weaponry behind it. Long tubelike structures marked the lower sides, small disks like the ones at the bottom dotting their surfaces.

It came to a stop in front of them, sharply turning so that it's back faced them, exposing a squarish indentation. The indentation folded away from the rest of the hull, quietly touching ground in front of them, exposing the interior; the walls were tan, with large cushioned chairs lined against them. It seemed mostly empty, except for the single airlock-styled door at the end of the small chamber.

Jarod stepped aside, sweeping a hand at the ship invitingly. "After you guys, please."

Zim quickly stepped in, thinking that the door he saw probably led to the cockpit, judging by it's position. The room itself, which struck him as a cargo hold, was almost completely empty except for a small dufflebag lying atop one chair. Zim sat at the chair opposite the one with the dufflebag on it, noticing that a large label on the dufflebag read _Property of Calvin Pelagius Nocker._ He looked to the side, observing Kim and Ron get into the first and second seats from the door. Abel came in next, his cross nestled in the crook of one hand. He sat a seat away from Zim moments before Calvin and Hobbes came up and got into the seats across from Zim; recognizing the dufflebag he'd filled with some spare things, Calvin assumed Jarod had simply taken it from the Gummi Ship for them and picked it up, slinging it over one shoulder and sat in the seat it had been in. Morte floated up next, coming down just above a seat next to Zim. Jarod came up after him, the ramp closing up behind him, settling into a wall with a number of hard clicks that suggested bolts securing it into place as it's surface smoothed over again, looking no different than the rest of the walls around them. Jarod quietly took a seat near the back of the room, well away from everyone else. Zim wondered whether this was because he was stand-offish or simply used to his own company; given his slightly awkward manner of communication, he supposed it was probably the latter.

Morte floated up and leaned against a head rest, muttering to himself thoughtfully and occasionally throwing glances at Jarod for some reason. For the skull, the feeling of familiarity he got from Jarod was impossible to shake; he felt like he knew him from somewhere, and very well at that. He did look very familiar, but it wasn't his looks that reminded him of a man he had once known. His presence was almost indistingushible from the immortal amnesiac he had known as Chief and what the multiverse had known as The Nameless One. He silently watched him with all the studious observation thought that centuries of having no eyelids had impressed on him, wondering what it was about Jarod that struck a chord in him. For his part, Jarod took no notice, or if he did, chose not to say anything; he pressed a few more buttons on his wristwatch, saying nothing.

Zim leaned back, letting his mind wander. The thought of everything that had happened had become a tight coil, constricting him when he wasn't preoccupied with something like he'd been all day. He'd always been like that, which was one of the reasons he'd preferred to have things to do at all times: it was always the quiet moments that got the more stressful thoughts boring into his mind and disturbing his peace.

Zim could freely admit to himself that he was still a bit shellshocked by everything that had happened. Dib's weird experiment(which had worked, after a fashion), the world being invaded by dark monsters and somehow winding up in this new world with a new mission, some irritating companions and of course, the Keyblade. All of that, though, was secondary to the ideas he had about what to do. He thought it might be easy if he could find Gir and Dib first. He remembered Gaz, and considered that she'd probably be with Dib: she could be incredibly cold and mean-spirited sometimes, but she was, in the end, attached to her brother, even if she'd likely massacre the first person to suggest that. Of the two of them, Dib was the one prone to take action; Gaz was more like a ship set to drift, moved primarily by whatever currents came her way, so in such a traumatic situation as this, she'd probably go along with whatever her brother decided. Further logic suggested that Gir, who regarded Gaz as a mother figure, would remain with her.

It seemed simple enough, then; find Dib first and go on from there. Zim thought that it might not work out that way; they could have been scattered from each other, just as he had. He was momentarily troubled by this, then determined himself to simply have no expectations: that way, he couldn't be stymied by any deviations in the collection of hopes and random thoughts he called a plan. Besides, if these two could be believed, their mission was to aid him. He didn't entirely trust Calvin and Hobbes yet, or understand them for that matter, but he was sure that the two of them would be an asset, if the skills they'd shown earlier were any indication. Zim momentarily considered finding Aang and Danny tomorrow and enlisting them in his quest. After some thought, he discounted it. For one thing, he knew they'd be busy enough keeping their own circles together and stable. For another, he wasn't sure there'd be enough room in the Gummi Ship for them.

The ship suddenly lurched up, cutting off any further thought in that vein for a while. Zim was so startled he almost fell down, but no one else seemed to have been as bothered. Calvin and Hobbes wer startled too, but they clearly weren't as lost in their thoughts as Zim.

Jarod's wristwatch emitted a blue light momentarily. "Okay," He said. "I've set a course to a safe place we can figure out what happened, we're now sight and radar invisible, and the Phase Matter Shifter has started."

-------

Spike smirked as the ship flew upwards and vanished from sight. A normal human wouldn't have been able to tell when it flew straight through the walls, leaving no trace of it's passage, but Spike was nothing like a normal human.

He popped his knuckles, feeling entirely at ease. He'd done what he'd been assigned to with no casualities, everything had been completed as directed(the little hiccups of earlier nothwithstanding), he had just made a good fifteen hundred dollars and he'd got to annoy Possible while he was at it. Add in six good hours of drinking and sharing the drink until everyone was good and drunk, instigating a bar fight and take out every single partaker of alchohol and Spike thought he'd be close to his definition of a perfect night. The reason it couldn't possibly be a perfect one had a little bit to do with Possible's likely misinformed jabbed at his mother; now he was going to have to drink off bad memories and think about all the other things thoughts of his mother usually led to.

_Things were simpler when it was just me and the other Scoobies,_ Spike thought morosely. _No Heartless, no other worlds, no other people dying by the truckload every other night...of course, I did have a inhibition chip planted in my head much of the time. I'd even take my first few months with Team Angel over this._

Spike decided that dwelling in the past was a terrible idea and resolved to think of more interesting things to do then get drunk and beat people. Just off the bat, he couldn't think of many, but he was sure they were there. He paced around the room, trying to think of some. It took him about five minutes to come up with a few. In the process, he absently scratched his name in three different languages into various parts of the room, dropped a chunk of pillar from the chandelier just to see if it would crack the floor (it did), used his sword to carve one pillar into a passable likeness of a singing frog in a tophat, got so distracted that he forget what he was thinking about in the first place almost four times and was generally destructive.

Spike decided to make a dramatic flourish before leaving the house. He knew perfectly well that he could have left by simply leaving with Jarod and the others, but he had no desire to subject himself to any question-and-answers; he found that kind of thing too boring to keep his attention for any real amount of time. The flourish he had in mind involved jumping on the intact chandelier at the top of the room and cutting the chain; if all went well, it would then crash into the floors, smashing down and down until it reached the subterranean levels, allowing him to escape through the sewers before anyone knew what had happened. Even if that didn't work, it'd still make a great mess and he could blame it on Bloo.

Twirling his sword around cheerily, Spike grinned malevolently and suddenly froze as the doubledoors slammed open. It slammed over in a very specific, very familiar way, ringing with the sort of pitch that only a bearer of flabbergasted and soon-to-be-infuriated authority could muster. There was a painfully long moment of silence as Spike realized what the scene had to look like; him standing in a demolished room, evidently responsible for the mess. His mind was ringing with screams of _Oh sonuva friggin' frackin' almighty crapshack! Dammit! Damn damn damnity damn DAMN! Shit, hell and other such expletives!_

"MASTER WILLIAM!" An ordinarily cordial and well-mannered English voice bellowed from behind. "WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!"

Spike knew this meant that he wouldn't be able to avoid the issue anymore. Moving with all the miserable trepidation of a dead man walking who knew that the distance between himself and a lethal injection was a single mile, Spike slowly turned around.

Standing in the doorway was none other than Mr. Herrimen, the imaginary friend of Madam Foster, the president of Foster's and head of all things related to it. He was a six foot tall vaguely humanoid rabbit, hs body covered with fluffy fur that was mostly gray except for the white on his front, mouth, belly and temples, his legs the only feature that were definitely rabbitlike with no human influence. His short face, rabbitlike except for the small dark eyes, was dominated by a outgrowth of fur over his mouth with a heavy resemblance towards a handlebar mustache. One of his eyes was covered by a monocle; the uncovered eye was usually only slightly open, but was now wide in abject fury. He was dressed in an distinct Edwardian style that left his large belly exposed, wearing a button-up plaid shirt under a black overcoat with a folded down white collar over a red bowtie and a tail that covered his entire backside, splitting apart just in front of his small fluffy tail. His somewhat overlong arms were held stiffly to the sides, his three fingered white glove-clad hands clenched tightly. Accounting for at least a foot of his height was a tall narrow stovepipe hat, perched neatly between his back-slanting ears, which brought to mind a dignified double ponytail. Overall, he was built somewhat like a slightly filled bag that someone loosely held; wide at the bottom and thinning as you went up.

Mr. Herrimen forced himself to calm slightly, though one of a pair of spat-clad feet thumped against the ground in an almost spastic twitch. The eye uncovered by a monocle nearly closed as he managed to calm himself. Mr. Herrimen looked around the destroyed room and observed the extent of the damage, which was considerably extensive. "Well?!" He demanded, his voice deepening slightly.

Spike felt himself faltering. "Bugger," he muttered, mostly to himself.

-------

Jarod, Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Morte, Abel, Kim, Ron and Rufus were standing around a conviently vacant room; it had a desk at one end, two beds on either side of it and a third bed on the other side of the room, otherwise much like the room Zim had been in. The Butterfly was floating outside the room's single window, it's open cargohold facing them.

Zim was sitting on the bed against the wall, with Morte floating around him. Calvin and Hobbes had respectively staked out the other two beds while Kim and Ron sat side-by-side against Hobbes' bed, the naked mole rat sitting atop Ron's head. Abel and Jarod were both standing up, at opposite ends of the room and resting against the wall.

As Jarod had explained, telling him what had happened in this room would make it easier for all of them; he himself could get a handle on what Lyle had been doing there, Abel's group could get a respite and rest before going home, and Zim's group wouldn't have to go anywhere else. They'd agreed with this idea, though they weren't quite sure what Jarod wanted.

"Okay," Hobbes said nervously. "Ummm..." He looked over at Calvin, his tail wagging anxiously. He looked up at Jarod, his ears flattened. "What do you want to know?"

Jarod recognized that Hobbes was exibiting signs of a distressed cat. "Well," he replied, keeping his voice as calm and even as possible. "I'd like to know how all of you got together of course, and how Lyle got involved is important."

"Okay, okay, we got the picture," Morte said. He looked down at Zim. "So, what do you say, Boss? Want to spill the dark?"

Zim took a few moments to think before he answered. "I am not sure. We _do _have to leave first thing in the morning-"

"About that," Jarod said quickly. "Your Gummi Ship won't be ready until twelve o' clock tommorow."

Zim straightened up in his chair. "That _long?_" he said in clear surprise. The incredulous look slid off his face as he mulled over it momentarily. He'd been assuming that it would be quickly done, even despite the warnings he'd been given that it'd be an all-night repair job; with his mistaken assumption had come the idea that they'd be leaving to investigate the closest world almost first thing in the morning. After some thought, he decided that he'd flow with it, as it would give them more time to get supplies, investigate this town and other such things. Zim settled back into his chair, feeling less on-edge. "In that case, I see no harm in any of this."

"There you go," Morte said. "And what the Boss says, goes!" Jarod gave Morte a curious look, wondering if the skull was a bit of a yes-man or simply regarded Zim as his leader. Behind his curiosity was a strange familiarity with the skull.

"So!" Kim said brightly. "Who goes first?"

They looked around at each other and quickly discussed it; they decided that since it was relatively short, it'd be best for Abel, Kim and Ron to explain how they wound up wandering around the catacombs of Foster's. That, and some of it had already been said before, with only a few details needing clearing up.

Abel started first; he stood against the wall, using the cross strapped to his back as a rest, collecting his thoughts with the trained practice of a man who not only read passages of Scripture every week to an audience, but had to impart what seemed to be the truth under the surface without repeating tired old theories and keeping his congregation's attention. His main experience as a priest was protecting people, killing evil things and other pursuits suited to a paladin, but he did know some of the most essential parts of his office. "Well, I suppose our story begins with me: if I hadn't been foolish enough to lose my way, I would never have needed these two's help." He gave the two teenager's and their naked mole rat a grateful look.

Kim frowned unhappily. "Father Nightroad, you shouldn't be so down on yourself. Humility isn't something you need to fake."

Abel shrugged indifferently. "I'm not faking anything; I'm just being honest. That's what a lack of overweening pride is all about. Wait, I'm getting off-track. Hold on..." He collected his thoughts again, pausing thoughtfully before he was ready to speak. "It was a few days ago; I was back in my church, listening to alternative rock turned up so loud the neighbors complained-"

"Wait," Calvin interrupted. "You play music so loud the neighbors complain?"

Abel smiled almost roguishly. "They complain louder when my choir practices. We like playing our own songs, preferably rock and roll. So...I was interrupted in my trivial pursuits when I got a call from Frankie; see, when people have problems, they ask me to help them fix it. Construction jobs, technology troubleshooting, advice on dealing with troublesome situations...that kind of thing. Frankie called me to fix a problem with the shields-"

"Shields?" Zim interrupted, his brow furrowed. "What shields?"

"Foster's is kind of a local defense zone," Kim informed him. "A lot of the large-scale defense systems for this district are based in that house. Because of that, it's really well protected; you can't send unauthorized satellite signals there, most communications have to be explictly authorized to work and there's a lot of offense-triggered force fields around it. And that's just the basic stuff."

Hobbes scratched his lower jaw with his foot before speaking. "Why put so many vital defenses in one house? Sure, it's a big house-"

"It's also one of the most easily defensible places in town," Ron reminded him. "There's only a few ways in or out and it's almost smack in the middle of the district, among other things."

"So why would such important things be malfunctioning? I may not be the science buff in this little group, but I do know enough about security systems to know that most of them have back-ups in case of failure."

Abel shrugged, making a goofy and somehow charming expression of supreme bemusement. "Lots of reasons." He starting counting them off on his fingers. "Ordinary mechanical failure, emergency overrides, programming errors, Cheese messing around with them, Bloo getting bored and playing with them, Spike getting drunk and messing around with them..."

Jarod's visage darkened. "Of course, we can't rule out sabotage."

Morte gave off the feeling that he raised an eyebrow. "Who'd want to sabotage the defenses?"

"Well," Ron explained. "While a lot of the people in town are heroes and adventurers, a few are just regular people but a lot are your standard-package freaks. Villians, super and substandard. Half the time we're going on missions, it's to stop them from doing anything really stupid or hurting anyone."

Abel nodded. "Right. In this case, someone had somehow sent a remote virus into the shields and fouled up, I think, the ones based around communications and threat detection. They couldn't get anyone else on short notice, so they called me in; I think Herrimen acquiesed because those systems are particularily vital. They can detect whether or not Heartless have invaded anywhere in the Foster's property. Not that it happens, very much; Heartless tend to inhabit dark isloated places and avoid densely populated areas; Foster's is the sort of place they avoid like the plague. Still, it does happen.

Abel continued. "It was simple enough to do; I'm guessing whoever sent the virus was just playing some pointless joke or isn't very skilled in programming. It only took me about twenty minutes to isolate the virus and remove it. The systems came back on-line only minutes later, and I left to go home. I _think _I took a wrong turn at one hallway or another. I do remember falling down six trapdoors, one after another, until I was in the subbasement levels and got hopelessly lost for the last three days." Abel paused, possibly for dramatic effect. He loudly wailed, "_THREE DAYS! _You have no idea how miserable I've been, wandering around in those dank corridors for hours, fearing the approach of the darkness or sadistic children every time I turned a corner, waiting breathlessly for the rancid breath of a thing man was not meant to even conceive of to come down on my neck! _I had to eat lint to survive!_" He paused. "It tasted like thread-spun cotton."

Morte bobbed uncomfortably, showing every indication of wanting to get as far away from Abel as possible. Zim, on the other hand, nodded in agreement. "This house is _evil_. Is it not? _TELL ME IT'S NOT!_" His left eyeridge twitched. "And I'll tell you a lie, blibbering and covered in the grease of all those ensnared in it's falsehood-derived claws!" Zim paused. "And then?"

Abel started to speak, then stopped. "Actually, I'm not sure." He looked down at Kim, almost questioningly. "Well, what happened next? Everything from after that last trapdoor hit me until you three found me is just a big, dark, lint encrusted blur, so..._your turn!_"

Kim's eye widened in surprise and she said nothing. One of the odd contrasts in her personality was her complete lack of fear when it came to physical challenges and how the very thought of inviting the criticism of others could fill her heart with dread in a way that, say, snowboarding down an avalaunch could not. She was suddenly aware of everyone now looking at her, and in her suddenly over-concious mind, they were all staring at her, waiting for her to start explaining and all ready to pass judgement on anything she had to say that they found objectionable or idiotic.

Of all the people there besides Ron and Rufus, the only person she knew fairly well was Abel, and that was mainly because Abel happened to be in charge of the church her family attended (despite being Catholic, Abel didn't consider other denominitions as outside of his jurisdiciton, making his church attractive to people of all denominations); she had no idea how these new people would take what she had to say. She was certain that Calvin would be quick to make fun of the first thing he heard and Hobbes reminded her of Ron in an odd sort of way, so she didn't think he'd judge her. And Zim and Jarod had something in common: to her, they were almost complete mysteries. She had no idea how they'd react to what she had to say. To say that Kim was paralyzed with trepidation at the thought of anyone dismissing her or critizing her based on what she had to saw was a bit of an understatement.

Before her drive to impress could push her into starting off with the first thing that came to mind, followed by her fear of being judged leading to her saying something to make herself look idiotic, Kim felt a pleasantly familiar light touch on the back of her hand. She looked aside to see that Ron had placed his hand over hers; he had recognized her mood and was doing something to help her. Looking at him, Kim realized that Ron, at least, was still there, ready and willing to back her up in the event of a mistake or a panic-induced case of short-term memory loss. More to the point, he, at least, was one person that no matter what she said, wouldn't think ill of her. Kim's panicked nerves smoothed out quickly.

Feeling more grounded with Ron there, she started to explain how they'd got the call to save Abel before she realized that Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte weren't familiar with their team function. "Um...you guys remember when Ron said that we got hired to go save Abel?"

"Yeah," Hobbes said. "Wait, 'hired'?"

"It's not exactly like that," Kim said, a bit heisitantly. Hobbes found himself fascinated by her obvious terror of public speech and her refusal to clam up and let Ron do it for her. It struck him as both girlishly cute and unusually courageous at the same time. "Uh...you guys know about Traverse Town's thing with adventurers, right?"

"Yeah," Calvin said, nodding and looking surprisingly interested in what she was saying.

"Well...me, Ron, Rufus and our tech genius Wade Load are a _team _of adventurers: Team Possible. People call us for help and we do what we can. Fighting villians, stopping disasters, securing dangerous areas, hunting for ancient treasures in lost cities for museums, we've done it all."

"Hence the motto," Ron said grandly, spreading his arms wide. "Team Possible: _We can do anything!_" Zim quirked an eyebrow, thinking that sounded a bit boastful, but he thought that given their performance in the fight from earlier, their motto might well be nothing more than honest advertising. "Mostly stopping the forces of evil, even if the ones we fight the most are kind of pathetic and lame."

Calvin and Hobbes looked at each other and raised eyebrows in virtually identical expressions of puzzlement. Kim, whose two younger brothers were identical twins, thought that Calvin and Hobbes acted like lifelong twins, even if they looked nothing alike. _No,_ she thought. Disregarding the gulf that being of different species engendered, they acted like identical twins. They moved like each other, had the little motions of sympatic thoughts and generally acted like brothers in all ways but the literal. Noting it as interesting, Kim continued. "So, about a few hours ago, we got a call from one of my friends; Kimiko Tohomiko-" Calvin and Hobbes exchanged looks, recalling their brief encounter with the Xiaolin Dragons and Eduardo. "-about Abel. She told us what she thought had happened and that Abel needed rescuing, and the other rescue groups weren't available: the Titans've been busy for a while, she and the other Xiaolin Dragons didn't have time, she couldn't get into contact with the Plumbers and everyone else charges money. So she contacted me and Ron at our house-"

"'Our' house?" Morte interrupted. "Not that I'm judging, but ain't the two of you kinda young for that kind of thing?"

"Mind out of gutter," Ron said sharply. "I live in the Possible's house. I stay with her family, they get a daily dose of the Ronshine, it's all good!" Morte clicked his teeth in a somehow perverse way, but he didn't say anything.

Kim continued on, rolling her eyes with a slight smile. "We set out right away. We don't live that far away from here, so we didn't need to call in a favor for a ride like we usually do. We managed to find Abel's tracks, but it took us a while to find him; by the time we found him, he'd gotten somewhere in the sewers."

"Few hour ago," Rufus noted, crossing his arms and nodding sagely. "Hnk, got him getting smack-human with big handbag iguana!"

To the majority of the people there, most of what he just said was just chattering with an unusual candance and pattern that sounded like speech. For some reason, Zim was starting to catch the candence of the mole rat's style of talking, but still found it hard to understand him. For the benefit of the others, Ron quickly translated. "In Ronman-terms, that'd be 'we found Abel fighting with a big sewer crocodile.'"

"Hnk, what I say!" Rufus said, crossing his arms irritably.

"A-HA!" Calvin suddenly exclaimed, pointing at Hobbes. "I _knew _there were sewer gators somewhere in the multiverse! And yet you never believed me, _like always!_" Hobbes rolled his eyes.

"We have been having territory disputes with them," Abel admitted sheepishly. "So they helped me mollify the iguana, er, crocodile."

"What'd you do?" Jarod asked, looking amused by the whole thing.

"Ron just hit it in the head really hard," Kim said, giving Ron an affectionate look, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Ron smiled confidently, putting his hands behind his head. "What can I say, some people just are born with it!"

"Yeah," Kim said, lightly punching him on the arm. "And _you _had to work for it."

"Ouch!"

"You're getting sidetracked," Jarod said, though finding their back-and-forth fascinating. Zim snickered.

"Oh...yeah." Ron scratched the back of his neck sheepishly.

Abel took the lead. "So we spent the next few hours pretty much just moving upwards; in retrospect, it was actually kind of fun. We got a lost a few times, until Kim made me stick in the back. I remember we had a few interesting things happen to us: there was that moment where we took a wrong turn and fell into a trapdoor and fell up to the Foster's roof, but then we fell into another trapdoor and ended up where we started."

"Hold it!" Morte suddenly yelled. "You said you fell into a trapdoor."

"Uh huh!" Rufus said.

"And you ended on that house's roof."

"Yeah." Ron said.

"So...you're saying you fell _into _a trapdoor, and landed out on the roof."

"That's pretty much it," Kim said.

"Ah." Morte's face, though fleshless, was somehow able to convey expression. He seemed calmly bewildered. "So...how in the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia do you fall _up?!_"

Abel shrugged. "I dunno."

Morte stared at him for a long time. He gradually floated down to the armrest, staring at the priest like a man who'd just found out that his soul was the legal property of a family of pineapple farmers, or more precisely, like a person who'd just been told something that was completely impossible but had no reason to disbelieve it.

Zim, on the other hand, had absolutely no problem with events that flagrantly violated all laws of physics, having perpetuated a few of them himself. "Yes, yes, you fell up and fell down to ground zero, blah blah, stuff happened, yeah yeah, what happened next?!"

Kim blinked politely at Zim. "Uh...there's not really much more to it than that. Right after _that, _we walked up a staircase and ran into you guys."

"Your turn," Abel said, folding his hands behind his head and wedging himself even further into his chair.

Zim paused. He remembered what Cyborg had said earlier, and looking at them now, realized that Kim and Ron had both been in Cyborg's picture, causing him to wonder why he hadn't recognized them. He shook his head and gave a quick run-through of his adventures in town, ending when he teamed up with Calvin and Hobbes.

"That sounded like a great fight," Kim said wistfully. "Wish we could have seen it."

"They had tapes of the scene," Jarod informed her, sounding a little uncomfortable. "If you want, I can send you copies later-"

"Excuse me, _tapes?_" Zim interrupted questioningly.

"Certain areas of the town are recorded by sensitive cameras," Abel explained. "It's an idea Bloo had; since there's so many crazy things happening at the same time, he thought that people would literally pay to see them. So he had a number of motion activated cameras installed in areas where these things tend to happen and made a show out of it."

Ron nodded. "It's not actually that different from a thing they've been doing in town ever since we got a visitor from this one world; I forget what it's called, but he called himself an Iskoort or something like that. This guy brought this technology that records memories in a playback format; turns your experiences into movies kind of idea."

"Yeah," Morte commented. "They have do something like that in the Sensorium back in Sigil. Use a magical stone that records memories in the same way. They call them Sensory Stones."

Calvin considered the tape thing thoughtfully. "Huh, that sounds kinda cool."

Jarod grimaced. "I _hate _them."

Abel suddenly looked uncomfortable. "Um-"

Jarod shuddered violently, in much that same way that somewhat who had just had something slimy, large and alive dumped down their back would shudder. "I can't _stand _being watched! I hate knowing all those Argusian eyes are watching me, recording my every move, digesting the sight of me and funneling the information down for others to see." He shuddered again, his hands shaking slightly. "I wish Bloo'd scrap that stupid idea and switch to the memory one full-time; all those cameras...all those eyes..._all the time..._"

Abel said nothing, looking horribly awkward. Kim and Ron looked stunned by his outburst and were watching him with evident concern and worry. Zim recognized the tone in his voice, and thought that his irrational loathing of the video cameras might be related to a more traumatic experience. Calvin and Hobbes keenly watched Jarod; not with the usual morbid interest of people who'd seen something completely unexpected, but of biologists in the field observing a new species of exotic animal. Morte looked at Jarod with even greater intensity then he'd already displayed; when it came to sheer intensity of staring, the only thing that came even close to a talking skull was an interested fangirl.

Jarod shuddered again. "What happened after you guys left?" He asked suddenly, wanting to get off the topic.

"Uh..." Zim looked intently at Jarod a few moments more, still wondering. "Bloo led us through an incredibly complicated and inarguably pointless venture to Foster's; now, I am certain that he had no real idea that was what he'd been doing and had been on a search for his strange treasures." Zim shook his head in disgust. "The full extent of what he led us through is far too long and convoluted to tell you tonight, but suffice to say, by the time we got out of an underground 'shortcut' he promised would take us right next to Foster's, we were in a completely different district! Spike and Bloo recognized no one, the architecture was completely different-"

"What kind of architecture?" Abel asked suddenly.

"More elaborate then the buildings here: mostly white tones, higher buildings and a lower population density."

"That was the Upper District!" Abel exclaimed. "It's on the other side of town! And even if you used the Underground, you'd still have the obstacles in the way to deal with! How'd you get all the way over there?"

"Obstacles?" Hobbes said. "We didn't see any obstacles."

"Wait a minute," Morte said. "What about that one room that looked like a cranked up obstacle course?"

"Underground obstacle course...between this District and the Upper..." Jarod sat up, visibly startled. "You ran into one of the Training Zone's obstacle courses!" He sat back, looking slightly bemused. "How'd you get through that? Kim here has problems getting through it! _I _have problems getting through it, and I designed it!"

"I don't know," Calvin said, scratching the side of his hair. "I think we were just running like the wind; course, Morte, me and Bloo were carried by Zim, Hobbes and Spike, and they're good at the whole flipping off walls thing, so it happened too fast for me to even notice."

Ron rubbed his forehead, still stuck on one detail. "I don't get it, how could you go to another district and not notice?"

Zim shrugged, well-used to that situation. "We were that lost. I still am not sure how we got back to this district with resorting to proper directions. We _somehow_ got to Foster's after; while Bloo became distracted with some paddleballs, I spoke with his creator and learned of the buildings's histories from Mac...Mac...whatever his last name is. We were told of the imaginary friends by him, then Spike spoke overmuch to the Frankie human, during which Calvin and Hobbes were momentarily distracted because of a freak paddleball accident, instigated by Mac and Bloo."

"Been there-" Ron said.

"Done that," Kim finished.

They looked at each other. Ron had just opened his mouth when Kim said, "You owe me a soda!"

"Son of a-" Ron started to say before he caught himself. "Wait," he asked Rufus, "How many sodas to I owe her now?"

Rufus dove back into Ron's pocket, holding a tiny notepad and wearing a pair of reading glasses for his subterranean eyes. "Uh..." Rufus peered closer at the number and said it clearly enough for everyone to hear.

Calvin and Hobbes stared. So did Zim, and Morte. Abel stuck a pinky into his ear and dug in, convinced that he had to have heard wrong and a build-up of ear wax was to blame. Jarod walked over to him and softly said, "Nothing personal and I mean absolutely nothing that infringes on you...but you are _really _bad at that."

Ron's jaw, slack in the fact of how many sodas he owed, closed with a small toothy _click_. "Aw man, I _am _really bad at this." He crossed his arms, eyes narrowing darkly. "And it vexes me so..."

"Yes, that's very nice, blah blah, _big deal!_" Zim said, stealing everybody's attention and reminding them that he was now talking. "I had no interest in the incident, so I wandered away, lost in my own thoughts and then ran into one of my old friends; Avatar Aang, the last Airbender."

"'Airbender'?" Ron asked. "What's that?"

"They were an ethnic tribe from Aang's world," Zim explained. "Roughly analgous to the Tibetians, I believe. They were called Airbenders due to their ability to manipulate the air around them through the use of certain martial skills. Because of their spiritual view on life, every member of their people, the Air Nomads, were skilled at Airbending." He frowned. "That is, until another of the Four Tribes, the Fire Nation, develouped an agressive expasionist policy and killed every Air Nomad as a preemptive measure. That is, except for Aang."

There was a moment of stunned silence. "That's horrible," Kim said, plainly horrified. Ron and Rufus nodded in glum unison.

"Aang's the last of his people?" Calvin said, clearly surprised. "I don't get it...he seemed so happy when we ran into him."

Zim shrugged. "Aang is not one disposed to despair. Although," He said, sounding troubled. "He does suffer because of it. You see, Aang was trapped in suspended animation at the time, and blames himself for not being able to save his people."

"Why?" Jarod asked plainitively. "What could he have done against an army?"

Zim gave him a look that suggested he knew more about this then Jarod did. It wasn't a look Jarod liked very much. "Because he is the Avatar."

"The what?" Abel asked, nonplussed. "That's a Hindu term, isn't it?"

"Perhaps. As far as Aang is concerned, it means that he is the living incarnation of his world," Zim said, noting they once again had stunned looks. It was like some malicious spirit was repeatedly smacking them upside the head with a large baseball bat when they weren't paying attention. "As such, giving him the ability to Bend the elements of fire, air, water, earth, act as a medium for the spirit world...you get the idea."

"Wait," Calvin interrupted. "You said your world disappeared."

Zim's eyes narrowed. "Yes?"

"Then how could he still be alive?!" Calvin demanded. "If your world was destroyed or taken or whatever happens when a star goes out, shouldn't he have died with it?"

"Hey, now..." Jarod started to say warningly.

"_That_," Zim said pointedly. "Is because he is _not _from my world."

This statement brought a number of blank stares. Finally, Ron said, "What?"

"You heard me. I met Aang and his group during a journey I had some years back. I believe he and his group came upon a natural interworld gate sometime after he ended the threat by the Fire Nation and brought peace to the Four Tribes and wound up on my world. He remained with me during the later half of it and liked my world so much, he decided to stay." Zim frowned, wondering what had become of Aang's world since then. He shook his head, continuing. "So, Aang and I caught up, and he helped me to locate the idiot trio-" Calvin, Hobbes and Morte made various angry noises in reaction to Zim's unflattering term. "Unfortunately, one of Aang's friends found him too, and we had to leave to save ourselves." He gave Kim a look, a thought occuring to him. "Come to think of it, you remind me of Katara."

"Hope that's a good thing," Kim replied, quirking an eyebrow at Zim.

Zim ignored her. "That was when we began our long search for a room for the night; during so, we wandered around the house for quite a while. Quite...a _long _while. I grew frustrated. And angry. And a little naeseous. But mostly frustrated." A mad gleam came to his eyes. "I had to resort to _drastic _measures. Oh, the drasticness of my measures! Wait." Zim brought a finger to the area approximate to a chin. "Is 'drasticness' a falsified term suitable for relatively informal conversation? I don't care, I am in full speech mood!" Zim laughed maniacally again, suddenly stopping for no apparent reason. "Ahem."

Kim held her hand up. "Hold it. 'Drastic measures'? Would this have anything to do with the angry mob?"

"Mob?" Jarod asked in plain puzzlement.

Zim's look of blank madness was quickly exchanged for something more evasive. "Eh, maybe..."

She looked hard at him. "Would that maybe be a 'most def'?"

Jarod rolled his eyes and ran a hand down his face. "I try to stay unnoticed, but this is a bit much."

Zim stared at her, his face a study in glazed incomprehension. "..What?"

"That would be a yes, Red," Morte said flippantly; he understood Kim, partially due to being an expert on languages and bizarre dialects but also because he was a good listener. "And I'll do a turn better; I'll tell you _everything _that these morons did!"

Morte explained, in excrutiating detail, Zim's acts of wanton obnoxiousness and the results thereof. He went on and on, the other's incredulous stares increasing in number and intensity as he lovingly lingered over Zim's inexplicable ability to annoy people and incite murderous mobs. As he kept talking, Zim straightened up, deciding to take pride in his 'accomplishments' rather then directly display his slight abashment at the whole scenario.

And thus did Morte continue, his barely veiled taunts and implications about his group's complete lack of anything remotely approaching directional skill growing by the moment; Hobbes made no effort to correct him on this matter, interrupting at a few key points to point out that Morte hadn't fully explained just how bad Zim and Morte were at navigating. Finally, about the the point where they fell into the trapdoor, he gave up trying to annoy Zim and traded irritating overdetail for simplicity. "And then we fell down a trapdoor into some subterranean room. Before we could get out, you guys came in."

Jarod had a question that was related to his curiousity as to how Morte could float around. "How'd you fall down with the rest of them?"

Morte bobbed to the side in a way that was analogous to a shrug. "Eh."

Abel took it upon him to quickly detail what had happened after the two groups had met; Jarod listened attentively to him, showing suprisingly little reaction to the various odd things that had happened, mostly because of Zim. He didn't say anything during Abel's narrations of Zim's initial paranoid reactions to seeing Team Possible and Abel appear and he only looked thoughtful when Abel spoke about Zim's attempts to exorcise the 'demon' or whatever evil spirit he believed had inhabited the map Abel'd had on him, instead of any stronger reaction to much of anything from then on. Zim thought he had an unusually strong resemblence to a computer recording data, stockpiling it away for future reference. In fact, the only point at which he had reacted strongly was when Abel referred to the time after Spike had appeared, when Kim, driven to extremes by her fury at Spike, had insulted him by calling him a mama's boy. At this, Jarod's eyes narrowed and he gave Kim the most intensely withering look she'd ever seen.

"Kim," he said reproachingly, with a hint of anger burning just behind his eyes. "You really shouldn't have done that."

"I know," she said resignedly. She knew that had been a mistake, but her anger had gotten the better of her, and so she had struck the only way she knew how. Still, the way Spike had reacted told her that she had gone miles beyond pushing a buttons to something not unlike what Lyle had done to her, to all of them. That she'd only meant to irritate him rather than remind of him of some past torment didn't make her feel any better evil; an accidental evil might be less than an intentional one, but as it was an evil she had commited, she saw no real difference between the two. "I don't know, you know what he gets like when he's around me and Ron and I snapped-"

"Wait," Jarod interrupted her. She stopped in mid-setence, surprised, noticing that the slightly plainitive look on his face was being supplemented by how the odd feeling of calm impentrebility that he wore around him like a cloak of authorutive tranquility was giving way to something entirely darker. Kim realized that, thought he wasn't showing it, Jarod was angry with her. The thought chilled her; Jarod didn't have a reputation around town for nothing. "You'd shouldn't treat him so harshly. He likes the two of you, you know."

Ron blinked. This struck him as either proof that he'd been paying absolutely no attention to the conveersation at all, or the second most misinformed thing he'd ever heard. Considering that he'd been listening fairly intently, he was leaning towards the second explanation. "He does?"

Jarod interlaced his fingers together, staring at the two of them. "I suppose that it might be because you two remind him a lot of some people he knew once, before his world disappeared." He gave them a thoughtful look.

Ron snapped his fingers, thinking that this was actually sounding a little familiar. "Yeah, I remember him talking about them once."

Kim thought about how Spike, not knowing they were hearing, once compared her to a number of the women he'd known then, which explained why Spike sometimes called her 'Red' in his less antagonistic moments and why he sometimes told Ron to 'stop acting the Zeppo' during Ron's occasional crises of confidence. She'd investigated it herself once, and found it almost eerie how similar their two stories were in small but absurdly significant ways. She'd never brought it up with Spike, as to her knowledge, most of those people were now dead. Irritant or not, she wouldn't bring up those kind of memories with her worst enemy.

Jarod gave her a long look. "The next time you feel about to lose patience with Spike, you should remember that just looking at you two reminds him of people that are at best scattered across the worlds and are at worst worse then dead. Spike hates dwelling on the past and you two can't help but remind him of it."

"So, in a way, he hates the two of you for that," Hobbes said perceptively.

"Yeah," Jarod said, his brow furrowing slightly. "So, how did you stop Spike from attacking?"

Zim looked surprised. "How do you know he attacked?"

Jarod's face revealed a modicum of impatience. "You don't work with Spike and not learn his habits."

Ron told him. "Abel did his..." he glanced momentarily at Zim and his coterie. "Thing. You know, the...thing he does."

Hobbes quirked one side of the stripe that occupied the area where his eyebrows would have been were he human. "You mean when his eyes glowed bright red and he used that weird shadow manipulation ability and restrained Spike?"

Abel shrank back uncomfortably as Ron heisitantly answered, "Uh, yeah."

"Would this have anything to do with that Crusnik thing you mentioned earlier?" Morte asked sharply.

"If it does, that would be Abel's perogative to tell you," Jarod said quickly. Abel sighed expansively and slumped back into his chair.

"Then," Zim continued. "That mob showed up again. Calvin trapped them in a cage, blew up the wall, allowing us to flee for our spleens!" He gave the various humans a look. "Those of us that _have _them, anyway."

Picking up the slack, Ron said, "We kinda just ran for a while until Rufus split up with Spike to distract them. Spike shoved us into that ballroom."

"Not too long after that," Abel said in obvious annoyance. "Mr. Lyle showed up."

At the sound of the name, Jarod's fists tightened, his knuckles turning white. His brow furrowed, his nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed. In a flat voice, he asked, "What did he do to you?"

"What do you mean?" Calvin asked, brow furrowed.

Jarod started pacing, unable to stay still and talk about this subject at the same time. "What I mean is that whatever Lyle's up to, whatever he's doing...he's always got an agenda, an ulterior motive." That last he deliveried with a furious near-growl, and from his clenched fists, it was fairly obvious that the very mention of Mr. Lyle set him on edge.

"So you do know him," Calvin said insistently.

Jarod gave Calvin a long look, one even the strong-willed mage had great difficulty returning. He'd seen intensity before: in stars, in thermonuclear reactions, in the eternal dance of molecues, in political debate. But he'd never seen anything as intense as the look in Jarod's eyes. "Yeah," Jarod said, sounding almost bitter. "We know each other." He looked away, looking distant for a moment. "How did he hurt you?" He asked again.

"He...he said things to us," Hobbes said heisitantly. "Things about us. Things he couldn't possibly know. And he told them."

"He..." Ron swallowed, his tail curling around him. "He knew about my family. About Cain."

"How could he know about _CAIN?!_" Abel demanded, angrily, slamming his hand into the wall, smashing a hole through it.

"I..I..." Kim shuddered violently. "He knew about..." She spoke in a tiny, quiet voice, a voice you expected to be carried out of hearing range by the air. "..._him_. And the gray laboratory." She shuddered again, looking sickened by the very thought.

"I don't know how or why," Calvin said, "But he knew about Hobbes' family history. You'd have to track down Hobbes' old clan to find that out, and they _hate _outsiders. Espically humans."

Morte didn't volunteer anything. He didn't want to say anything more about the Pillar of Skulls then he had to.

Zim quietly said, "At least he didn't say enough to force anyone to know things about people you wouldn't want to know."

Jarod looked at him sharply. "What do you mean?"

Zim looked away. He didn't speak for a moment. "Sometimes, when you know all there is to know about someone, you may decide that they're not worth knowing."

Abel shook his head. "No, that's not true. Everyone here in this town has secrets, many of them terrible ones. We won't think the less of you because of whatever may have happened in your past."

Zim half-shrugged. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'd rather not put it to the experiment."

"People change," Ron said sagely, placing a hand on the floor and leaning into the bed behind him. "Until one of those days you look back and you can't recognize yourself anymore." He gave Zim a look. "Even if you did things you're not proud of, that was a long time ago, y'know."

Zim frowned thoughtfully. Unwilling to risk anyone getting wind of his past misdeeds, he changed the subject and said to Jarod, "What was this Lyle doing there?"

Jarod heisitated before answering. "I don't know how he got in there...as for what he wanted, I have no more idea then you do."

"He _did _say something about an old story of the Keyblade," Abel recalled, looking at Zim. "That tormented souls are drawn to it's bearer."

Jarod frowned. "He did?" The others nodded almost excitably, but Jarod didn't say anything. "What did he do after that? Fight you?"

"In a manner," Zim said. "He summoned a large number of Heartless, commanded them to attack us and then disappeared."

Jarod arched his eyebrows. "He summoned Heartless? That's a new trick."

Ron quirked an eyebrow disagreeably. "We've seen lots of people with enough darkness in their hearts command at least a few Heartless; more if they're strong." He paused, arching his eyebrows at Zim. "And he brought a _lot _of Heartless."

Jarod frowned. "That doesn't make much sense. His heart's dark enough to attract their attention, but I seriously doubt that he possesses the strength of will to control more than five, if even that. And then there's what he's been doing. It doesn't fit him at all."

Kim faintly frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Lyle's usual pattern is different from this. He tends to insinuate himself with his victims and manipulate them into doing what he wants. What he did here was, well, it seems so random."

Calvin nodded. "He did pass himself off as a nice guy at first, at least until he started cutting with words."

Jarod spent a few moments thinking about all that, then returned to the discussion at hand. "He was using dark powers, his _modus operandi _has completely changed and he knew things about you guys that you make an effort to keep quiet...something about all of this screams suspicion."

Ron's eyes darted back and forth. "Yeah...it's _suuuuh-spiii-ciOUS!_"

"Ron, quit it," Kim said flatly.

"Normal person." Ron shot back.

"How _did _the fight go?" Jarod asked, ignoring them.

Calvin shrugged. "Reasonably well, I guess. There did seem to be a lot of them, but I seriously doubt they would have ever been able to overwhelm us with sheer numbers, even if Spike and Ron's mole rat hadn't came back halfway through like they did. They seemed kind of...weak, compared to the ones we fought earlier." He crossed his hands behind his head and laid down on his bed. "Then again, you guys are more experienced at this then us, so maybe that made a difference. Strange thing; they attacked in groups. I don't think they did much of that before."

"Heartless do generally attack in numbers," Jarod informed him, raising a finger. "But they use horde tactics, descending in a group and then seperating. They rarely display any sort of tactical patterns at all unless they're a more powerful Heartless nearby or someone's directing them."

"Lyle did show up after we finished them off," Abel commented. He leaned back leisurely, looking up at the stars thoughtfully. He sat up, his face contemplative. "He _did _claim to have observed us the entire time."

"Co-ordinating an entire group like that?" Jarod asked, almost challengingly.

"They _did _seem weaker than usual," Kim said, crossing her legs, propping an elbow on a leg and holding her rounded face in one palm, thinking back on what happened earlier. "The weaker ones never bothered to heal themselves and they didn't display their usual attack patterns."

"He could have found a more effective way to control them," Zim suggested.

"I wouldn't put it past him to do something like that," Jarod said thoughtfully. "But I really don't know why he'd bother: none of this really seems to be Lyle's style."

Zim snorted. "You call _that _style?"

"I never said it was _good _style."

Kim laughed suddenly. "You know, after Lyle came back, he almost did the same thing I did." She shook her head ironically. "Spike broke his hand, nearly snapped his arm in half and knocked him off the balcony. Think I got off lucky."

"You think?" Calvin said sarcastically.

Hobbes brought his hands up, making some sort of complicated gesture. "Then he summoned some kind of gun thing to his hand, the one without a thumb. Abel went after him and Lyle shot him in the head. Didn't stick, but I think that was when he already lost."

Jarod, alarmed, looked at Abel keenly. "You got shot in the head?"

Abel rubbed his forehead ruefully. "People have no appreciation for how much that stings." Looking thoughtful, he added, "Not long after that, you showed up." He shrugged. "And...that's pretty much all there is to tell."

Jarod nodded, a little slowly and looked up at the sky thoughtfully. "I see." He stood away from the wall and walked over to the window.

Seeing what he was doing, Hobbes called out, "Are we done here?"

Jarod nodded at him. "I need time to think about this. Since none of you have that kind of time, I'm setting the Butterfly to fly you home. Just give me a few minutes." He opened the window and disappeared into the awaiting ship. The others chose to take the time he was gone talking; not serious buisiness, as they had been earlier, but just speaking about random subjects that came into their minds.

They barely knew each other, but Abel and Zim still felt a vauge rapport with each other, perhaps each other sensing the other's warrior spirit; Zim was a career soldier, driven by both his own thirst for challenge and his need for approval while Abel was a paladin, driven by his need to protect people that couldn't help themselves as he believed his faith commanded him to, but they were both warriors.

"You're different, you know," Abel said. "From back when I had met you. More well-intentioned, I think. And you've become a true leader."

Zim opened one eye at Abel. He saw no reason to disabuse him of what Abel had clearly misinterpreted. Life, Zim had come to understand, was a thorny flowering vine, and he saw no sense in trapping another heart in it's labyrinthean brambles. "Two years can change a person. Not in overt ways, perhaps, but change is inevitable."

"Yes, yes." Abel looked up reflectively. "Contrition can lead to wonderful things. It hurts like blades buried in your side, but in the end, it's better then being the worse you." He thought momentarily of what Mr. Lyle had said to him, his cruel near-revelation of the countless people he had murdered in the days when he had filled with rage towards ordinary humans for using him, his siblings and his love as tools and not human beings. When he had sought to drive them into extinction and had brought about a disaster of near-apocalyptic lengths. It had taken Cain's sudden turn to evil and Lilith's murder to make him see sense, and that still struck horror in him.

"Yeah," Zim said agreeably enough, understanding what Abel meant completely. "Some things stay the same, regardless of time's passage." He remembered how he literally ran into Abel two years ago because of his impulsive decision to find out what happened when you poked a Flying Bison with a beehive when Aang wasn't looking. As it turned out, the answer was a small hurricane.

Abel knew what he was talking about and smiled. "May some things never change, God willing."

Hobbes was happily relating some of his past experiences to Kim and Ron, having invited the two of them to sit on his bed; he sat inbetween them in a fashion more appropiate for his more bestial evolutionary ancestors. "So Calvin comes up with this idea for giving all my knights hi-tech armor, right? Something about making the metal out of free-shifting nanites. Of course, we already used hi-tech armor, but he _had _to step it up."

"Yeah, we use the same technology for our supersuits," Kim said, motioning for him to go on.

"Well, it was a pretty good idea until he thought it'd be great if they could function with an A.I., to use built in fighting skills, to enchance the knight's fighting capabilities," Hobbes said, smiling ironically.

"Bad thing happen?" Rufus guessed.

Hobbes sighed heavily and his tail flicked at Calvin's direction. "Ooooh, yeah. See, he programmed the armor's A.I. to evolve over time to create more intelligent capabilities, but they quickly became sentient and quickly absorbed all the schemata in their linked networks. Calvin shut it off, but not before they were fully autonomous warmachines with enough individual power to decimate a large army on their own."

"They attacked your kingdom?" Ron asked, his eyes wide.

Hobbes shook his head. "No; for one thing, the Kingdom spans quite a few worlds. You'd have to have a _big _army to attack all of it at the same time. What the suits actually did was suing for the Kingdom to recognize them as legally ensouled beings, with all of the rights and privilges thereof."

"Did they?" Kim asked. "Win, I mean?"

"Of course they did," Hobbes said, sounding surprised. "They possesed the ability to communicate, had spontaeneous emotional reactions, possesed individual personas...what more clarification would you need?" Hobbes smirked. "Calvin's still mad at me for arguing the armor's case for sentience. He wanted to do it himself. Not your typical mad genius, my brother is."

Kim had to agree with him; Calvin seemed like a bratty kid that was frighteningly intelligent, but given that he'd wanted to make his accidentally intelligent creations beings in the legal sense instead of fighting it to keep him under his control, he was different from every mad scientist she'd ever known.

Kim decided to ask a question that had been pestering her. "Are you and Calvin adventurers?"

Hobbes nodded. "We were, before our days as the best of the best. How'd you know?"

Kim shrugged. "Lot's of ways. It's mostly in the ways you guys reacted to the Heartless showing up. Instead of freaking out, you got on the defensive right away."

"Well," Hobbes said. "We did a lot of odd jobs back then but exterminating freaks of mass destruction was our specialty. These Heartless aren't really anything new." Hobbes smiled slightly, a nostalgic glint in his eyes. "Those were the days. We didn't have to plan out things weeks in advance, I didn't have to keep all the knights in line, Calvin didn't need to argue with his co-workers for hours about his ban on testing on live subjects...we didn't have to deal with all this nonsense. Come to think about it, this adventure is kind of a decent break. It's just like the old days."

Rufus cocked his little head. "Hrk, don't like job?"

"Sure, I like it. What I _hate _is the bereaucracy." Hobbes paused, looking at Kim. "Wait, why'd you ask in the first place?"

Kim pointed up at the stars. "I don't know much about the people who do go up there, but adventures I do know." She paused. "Have you ever gone on world-spanning missions?"

"No," Hobbes admitted. "Diplomatic kind of stuff, overseeing various departments on other worlds, enviromental evaluations, making sure the knights were up to snuff, but not the more actiony things."

"Would you..." Kim seemed embarrased. Hobbes suddenly thought that as confident and fearless as she was in battle, she had a rather severe preoccupation with being in people's good graces. Considering from Ron's behavior ealier, Hobbes thought that he really didn't give a damn if the entire universe regarded him as lower than an animate pile of sewage, which made for an interesting combination that reminded him a bit of him and Calvin; where one was weak, the other was strong, benefiting from each other's strengths and helping to undermine the other's weaknesses. "Would it be offensive if I, y'know, gave you a little advice or something?"

Hobbes shook his head, the longer fur on his ruff fluffing up. It was an old custom of his people to grow that part of their fur long, and to style it for ceremonial purpose or just to look cool. Personally, Hobbes favored braids with decorative beads, but it was too much of a pain to do except on ceremonial occasions or fights when he had time to prepare. "No, go ahead."

"Well," Kim said, her confidence returning. "If you want my opinion, I think it'd be best if you guys stocked up on supplies before you leave."

Hobbes nodded gratefully, slightly irked that he hadn't thought of these things until she'd brought them up. "Good idea. Think I'll do that first thing in the morning. Assuming I can find my way around."

"Yeeah, guy like you?" Ron said, pointing a finger at Hobbes. "You'll find someone to show you around? Say, where'd you learn those bon-diggity fight moves?" Ron asked him.

Hobbes sat back, blinking uncomprehendingly. "Excuse me." To Zim, he yelled, "Can I have a translator here!?"

Zim threw the Hitchhiker's Guide at him. Hobbes tapped it as it flew at him, causing it to spin in the air. He stuck his foot out as it dropped, catching it one by the corner between his toes. His foot gently flicked up, tossing it into the air; it landed in his open hand, falling open as it did. Hobbes gave it a long look and proceeded to push buttons and such, figuring out how it worked by trial and error.

The screen beeped, lighting up. Hobbes looked up 'bon-diggity' though not quickly, having to correct his spelling half a dozen times; both due to the odd word itself and the fact that he was just a lousy speller.

Zim had earlier deactivated the voice, so Hobbes was able to silently read the article. _Bon-diggity. Phonetically pronounced. Adjective._

_Originally develouped by Ronald Stoppable as a word that just sound good, this term sees uncommon use around Traverse Town, primarily by the Ron Stoppable Fanclub, which has been classified a 'Stalker Fangirl' designation by the Traverse Town Defense Association._

_The word's precise definitions are vauge and unclear, but analysis in the various instances it has been heard suggests that it generally is used as a means of declaring an interest of a specific thing; it has also been hypothesized to make known a feeling of admiration or appreciation that the speaker would be otherwise hard-pressed to state._

_Examples: "I am loving this bon-diggity ambience." or "This is one bon-diggity scenario they got going on here!" or "Aren't falsified terms just bon-diggity?"_

_Related articles: Ronald Dean Stoppable, Popular Catch Phrases, Sidekick Syndrome and the 'Ten Signs of Insanity(Number 7: Usage of Any Word Ron Stoppable Has Made Up)'._

"Oh," Hobbes said, understanding at last. He turned to Ron, closing the book. "Well, uh...ancient techniques of the Kotirrim, you know."

Ron wasn't really listening, having had his attention drawn by the article Hobbes had read with surprising speed. "Snap, I thought I edited that link list," Ron muttered, referring to the list of related articles at the end of the article.

Hobbes' ear twitched. "'Edited'?"

"Yeah, I'm one of the editors of the Guide: they pay me to do the food critiques and stuff and I've never looked back. Buuut!" He pointed at the offending list of related articles. "I'm also able to edit the articles, try to keep my buds from looking bad." Ron snorted. "I hate the 'Sidekick Syndrome' one. They make me look bad."

Hobbes looked back, curious. "Why does it mention 'The Ten Signs of Insanity'?"

Ron rolled his eyes. "It's this stupid quiz they have in the magazines. Not as stupid as that Animology thing, but too close for me. They have ten signs that supposedly mean you're insane or at least classically shizophrenic. First one asks if you've ever wanted to be a florist, then they ask you ever used a catchphrase, then there's that one about if you've ever wanted to take over the world in any way..."

As Ron babbled on, Hobbes let him talk and gave the impression of listening. Being around self-important politicians, whiny braggerts and worse, Calvin, had instilled in him the ability to convince people he was paying attention when he was in fact not listening at all, except subliminily: one too many disasters from this act had convinced to him to submit to training that had given him the ability to devote a portion of his unconcious mind to listening so that he could later remember what had been said through the use of total recall; it always ended up giving him the baffling and bizzare surrealistic sleep-visions he referred to as 'Kafka dreams', but it was worth it. As such this gave him the oppertunity to let his mind wander.

He thought about what Ron had said about the Guide. Hobbes inferred that this editor buisiness was an actual job. He knew, from both common sense, personal experience and what Kim had said that supplies were paramount in an adventure: run out, and your chances of not making it out alive rise by forty-eighths, by his count. It was therefore imperative that they kept them going. Of course, supplies were no doubt expensive in a town like this. Businesses no doubt exploited the adventurer traffic, and they had only a limited supply of money, even if the Queen had given him a munny card before leaving, to pay for any of their expenses. Money, even if they were careful, was limited, and while he didn't doubt that they could convince Prime Minister Opus to funnel more munny into it, there was always a possibility they could somehow be cut off from the Comic Kingdom and he didn't much enjoy the mental image he had of himself, beaten and bruised from the rough voyage back home, begging the little penguin for money Calvin had wasted. It was a good idea to secure some other means of money making.

He supposed Calvin could patent some of his less destructive inventions in town, but that didn't seem entirely feasible in the short run. But if he was right and editing the Guide was a service worth being paid for, they might be sitting at the top of a convient means of avoiding all of that and being not having to give anything back to the Queen. He was going to have to do some research, but based on the articles he'd seen before landing on the one he'd read, he had a strong idea what it was.

He waited for Ron to pause between sentences and abruptly asked, "So this Guide thing, do the editors do stuff about other worlds?"

"Pssh, _yeah!_" Ron said. "How do you think we know so much 'bout the other worlds? We send tourists up there, they check out the worlds and stuff and they put it down in an article. Not really my thing, but I get told stuff."

Hobbes tapped his chin. "Do they pay you for this?"

Ron looked proud and a little smug. "Yeah. I'm one of the best editors about the Traverse Town feed scene: every single article about food, dishes, snackage and eateries was written by yours truly!"

"See?" Kim said encourgingly. "I knew you had potential!"

"Even when no one else did," Ron said back happily.

Soft as he was, Hobbes didn't have time for listening to sappy banter. "So how do you get employed?"

Ron looked surprised for a moment, then simply grinned slightly, his eyes narrowing in what he clearly thought was a rougish expression but made him look a little insane. "Oooh, trying to muscle in my territory, huh?"

Hobbes blinked. "Huh? What-"

Ron waved his hands peaceably. "Relax, man, I'm just joking. So, sitch me, what do you have in mind? I'm guessing, world exposition?"

"Uh huh."

"Well, there's always an opening there, though if you were to move here, I'd recommend something a bit more your style, like the arts. You look like an artsy guy. Here, give it to me." Hobbes handed it over to Ron; Ron opened it, gave it an analytical look and input a number of button sequences, his big fingers moving quickly; to anyone without Hobbes' rarified vision, they would have been nearly unseeable blurs. After a few more minutes of this, there was a loud _beep!_ and he handed it back to him, grinning sunnily. "Congrats, the Returners are official Guide editors! Just do what you want with it, I'll do the paperwork later."

Hobbes' whiskers quirked. "'The Returners'?"

Ron shrugged. "Hey, you guys needed a group name! And it makes sense, think about it! You guys want to find your King and _return _him, Zim wants to find his friends and _return _them to Traverse Town..." He tossed the Guide to Hobbes. The tiger mulled over the name and decided it was good enough. He would have liked more time to think about it, but if it was too late and that was the name they'd go by in town, he would use it.

Calvin didn't really have anyone to talk to, so he was just having an insult war with Morte. It was fun, but not espicially rewarding or interesting.

All their various pursuits were interrupted when Jarod stuck his head into the window. "It's all set up. Ready to go?"

There was an overwhelming affirmative from Kim, Ron and Abel.

Jarod nodded. "Right. I haven't had any ideas about what Lyle was trying to accomplish-"

"Aside from being an ass," Zim said.

Jarod ignored him. "But I think if anyone has any resources they can use, I'd appreciate it."

"I could put Wade on the job tomorrow," Kim offered, rolling off the bed and lightly landing on her feet. Ron followed her in a similar manner, though instead of agilely landing on his feet, he fell to the ground and rolled into a wall, rebounding onto his feet. "You might have to give Herrimen a call and tell him it's labeled a crime scene so he doesn't have anything moved around."

Abel stepped away from the wall, spreading his arms. "And I could get some of Section Thirteen help. Maybe Alexander Anderson or Nicholas Wolfwood could help." Abel paused. "Wait, maybe _not _Anderson, if you bring Spike..."

Jarod nodded. "I can promise you guys one thing; I won't rest until I figure out what's going on. But I don't have all the pieces left." He made a noise of deep frustration, briefly clapping his temple. "I wish I knew what to do." He shook his head. "Well, see you later...Returners."

Hobbes and Ron blinked at the same time.

Jarod smiled in a way that suggested unknowable knowledge and was incredibly irritating at the same time.

Zim looked around questioningly. "'Returners'? What does that means? Why'd he call us that? Why does it sound like something from a role-playing game? Hello? Anyone? Anyone?" Zim crossed his arms and scowled. "Oh, fine. Everyone ignore me. I'm just the bearer of the Keyblade, never mind what _I _have to say." He made a rude noise. "Turlingdromes."

-------

Not too long after that, they left, leaving Zim's group on their own. He had fallen asleep about fifteen minutes later, though his mind was still ablur with unanswered questions, vague suspicions and the usual unfettered chaos of his mind. He didn't remember much about his dreams, except that they had been filled with torment, fear and darkness. That, and one odd dream about a full-scale war that wouldn't have been out of place in that one fantasy movie about an evil ring they'd filmed in New Zealand a few years back, except his dream had been about an epic battle between freakish abominations best described as lobster-scorpions with a little dinosaur in there and what looked like adorable little creatures resembling crossbreeds between pandas and kangaroos, riding on motorcycles and armed with chainsaws on hilts. The poor lobster-things never stood a chance, even after the hour-long break the two armies had taken for slow-dancing and some mid-massacre tea.

Entertaining as that last one was, he now had no real inclination to sleep again, at least not yet. With his mind too alert to return to the imaginative blackness of sleep and little else left to do, Zim had sat back and read from the Guide, which Hobbes had helpfully left upon the desk that Morte was now sleeping on, his eyes rolled back into his head.

He'd started off reading articles completely at random; among other things, he knew now of what the literal definition of opoponax was (a word not to be found in the dictionary or a fearful mystery), how many ways there were to pronounce the Old Galactispeak word for 'taco'(it depended on how prehensile your tongue was), the correct method of killing your own sins made manifast (preferably with a knife endowed with Holy magic, but a flesh-eating gerbil down the pants would suffice and any workable method is held to be highly therapeutic), and a diagram that laid out exactly how much wood a woodchuck could chuck, were woodchucks given to chucking wood(the answer depended on the woodchuck's weight, the amount of lumber in it's immediate area and whether or not it was being paid, and if so, how much it's salary was).

He'd discovered that his new aquaintances were celebrities of a sort after he randomly put Abel's name in, finding a fairly large number of articles, including _Nightroad, Father Abel; Church Reforms Instigated By Abel Nightroad, Members of Vatican Section XIII 'Mattias', Theological Figures In Traverse Town, Local Writers, Guide Editors _and stranger still, _Persons of Mass Destruction._

His curiousity aroused, Zim looked to see if any of the others he'd met that day had had any articles relating to them and found some interesting things out. Bloo was one of the ten richest people in town, Spike was part of a group called Angel Investigations (motto: We Help The Helpless), Abigail and Nigel were part of a five member group that was a combination investigation team and strike force called the K.N.D., Gwen worked with her cousin Ben and her grandfather Max as part of a three-fold multipurpose team popularly referred to as the Plumbers, Cyborg was a member of a group of heroes called the Teen Titans that currently employed eight members, Gaara and Naruto were only two of a large number of ninja from their world that did missions on demand and Abel was, among other things, a priest that did exorcisms on demand, claimed to view the entire town as his congregation, a noted demon slayer and was on the consideration list for the papalcy election next week, but was considered a dark horse contender due to his bizarre personal beliefs and the popular rumor that he had spent time in a rehabiliation clinic for schizophrenic priests.

Of the various people he'd met, there was at least a small mention of everyone, with the notable exception of Jarod. There was very little said about him at all, and he had to do some work to find any mention of him at all. Once he did, he was surprised to find him mentioned in an article called _Urban Legends of Traverse Town._

More specifically, Jarod was an urban legend of great interest among a number of webrings, but they were said to be disreputable and had never found anything substantial. He was at once a tale told to children as an object lesson in what a good person should be like and a spectre of horror whispered about in dark alleys between villains and criminals all over town. The various theories didn't even agree with each other on who or what he was: some claimed that Jarod was a justice-seeking clairvoyant with the ability to look at someone and see every act of evil they'd ever done and everyone person they'd wronged; another claimed that he was a spirit of vengeance bound in a human body, forever sworn to hunt down the guilty and avenge the innocent, while yet another claimed that there wasn't one Jarod: he was actually an entire species of enigmatic spiritual beings that were in some strange way avatars of Justice.

Zim continued to pour over the Guide, finding out all he could about the town in preparation for tomorrow. He knew that it wasn't advisible to go from world to world without stopping: they needed to use a base, and this town was as good as any. If he was to be making a new home here, he needed to know everything about it anyway.

As he continued to read, he allowed his mind freely wander, and it hit upon another issue: his poor skill at magic. His rapidly escalating use of it notwithstanding, the fact that he was unable to do it as well as Calvin bothered him. Calvin could freely manipulate his elemental magic, could alter the very state of matter, could do all manner of interesting things...whereas he, Zim, a former member of the Irken Elite and a qualified Invader, had to struggle to keep from setting himself on fire.

He mulled over the issue, eventually coming to the conclusion that he was too new at it to learn it properly. In order to become better at using magic, he'd need to practice it. He felt pleased at this discovery until he realized that he wasn't sure how to do that. He could shoot all the fireballs he wanted, but that wouldn't help him figure out the abilities Calvin had, or how to become better at shape manipulation.

Zim fell back on his pillow, his feet crashing into the bed with a soft _thud_. He stuck a hand in the air, summoning the Keyblade. Hobbes stirred at the brief increase of light in the room. Once the light faded, Zim regarded the moonlight shining gently across it's metal surface, wondering if that actually _was _metal it was forged of. He gently flicked the Keychain with his freehand, wondering just that part was for, anyway.

He stared at it, willing for it to give up it's secrets. Nothing happened. With a grunt, he pulled himself into a sitting position, staring at the Kingdom Key with a slight frown.

He came to a decision: if he was to learn how to use magic, to enable him to fight the darkness more efficiently, he would have to be more experienced at what he did know.

He looked out the window. And to do that, he would need to practice. Zim observed that it was deserted outside. He thought that there was no time like the present to get to work.

Getting up, he quickly put his shoes and jacket back on, thinking for a moment that his clothes were a little plain compared to what he'd seen so far. Putting that issue out of hand, he tapped the Keyblade against the window; the latch on the inside and outside simultaneously slide into the 'open' position, the window sliding open. Zim carefully crept into the open space, glancing back to make sure he wasn't being watched.

Calvin was still at work, and Hobbes was still fitfully asleep. Grinning to himself, Zim jumped outside, landing on a roof-ledge made mostly of rock-steady rust-brown plates. He took a briefly unsettled step, then extended his spider-legs, cautiously making his way to the ground, confident he could find his way back to the window, not certain he was even going back there.

He spied a good looking patch of ground on the lawn, near an old tree. A number of large boulders were standing up, looking perfect for target practice.

Four slightly curved metal points hit the ground, followed shortly thereafter by a pair of shoes. Zim summoned the power he had learned to control, wreathing the Keyblade in softly glowing yellowish flames with a hint of white as he advanced upon the rocks, certain he was going to have a busy night.

------

The landscape, if anyone else had been around to see it, would have been judged somewhere you wouldn't want to take the wife and kids, unless you really, really hated your family.

The place was all craggy rock, with a lingering trace of stunted greenery here and there; the effect wasn't of wild Nature stubbornly maintaining a presence as it might be in other such benighted wastelands, but brought to mind shellshocked survivors being ground into death by the whim of a conquering overlord with bad taste in entertainment. The ground was almost all cracked dirt, the wreckage of toppled buildings littering it like the litter of giants, and the sky was an almost unrelieved stretch of dark red clouds, greenish lightning flashing across the sky from time to time. There was illumination, but it was hard to tell what was lighting the night up: no stars were visible under that red sight, nor could any moon be seen either. The overall effect was a bit like a big sign that said _Abandon all hope, ye who wander here. Please submit suicide forms at the front desk, thank you. -The Management._

All in all, the best thing that could be said was that no one was around. If some unlucky visitor were to come here, it would be a good thing if he disliked the company of others. If he could get over the post-apocalypic look of everything, the strange way the darkness was almost solid and the total desolation of everything around and the overall feeling of impending doom, that is.

It wasn't, however, completely devoid of life, appearances notwithstanding.

Dib, sitting in a bowllike depression in a conviently hollow rock, looked up at the black sky, thinking thoughts only slightly darker than the scenery around him. The vista around was, if nothing else, a clue that he _really_ didn't want to be there. The complete lack of anything remotely approaching civilization, the absence of anything nonthreatening since he came there and most of all, the all-encrouching darkness made him seriously doubt the wisdom of using the darkness like he had without a coherent plan.

Dib looked at himself, thinking that he looked an absolute wreck. His pants were doing well enough, as were his boots, but he'd lost his trenchcoat some time ago. It was probably still in the grasp of the ratlike beast that tried to catch him and snared it instead. One of his glasses was missing it's lenses and his exposed sleeveless blue shirt was ripped in places. He'd had days where he had looked better, but then again, he'd had days where he had looked much worse, too. "I'd say this is been the worst day of my life," Dib said aloud. "But it could always get worse by being the last day of my life. Besides, this is just an apocalyptic wasteland, I've been through worse. Hey, why does apocalyptic keep coming to mind? I seem to have an inexplicable fixation on that word."

Dib stood up, peering nearsightedly into the distance; without both lenses, seeing things that weren't close by was difficult, but he could see that he was on top of a relatively smooth short hill; the only real feature he could see was what looked like a sprawling deserted city.

With not much else to do, Dib carefully made his way down the hill. His limbs still felt sore and tired, but the exhaustion he'd had when he'd awakened here had long since vanished.

As he descended, he thought to himself. It had been troublesome getting down from the stone pinnacle he'd appeared on, but once he'd made his way off the ice field and the long cavern right by it, his troubles had began; almost immediately he'd been attacked time and time again by a number of monsters, most of which he had no name for, even given his interest in the paranormal. A few times he'd been attacked by ratlike things he compared to the aliens formerly known as the Slaughtering Rat People, he'd occasionally been ambushed by nightmarish blobs constantly shifting form, never keeping the same shape for more then a few seconds, gibbering insanely the whole time and more frequently he'd had to avoid the attentions of enormous stone golems with glowing green eyes.

And those were just the things that were actively trying to hurt him. The very landscape was a passive threat; more than once, it was only his honed reflexes that had kept him from plummeting into a sudden sinkhole or crushed under a falling rock from above and he was reasonably certain he'd never be able to go near a crane now after the one that had nearly fallen around him. Almost everything he'd seen had been a threat, and he was sure he'd been watched the entire time: more then once, he'd glanced into darkly-lit places and seen yellow lights suddenly flicker away. Lights that seemed all too much like eyes.

Dib maintained his balance with the help of a nearby plant, grabbing it and carefully moving downwards as he did. He thought that perhaps this might have been easier if one of his allies was around; he wondered what had become of those few people he could consider himself friendly with, and the thought of where Gaz had gone to disturbed him. Sure, she could be cruel, absurdly vindictive and self-absorbed, but that made little difference to him. He was her big brother, the both of them born in a laboratory under their father's watchful eye. It was his duty to worry about her, to take care of her and protect her. It was as much his duty as it had been to protect the Earth.

And then he thought of Zim. His eyes narrowed as he thought of the unstable Irken's paranoid reaction to the darkness sweeping their world. Dib thought that that had definitely been horrible, and he hoped it hadn't been his teleportation device that caused it, but he still had had the presence of mind to use the darkness to his advantage rather than running away from it like Zim had.

Zim had seen it and only seen whatever paranoid delusion his mind could come up with, but Dib knew that it could be his tool just as easily as Zim had only seen the stuff of fear and loathing. A sudden flare of anger caused his fists to tighten on the plant he was balancing himself with. "Stupid Zim!" He yelled. "Stupid world, stupid people, stupid, stupid, _stupid!_"

He pulled too hard on the plant; it tore loose of the ground and he overbalanced, falling head over heels down the hill, letting loose a series of pained exclaimations as his helpless body made contact with rocks, stickers and loose twigs, which had to be every one and a half second, as though gravity was making a point to steer him down the path with the most painful things to contact.

He hit level ground fairly hard and came to a sitting position, his unfocused eyes staring dazedly. He fixed his crooked glasses as best he could, displeased at the numerous cracks in his remaining lens. "Figures," he muttered sullenly.

He got up, observing that he was at the bottom of the hill, next to what looked like an abandoned roadway into town. The ground along where he was standing looked more craggy then normal, as if someone had just shoved the decrepit town into the ground and shoved up a great deal of earth.

Not much else to do, Dib boldly walked ahead, hoping to find some other living creature that didn't want to rip him apart.

-------

It was about fifteen minutes later, and Dib had yet to find any other living creature that didn't want to rip him apart. On the bright side, he hadn't found any living creature at all, which served his purposes well enough.

He assumed that this town, before whatever disaster had assulted this place had struck, had once been a reasonably prosperous town; everywhere he saw moldering wrecks of cars and buildings, all of them looking like they had been well-designed in their prime. He noticed that this hadn't been a big city place, but more like a step above suburbs, more or less.

The architecture almost reminded him of Nicktown, and to a lesser extent, Doomsdale, the city he'd lived in when he and Zim had first been bitter enemies, then arch-rivals. He thought that it had once been a nice place to live, 'once' being the keyword. He had seen a number of places that had once looked quite nice, and he'd seen a school that definitely made the ones he'd attended look poor in comparision; at least the one in Nicktown, anyway. It was actually in better repair then the poorly named Skool in Doomsdale, and he half-expected to see the sillouette of Ms. Bitters skulking through a window. The twisted billboard lying across the walkway from the school doors to the sidewalk still had a number of letters on it, too worn away by the elements to be legible.

"What happened here?" Dib asked aloud. As if in reply, a mournful wind blew through the ruins, blowing dust around him. It occured to him that the dust might well have it's origins in the ground bones of what people had once lived here and he shuddered.

After nearly twenty minutes worth of further walking without seeing anything alive, he came to the conclusion that whatever disaster had happened, it had to have been at least five years ago, and struck extraordinarily quickly, or at least enough to catch people off-guard in the middle of their daylives. He noticed quite a few smashed-up buildings with holes in them that made him think of punching bags that had been hit too hard. There were enormous footprints around those areas, like the imprints of clawed boots. He saw evidence of claws and the like; scratches in the peeling building-paint, burn marks and melted metal, walls that looked like they had been literally ripped apart and he'd seen many faded marks that looked like old bloodstains. The streets were littered with cars; some of them had smashed into lampposts, mailboxes and other stationary objects, others looked liked they'd been partially ripped apart, and still others looked like they had just been frozen there.

Oddly, Dib saw no bodies anywhere. Stains in many places, but no other evidence that anyone had actually died. It was odd, reminding him of old stories about the disappearances that happened world-wide every fifty years, or so he heard. A few years back, the subject had interested him intensely; he had believed that aliens were behind it, coming every fifty years to harvest human beings, perhaps. He'd since disregarded the idea, as Zim had told him that he'd never heard of anything like that, espically after Zim had mentioned something about most alien abductions being the work of bored rich kids or a few peverted freaks.

Just looking at this place, though, made him think of the disappearances at Roanoke and all those other places famed for people suddenly disappearing without a trace. It gave the deserted town an odd feeling, but not a terrifying one. If anything, it was a sad one: something terrible that was never supposed to have happened, had happened.

"It's like everyone was taken by something," Dib said aloud, plodding up the long walkway to a wide, lodgelike two-story house that looked better kept together then the other houses and set up on a hill, away from the other houses; Dib thought it might make an adequate defensive point.

He walked up and opened the door hesitantly, expecting something to attack him as soon as he looked in. Nothing unpleasant happened, except for him getting a whiff of stale air. The interior of the house looked as damaged as the rest of it; that is, not as badly as most of the town, but badly enough to make one wonder what had happened. There were some noticable claw marks here and there, some rather noticable holes in the walls and some other things that put him in mind of a confrontation. He noticed no bloodstains or anything like that, making him feel a little better about it. Making his way to the intact couch, Dib laid down, intending on thinking about his situation.

He laid his head against the cushion, closing his eyes momentarily. He knew it wasn't a good idea, but his eyes felt heavy; he'd been through so much since he had escaped through the gale of darkness and wound up on this strange damned world, attacked almost constantly but not enough to make him forget about the others and where they might have gone to. His body had endured so many near-misses and pains over the last few hours that he felt like a walking bruise and his pain was compounding by the unbelievable exhaustion he was suddenly feeling. He started to nod off, rationalizing it to himself. He was so tired...and there was nothing else around here to harm him. Surely there was no harm in taking a moment to rest? _Yeah,_ he thought dazedly. _No problem there_. There shouldn't be anything wrong with wanting to retreat, if only for the time being, to a dream-world where there were no painful memories, horrible regrets, constant second-guessing or that aching awareness that no matter how hard he tried, it was never going to be good enough for anyone, espically himself.

And Dib gradually went to sleep, his thoughts untroubled by dreams of any sort.

He woke up fifteen minutes later with a jolt, swinging his body upright. "Ugh...I hate my life." He swung his legs out, grimacing as some of his scratches stung as his entire body ached. "Man...all of this makes no sense. What happened at home? What happened here? And why haven't I been talking to myself as much as I normally would?"

"Perhaps you are troubled," suggested a rasping, female voice from somewhere above him. "A not unreasonable reaction to...recent events, boy."

"Yeah, that's probably it-" Dib froze, his amber pupils contracting to small dots. Taking a chance, he slowly turned his head up. Upon seeing what had spoken, he fell to the floor with a yelp.

It was a small purple ghost, partially phased through the wall. It was a great deal smaller than most of the ghosts he'd seen, being only slightly larger than his own head and not remotely humanoid in the least. In that matter, at least, it was similar to the weaker ghosts Danny had fought at the begining of his career as a half-ghost. Like those things, it's body had a pair of pawlike forearms, a long wispy tail coming to a small point behind it and no real neck between it's head and body. It's face, if it had one, was covered by a colorful mask with a long beaklike red nose, it's large eyes glowing with a yellow radiance and in place of hair were three large squidlike tentacles, fluttering over it's body endlessly.

Seeing it had his attention, the ghost smoothly flew out of the wall and just above the couch as Dib got to his feet, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. Since the first it had done was speak to him rather then posesses him or terrify him, he believed that it was intelligent.

That worried him. An intelligent evil spirit seemed a great deal worse than a wild bundle of half-formed hatreds, jealousies and envy. Those sorts of thing just reacted to events around them, frequently inciting others to their needs. An intelligent ghost, even a weak one, was much worse. "Who are you?" Dib asked, feeling that asking the more obvious _what are you_ would have rude and not at all conductive towards his continued survival.

"I am Wuya," The ghost said, it's voice indisputably feminine dispite it's rasping quality; the mask-face smiled slyly, showing off pointed teeth. "And now, who may I ask are _you_?"

"I'm..." Dib paused, not sure if he should trust her. He'd learned to trust his hunches, and there was something unsavory about Wuya. There was some elusive quality about her that he didn't like at all. Some twinge of intuition, perhaps a rudimentary form of psychic awareness, suggested that Wuya was _dangerous_. That alone gave him reason to be wary before one considered the scenery around him.

"Come now," Wuya said, as if discerning his troubled mind. "Who else will help you if not I? Who else would be willing to aid you in this desolate place."

"I'm Dib," the self-declared paranormal investigator said. "Dib Vael, m'am."

Wuya smiled happily. "Ahh...politeness. Such a rare commodity in this brambled multiverse."

Dib quirked an eyebrow. _Multiverse?_ "If...you don't mind my asking...what happend here?"

"It's such a sad story," Wuya said, shaking her masked head. Dib wasn't entirely convinced that her sad tone was genuine. "This world you stand upon is formed of several worlds that fell to the Heartless. I have taken it for my own, you see."

"'Heartless'?" Dib questioned. "You mean...those black creatures?"

"None other! You see, _many _worlds have fallen to the Heartless, those witless incarnations of darkness. Many indeed. Long have they existed, but only until recently have their numbers increased to the numbers they do, and so have the worlds and peoples fallen to them." She grinned again. "Blame Hohenheim for that, if you must. All his fault, it is. So much pain, so much disaster and so many shattered lives." There was a slightly excited tone in her voice that Dib greatly disliked.

Feeling confused and annoyed, Dib rubbed his large forehead gently, avoiding a small cut he had on it. "We...we shouldn't stay here. We need to get to a place of safety. The monsters will-"

"Monsters?" Wuya chuckled, and Dib's vauge feeling of unease about her erupted into a near-certainty that she was worse than any of the things he'd fled from. "Dear boy...I have no fear of the monsters that lurk outside here! And neither should you, for I have far greater power then those miserable cast-offs." Wuya lifted her stubby limbs to the mask on her face, somehow lifting it off; Dib stumbled back on the couch as the mist comprising Wuya's form rapidly billowed out, becoming a distinctly humanoid shape before fading away, revealing a rather beautiful if somewhat inhuman looking woman. She quietly put the mask she'd worn on her belt, smirking at his obvious surprise and gesturing with her long fingered hand. Green flame whirled around it, wreathing her hand in a soft penumbra. "_I _have nothing to fear from the likes of them. And if you come with me, dear boy, I will help you."

Dib was stunned, but he was nothing if not quick-witted. "Help? Help me how?"

The flame around Wuya's hand vanished. "There is greater power sleeping within you, boy. I can see it as clearly as you see this abandoned home around us." She spread her arms wide to emphasize her statement. "Power that you have yet to give shape to."

"Power?" Dib said dubiously. " I just want my sister and my friend back."

Wuya smiled as if she had expected no other answer. "That is easy to understand, my young friend. But it is a cruel, cold universe out here in this Realm of Light. How like might they survive on their own, cut off from you as you have from them? Lost...alone...friendless."

Dib started to speak and stopped. He looked at the floor near his shoe, his mouth set in a tight line. He didn't like it, but he knew she was probably right.

"But I can help you," Wuya reminded him. Dib slowly turned to face her again, his expression incredulous, the child that lay buried under layers of cynicism and grim expectation waiting to evolve into full-blown misanthropy wanted to believe, wanted to believe so badly that it was almost a physical ill. "I can help to awaken the power of your heart, teach you to turn your heart's darkness from a burden in a strength that those who hurt you would tremble at."

Dib started. "H-how...?"

"Yes," Wuya said smoothly. "You _have _been hurt, haven't you? You poor boy...you have always tried _so _hard to help those around. Tried so hard to save them from the nightmares dancing around them. And how did they repay you? With scorn, cruelty and malice. Such a life would scar anyone, but you endure. Tell me something, child: do you call that simple brute stubborness, or strength of heart?"

Dib's brow furrowed. "I don't call it anything. I just do what I should."

"I'll tell you this," Wuya said, placing a hand on his shoulder. Dib couldn't help but notice the tremendous strength in that hand; Wuya was enormously strong, and he didn't doubt that she could had ripped him apart right then if she had chosen to. "You have the strength of heart to tear your own path through the universe, to take the power you bear inside and crush anyone who would dare stand in your way."

A flare of his innate suspicion of everyone and everything around him, mixed with his state of almost utter exhaustion pushed him to draw back and snap, "I don't need anyone's help!"

Wuya looked at Dib with surprise, obviously stunned at the sudden outburst. "Oh?" Wuya said, the surprise quickly subsumed by her usual dry confidence. "Tell me then; without me to help you, how will you escape from this place? How will you acquire a means to search for those you miss? How will you find a way to fight? And of course, how will you know where to go?"

Dib said nothing, scowling slightly. The wheels in his head were turning, and he didn't like the direction they led in.

Wuya couldn't repress a grin. The boy-child before her had one of the greatest streaks of stubborness and self-reliance she'd ever witnessed. It would make breaking through to him and winning his trust an exceptionally difficult task, but once it was done, she knew with complete certainty that he would make an excellent tool. He was one of those grim fools who would do anything for those he valued, no matter what the cost was to himself. To bring his companion and his sister to a place of safety, he might well dive into the darkness and push away any safety line that came his way. Wuya walked away, silently striding to a window. "Your sister and your companion lie out there, somewhere. Alone of all those in all the worlds who might have reason to care, you alone have the ability to save them. You alone can help." She turned back to Dib, smirking knowingly. "What will you do?"

She extended a hand towards him.

Dib cautiously considered this offer. After a few more moments of tense thought, he came to the conclusion that he really didn't have a choice. If he didn't take a chance here, there was every possibility that he, Gaz and Zim would all die. He refused to take that chance, no matter what the cost was. Even if he had to dwell among those things of darkness and risk his heart, his very soul, he was willing to take that risk. But he also vowed to never entirely trust this Wuya. He knew people like her, out only for themselves and unable to see people as anything else but tools. He refused to be her tool any further than he had to. "Fine," He said warily, taking her hand.

Wuya laughed; the sound reminded him of a cawing crow. "Excellent, boy! You will not regret this."

_I hope not, _Dib thought grimly as she led him out the door once more, the darkness flickering around her like flapping wings.


	7. Red Lotus: Blooming

Well, it's been a good long time since I updated. And yes, you may consider me properly abashed. If any of you knew where I lived, you could feel free to take a baseball club upside my head. But you don't. So you can't.

Lucky me!

We're taking a short break from the main trio in this chapter and focusing on the villians. I'm not sure if I'm going to make a habit of this or not, but I guess we'll see, yeah? You might see some familiar characters here and there, and you're probably not going to like what's happened to them, either...

This chapter took _forever_. Seriously. I've been working on it in one form or another since the last update, but the key term is 'one form or another'. This chapter has gone through at least _four _different versions, all of them massively different. It just didn't want to behave.

Thanks to Night-Owl08, Plutos, Echo the Etheral Swordmaster, Balverine, The Plot Master, Lt. Commander Richie and Ri2. Your reviews are what keep me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Anyway, enough babble! Well, enough babble not directly related to the story, anyways. Also, remember that what might be seemingly random isn't.

Disclaimer: I make no claim to any copyrighted properties. Characters appearing in this chapter belong to Nickolodean, whoever owns Xiaolin Showdown, Marvel, Hiromu Arakawa, and a bunch of others. There is someone I do own, though.

* * *

Dib sat alone in the dark, and it seemed only fitting.

The barely glimpsed countours of the room around fhim felt wrong to him, not because they almost all came to harshly beveled edges, not because the vauge suggestion of opulence was alien to Dib and not even because some strange part of him, something that stirred within him and felt like all the hurt he'd buried within him all his life, _knew _that there was something terribly wrong about everything around him, like it was something built from the foundations of all that was wrong with the universe.

All else was secondary to the simple fact that it was _not _his room, and that was his fault that this was so.

He hugged himself tightly as the thought reverbeted in his skull like a ball richocheting in a far too small space. He kept his eyes shut tight until they ached, but it did nothing to keep back the memories of what he had allowed to happen-

_-goggles crunching against the floor, lenses cracked and splattered thick with blood, his father screaming for them to run, run far away, even as an utterly black creature like the apothesis of all the things he had always insisted had never existed buries it's grotesque jaws into his throat and TEARS-_

Dib shivered so violently his ragged nails scratched him, but the thin sob that escaped his throat had nothing to do with physical pain. He tried to force his mind to stop thinking about the blood that, indirectly or not, was on his hands, tried to will himself to think of nothing, tried to think of something, anything but the memories of the death he had unleashed-

_-screams echoing all around him, from the blackened house behind him to the streets, the buildings burning and crawling with things he had never imagined in all his curious explorations into the supernatural, like shadows given life and monstrous form, mutilated bodies lining the streets and staining the asphault red with blood as those who dare to fight are torn apart piece by piece in front of him, and those who run are in turn chased down by packs of the merciless abominations-_

A light sweat broke out on his brow as he struggled not to cry. For years, he'd kept his emotions under control, forced himself to bury all of the hurt and pain he dealt with on an almost daily basis until all but the most determined sadists gave up on trying to hurt him, simply because it was too much work on making him cry, and even most of them had the sense to back off once Zim had become a friend instead of an enemy. It had been so long since he'd felt bad enough to cry, it was almost an alien reaction to him. Pain? Most certainly. Unhappiness? Sometimes. Frustration? Almost contstantly. Sadness? So very frequently.

But feeling bad enough to cry wasn't usual for him, not anymore, but these were far from normal cicumstances. In fact, normalcy itself was dead now, wasn't it?

As dead as Earth and the human race.

His hands clenched tightly, so tight they hurt as he thought that in one fatal mistake, he had finally done what Zim had attempted to do for years until the truth had stared him in the face and ripped the malevolent innocence from him: the complete obliteration of the planet and almost every single living thing on it. He wasn't altogether sure how he knew this now, but he knew all the same.

A small malicious part of him, the part that kept him from falling into meek submission to all the torment the idiots around him had put him through, said that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing in some ways, that his tormentors had finally gotten what they'd had coming to them after years of osctracizing and tormenting him, had all the pain they'd directed onto him pushed back on them, that they had screamed and bled and died-

Dib squashed the cruel thought before it could become anymore pervasive. It was a perversely comforting thought, too comforting, and made him feel ill to think about it.

He shook his head to himself, mumbling distractedly under his breath and not sure what he was even saying, only understanding the tone: it was low and wavering, almost desperate. "Come on, come on, come on," He said after a few unintelligble moments. "Don't think like that, don't think about it at all. Just..."

His mind went blank for a moment. _Just what? _He wondered, the grief and guilt undermined for a moment by a vauge sense that he should _do _something instead of sitting on a bed feeling sorry for himself. He couldn't help it; as far back as he could remember, he'd always resolved things by handling them himself, even when doing such was, in hindsight, an incredibly stupid idea.

For the briefest of moments, between the grief and his drive to act. Dib found himself smiling, amused by memories of when that had led to certain consequences that were almost invaribly painful or at the very least embarrasing. Then he frowned, a cold feeling creeping in his stomach and he threw himself back on the bed, miserably thinking that none of his old mistakes, slip-ups or errors in judgements had ever come close to the nightmare he'd unleashed.

For a moment, he remained motionless on the bedspread, staring blankly at the ceiling. It had seemed so much simpler last night, before the full impact of what he had done to his family, to the people he knew, to the entire _world_ had finally crashed upon him like a payload of rectangular building materials in the middle of the night, waking him from fitful dreams too hazy to recall, and the fleeting impressions of terror and guilt made him feel a vestige of relief under the greyness choking his mind that he couldn't remember them any clearer.

His vaugely indignated demeanor during his wanderings in that wasteland where Wuya found him now seemed so childish.

Dib's hand paused over his forehead. _Wuya,_ the name echoed in his head, like the call of a blind thing in some deep cave under the face of the world. It was exotic, clearly of Asian origin, and Dib's nearly encylocepdic knowledge of trivial things gave him a meaning to the name: a raven or crow, the bird most accustomed to places of mystical import the world over, or in more prosaic knowledge, a merciless scavenger that was sometimes known as a gorecrow because of it's long-time habit of falling down on the wreckage of battles, pecking the eyes from the dead and taking whatever they could from the fallen.

The metaphorical implications of the latter fact weren't lost on Dib, and he disliked the implications. _Is that all I am to you?_ He grimly thought. _Something useful you plucked from a dying carcass?_

The thought receded from his mind as the roiling misery and guilt came to him again, and the dark thoughts of Wuya's intentions were replaced with sickening memories of all the people he had seen die screaming, the thoughts of those who'd been torn to pieces in their sleep and the gut-twisting knowledge that it was _all his fault_.

The need to do something, anything at all, pulled at him, and he let his hand slump to the side, unaware of the way the darkness of the room shifted like a misplaced blanket at his movement, how for the briefest of moments black mist followed the shape of his hand before fading away. He thought of Wuya's offer, thought briefly of the costs he was sure would come with whatever power she offered, and decided that whatever the price was would be worth it, if only so he could make amends.

_Whatever it takes,_ he told himself with all the resolve he could muster in his traumatized state, the core of his being wearing through the tired grayness choking his soul. _I'll set this right._

-------

Some evil plans were intricate and deep. Convoluted masterpieces that boggled the mind first with their complexity, and stunned those who survived the plan's execution. The twisted designs of twisted minds that glared into the universe and roared, challenging logic and sanity to fight back.

Other plans were less..._logical,_ but still no less complicated, often to a stupid extreme. Plans like spending several lifetimes mastering magic in order to arrange things to make your enemies suffer tended to fall into this category. They worked, but not very often. Probably because of the explaination of the Speed Force: 'It's so stupid, it _has _to work!'.

And still other plans were just plain stupid. Plans that might succeed if it wasn't for minor details like casuality and the laws of physics. Plans that would have been better if implemented by a living broomstick with, say, the common sense of the average chicken.

Wuya preferred a simpler approach in her evil plans, particular ones when the point of them was simply to cause havoc and chaos, and hopefully loss of life. Sometimes, though, as a demon had once told her, 'The complexity is involved not in the implementation of your evil plan, but in the set-up. It's a bit like stage comedy done by people that think too much, you know?" Wuya hadn't, actually, but thought she did now.

Traverse Town was getting a little too...content. The usual boil of chaos about to burst into outright lunacy had come to a merely weird simmer lately, and partially out of a respect for her long-range schemes and mostly out of a fondness for watching things go 'boom', both literally and figuratively, Wuya had a plan to raise some good old-fashioned bloodshed. And, hopefully, some dischord.

Her actual plan to get the person to do those things were, she admitted, rather convoluted. But she wasn't the type of person to take actions back, even if they would save her skin. Unlike some other people she knew.

"Okay, I'm the first to admit that I could have handled that better," Mr. Lyle said as he and Wuya, the Heylin witch carrying her staff as always, walked down a long high corridor deep within the confines of her fortress, him walking a jerky and extremely uneasy few steps behind her. "'And I probably should have sent a proxy, but I still accomplished my mission, didn't I?"

Wuya raised a weirdly angled eyebrow at him. "In a manner of speaking, I suppose so, but that was still a damnably foolish method you took. You're lucky they didn't kill you on general principle."

"I'm the first one to have noticed. And that reminds me; how did that Irken psychopath get the Keyblade, anyway? I thought it was supposed to be wielded by the purehearted or the baseline heroic or something like that, not a soldier that barely has a handle on sanity. If anything, in his little group, I'd expect the ghost-boy or the Avatar to get it. Even that blond kid that Cain wouldn't frag would do better, whatever his name is. Blonde hair, about this tall, looks a lot like a Nightroad for some reason, has a tail and that whole monkey power thing going..." Mr. Lyle gestured vaugely. "You know who I'm talking about."

"Certainly. It's...it's..." Wuya frowned in thought. "Terry? Will? No, it's a bit shorter than that, I think. Some sort of a hard 'o' sound."

"Yeah, like...Jon? Kon? Don? No, I'm sure it's higher on the alphabet."

"I want to say Don Stompable for some reason. I'm sure it's a pun of some sort."

"Yeah, that I can remember. Supposed to sound like 'unstoppable'. Which is weird, because he's really passive from what I've read. Mellow, even. When I said stuff, he didn't want to stab me silent. I think. Now, the Zim guy, he would have if I'd given him an opening before they cornered me."

"So would have most of the others," Wuya remarked. "Save perhaps for the tiger. Odd; I've heard that his people value personal honor quite highly. One would think that referring to his cultural division would incur some sort of bestial wrath. On the other hand, his childish companion would have hurt you quite badly, but not to the extent of actually killing you."

Mr. Lyle gave her an intent look, making a obvious attempt to keep his eyes off the ground and walls. "You think he's soft?"

"Something like that. I've heard he's instated a ban on testing anything on living lifeforms. I suspect it has something to do with their time in the Under."

"Well, he got mad when I said that he didn't care about much of anything at all."

Wuya gave him a look. "Yes, I've been wondering about that. You had all that information about them available and you chose to hurt him with that? Why didn't you say something about how his King no doubt chose him for his position because of his talent for destruction, or that he was living a lie, or even what his father did to the tiger-boy's birth family?"

Mr. Lyle gave a twitchy half-shrug. "Honestly, by that point, I couldn't think of anything really interesting. I was running out of ideas. Besides, kids are boring when it comes to traumatizing. You have to be _protractive _to scar their souls." His voice took on a bitter, knowing quality. "I should know."

The hardness in his voice suggested that he didn't want to discuss the matter further, and Wuya chose to end the conversation there. She found his obvious discomfort in the corridor to be far more interesting; his breathing was becoming erratic, he kept closing his eyes every few steps as if to block out the walls around them-or perhaps vile memories-and Wuya saw that his quick, harsh footsteps were obviously playing out an urge to _move_, to run as fast as he could. Psychically, she felt the echoes of screams from old memories playing out in his head, the voice of a little boy screaming in a metal box with only the whispers of moving cockroaches the size of kittens and his own rising terror to answer him.

It had been like this, going through these corridors on their way to the main biological laboratory. Mr. Lyle, it was clear, did _not _like enclosed spaces. All the better for her; Wuya could have just used a dark portal to take them to their destination, but it was just too much fun to watch him squirm.

They kept moving through a series of largely identical corridors all grouped together like tunnels in a warren, moving seemingly at random, the steady light from the glassy orbs hung at regular intervals over the ceiling lending a greenish-yellow glow to the Gothic arches above them and the elaborately shaped walls shaped into abstract depictions of demonic figures, worlds burning to ash and Wuya victorious over her foes, all shining with a baleful gleam that suggested that this was a place of such unspeakable evil that it's inherent malevolence had sunk into the very walls, or that the janitors had an unhealthy obsession with polishing every surface reachable with a good coat of varnish and a rag. Wuya had very definite opinions about evil architecture.

The corridors she was moving through had a purpose, aside from just looking evil-ish. They were, in a sense, a prison and a place to keep the ones that survived the experiments.

Large cells were built into the walls, each just large enough to hold it's particular occupant, blocked off from the corridor not by bars but by translucent curtains of shimmering green-black energy, fragile-looking force fields that were far more deadly then they looked. The cells themselves were almost completely bare but for scant toileting facilties, threadbare sheets for bedding and the remnants of whatever food and water they'd been given, if any. In this particular corridor, not all the cells were occupied, but those that were had small name plates just above them, either with the cellmate's names or the specific project they were a part of. The latter were more common; Wuya found a certain cruel pleasure in refusing to acknowledge her prisoners as anything other than her personal property, and it made it easier for underlings to identify them. Nonetheless, some were unique enough to warrant a more specific identification, or else were one of several victim in a specific project.

For a time, they stopped thinking overmuch about their immediate concerns and focused on the interestingly mutilated and suffering prisoners here. She didn't have to look at Mr. Lyle to sense his unhealthy interest at some of the prisoners they passed by; she felt the almost sensual sense of fascination he found in their broken bodies and minds, almost as strong as his obvious claustrophobia. He grew more excited-though not overly so; he rarely did things to extremes-as they saw more; the patchwork products of animals she had magically bred together to create ghoulish warriors, repulsive to look at and so unnaturally _aware _of their ugliness that they had to be restrained to keep from gouging their eyes out so they didn't have to look at themselves; obviously insane children with much too wide eyes, wrapped nearly head to foot in thick bandages to cover the diseased woodlike husks their flesh had congealed into, each of them bearing a grotesquely swollen limb bigger than their entire bodies, toes or fingers little more than jointed talons; things like anthropomorphic animals but twisted and distorted, their fur or scales turned ashen gray and throbbing from within, nowhere as refined or, well, _human _as the numerous species of sentient man-beast hybrids around the worlds were but infinitely more savage than even the most rabid human-hater was, their impossible physiologies wracked with a pain they would be all too eager to turn on others.

Mr. Lyle's phobic reaction to the subterranean space they were in gradually abated as he became interested in the experiments around them, espically as they came into a part of the corridor that housed experiments Wuya was inclined to think of as her guests, albeit with a sardonic touch. Their enclosures were larger than normal, partly as a nod that they were exceptional individuals even if they had either refused to join her or weren't suitable to, but also because many of them were subject to more specialized experiments and needed unique enclousures to keep them safely caged. Some of them had offended her in the past, tried to attack her or had done some wrong to her that required her to retaliate in an appropiate fashion. Others had been captured by her scouts for their superior physical prowess, unique talents, and still others simply because they'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A teenage boy that had long ago gone from large and strong to an emaciated wreck whimpered in a corner of his cell, huddled in a fetal curl, his leathery prisoner's tunic and pants torn at uneven angles, not seeming to care that his blond hair was matted with dirt and filth Wuya didn't care to look closer at. The blackened and ragged welts criss-crossing his body, following the extent of his central nervous system and veins to form a twisted map around him shifted slightly, swelling and contracting as though alive. "I can't feel it," He half-whispered to himself or perhaps the cell. "I can't feel the Other, the Other's gone, gone, _gone_..." He violently twitched, his sides jerking as though something inside him was fighting to get out. He settled onto his back, shivering and sobbing as something pitch black seeped from the corners of his eyes instead of tears, dissolving into acrid muck on his cheeks. His cell's nameplate, _Brock, Edward Jr.,_ was faded and uncared for, much like what was left of the teenager himself.

In an adjacent enclosure was a young demonic mutant teenager, his lithe body covered in nearly black dark blue fur marred with burning yellow tattoos patterned after angelic symbols. He clung to the back of his cell with his adhesive elongated two-toed feet, back braced against the wall and utterly calm to all apperances, the same yellow fire of his tattoos streaming from between his lips, closed eyelids and nostrils. His two-fingered hands were clasped together in prayer, and only a tail as long as he was tall gave any pretense of stress, twitching erratically in the air, the triangular spade it ended in flexing peaceably. His apparent serenity was all the more suprising, given the machinery in the cell he was being tortured with: a massive inhibitor collar around his neck, numerous cables wired directly into his spinal cord feeding into a small bank of diagnostic equipment, four drip-lines injected into his neck, the base of his tail and both wrists, all wired into a small tanker built into the wall, filled with a black liquid shimmering with purple. _Freak,_ Wuya thought disdainfully at the mutant boy whose nameplate bore the name _Wagner, Kurt Darkholme_.

A massive red-brown humanoid with the dense armorlike skin of an armadillo, the powerful forearms and claws of a bear, the spiked tail of a _stegosaurus_, the head and general appearance of a rhino stared cooly into space, eyes glowing blue-tinged white. "No, no," He muttered to himself in at least half a dozen dead langauges. "The people belong to the _land_, not the other way around..." A complicated machine that was almost all chemical-filled vials feeding into a vat of bizarre fluids wired into a number of living brains, suspended in shielded jars near the top, and was in turn connected to the creature's skull by means of a large cable. A light on the machine blinked, and the humanoid's eyes stopped glowing, revealing a pair of mechanical lenses. It's mouth cracked open, mismatched teeth gleaming wetly, and it giggled to itself. "Dark, dark, dark," It sang to itself, it's multi-linguistics gone and replaced with quavering English. "We all go alone into the dark..." It's nameplate simply read _Collective Unconsciousness/Psychic Amplification._ In all honesty, Wuya had no idea who or what it had once been, and she didn't really care either.

A massive wolf the size of a station wagon, it's fur a dark gray darkening to near-brown along it's head and back and nearly white on it's underside and hindquaters, sat quietly in it's cell, utterly relaxed despite the way it's back was scraping against the low roof. With an intensity alien to any animal, it stared at her with cold yellow eyes shining with an intelligence beyond that of any human. They were _old _eyes, the mind behind them more ancient than some worlds, speaking of a lifetime that inspired tales as much as it had been shaped by them, and one that was almost older than language itself. It bore no obvious marks of ill usage, but it's cell floor was stained with the maroon of dried blood, so thickly that a hundred creatures might have bled to death on it's floor, and the complete absence of toiletries or bedding suggested that this was less an experiment's home than a more traditional prisioner's cell. At the sight of her, the wolf bared his impressively large teeth, the air around him twisting like something alive and angry. He glared at her with a single-minded malevolence that promised her doom, a curious mixture of the rage that an alpha wolf whose pack had been taken from him and the mad grief of a father whose wife and children had been stolen away.

Almost completely filling up one cell was a sentient mechanical lifeform, remarkably uninterested in Wuya's presence, focused on it's own internal issues. When this sentient robot had been captured, it had been humanoid in form, but now it was a continually transforming mass of alien machinery, constantly shifting in and out on itself, forming amazingly advanced variations of machinery for a moment or two before falling back into the chaos that it had become while never quite remaining a shapeless mess. Large sections of itself shaped itself into armor-covered wheels or thrusters more appropiate to a flying machine, the suggestions of arms or legs forming at odd and unusual angels, broad fingers or massive feet starting to piece themselves together until they fell back apart and fell back into it's main body mass, which itself was constantly trying to reform into a likeness of the broad, squat mechanoid it had once been. The scientists were still unclear if it was doing this mockery of the elastic adaptations it's species was known for on purpose, or if it was an automatic reaction while it sank steadily deeper into it's own thoughts even as they hacked off the less aware bits of it for reverse-engineering. Perhaps it was the latter, because the three parts of it that never changed completely were it's coloration-a bright yellow with beelike stripes of black-, a pair of eyelike lenses blazing with the bright blue of it's very life-spark drifting in the mess that was it's body, and a very clearly defined symbol on it's body that resembled a mildly neutral robotic face made of geometric shapes: the symbol of the Autobots. The nameplate on it's cell read _Bumblebee_, which was the rather odd (in Wuya's opinion) name of the machine.

There were more of them. More prisoners that had once been enemies or merely unlucky. Wuya was determined to keep her organization as quiet as long as she could, but nevertheless, word still reached people. Sometimes, those people were the right sort, and offered her their surfaces in exchange for whatever rewards they believed she might have. Other times, they were the wrong sort, and tried to stop her. The ones that didn't end up horribly bloody messes usually ended up down here.

They paused by a cell being emptied by three of the demons known as Founders that Wuya employed, each of them short, stocky and resembling goblins, their skin chitinous and nearly black, apish arms ending in large clawed three-fingered hands and mouths dominated by sharp-toothed and disarmingly friendly smiles, dressed in the plain jumpsuits that were the uniforms of Wuya's multi-purpose minions: black leather one-pieces with glowing seamlines, matching streamlined gloves and steel-toed boots and a detachable face-hood with built goggles and respirator masks. One of the Founders was standing by the cell, hand placed firmly on an adjacent control panel to keep the force field deactivated while the other two hauled a large corpse out of the room that was only barely recognizable as human; every inch of it was withered and deeply wrinkled, folds of calcified skin hanging loose on quite visible bones. It was quite a large body, even withered as it was, but it's prisoner's clothes hung loosely, made for a body that had been much bigger than this emaciated husk. It's face looked vaugely recognizable, square-jawed with tufts of wispy white hair falling out the top, but Wuya couldn't quite place it, and the nameplate above the cell had already been removed, providing no help there.

"Good mornin', miss," One of the Founders said to her, nodding deferentially to her, hood flopping over it's back. It straightened up, claws securely around the corpse's ankles.

"Evening..eh..." Wuya thought for a moment, trying to remember the names of these particular Founders. Considering that she had over three hundred under her employ, she decided not to make the effort and mentally nicknamed the one who had just spoken Screwtape, the other corpse-carrier Balthazar and the one at the control panel Bob, the first two being fiends she had fond memories of and the third just being a random thought. She resolved to add nametags to the uniforms starting next week. "And what exactly is this thing?" She gestured at the corpse.

'Bob' saluted her with his free hand. "Right now, it's destined for the Sewing-Life Alchemist's examination table, and hopefully, tomorrow's lunch, but it used ta be...eh, can't remember the name." He shuddered. "I _hate _that guy. The Sewing-Life Alchemist, not this guy, mind." Wuya wrinkled her nose in distaste, echoing Bob's sentiment; she disliked the Sewing-Life Alchemist for various reasons, and given that the question of Dib would require his particular expertise, she didn't like being reminded that she was going to have to deal with him soon enough.

"W.R. Monger," 'Balthazar' said, grunting a bit as he hooked his hands tighter under the corpse's shoulders. "That crazy general that tried to infiltrate us and got caught, right?"

Wuya recognized him now that she had his name, even thought this twisted husk was barely recognizable as having been human once. Mr. Lyle gave W.R. Monger's body the once-over of an experienced killer: he only needed one glance to see everything. "And what killed this? I've seen burnt hotdogs that looked better than this."

Balthazar gave as best a shrug he could. "Hard to tell. Looks like a number of factors, like the trace symbiotes in his bloodstream eating him alive, that petrifying disease Miss Azula tried out on him last week, and some other stuff, but it looks like it was that infusion of Crusnik nanites from Mr. Nightroad's bloodstream."

"Tore him apart from the inside out, drained him dry and worse," Screwtape commented. "Just like all the other ones, though he held out longer than anyone else, I'll give him that much. Looks he started to change shape at least a little at the end; his skin and muscle were starting to merge, turn into something like organic minerals." Wuya thought he had a point; W.R. Monger's body did display several characteristics that any of the Nightroad family displayed when their power was active; his skin was stonelike, perhaps a precursor of a potential elemental association, small spines that might have been wings sprouted from his shoulderblades, his nails were unnaturally long and thick, the beginings of claws, and not least of all, what few teeth left in his mouth were serrated fangs.

"Ah," Wuya said, a bit regretfully. "He came _so _close. Closer than anyone. But at least Tucker will find something interesting in his remains, no doubt. Perhaps another step on recreating the Crusniks."

"And lunch?" Bob asked hopefully.

"We'll see," Wuya said amiably, not a yes or no. The three demons whined, but didn't press the issue, hauling the corpse out of the cell and moving it down the corridor several paces before turning right, taking a different path from Wuya's.

"I like it here," Mr. Lyle commented as they went on their way. "There's always something happening."

Wuya and Mr. Lyle went on their way, and down here, closer to the laboratory, there were more of the 'special' prisoners, some in better shape than others, some far worse but most manifastly broken in some manner or another, unlike the old wolf or the demonic mutant. Wuya found herself wondering just what kept their minds intact even after she had them tortured on a regular basis, psychics invading their minds and twisting their recollections until every memory they had felt wrong and painful, after her scientists had used them for whatever projects and experiments they were suitable for, food delivered to them infrequently and without any semblence of a pattern to throw off their grasp of time, not to mention whatever she deemed a good idea to do to them. The psychology of the hero was always an enigma to her, and while many of her prisoners were far from that lofty title, so many held the potential to be heroes. She had led many experiments and examinations to determine exactly what constituted a heroic mindset, ostenibly to use it against any enemies that might come her way, but really out of simple curiousity. Her limited success in this inquiry wasn't discouraging, just mildly annoying; the fact that many her subjects had been reduced to psychological trainwrecks was more than a little gratifying, compared to the bravado they so often displayed before they crashed and burn, occasionally literally.

Heroes. She hated them. It was part of her job description, or at least it would have been if she'd had one. Ever since Grandmaster Dashi had tricked her into that stupid box so long ago, she had been foiled at every turn by idiots with delusions of bravado, and even now, the thought of that small band of elementally-empowered children was enough to set her teeth to grinding. They would pay in due time, oh, how they would pay, and they might never suffer enough to satisfy her taste for vengeance, even with their world less than dust. Nevertheless, simple curiousity had demanded to know _why _they did what they did, and Wuya found it frustrating that she still wasn't much closer to having an easy answer.

Wuya smiled. Curiosity and interest had led to Mr. Lyle's disastrous assignment of the night before-what idiot confronts an unknown quantity directly?-and in some respects he had failed, but in many others, he had done well. He had examined the new Keybearer's capability, tested the cat-king's minions and might have began to put doubts in the heads of the refugees, or at least in three that were ideally placed to influence the more dangerous elements of the town, which was a start. And he'd let them all know of things better left buried, which was both entertaining and a potential rift in the tentative partnership that King Garfield seemed intent on forming. She knew that it was probably a good idea to punish Mr. Lyle for his mistakes, but she wore inclined to leniency than most in her station, and of course, she didn't want to offend his master. She had power, but the ones that pulled his strings might well blow her out like a candle in a hurricane. And that was the best possible death they might bestow upon her; she knew that their kind delighted in the painful subjugation of others, and knew oh so many ways of how to break the mind, body and soul of others, all without laying so much as a polished claw on her.

No. They could wait until she could do the same to them.

But all the same, Mr. Lyle hadn't failed at the true purpose of his mission, which was basically a follow-up on their examination of Zim during his battle with the Guard Armor. It had worked; the Keybearer's powers were develouping disturbingly quickly, but by the same token, they were much too...wild. Chaotic, even. He had too little control, and that was something valuable to keep in mind. To Wuya, Mr Lyle hadn't failed so much as he had been foiled, which was an important distinction. And of course, since he had been foiled while on a mission on her direction, that implicitly meant that _she _had been bested, and she very well couldn't let anyone get away with that.

Hence a plan concoted over a morning's breakfast that, while _basically _simple in excecution, would require a bit of leg-work to get moving. Still, the results were bound to be good.

As they walked from corridor to corridor, taking a cruel pleasure in the prisoner's pain, Wuya realized that her path wasn't quite as random as it seemed. She was being _pulled_, unconsciously following the psychic bond she shared with her apprentice, who was clearly close by. Delighted with the prospect, she followed it instead of merely being led by it; there wasn't any real practical purpose for it, but Wuya liked the prospect of company other than Mr. Lyle, who embodied the old woman's saying, 'if he looks too good to be perfect, he probably isn't'. Without consulting Mr. Lyle, Wuya took several left and rights through the winding corridors, eventually backtracking a few times as she followed her bond. The detour didn't matter, as the corridors all ended up in the same place, and Mr. Lyle seemed to be under the impression that Wuya was moving more or less linearly.

Wuya soon found her apprentice in a wing of the prison-warrens reserved for the most dangerous of the experiments: she was standing in front of an occupied cell, a late teenager that was much like Wuya herself, quite beautiful in a distinctly dangerous way and pale-skinned. The girl wore her long black hair in a loose style down over her shoulders to mid-way down her back, her sun-yellow eyes narrowed in some cruel thought.

Her clothes were well-tailored, and excessively decorated: an elaborately designed dark red vest, the chin-high collar folded over, her high-collared black shirt embellished with red flame designs, form-fitting black pants with an elaborate series of ribbed red pieces on the outer sides of her hips and downwards, becoming increasing complex and joining with the cuffs of a pair of light knee-high boots, criss-crossed with straps, the toes capped with spiked steel. Heavy-duty combat gloves clothed her forearms, colored fire-red with darker accents on the seamlines and borders, several of the glove's fingers fashionably cut away, short retracted blades built to slide over the steel-covered knuckles and presently hooked behind the wrist. Her short sleeves exposed a tracery of glowing blue geometric runes covering her toned arms and, if similar lettering at what could be seen of her neck was any example, most of the rest of her body. She held herself with an almost unnatural sense of confidence, the unerring ease of a predator in it's natural element, posessed with all the beauty of a contained blaze; under control to all apperances, but quite capable of incinerating anything that failed to excercise caution.

"Good morning, Azula," Wuya said genially.

Azula gave her a brief look that, to anyone else, probably would have been dismissive. Wuya knew it to signify acknowledgement. "Hello, Wuya," Azula said calmly, as though she'd been expecting her. She probably had, through the psychic bond Wuya had forged between them with powerful magic that connected them as master and student. Azula glanced at Mr. Lyle with obvious distaste. While she was nowhere near as powerful as Wuya was, Wuya had still given her more power than she'd ever had even as a Firebending prodigy, and she was no doubt picking off the same vaugely repulsive vibes off Mr. Lyle that Wuya was, perhaps even the vauge sense of inhumanity that accompined him. "And..._you_."

Mr. Lyle, for his part, only grinned salaciously at her. He didn't seem at all put off by her dismissive attitude; if anything, it piked his interest. Wuya grimaced, and withdrew her psychic awareness from him as quickly as possible: being telepathically close to Mr. Lyle could be like pliunging your hand into mildly acidic sewage.

Acting to prevent Mr. Lyle from doing or saying anything exceptionally stupid that would resort in his horrible doom before she deemed it ready to happen, Wuya stepped directly in front of him. "Ignore the idiot, he fouled up last night and I fear it's affected his judgement-"

"Hey!" Mr. Lyle snapped from behind her.

Wuya ignored him. "-I was hoping you could accompany us on a mission of some importance. I've been around him for far too long. I miss intelligent conversation."

"It's only been fifteen minutes!" Mr. Lyle said, indignant. "Twenty-five, maximum!"

"With you," Azula said with a smirk. "Time expands to a horrible crawl." She turned her attention back to Wuya. "Certainly, but I've got to finish up the latest attempt at one of the projects you've assigned me."

"Oh? Which project, exactly?"

Azula gestured towards the cell. "Alucard," She said simply, and that was all that was needed to be said.

The cell was one of the more sophisticated ones Wuya had at her disposal, virtually every inch of it etched with glowing arrays of increasing complexity until it resembled a fold-out from an obscure grimore, all of them seals designed to restrain beings of immense power. At the center of the cell, juxtaposed between the most powerful of the binding seals was a gaunt and cruelly handsome man with ink-black hair falling below his elbows in a tangled mess, wrapped up in a bizarre black leather outfit resembling a full-body straightjacket, his arms forced behind him with the cloth riveted shut. No less than fifteen massive noon-forged golden chain imbued and glowing with the very essence of the sun itself were bound to shackles riveted into his outfit, wrapping around his legs, arms and lower body and holding fast dispite the fact that they phased out of visibility just inches short of the wall, as though they were shackled into another dimension entirely. The flickers of a force field far stronger than the usual ones she employed appeared with every movement the man in the cell made, seldom though they might have been. And Wuya knew perfectly well of the other defenses specially made for _this _particularily prisoner, defenses that she kept private so that no one might let this thing loose, whether through intent or accident.

Her primarily laboratory, once housed on Azula's old world, had already seen one breakout before she moved all her prisoners here. If this _thing _got loose, her entire world would be at risk, if not all the other ones currently under her control until the Heartless ate them.

There was a lot of blood in that cell, too, slowly moving back to the man and flowing into his flesh like water to a sponge. Splatters of red decorated the walls in random spots not unlike a rorschach inkblot, thick and rimmed with glimmers of black. Wuya could feel heat radiating from the cell, the ghosts of recent fires. And there was a certain energy to the air, suggestive of a lot of action having taken place, as though they were witness to a down moment between scenes of enormous violence and cruelty. Of course, when Azula was involved, that was more of a given rather than a possibility.

"Ah. _That._Wuya gave the man in the cell a sideways glance. "I...see. Still as uncooperative as always, I assume."

The younger woman sighed. "You've _no _idea. No matter what I do, whenever he reacts to me, it's usually just the round of insane laughter." She paused. "Which is an improvement from always ignoring us. I don't know if I'm finally breaking through to him, the more creative measures I've been using or if he's just screwing with our heads. Again."

"Well, it could be a start," Wuya muttered. "If we want to muck around with his blood to make vampire soldiers like Millenium did, we have to find some way of breaking him," Wuya admitted, as much as she thought that it was an futile effort trying to make the creature within the cell cooperate, willingly or not.

"Ah, did I miss something?" Mr. Lyle asked abruptly. "What's going on here?" He frowned, looking at the cell's occupant, clearly unaware of who it was. Wuya studied the incredulous look on his face, and thought that he might well be picking up some disturbing enemations. "And what _is _that thing? Some kind of...vampire?" His frown deepened, and Wuya glanced at him as she felt a dim _shift _within his morphological field, something begining to emerge from the depths of his maimed soul, something that better suited Mr. Lyle rather than the vestige of humanity he was still troubled with. His face twisted, contorting in bizarre ways, cheekbones crunching up into bizarre protrusions as his eyes swimmed with blackness that swallowed his pupils and whites both, turning them black as oil, shining red where the light struck them. "Reads like a vampire," Mr. Lyle muttered to himself, his voice changed. It was deeper, raspier, with an odd reverb like there were several of him speaking at once. "But not like one I've ever seen. Darker than anything I've seen outside of Hell, but it's not outright evil." He took a cautious step closer to the cell; not out of any actual fear that it could hurt him, but of a simple reluctance to get closer to it. Mr. Lyle obviously didn't know much about it, but Wuya thought he might be seeing enough to seriously unnerve him.

He looked the man in the cell over, his fiendish eyes glimmering with awareness as he did. After a moment, he suddenly hissed, like a sexually-obsessed man spotting an impossibly alluring woman. (Or man. Both applied to Mr. Lyle.) His jaw fell slightly open, uttering a wordless noise of mingled surprise and perverse excitement. For another moment, he held the pose, then he spoke, haltingly and stuttering slightly, as though whatever he had just seen had unhinged him just a little. "You. You're him. You're _that_. Alucard. You're _Alucard_. The nightmare that broke Milleniun." He stepped back, eyes wide, and his face and eyes returned to a semblence of humanity with several sickening noises. He spoke again, in a quiet, almost awed whisper. "The Bird of Hermes is your name, eating your wings to keep you tame." Mr. Lyle chuckled, a little disbelivingly. "And you're _ours_. We have _Alucard_."

The man in the cell, silently regarding Mr. Lyle's odd babbling as Wuya and Azula stared at him warningly, looked at Mr. Lyle in obvious surprise. "Have me?" He repeated. "You believe...that you own me? That you have broken me as you have broken so many others?" He stared up at them in blank amusement, and suddenly began to laugh. "Heh. Heh heh heh...ha! Ha ha hah! _Ha ha hyah hyah ha HYAH!_" The laugh surprised them all, stealing their attention and coming from the man in the cell, seemingly disinterested in the events just beyond him until now, dusky, as wild as the voice of a sentient predator would be, and not in the least bit human.

He, Alucard, moved his head very slightly up, and a pair of monster's eyes opened beneath his mass of black hair. They were red, or orange, glowing a color that was just between the two colors, his pupils slit like a cat's. He grinned in clear amusement at them, thin lips sliding over white teeth as pointed as railroad spikes.

"What are you smiling at?" Wuya said, feeling a bit unnerved.

"_You,_" He said in a near-whisper, grinning even wider. "You all dare to dream of controlling me? Your hubris is an astounding thing, witch!" He chuckled darkly. "Perhaps it is true that one with an immovable place to stand on can turn the world on itself, but you should heed your predecessors in this mad endeavor of control and dominance..." He gave Wuya a consperatorial look, cocking an eyebrow. "When you hold the world above you like a crown, there is only one way for it to fall. On you. And then, it's a short move straight down!" He abruptly broke off laughing again, long and loud, the sound echoing through the hall.

It was a bit more personal to her. It was almost a promise, this insane laughter of his. He was making a statement: _I am not broken. I shall never be broken. I will survive this as I have survived all else. I shall escape, and then I shall find you. And then not all your stolen power, not your allies and not the darkness barely under your control will save you._

He stopped as suddenly as he had started, leaving an eerie silence where his laughter had just been. "No matter where I go," He said thoughtfully to himself. "No matter now long I have lived, they always come back. Fools and madmen obsessed with controlling everything around them, who had the audacity to be suprised when they find the death they so richly deserve."

"_Now _he graces us with his attention," Azula complained, giving the vampire a sour look. "After completely ignoring me all morning. That's very rude of you."

Alucard smirked faintly. "It is a king's perogative to give his attention to whatever he wishes."

"It's still rude," Mr. Lyle remarked. Alucard only grinned at him, teeth bared like a clenched beartrap. Mr. Lyle took a step back after a moment, unnerved.

He then turned his attention to Azula, a horror that had been subjected to things nearly as nightmarish as he was, and Azula the one who did most of them to him.

It was reasonable, and correct, to assume that he might be annoyed at her, in spite of his demeanor. He was annoyed indeed, very deeply annoyed. It was an annoyance not quite on par with the legendary grievance that the spirit Agrajag bore the man who had kept killing him in _every single one_ of his many, many lifetimes, all apparently but complete coincidence, but Alucard was still unhappy with being tortured and other stuff. Like most strong-willed people in his position, he chose to vent that frustration.

Someone else might have screamed obscenties at her until they were hoarse, or howl all their bile-black hate at her until they weren't able to speak a single word. The more stoic of personalities might take to glaring hatefully at her, and still others might turn away from her sheer force of personality. And the utterly enraged-or those with nothing to lose-might throw themselves at her in an attempt to break through the shields and get to her, even if it only meant their deaths by immolation.

But then, those were human things to do. The products of a sentient mind that might be sprained, or even broken, but still essentially sane. While he looked human for the most part, Wuya knew from haunting personal experience that Alucard was posessed of a mind that was not merely twisted but in fact totally bent.

He grinned impossibly wide, horribly sharp teeth exposed and eyes wide like a madman's and glowing painfully bright. Wuya's awareness of the extrasensory pricked; Alucard was doing something, mustering powers that even as weakened as they were by the seals around him, weren't completely nullified. Mr. Lyle seemed aware, judging by his sudden edginess, and Azula was all too aware; she took a step back, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Alucard struck. Not physically, he was immobile as ever, but one second Wuya felt that awful sense of gathering power, like a tsunami pulling itself up before a hapless beachfront, and then she felt it _hit_, and Azula staggered back, eyes blank, and Wuya felt the same things she did, through the semi-psychic bond between them-

_Alucard's voice in her head, echoing from every corner, every memory, everywhere, like something alive. Laughing at her, mocking her, taunting her in a thousand words that weren't words at all, that insane laughter sounding like every harsh condemnation Azula has ever imagined from behind everyone else's eyes, like the horribly pitying way Zuko looked at her after that Water Tribe girl saved him from the brink of death, like the way her father only cared about her as a tool he never entirely trusted, like the disgusted look Uncle gave her everytime she saw him after the war..._

_That monster's laughter rang all the harder as he moves through all the carefully constructed barriers in her mind, not even smashing through them but flowing around them, _ignoring _them, and it's like having entire pack of massive ferocious wolves cornering her, snapping at her, like having a thousand poisonous centipedes crawling all over her naked skin, biting and stinging and poisoning her from the inside-out, and the deeper he goes, the more he knows, every dark thought, every forgotten hurt, and every screaming instant of burning envy and crushing fear comes rushing to her as he observes them all, until in a searing flood of horror, he finds the very kernel of her mind and LAUGHS-_

And then, as soon as it happened, she felt Alucard's mind abruptly falling away from Azula's, and not by his choice;. Alucard rocked back in his cell as much as he was capable of, looking mildly surprised. Azula's face was lightly coated in sweat, her eyes were wide, and her hands were shaking both from the tremendous psychological shock Alucard had put her through, but also because she had just expelled Alucard from her mind, a feat equivilant with pushing a lever clenched in your teeth while sitting on greased tiles. In spite of her obvious exhaustion, she was grinning, her teeth bared much like Alucard had been, a look that quite simply said _I won_.

Wuya was impressed at Azula's force of will in actually forcing Alucard to do something he didn't want to do, but Mr. Lyle said nothing. He only looked mildly thoughtful. Interested. And he was smiling, ever so slightly.

For a moment, Alucard and Azula stared each other down, the vampire looking vaugely amused, Azula rooted where she was and unwilling to budge. Then Alucard laughed some more. "You," He said softly to Azula. "Are so _cold_."

Azula's eyes went wide, first with shock and then with rage. She thrust her arm out, blue fire billowing out once more from two outstretched fingers and passing through the force field. Mr. Lyle took a half-step back, stopping and staring in obvious excitement as the blue fire homed in on a grinning Alucard, the force fields within the cell glowing painfully bright, protecting the circles, chains and other defenses completely while according the vampire within the cell no such protection.

Alucard didn't so much as twitch as the blue fire engulfed him.

Azula stepped back as Alucard burned, the smell of burning cloth and roasting flesh hot in their nostrils while the man inside failed into react in all but the most involuntary ways, his head forced back by his incinerating muscles, jaw hanging open, inhumanly pointed teeth blackened and falling out as his gums burned away. His skin baked and chipped as it was consumed by the flames, and his jaw fell open, muscles disintegrating under the heat. His entire body seized up as he went up like a torch, hair blazing like a warped halo. The only noise he made was the creak of burnt leather straining against itself, the hiss of internal gases burning and the chains that bound him clinking as his body's contortions twisted him into an unnaturally twisted posture.

The fire snuffed out, leaving the cell untouched and an unrecognizable husk, half bent back, hair burnt to ashes and the skin a baked red-brown. Yet, it still radiated amusement, the few teeth it had left seemed bared in a grin, inhuman and mocking. The three of them processed it in equal silence: Wuya because she knew what was going to happen, what _was _happening, while Mr. Lyle looked on with prurient fascination; not at the burning dead man, but at Azula, and Wuya would have blasted his head off on the spot if it wasn't for the wrath that would evoke from his masters. The girl paid both of them no attention, focused exclusively on the man, her lips twitching irritably.

"Laugh _that _one off," She spat, turning around from Alucard's burning body.

Mr. Lyle frowned at a whispering sussuration, like the movement of many small forms, and in the cell, shadows were moving. Not like the distinct forms of intangible Shadow Heartless, but vaporous shapes, glowing red and bubbling a deeper red at the core, swarming from around the cell and over Alucard's body, flowing over it and merging with the burnt husk.

"_If you insist,_" Alucard's voice whispered.

The red in the shadows deepened, clearly growing thicker and changing Alucard's body in some subtle but definite way. It was straightening, moving back into the subservient posture his bindings had forced him into. There were several audible cracks and pops as bones were forced back into their proper settings, and more shadows formed from the top of his head, down over his shoulders, becoming finer and thinner until they were no longer shadows at all, but quite clearly Alucard's black hair.

Bit by bit, the shadows covering Alucard turned a disturbing violent color, until he seemed to be drenched in blood, and it suddenly faded away-or, more likely, directly absorbed into his body-revealing Alucard to be completely regenerated, looking as though he'd never been burned at all. He smirked up at them, eyes glowing, and chuckled cruelly, sounding like rats running over greasy bones.

There was a long moment; Azula glaring at Alucard angrily, Wuya impassive and Mr. Lyle still quietly thoughtful, looking interested.

"That was fun," Alucard finally said, grinning like a shark. "Shall we try again? Think of something nastier to fuel your fire. The flames might be hotter, and the healing take _much_ longer."

Azula stared at him before turning away with a revolted grunt. "...You disgust me."

"Actully, I find him charming. And pretty good looking, too. I'd take him in a heartbeat," Mr. Lyle said brightly. Wuya, Azula, and even Alucard stared at him. "What?"

Wuya slowly took a step back, followed by another and then another. "Er...ah...I'm going to leave now," She said slowly. "Before you say something else to make me violently ill."

"Don't forget me," Azula said quickly. "I'm done here." The two women quickly left, moving at a brisk walk that took as quickly from Alucard's general vicinity while not actually running and thus embarrasing themselves in front of the prisoners, while Mr. Lyle followed after them at a steady pace.

Alucard watched Mr. Lyle's progress as best he could from his position, and shuddered. "Not even were I drunk," He muttered, looking distinctly disturbed. And it took a _lot_ to disturb him. Generally, it took bizarre dreams involving vistations from gun spirits, random celebrity cameos and utterly deranged events that made him feel like a character in a demented (and not altogether consistent) manga.

Being hit on by a man who seemed on the verge of a claustrophobic panic attack yet still having the presence of mind to flirt with not only Azula but _Alucard _himself was more psychologically dibilitating.

-------

After an interminable length of time going through the corridor warrens, a veritable maze of rights, lefts and more than a few elevator lifts, they gradually found themselves moving into a more open area. Rather than the corridors that the prisoners were kept in, they were now in a much larger box-shaped chamber, the glow-orbs brighter than in the corridors and the stones of the floor slowly worn and set at smooth angles to accomodate wheels. Large tunnels feeding into the corridors and various elevator lifts opened into the sides of the wall, each big enough to let an elephant or large truck through with ease, and the greater size of the room certainly had a positive effect on Mr. Lyle: he was still annoying and unpleasant, but whether it was his claustrophobia easing off or him actually learning the errors of his ways or he was being more subtle about it. Wuya would have bet good money that it was the latter possibility; she didn't know enough about his life to understand more about him than she absolutely had to, but it was evident that he abhored enclosed spaces with an almost psychotic intensity.

Wuya's staff, the various accroutments on Azula's clothes and their respective footwear clicked on an elaborately designed metal disc set into the middle of the room, easily as big as any of the tunnel entrances if not bigger, made mainly of brass with cold iron overlaid in a variety of mystical patterns. Among the circles-within-circles, almost non-Euclidian gemetrical angles and other occult symbology Wuya liked, at the very center of the disc(which was actually an elevator lift) was the crossed-out heart that the Heartless overlaid the shadow of a raven with it's wings spread out, the symbol that Wuya took as her own and, by extension, her entire organization.

In a short time, they stood in front of the only actual door in the room, a large circular one built like a mixture of an airlock and a vault; completely round and made of a gleaming metal that looked and felt like moonlight made solid, a single black disc set into it's surface at arm's-level and surronded by a mystical diagram inscribed in exquisitely drawn calligraphy, the ink seeming to shift like the currents of the deepest ocean depths.

Mr. Lyle gave it a mistrustful look, his eyes betraying a hint of fiendish red. "Magic," He muttered to himself. "I _hate _magic." He glanced around suspiciously. "I feel like there's something in here that wants to eat me."

"Most assuredly not," Wuya said loftily. "The demon bound to this chamber know better than to do something so crass. At most it would take a bite out you. Just for the taste, you understand. We haven't had cause to feed ir for quite some time."

Mr. Lyle grimaced. Behind him, the air rippled momentarily, some anamolous form almost visible behind him. It cast a shadow not unlike an ape's, adorned with spikes and sharp protrusions and dripping something thick off it's fur. Mr. Lyle jerked as a thick, wet noise came from directly behind him, and he turned around just as the air stilled, the shadow on the ground disappearing. "Can we just get _going _already?! The corridors were bad enough without there being some kind of evil spirit in here?"

"Eurymanthus, actually," Azula remarked. "'Blood ape', if you want to go so far as to use common vernacular."

"And if you're in such a hurry, open the door yourself," Wuya said, trying not to grin evilly and failing.

Mr. Lyle, too unnerved by the unseen presence, didn't notice, and also failed to notice a silent back-and-forth between Azula and Wuya: At once, Azula raised an eyebrow, glancing at the door and Mr. Lyle and back again. Wuya smirked and held a finger to her lips, shaking her head slowly. Azula raised an eyebrow in thought, and grinned back at her.

So, ignorant of what they were probably up to, Mr. Lyle walked to the door and examined it for a moment before he cautiously held his thumbless hand up to the door, his palm crackling with red-black telekinetic energy that snaked out just in front of the door and suddenly spread out, as though covering a curved surface before winking out like a candle in a highwind. Mr. Lyle blinked, nonplussed, and laid a hand just in front of the door, his hand meeting a unyielding resistance just in front of it, translucent blue-purple force forming out of the air around his hand. "A force field. How..._cliche._" He pressed on it, his splayed fingers making a thumbless indentation for a moment before he removed his hand, the force field disappearing from sight.

A ripple flashed out from the disc and spread over the door, it's metal suddenly as liquid and fluid as a storm-tossed sea, and a slightly curved and knife-thin protrusion formed out of it so fast that it had already sliced through a good portion of Mr. Lyle's hair before he was even aware that it was there; with a yelp, he ducked just as the blade dissolved into liquid metal again, absorbed by the door, and several blunt spikes surged out from the lower section of the door and struck his shoulder and stomach, knocking him off his feet just as the force field appeared again, but not the half-there shell Mr. Lyle had seen but a darkly radiant mass, so thick that the door vanished behind it, and abruptly flashed out, striking Mr. Lyle with all the force of a speeding car hitting a brick wall, flinging him halfway across the hall. The stone floor flickered with the same energy of the force field, and swelled up into a vaugely hand-shaped mass in time for Mr. Lyle to crash right into it's palm and immediately slam him down into the ground, the fingers arranging themselves in such a way that he was completely unable to move even as they seamlessly joined with the floor, the hand slowly pressing down and crushing him.

Wuya and Azula laughed at him as several strangled gasps were squeezed from him. "Oh, it appears that I forgot that you're not authorized to access the labs on your own," Wuya said. "Even though we're with you. It appears that the door-wards aren't intelligent enough to tell the difference."

"Or maybe it took offense to the little trick with the red light," Azula said, almost grinning.

"Okay...point taken..." Mr. Lyle wheezed, his face turning red as the stone hand steadily crushed him. "A...little help...?"

Wuya snapped her fingers, clawlike nails scraping against each other, and the stone hand obligingly melted away from Lyle, joining with the floor and becoming inanimate stone again as the blunt spikes on the door melted away, the liquid metal turning still.

"That was fun!" Azula said cheerfully. "Make him do it again!"

"Let's not, okay?" Lyle grumbled as he got to his feet and stumbled back over to them.

"Consider that a warning. It would be...ill-advised to go wandering where you are not wanted, or to attempt to interfere in my more delicate machinations. I do believe that your masters would understand if something _unfortunate_ happened to you within my demenses because you didn't heed your limits."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Mr. Lyle muttered. "Devils aren't known for being understanding about anything." Azula rolled her eyes and lightly struck across the back of his head. "Ow! What was that for?!"

Azula shrugged. "I felt like it."

Trying not to laugh, Wuya stepped forward and placed a hand on the black disc, her palm burning a green and black that quickly spread through it in grainular veins and lines, glowing from and quickly acquiring the partial translunce of a translucent gemstone lit from behind. The diagram around it turned red for a moment until it polarized into a calming shade of blue-green, pulsing gently until it flared out, a single large ripple rushing through the door's metal. Wuya sensed rather than saw Mr. Lyle flinching behind her, even though this change was nowhere as chaotic as the door had been.

The force field pulsed into view again, as powerful and wild as it had been only moments before, turning almost rock-still before it irised open, forming a large hole the exact diameter of the door behind it, and almost immediately, the door itself came to life again, the metal flowing like liquid once more and creating three large openings, each big enough to permit the three of them comfortable entrance. Without a word, Wuya and Azula walked through it with an almost unconscious ease, and a few moments after something unspeakably horribly failed to happen to them, Mr. Lyle followed after them. Given Wuya's puckish and slightly twisted sense of humor, it might have occured to him that she could have set up something bad to happen to him anyway, but he didn't, and in this case his belief was validated.

The three of them came into a massive sprawling rectangular room, far bigger than the chamber they'd just left and furnished with a more futuristic touch than Wuya usually liked; strange machinery that formed part of the walls as they carried on their function, smooth forms and odd protrusions giving them a throughly organic look, and quite a few of them quite clearly had disembodied brains floating in small tanks much like the ones of the animalistic experiment from the corridor, wires and cables connecting them to the machines they served. Several airlock-style doors less obviously magical than the vault-like door they had just passed through were set into the walls at oddly spaced intervals, while several elevator lifts were set at equally unpredicatable places at the lab.

Even more randomly arranged were the various enclosures in the lab, placed in no clear order, more technologically reliant than the prisoner's cells where most of the experiments the enclousures housed spent their time, none of them the same size, ranging from the same dimensions as the cells in the corridor beyond to the size of large rooms(all depending on the experiment or project in question), all of them the same box-shaped constructs of magically-forged alloys that could resist the exertions of a full-grown Tetramand, the metal almost completely translucent for easy viewing except along the corners and edges, small arrays of control equipment monitoring their degree of transparency, size and other factors more specific to each enclosure.

Less dramatic were the various tables set around the room, lined with alchemical equipment and tools of the magically-knowledgable scientist's trade; some of them were simple desks, used for work upon strange minerals or other substances Wuya's scouts and explorers had procured, others were carefully shielded areas to test magical weapons, and still more were surgical in nature, shackles and heavy-duty straps part of the padded chairs. Many of them were being used at the moment, the prisoners that were being operated on generally anesthetized so the screaming would distract the scientists. The laboratory itself was bustling with activity and action, much of it moving along the pathways inaverdently formed by the larger enclousures many enclosures; scientists that Wuya had hired or who had come as part of the allies she'd found, along with their assistants and superiors, doing various arcane things that seemed less like work and more like _looking _like they were busy to Wuya.

Mr. Lyle and Wuya both looked around for a moment before Mr. Lyle frowned at Wuya. "He's not here."

Wuya looked around some more, scanning the faces around her, looking for a certain mess of green hair and a purple suit before she admitted that Mr. Lyle was right. "Should we really be surprised?" She muttered irritably. "He isn't posessed of what you might call conventional sanity..."

Mr. Lyle grunted. "Then we'll just have to take a look around, then."

"What? Why? We could just wait here for him. If he shows up while we're gone, we could miss him and throw my timetable completely out of whack!"

Mr. Lyle glanced at her. "I _do _have my own report to make, you know. And my superiors have expressed an interest in the experiments you might be doing." He gave her a pointed look. "Do you really want to give them an outright 'no'?"

"Oh, fine," Wuya said, rolling her eyes. "If you insist. But only until we find him!"

"Yeah, yeah, get the clown and get out, got it."

Azula grimaced as Mr. Lyle walked off to look at a number of scientists busily stitching together a war-ghoul. "Ugh, I hate being out of the loop. What are we here for?"

Wuya glanced at her apprentice. "Receiving a package, in a manner of speaking. Do keep an eye out for the Head of Enforcement Division and Field Operations, will you? Or whatever we've decided to call him this week." Wuya psychically sent an image into Azula's mind: a pale-skinned thin face with unkempt green hair, a ghoulishly deformed yellow-toothed grin, and too-bright eyes glimmering with insanity. "We're looking for him."

Azula blinked, and sharply looked off in a completely different direction, clearly spotting something neither of her companions had. She started to say something, but Mr. Lyle called to them. "Hey, what's this thing?"

They caught up with him, now standing in front of an exceptionally secure enclosure housing an amorphous black mass the size of a small truck, constantly morphing and shifting in slightly disquieting way and never staying the same for more than a few seconds. Tentacles laced with dozens of tiny sharp teeth thickened into an insectile leg before being reabsorbed into the main body mass while a single massive mouth filled with bristling teeth the size of daggers snapped at the air, a thick pink tongue lashing out and spraying green saliva while countless smiliar jaws formed and disappearing all over it's body at once, jagged white streaks trailing all over it's body, two large patches located above it's largest mouth like a pair of eyes.

It shrieked in agony, strangled voices howling from it's many mouthes, most of them smothered and echoing within it's mass as those mouths disappeared, it's body shredding and dissolving under the sonic waves being projected at it from sound cannons placed at the perimeter of it's enclosure. It screamed all the louder as a small adjustment by an attending scientist intensified the sonic waves, it's body wavering like a heat wave as it tore apart so quickly, and regenerated equally fast, that the human eye was almost unable to comprehend it. Yet, Wuya noticed, it's screams of pain were not entirely physical. It thrashed and slammed around in much the same way that a violent mourner might smash furniture and dent walls in a rage of grief, and even louder than the pain in it's many voices was a clear note that, if it were human, she might be inclined to think of as loneliness and loss.

Wuya didn't need to listen to know it's pain, both emotional and physical, the former far louder and greater than the latter; as a result of the immense power at her disposal, she could _feel_ the agony racking it's mind, slowly but surely driving it insane. It wasn't quite telepathy, which _was _a talent she had stolen and refined some time ago from a paraplegic telepath shortly before she killed him, but a related ability much like an advanced form of empathy; as if she were a receiver dish and every living mind and soul around her were broadcasting, she was awash in the glimmer of their near-thoughts at the front of their minds, the echoing murmur of dim memories, the emotions that were a result of sensory input, and most of all, their pain.

She felt the agony and distress of everything around her, the mental howling of even the most stoic prisoner, how they scrabbled for ever-receding glimmers of sanity even as they slipped deeper into madness and worse. She felt her scientists and their assistants, whether their minds and hearts whimpered at every nasty thing they did or they enjoyed every tear-soaked moment of their vicitm's pain or simply didn't care at all. The misery seeped into and through her, like a river of tears awash with brittle memories, flowing into the stone and metal of the very building around him until the stones could sing of the pain that fed the mysterious mechanisms of her fortress, giving it strength and flowing through it like blood through veins.

It was _glorious_. Wuya thought that maybe a businessman, watching an investment growing and growing in giddy anticipation of the day he finally cashed it in would understand how she felt. And one day she would; everything was for that promised day, when everything that had gone wrong in her life would finally be set right.

For a moment longer, Wuya reveled in the pain she was responsible for inducing, until murmuring words, not a part of suffering minds, made it clear that she had become overly proccupied. Willing her awareness of the river of pain to diminish to a mere trickle, she returned to part of the attendent's answer to Mr. Lyle's question. " ...No ones knows, actually, but they're commonly called symbiotes, largely due to it's method of surviving by attaching itself to another life-form for a time before draining it. By it's own people's standards, this one is insane, because it attempts to permanently attach itself to a given host, bonding with it on an emotional and mental level, as well on the merely physical.

"Seperating it from it's original host seems to have caused both of them severe mental damage, but it has helped us observe the results of what happens when you seperate a bonded symbiote from it's host through non-lethal methods. We've managed to cultivate enough samples from it to create smaller, weaker versions with no individuality. We're hoping to create biological weapons to enhance our foot soldiers, but so far we've only created non-sentient savage creatures that only live for a month before draining their host dry in their death throes, but they ought to be enormously effective in an initial strike."

Wuya zoned out as the scientist started droning on and on, not even bothering to follow Mr. Lyle on his attempt to pretend to understand half of what the scientist was saying. After the scientist started earnestly talking about all the new suits spontaneously develouping emotional attachments to a single bionic-kitten named Growltiger that had somehow wandered in one day and never left, Wuya and Azula slipped away, Mr. Lyle making some excuse or another and following after them.

They barely went six steps before he wandered off, intrigued in a massive vaugely anthropoid creature with the head of a snarling wolf, mangy greyish fur, burning green pictographs on it that looked somehow _wrong_, and was in the process of having an array of blades, guns and powered armor grafted onto it's flesh, all made of silver; a horrible smell escaped it's enclosure as it's skin erupted in boils, burning at the contact, and it howled loud enough to shatter glass before the sound dampeners went on, silencing it's cries as the scientists went to work. Wuya humored him; she would rather have left him behind(or in a very small box), but his presence was required to satisfy his masters that the retaliation that their customs demanded would be promised.

In about five minutes, he got bored and immediately went over to something else, quickly losing interest again, quickly producing a vicious cycle that showed no signs of stopping any time soon. Wuya tolerated it because she wasn't ready to step on any diabolic toes just yet, but she wasn't sure why Azula hadn't tried to intimidate him into stopping. Most likely, she was genuinely interested in the things he was investigating.

As time wore on, Mr. Lyle gravitated towards so many different projects that Wuya couldn't discern the common ground any of them held, and worse, there was an element When Wuya realized that Mr. Lyle had wasted the better part of an hour in the lab, her patience abruptly snapped.

"Will you focus, already?!" She yelled at Mr. Lyle as they caught up with him moving from one experiment to another. "We don't have time for this!" She paused. "Well, actually, we _do _have time for this but I don't feel like using it."

"Calm down, calm down," Mr. Lyle said soothingly. "That's probably true, and I hate wasting time as much as you do..."

"You do?" Azula said disbelievingly. "I thought you worked for bereaucratic fiends."

"Not all careers are perfectly matched," Mr. Lyle replied.

"Also, what are we _doing _here at all. Surely not an inspection." Azula scowled unhappily. "Not another loop. I thought I made my position about them perfectly clear before. What _is_ going on here?"

Mr. Lyle and Wuya glanced at each other. "Well," Wuya said, an oppertunity to enlighten the ignorant deflating her temper a little. "You realize that the new Keybearer appeared last night, correct?"

"Yes, some eccentric Irken frycook. It's been all over the news networks. So what?"

"_So_," Mr. Lyle said. "As it turns out, two of King Garfield's fighters found him and joined up with him. Do the names Calvin and Hobbes sound familiar?"

"Ah...no. Not really." Azula raised an eyebrow. "How did they know to find him in the first place?"

Mr. Lyle was, if anything, even more eager to educate the unknowing than Wuya was. "They're a pair of troublemakers from the Comic Kingdom, a beastman tiger with some supernatural martial arts and a surprisingly powerful kid that knows magic-based alchemy. From what I've dug up, they're both in high positions that are basically there to keep them out of the way: paper tigers, if you will. Heh, I made a pun. As for how they found the Keybearer..." Mr. Lyle scowled unhappily. "Our informants don't know, but I'm willing to bet some good money that King Garfield is behind it. He's cagier than he lets on, and I've heard rumors of another group trying to oppose us that just may be more than they appear."

Azula snorted. "You're joking, right? A fat lazy cat somehow knows what we're planning, knows where the Keybearer ended up before we did and _planned_ all this?"

"Yes," Wuya said cooly. "A fat lazy cat that also spearheaded a rebellion that destroyed a legion of severely mutated humans, took his monarchy almost completely by accident and singlehandedly turned the warzone of his old kingdom into the foremost intersteller empire in the galaxy."

"Ugh." Azula rubbed her temples, vaugely stressed. "Fine, I'm not taking an animal seriously. Whatever. You still haven't explained what we're doing here."

"I was getting to that," Mr. Lyle said, a bit impatiently. He told a quick retelling of his experiences the night before; how he had made his way into Foster's Home and tracked Zim and his three sidekicks down to a ballroom, along with three residents of Traverse Town and survivors of various Heartless attacks on their original worlds: Abel Nightroad, Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable.

Azula grinned at the names. "'Kim Possible'? I haven't heard that name in quite some time. Not since she and some of our other 'guests' escaped from the old laboratory." She smiled pleasantly. "She was my _favorite _prisoner. So full of spirit. And I never got to burn it out of her." She sighed dramatically. "And I tried _so _hard."

After that slightly disturbing aside, Mr. Lyle continued, and all of them kept laughing as he recounted the various ways he had brought out their pasts just for the fun of it; technically, he had only been there to evaluate and study them, but he had been curious to see how they would react. Mr. Lyle smiled nostalgically as he spoke about their individual reactions, and the sick feelings each of them had to have just _thinking _about what the others thought of them now. Zim's less than noble history, Calvin's apparent indifference, Hobbes' status as a pariah among his own kind, Kim barely escaping from a place not unlike this one, Ron's inability to save his family from the monster that was Cain Nightroad, and Abel once being every bit as vicious, savage and monstrous as his brother was.

Mr. Lyle went through the remainder of his experience in a bit of a rush; how he'd hidden in the shadows while they fought the weak artificial Heartless he'd summoned, the surprising capability Calvin and Hobbes had displayed and Zim's rapidly increasing power. When he got to the point where he'd lost his temper and attacked them, he tried to spin his humiliating defeat as a heroic stand against overwhelming odds (dispite the fact that, by his own admission, he considered them all to be losers) and had only been truly beaten when more heroes kept showing up out of the blue.

When he was done, Wuya said, "While you did do an amazingly half-assed job of his objective, Mr. Lyle-"

"Hey!"

"-You were still working on my orders. Doing _my _work. Those..._heroes _fought him, attacked him, and I'm certain that deranged Irken might have killed him. And an attack on my minion, incompetent or not, is an attack upon me. Such insufferable arrogance can never go unpunished." She paused. "There's also the small manner of that town getting entirely too mellow for my tastes."

"Doesn't it normally exist in a state of weirdness approaching anarchy?" Azula remarked.

"Yes, but it's not _real _anarchy. And that bores me."

Azula shrugged, apparently thinking about the implications. "So what's the plan?"

Wuya told her. It wasn't overly complicated, at least the stages of it that she told her. It basically involved the usual method in these matters: send a man in, suited to do the job. Have him go to the place and do what the plan required, and leave once the mess had been made. Except that this time, the man for the job wouldn't actually _leave_; Wuya wanted another man in town, perhaps someone that could rouse the criminal element in the area and make things a little more unstable.

"So that's it," Wuya concluded. "Not too complicated, I hope?"

"No. It's a good plan. Short, simple-"

"I wouldn't say simple," Mr. Lyle said quietly. "Not with all that we're going through to actually get it going."

Azula gave him a sharp look before she resumed talking. "Anyway, it seems good enough. I like retaliation."

"Me too," Mr. Lyle admitted. "I don't like plans like this one-"

"You know all this running around for the Head of Enforcement and Field Operations isn't really part of the plan," Wuya snapped. "It's...for making the plan happen. Getting the underlying structure of the plan together. The _pre-_plan....plan." She paused a few moments, thinking how stupid that last part sounded.

Azula blinked. Wuya hadn't told her about the...pre-plan plan."It's still stupid," Mr. Lyle grumbled. "Still, there _are _certain protocols in mind. Certains regulations that have to be complied with. Retaliation works here. Even if most of the people it's going to affect aren't going to have any idea _why _they're being punished."

A high-pitched giggle sounded behind him, and they turned around to see a figure walking towards them, clapping sarcastically with every step; the clownlike man from Wuya's inner circle the night before, and the very man they had been expecting. As soon as they caught sight of him, he started laughing even harder, a distinct wicked edge to his glee. "Heh, heh, heh! Rules. Heh, heh! Regulations! Hah! Hah!" With the corners of his mouth twisted into a permanantly inhuman grin, it was impossible for him _not _to be smiling, but he seemed to be grinning even wider than normal, his eyes dancing with evil humor. "_Protocols!_" He broke off into another giggling fit before he stopped abruptly, straightening up and fixing them with a snide look. "That's so stupid, it's funny. People like you..." He paused. "Yeah...yeah! People like _you,_" He pointed at Mr. Lyle. "Never get it right. You have all these insane rules like a noose around your neck, and you jump off the chair without even thinking about it. You don't do these things because you have to or because these fussy little words and ideas tell you to, you do them because you _want _to! Because you just _gotta!_"

Everyone stared at him evenly as he continued to rant, pausing every few minutes to remember what he was talking about, and breaking off into sporadic laughing fits, apparently so amused by what he was talking about that he couldn't help but laugh himself until he almost choked. The scientist-types all around them were giving the man an extremely wide berth, though Wuya's company didn't mind at all.

You got used to such things when you spent enough time around the Joker.

Evenly, trying to hold her temper, Wuya said, "You said you'd be waiting by the door."

The Joker shrugged his thin, sinewy shoulders. "I say a lot of things. One time, I told our guy Deidara that I wouldn't blow up this art museuem if he gave five bucks, but I did it anyway. He was _pissed_." He snickered.

"Oh, I know that guy!" Mr. Lyle said brightly. "Long blond hair, scope over one eye, looks like a girl, has mouths in his hands and molds explosive clay sculptures with them? He's a real blast, pun not intended, once you get past the avant-garde thing he has going on."

"And the mouths in his hands, don't get me started!" Joker added. "He _licks _your hand when you shake! Even for a guy like me, that's _weird_. First time he tried it on me, I had an electric joy buzzer on. It took him _weeks _to get his hair back to normal. What's with bishounen and their hair, huh?"

Mr. Lyle shrugged; he didn't know either. "I don't think the hands are so bad," He said suggestively.

Azula looked from clown to...whatever Mr. Lyle was, disturbed by their apparent familiarity. "Do you two..._know _each other?"

"We've worked together in the past," Mr. Lyle replied. "Occasionally giving him odd jobs..."

"Destabilizing worlds that go and get _boring_," Joker added."Heh. It's hysterical what a few pounds of plastique, some unstable foundations and a little gossip can do to turn a single city on itself."

"I met him when I was in college," Mr. Lyle added. "He helped make me the man I am!"

The Joker sidestepped over to Azula and leaned in close. "I know some alchemists, and believe me, it's true what they say about superior ingredients. I had some _great _raw materials to work with. Mr. Lyle here was one of the great undiscovered serial killers of his world. Pity he had to go all _schemer _on me, but..." He shrugged.

Mr. Lyle tried to look modest. "Well, I don't like to brag...but I do it anyway. It's one of my many innate talents. Including, to a lesser extent, accesorizing and interior decorating."

Wuya shuddered at the idea of them having a prior association. "Where have you been?!" She demanded, before she paused and groaned. "Don't tell me; you were hiding out of sight and following us ever since we came in, didn't you?"

"Yes," The Joker said plainly.

"Obviously," Mr. Lyle added.

"I saw him earlier. I would have said something, but I was interrupted," Azula said huffily.

Wuya gaped at her. "And you didn't say anything!?"

"I _tried._ Then I got distracted and stopped paying attention." Azula shrugged. "An old trick I had to learn to deal with my uncle."

Wuya groaned. "I'm surronded by idiots and ingrates..."

Mr. Lyle and the Joker snickered as Azula turned red. "Hey!"

"No, no, those two are the idiots. _You're _the ingrate."

"Oh, okay then." There was a short pause. "Hey!"

Wuya ignored her, and turned to the Joker. "Do you have it? The...thing you were told to bring?"

The Joker gave her a blank look. "Huh?"

"You know," Wuya said, speaking as subtlely as possible, not because she was afraid of eavesdroppers, but also because she wasn't altogether sure what to call the thing she was talking about. (She was also keen on playing things close to the chest, after the failures with some of her other pawns, whether they were either incompetent, heroic, or treacherous.) "The....thing. You know," Her voice dropped. "The object of my pre-plan plan? The most important part of it all?"

The Joker looked blankly at her. So did Azula.

"You know, the 'human weapon' of Amestris we have? The one you were supposed to fetch on your way here?"

"You're batting zero, boss-lady," The Joker said, shrugging more or less indifferently. Mr. Lyle snickered and she glared at him; he knew perfectly well what she meant and wasn't saying anything on purpose.

Wuya slapped her forehead. "The Red Lotus!" She snapped. "_Did you bring the Red Lotus or not!?_"

The scientists and such flinched at her harsh tone of voice and immediately made a reasonable impression of the sheer busyness normally found around a dead cow lying on an anthill. "Oh, that," The Joker said, reaching into his coat and pulling out a small syringe filled with a thick red liquid similar to blood but with a red glow, a red lotus stylized on it. "Got him right here!"

Azula stared at it, as did a number of scientists that were openly drooling at the sight of it. (And possibly Azula and Wuya..) "'Him'? What's that supposed to mean?" She frowned peering closer at it. "It looks almost..._alive._"

The Joker shrugged. "For a given value of life, yeah, you could say that."

Azula gave Wuya a questioning look. Wuya looked away, whistling innocently and peering intently on a small spot on the ceiling. It happened to be occupied by a large automation that resembled a spider made out of blades oozing poison, but that was besides the point. She stole a peek at the stuff in the syringe, her eyes glowing as she shifted her perceptions up a few levels just to make sure that it was the real thing, and not something the Joker had brought as part of some stupid (and lethal) prank.

Everything became defined in lines of energy, turning deep black rimmed with blue, living things defined by shifting auras around them, changing into a shocking variety of colors, none of which having a set meaning. Those auras _defined _the person radiating them, the colors comprising them being metaphorical representations of the conditions of their hearts and minds, and if Wuya had felt like it, she could have read everything worth knowing about most people around her; not her group, their mental defenses were too strong, and not the experiments either, their pain served as a kind of mental shield, but certainly the assorted scientist-types. They were open books to her.

Most of the auras around her _burned_; some were candles, others were pale flickers and still other were bonfires, or infernos. These fires were representations, like the colors, metaphors conjured by mind's perceptions of things less physical than the world around her but even more real. These fires represented willpower, determination, and more than anyone there, the auras of Mr. Lyle, Azula and the Joker blazed. Mr. Lyle's aura was strangely ordered, chainlike shapes moving through it, and the vauge shape of something twisted, reptillian and inhuman just around him, and Azula's looked like nothing less than an approximation of fire distilled to it's barest essense and roiling around her, defining her form and making it appear as though she _was _fire incarnate, but it was a cold fire, like her heart had burnt to ash years ago. The Joker's aura was strange, as was obvious: it was chaotic, twisting, like a living thing twisting through an endless series of iron rings pulling it in every possible direction. And within it was _another _aura, greenish, far older and more powerful than any human's ever could, like the aura of one of the old gods, and even more chaotic than the Joker's...though it seemed marginally saner, for what that was worth. An emu on acid was saner than the Joker was.

And, in spite of the lack of a proper body, there was an aura around the red stuff in the syringe the Joker held as well, as though it was alive. The aura was a faint red, and roiled in rippling random patterns, like a glass of water shaken by the steps of an approaching behemoth. Other color were present, beneath the red, but muted and dim, too faint to properly make out, or perhaps the right word was _dormant_. There was a mind there, it's thoughts and feelings as faint as the soul-colors in it's aura, and Wuya knew it to be a sleeping mind, awaiting a proper veseel before it could awaken, and return to life once more. What little she could gleam of that sleeping mind was limited to vauge impressions, but most of all it felt cold; not in the same sense as Azula was, but on a less comprehensible scale. It was suggestive of a mind that seemed to regard everything else as _things, _a heart with all the warmth of dust and easily as twisted as the Joker.

Wuya scaled her perceptions down to normal, the auras fading away and revealing the world as she normally saw it. Azula, she was sure, was curious about what exactly the red stuff the Joker had was.

The sudden appearance, though, of two swirling portals of darkness that quickly faded away to reveal two Founders with their hoods down, one of them with an absurd number of facial piercings while the other was wearing clown make-up for some reason and both of them looking very purposeful, derailed any questioning.

"'Ello, Miss Wuya, Miss Azula, Misters Lyle and Joker," The one with all the piercings chirped in a Liverpool accent, saluting. The other followed his example. "Eh, am I interrupting something?"

Wuya stared at them for a moment. "...Yes. Yes you are. What do you want? And can it wait?" She paused, and stared some more at the one with the make-up. "And why are you wearing clown make-up?!"

"Don't tell me you're trying to cosplay me," The Joker said grouchily, putting the syringe back into his suit-jacket. "The last outbreak of that was _not _pretty..."

"What?" The Founder with the make-up whined. "It makes me look pretty!"

"Does not," The other grumbled. "'Sides, you're a guy. I think. If you are, you _can't_ be pretty, more or else by definition. If you are female, you're doin' a spectacularily bad job of it, mate."

"Says who? I'll be pretty if I want to! Where is it written that a man can't be pretty, huh?!"

Wuya groaned. "These demons get loopier by the day..." She frowned at Azula. "What have you been telling them?! I told to stop giving them ideas after the incident with the paint-guns, the magnets from Planet Belgium and the man-eating toilet!"

Mr. Lyle blinked while the Joker snickered. "When did you guys have a man-eating toilet?!"

"What, it was funny!" Azula retorted. "We made a killing from the tapes we sold to comedy networks! Though, admittedly, not the reputable ones."

"Are there really any reputable TV networks now?" The Joker wondered.

"Not really," Mr. Lyle said knowingly. "All the good showss are getting cancelled or lame spin-offs. The only thing that makes good money now are easily marketable cheap archetypal knock-offs. Sickening, isn't it?. Even from a devil's point of view, that's just plain _wrong_. I should know, I was the secretary to the devil who thought of it for a week. You should have seen his promotion; for sheer speed, he made the record books."

Wuya rubbed her forehead. "I think we're starting to get entirely too comfortable with each other..." Ignoring the debate now emerging between Mr. Lyle, Joker and Azula, she turned her attention to the two Founders, who were arguing about how the meaning of life related to the recent drop in intersteller peanut butter trade, the up-swing in metahuman evolution and whether or not cheese tasted yellow. "Shut up. you two! Now what is it that you want...er...what's your name?" She pointed at the one with all the piercings.

He saluted. "Metalface, m'am! At least, that's my name until I do something else particularily noteworthy, or get bored with it."

She took a moment to observe all the piercings he had. Three small chain-links in each eyebrow, a small key hooked into the top of each one. Four studs lining either side of the bridge of his piglike nose. Six earrings on each ear, all hooked into each other and coiling around his dense earlobe, culminating in a thick stud at the point at his ears. A massive nosering, gilded in brass lettering. The small horns over his eyes had been filed to points and tipped with metal caps.

The Founders, Wuya thought, were not typical demons, if there even was such a thing. The original ones she'd coerced into her service some years ago had been bound to a twenty mile expanse of wilderness for several thousand years, perhaps even a millenia, and their years of imprisonment seemed to have caused to change somewhat from the things they had once been. One aspect of the informal culture that had sprung up among the ones in her service seemed to be fluid identites bound in every aspect of their personal apperance, due to their ability to reshape their bodies to a limited extent.

Regardless, Wuya waved her hand in an impatient 'go on' gesture.

Metalface took the hint and nodded hurredly. "We just received the reports from some of our, eh, 'worlds of interest'. That's the word, right? You were supposed to get them earlier this week, as usual, but there were...extenuating circumstances, you see?"

"Oh?" Wuya said, an eyebrow arched. "Like what?"

The Founder paused, consulting a mental list. "Er...renegade factions allied against your interests, surprisingly stubborn locals, the Heartless popping up where we ain't expecting them, and general incomptence." His eyes darted back and forth suspiciously. "A _lot _of general incompetence."

Wuya toyed with the idea of using a spacial-relocation spell to modify the corrospondence of Metalface's body so that his internal organs would occupy the same space as a vat of acid she kept in a room somewhere for supplying gameshows, killing him in an excrutiatingly slow and horrible manner, chain his newly released soul to a hungry ghost and set it loose upon a random world and film the resulting carnage for retail purposes. Luckily for the demon, she chose not to vent her frustration in such a manner: it wouldn't be good for morale, and besides, she'd already done that three times this week. "Be more specific," She said curly. "And try to supply some good news, will you?"

"Ah. Oh-kaay..." Metalface paused for a moment, thinking. "Well...our agents in Oddworld are making some headway with the Glukkons. After they transplanted some new lungs into her, they've been much more inclined to ally with us. Give us money, hire off some Big Bro Sligs to us, stuff like that."

Azula, deciding to pay attention to the report, said, "Who do we have on Oddworld?"

"My hyena muscle," The Joker said. "Shenzi, Banzai and....Ed."

"What? _Those _idiots? The hyenas you recruited from that one world of anthropomorphic animals that mirror various cultures from around the worlds?" Azula said disdainfully. "How in the world did they pull this off? They can barely grasp the concept of walking straight!" Azula paused. "Alright, Shenzi's fairly intelligent, being a girl, but her boys would get lost in a straight corridor."

"They're more resourceful than they look. Where do you think the man-eating toilet came from?"

"But there's...a small problem," Metalface said heisitantly. "You know the fight the native Mudokons and the recently renewed Gabbits have been putting up?"

"Yes?" Wuya said tensely, sure she wasn't going to like this.

"It's gotten worse. A few weeks ago, six entire Glukkon industrial factories were wiped off the face of Oddworld. There was _nothing _left, nothing at all. Just twisted scrap and..." He paused, and in that pause, Wuya read a lot about things that put even demons off their lunch. "The bodies. The Mudokon Scrubs and other prisoners escaped before whatever it was hit, but every single Slig, Glukkon executive and everything else was dead. Very dead." He gulped, looking a little shaken. "_Really _very dead. They were torn apart. Bits were everywhere. And what was even remotely recognizable was blown apart, fried and, looking at what was left, battered _after _they were dead. Blood was everywhere; even the explosions that took out the factories couldn't get the blood out. And a Mudokon Scrub we caught swears that it was a monster that set them free and killed all the guys in charge. He was terrified of it; made it sound like a white-haired demon with perfectly black eyes, dead-pale skin, big claws and bigger horns." Metalface paused. "And they said he had a orange otter-weasel thing on his shoulder that never shut up."

Wuya's eyes went wide. Mr. Lyle frowned while Azula started. "Why does that sound familiar?"

"Was there any Dark Eco contamination?" Wuya demanded.

"A-a little bit, yes! Not too much, it was mostly dissipated, but it was still Dark Eco. That's not a Precursor world, you know, there shouldn't have been Eco there at all. I gave the science-type report to the Sewing-Life Alchemist, like I'm supposed to, and he said the same thing." Metalface frowned. "At least, I _think _that's what he told me. You know the way he talks, m'am; hard to understand half of what he says. The guy talks like his head got twisted around a few dozen times."

"That's because it _did_," Mr. Lyle remarked off-handedly.

Wuya rubbed her temples. "Ugh. A factory gets attacked by a monster with a talking orange rat-"

"Otter-weasel," Azula corrected, feeling a vauge sense of familiarity with the word. It sounded like something from her homeworld.

"Whatever. A factory gets attacked by a monster with a talking orange _otter-weasel_ that leaves the working slaves alone, utterly savages everything else and leaves only unrecognizable pulp behind, and when it's done doing whatever it did, there's traces of Dark Eco. Do you know what this means?"

"Yes!" The Joker said triumphantly. He paused. "Wait a minute. Uh...no."

"I do," Azula said grimly. "It looks like the eco-freak is finally rearing his ugly head."

"That's what I thought," Wuya said. "And here I was hoping that he had died in the chaos of the break-out from the old laboratory...even if Baron Praxis wouldn't shut up about for weeks..." She glanced at her companions. "Joker! Make a note of it. Send someone to Oddworld to help the Glukkons and hopefully curry some favor. Or even recapture the eco-freak. I doubt the hyenas are going to be much good there..."

The Joker grinned slightly more than usual. "You got it."

Wuya glanced at Metalface again. The Founder hurredly resumed talking. "Our agents infiltrating the Super Smash Brothers Stadium have reported that they're going to start a new tournament shortly. Popular rumor is that it's going to take the form of several week-long tournaments, with escalating cash prizes and artifacts of magical power. One of your Inner Circle already has a particular interest in that world, but he requested that I pass the information on to you for some reason."

"Very well," Wuya said. "What else?"

"Our intersteller patrols are reported a weird fluctuation fairly close to Traverse Town. They're not sure what it is (but then again, they're Heartless, they don't really know anything but killing things), but examinations of the energy readings suggest that it's some kind of reverse wormhole; some new and really weird world is starting to move onto the interworld dimensional matrice. From the background magic readings, a _very _powerful one."

Wuya raised an eyebrow. "Indeed? I'll bear that in mind." She glanced at Azula, already planning a small field trip for her apprentice in the near future.

"Oh, one of the late reports only gave me a codename, so I hope you know who it is. Something like, uh, the Angel of Destruction. Or Angel of Death. Angel of Light, maybe. Some kind of angel. Which is weird, 'cause he's working for you, thus making evil more or less by default and therefore no angel at all-"

Wuya coughed pointedly. Metalface got back on track. "Anyway, whoever he is, he said that he's almost co-opted Thugs-4-Less, but he needs a bit more time. Oh yeah, he somehow got wind of something Mr. Lyle did, and he says that if you ever screw with his brother like that again, he's gonna, ah, what was it..." Metalface than cheerfully recited a list of incredibly horrible and violent things, including, not in any particular order, pulling Mr. Lyle's head off and using it as a lawn ornament, carving every word imaginable in the Japanese language on his entire body in very small calligraphy with a rusty knife, feeding the left side of his body to a land pirahna, breaking every single bone in his body at least twenty-two times with the help of a spiked sledgehammer, imprisoning his consciousness within his rotting corpse so he could feel the experience of decaying, and a lot of other nasty things. As the list went on, Mr. Lyle's face turned more ashen, the Joker listened admiringly, and Azula took notes, intending to do several of those things to people that looked at her funny. When he was done, Metalface said, "Oh, yeah, who's his brother? He didn't say."

"That's not important," Wuya said rather stifly, trying not to laugh at the way Mr. Lyle looked like he was about to have a heart attack, stroke and terror-induced spontaneous combustion all at once. "Is that all?"

"What? Oh, no, sorry. Anyway, we got reports that the agents working on the Discworld are doing fairly well, even if they haven't found many receptive to their suggestions. That's the worst of it, m'am." Metalface proceeded to go on a long and boring report of various worlds either under Wuya's control or getting there, talking far too much on mundane factors and embarrasing remarks on the sheer stupidity of many of Wuya's people involved in the lateness of their reports.

Wuya didn't pay much attention to this part; she had bereaucratic people to take care of inconsequential things like that. When he was finally, mercifully done, Wuya waved her hand in the universal gesture of dismissal. "Oh, good, I'd thought you'd never shut up. Go and get those reports filed in the records, will you? But before you do that, go tell the Sewing-Life Alchemist to be expecting me in a short while; I have business with him. Do tell him to throw his other little experiments on the back burner; I have something very _important _for him to see to personally." She paused. "And please, this time, make sure not to make him think that I mean that literally. The last incident of that was not pleasant."

"I don't know about that," Azula said. "The smell was nice. It's surprisingly hard to get the smell of burnt flesh and pineapples _just _right."

The two Founders stared at her for a long moment. "...I'm going to be having nightmares about the things you say, m'am," The Founder with the make-up finally said. "_Bad _ones." That said, the two demons stood at attention, saluting. Dark portals flowed out of the ground below them, swept over than and disappeared, taking the demons with them.

Wuya shook her head and look back at her entourage. "Well, that was annoying. Anyway, to use an all-too appropiate alchemical metaphor: the circle and runes have been drawn, the elements have been brought together, and all that is needed is the proper flow of power." She gave the Joker a meaningful look. "I trust you have provided an appropiate vessel for the Red Lotus? Like you said you would?"

The Joker, idlely flipping a two-faced coin across his bony knuckles with inhuman dexterity, shrugged absently. "Nope."

Wuya stared at him.

For several long moments, the Joker continued to play with the half-dollar, the burned side of the coin contrasting the brighter half. Wuya gripped her staff tightly as magical energy flowed from it into her, filling her with raw power that immediately made itself known. Unnatural forms flickered in and out of existence around her, her rising rage taking itself out on the fabric of reality itself, which nowadays was more like a threadbare patchwork hand-me-down rather than the thick tapestry it was normally depicted as. Azula and Mr. Lyle gave each other significant looks and took several steps away from the Joker. "And _why_," Wuya hissed. "Do you not have an appropiate vessel available?"

"Because it's not appropiate, it's insanely convienient and a potentially permanent solution to the problem to begin with. "Besides," With his free hand, the Joker pointed at Mr. Lyle. "It was his idea to begin with."

Wuya slowly turned to Mr. Lyle, her anger turning on a new target. "And you didn't think it prudent to tell me about this before..._why?_" Malevolence dripped from every word, and was matched by unbridled fury by the green fire flickering around her eyes.

Mr. Lyle started to sweat. "Ah...I thought it'd be funny to tell you at the last minute?" He said weakly, grinning hopefully.

She sharply stepped over, just in front of Mr. Lyle and swung the lower end of her heavy metal staff directly between his legs and into his crotch.

The resultant scream was notably higher-pitched than a man's normally was.

Wuya neatly stepped out of the way as he fell over, the power she borrowed from her staff flowing back into it wile the unreality swirling around her neatly fading back into normality. "Well, what do you know?" She said brightly over Mr. Lyle's whimpers. "_That _wasfunny!"

The Joker crossed his arms and made a disgusted noise. "You call that comedy? Where's the depth? Where's the disatisfaction with the status quo? Where's the revelation of the chaos inherent in the apparent logic? Hell, I'd settle for cleverly timed punchlines starting with the comedy 'k's!"

Ignoring him, Wuya rolled her staff into the crook of her arm and brought her hands together expectantly. "So, the vessel. Whe and where is it?"

Mr. Lyle moaned before he managed to get back on his feet. Most men wouldn't recover that fast from being whacked in the Place That Shall Not Be Thwacked, but Mr. Lyle was more durable than seemed normal, or even decent. "I got Kevin Levin."

Azula gave Wuya a look. "What, exactly do you mean by vessel?"

Wuya glanced at Azula. "It's a bit complicated, but take 'vessel' very literally and you'll get the right idea." She frowned. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. "It rings a bell, but I can't place the note."

"And your metaphors are too obscure, too," The Joker complained, evidently still displeased with Wuya's sense of humor. "What, am I going to have to set you up with appointments at the Society for the Educuation of the Pun-Reliant? Oh, and he's obviously talking about the absorbing boy."

"Isn't SEPT what you call a bunch of werewolf packs that gather in one general area for mutual support and companionship?" Azula wondered.

"Oh," Wuya said. "_That _Kevin Levin." She frowned, thinking about the consequences of the boy's powers combined with the substance the Joker had brought. After a moment, she grinned wickedly. "That's..._brilliant_." She patted Mr. Lyle on the head. "I may have misjudged you, Hell's pawn."

"That'd probably mean more if you hadn't just violated the most taboo law of interaction known to mankind in general and men in particular," Mr. Lyle grumbled. "Hey, did you just call me a Hellspawn?"

"No, I said 'Hell's pawn'. _Pawn_. It's more accurate."

"True," Mr. Lyle conceded. "I auditioned to be one once, you know. A Hellspawn. Didn't pan out; something about me lacking certain appropiate character traits. And the last one went AWOL and the Senior Partners are still steamed about it."

Wuya rolled her eyes, not overly interested in the sordid details of Mr. Lyle's homelife. "Whatever. Where is he? I don't suppose you stuck him in a cage or something right around the corner? Something that won't require us to, ah, walk through another small, cramped, subterranean corridor?"

Mr. Lyle violently shuddered. "No, nothing that contrived," Azula said, surprisingly enough, cocking an eyebrow at Mr. Lyle in a way that indicated that she had every intention of exploiting his clear claustrophobia to psychologically torture him in some hideous fashion in the near future. "Assuming he hasn't been moved, he'll still be in solitary confinement. Shoved him in there to see if the complete absence of anything to talk to might make him at least bend a little, but..." She shrugged with an irritated little jerk of her wrists, conveying her clear unhappiness with his rude inability to break.

Mr. Lyle raised an eyebrow. "Wait, why did you take an interest in this kid in the first place? He doesn't have the right sort of...personality for torturing. He's like a rock."

Azula returned his eyebrow-raise and added a crooked nod for emphasis. "I could ask you the same thing. What gives _you _the idea of using him for...whatever it is we're using him for...when you've only been here for a few weeks and you've only just gotten to know the prisoners?"

"I take an interest in profitable situations," Mr. Lyle said, smiling an off-kilter smile. "And that includes what I shall call, for lack of a more dignified word, 'personnel'." Azula gave him a curious look tempered with interest.

"Enough already," Wuya said before they could start doing something stupid like debating on whether it was more artistic to torture someone to death with finely honed instruments utilitzed according to neatly arranged graphs of acceptable violence measured against pain thresholds, or using a blow torch, acid-laced stencils to gouge pictographs of nightmarish horrors that would make the Marquis de Sade retch into their flesh and bone and see how far you could get until the victim went and died out on you like a wuss. "If you know the way to Devin-"

"Kevin," The Joker corrected.

"-Then lead on. Wait, has he been moved?" Mr. Lyle shook his head. "Okay then."

Azula thumbed backwards over her shoulder. "I think there's an elevator lift that way. If the layout hasn't changed on us this week, it'll take us halfway there. Then it's just a short walk to his cell."

"Do we have to walk? Couldn't we use the Dark Corridors?" Mr. Lyle asked uncomfortably. "That elevator's going to get a little cramped with all of us in there."

Wuya rolled her eyes. "Oh, swallow your cowardice, Mr. Lyle. A little exercise can't kill you."

"It does if you overdo it and you have cardiac arrest," The Joker remarked. Mr. Lyle gave him a look that he might've learned in whatever trade school fiends attended before they were certified as tormentors of the damned, corruptors of the living and network television executives. "What? You know it's funny."

------

It was a short trip to the elevator lift Azula had mentioned; fortunately, it hadn't been moved lately, though there had been a large and unusually articulate squid blocking the way and complaining about everything around them, including things that it had no logical reason for being capable of knowing. A technician had blamed it on excess magical backlash, and Azula's Firebending had seen to it that the squid ceased to block the way in about six point two seconds, with a net result being that the squid was quickly reduced to an ashen feast for the Founders (and her more craven employees) and three unlucky technicians had been horrifically burned. Business as usual whenever Azula was involved, in other words.

As the calculatedly ponderous machinery operating the lift went to work and took them up. (And down. And sideways. The solitary confinement cells were located in a well-guarded massive chamber the size and shape of a silo, all as a security measure. Besides, even Wuya wasn't totally sure of the precise dimensions of her fortress, even though it never impeded getting around. In that way, it was a bit like an evil Fosters.), Wuya told Azula about a man from an alchemical country called Amestris. A man who even _fiends _admired.

His name was Solf J. Kimblee. But he was better known, in history books, mass murdering records and the blood-soaked memories of his world itself (until it was devoured by the Heartless) as the Red Lotus Alchemist.

Azula knew very little about Amestris, the secret plot that was responsible for it's very existence or the State Alchemist Program that recruited talented alchemists into the military, but Wuya didn't to tell her much, only informing her of the essentials. It was enough to tell her that Amestris was a country that quite intentonally had a history splattered with blood wherever you looked; from the savage skirmish at it's very begining, conflict had driven Amestris since it's inception, and the pinnacle of the country's many wars prior to it's destruction not so long ago was a civil war waged between Amestris itself and an ethnic people living in the east of Amestris whose dark complexion, red eyes and generally white hair made them stand out against the primarily white and blonde Amestrians. More important was that they were almost universally followers of a religion called Ishbalinism (which seemed to be a mixture of the various Judeo-Christian faiths, a subject of interest to numerous theological scholors researching the fact that many, many, _many _of the various world's religions were nearly identical). That civil war had been started when a shapeshifting artificial human being-a homunculus- that was Envy incarnate shot an Ishbalan child while disguised as an Amestrian officer, who, ironically, was against being there on Ishbalan land in the first place. The Ishbalans, already fed up with the Amestrian forces occupying their land, erupted into furious retaliation that soon became a full-out war.

The resulting war lasted more than seven years. For all their experience and efficiency, the Amestrian military was stymied by the brutal stocism of the Ishbalans; one reluctant soldier, years later, had remarked that the merciless desert climate that had bred the Ishbalans had consequently instilled in them a incredible resilience of spirit that went hand-in-hand with their religion's strict code of conduct and honor. Of course, this was all going according to plan; the point was to shed blood on another part of the map, and it was immaterial whether or not the blood in question belonged to Amestrians or Ishbalans.

In time, though, the toll it took on the country necessitated a quicker resolution; trade with the eastern and soutern nations were suffering, soldiers were dying off by the cartload or being sent home with an indecent lack of limbs, and it didn't help that a single Ishbalan warrior priest was as good a fighter as an entire unit of soldiers. The ruler of Amestris, Fuhrer King Bradley (King being his first name), who was himself a homunculus properly named Wrath for fairly obvious reasons, sent in the State Alchemists to solve the problem of the Ishbalans by simply killing every single Ishbalite down to the last man, woman and child, even down to the military officers who happened to be Ishbalan. It was an all-out genocide campaign that was strikingly similar to various other incidents like it around the worlds in the last few decades. Azula herself thought it sounded a bit like the Air Nomad extermination, except much more protracted, not to mention recent.

To put it bluntly, the overall effect was like dropping a brick on a watermelon: pieces were everywhere and the mess was incredible. There was a good reason, after all, that the war was officially refered to as the Ishbal Extermination Campaign. The State Alchemists were selected based on their skills, and the ones chosen to go in based on their combat abilities were almost armies in their own right, and it didn't help that most Ishbalans were opposed to Amestrian-style alchemy on theological grounds.

Solf J. Kimblee was one of those alchemists, and was a living example of the saying '_every government needs it's butchers as well as it's shepherds_'. A destructive man with no real understanding of other people as, well, _people,_ he'd joined the State Alchemists for the purpose of going into battle and conducting what he called his 'symphony of destruction': as an alchemist, he was skilled in manipulating transmutations to creat explosions, most frequently reshaping the metallic compounds in a human body to turn that person's entire biological structure in a big explosives, turning the hapless victim into a human bomb, or else compressing the air and blasting it outward. Given Fuhrer Bradley's view on the proper role of soldiers in general, it was likely that Kimblee's apathetic opinion of his fellow man would have been an asset; armies spent a lot of money trying to instill their recruits with the same approach to war simply as a job to be done with a sense of self-satisfaction and professionalism that Kimblee already had as a consequence of faulty genetics and a stunted soul.

In other words, he was basically the ideal agent of mass destruction. All you really had to do was point him in a general direction, stand a good ways back, and marvel at the mess that ensued.

"Do you know what a Philosopher's Stone is?" Wuya had asked Azula after she was done explaining Kimblee to her.

"No, not really," Azula had replied, not really interested. She didn't understand what the point of the exposition was, and so she ignored it.

"It is the ultimate goal of the Amestrian alchemist, and pretty much any other alchemist, for that matter. You see, alchemy operates mainly on the Principle of Equivalent Exchange: for something to be gained, something of equal value must be lost. The Philosopher's Stone is an indescribably potent alchemical amplifier. An alchemist with it in his posession would no longer be bound by those restrictions, you see. They would become almost incomprehensibly powerful."

"Sounds a bit like the Sorcerer's Stone," Mr. Lyle had commented. "Makes gold from lead, extends your lifespan."

"Cosmically speaking, they're the same artifact. Sort of. Now, here's something hundreds have died trying to find out: what few ever learned, and what even fewer put into action, is that the Stone is made from the most powerful materials there are. Do you know what that is?"

"Soulsteel?" Mr. Lyle had volunteered.

"What? No."

"Refined shards from Sozin's Comet?" Azula said.

Wuya had blinked. "...No, that's not strictly applicable to non-Firebenders."

"Aw."

"Unique metals from all the Outer Planes that, when smelted into an ore, gives you a vision into the true metaphysical nature of the multiverse and the cosmology that it represents, granting you an awareness of Reality itself, allowing you to manipulate in cosmically small but personally immense ways?" The Joker had asked. Everyone had stared at him. "What? I'm not allowed to be all astrally-minded? Supervillians can't have an open mind to the nature of reality, that's what you're saying?"

"Yes," Wuya had replied flatly. "At least when _you're _doing it. That was incredibly disturbing. Don't ever do that again." To Mr. Lyle and Azula, she had said, "The material in question is greater than all those things. I speak of nothing less than the very lives of sentient beings."

There had been a long silence. No one really reacted. "You know," Wuya had prompted. "Transmuting living human beings, killing them and condensing their life energies and almost certainly their souls into a high-energy substance? That sort of thing?" She had grunted. "I'm not getting through to any of you, am I?"

There had been a longer pause, almost loud with the amount of pondering going on. "So I was close," Mr. Lyle had remarked, looking pleased with himself.

"What?"

"I guessed soulsteel. It's an extremely powerful magical material created by imbuing souls into cold iron. The souls have a tendency to appear in the reflections on the metal and scream a lot. It's very popular among the undead, fiendish and people who buy into the whole Goth thing."

Yet another long pause. "I _know _that," Wuya had snapped. "Is the import of the power of the Philosopher's Stone and what it means to construct them on a mass scale meaningless to you all?"

"Pretty much," Mr. Lyle had said with a shrug.

"I have no interest in alchemy, so no," Azula had said.

"I wasn't really listening," The Joker had remarked. "What were we talking about again?A medical problem the great thinker Socrates had once?"

And there was much face palming, at least on Wuya's behalf.

Somewhat disappointed by her fellow's lack of interest in something as powerful as the Stone (and the delightfully evil and heartless means of creating one), she had continued with her story. Shortly after the State Alchemists were set loose in Ishbal, all the Ishbalan officers that had been in the military had been decomissioned and arrested, and shortly afterwards killed when their lives had been consumed in the creation of a Philosopher's Stone. It was an experiment, as well as a means in ending the war as bloodily as possible; Ishbalans were, as a product of their enviroment, culture and faith, tough of body and spirit, so there were those who wished to know if the 'ingredients' in a particular Stone made for a more powerful one if those people had stronger spirits than the average person.

It did.

The Stone had then been delivered into the hands of Kimblee, an act on the same level as giving an amoral pyromaniac a flamethrower than never ran out of fuel and setting him loose in a neighboorhood made entirely of tar and wood, and he then proceeded to make a nightmarish legend of himself. His already formiddable powers amplified a hundred-fold by the Stone, he was no longer bound by the rules of equivilency, and, for that matter, to the more basic laws most people understood instinctively, like 'do not blow up that city because the architecture is shoddy' or 'do not blow up your soldiers just because they weren't smart enough to move out of your way in time'.

To this day, even in Traverse Town, traumatized and soldiers told stories of how he had held out his hands, Stone clenched between his teeth, and entire _cities _had erupted into smoke and rubble, the ensuing blasts anhillating friend and foe alike with no regard for who died as long as the body count soared higher. Sometimes those stories were of a more personal; the handful of surviving Ishbalans that spoke of how Kimblee had turned their friends, families and countrymen into bombs, blowing apart in gory red showers that were still explosive and blew everything they came into contact with, whether buildings, the ground or horrified family members. Soldiers would talk of how he would pick off surviving Ishbalites with timed aerial detonations that would shred them like paper in a grain thresher, or how he would sometimes talk to his fellow alchemists between battles, expressing bewilderment at their trauma and despair at killing thousands of innocent people. And he fought, Kimblee would laugh so terribly and joyously, roaring like a maniac as explosions tore the ground apart, leaving rubble-strewn scars in the landscape where villages and cities had stood.

"I like him already," Azula had remarked, looking dubious even as she said it. "But what I don't understand is you bothering with all this exposition." She had paused. "Also, why the 'Red Lotus', anyway? Sounds too...girly for a serial killer."

"He didn't pick it," The Joker had said. "Fuhrer Bradly (or Wrath) chose a code-name for each alchemist when they were given their license. Kimblee's shtick was blowing people up, tearing them apart in bloody gouts. Like the petals of a lotus opening. Sort of like how some warrior cultures call gladiator fights the 'Flower Wars'."

As their elevator came to a stop and they exited into another corridor, even smaller and sparse than the ones they had traveled through to get to the laboratory (much to Mr. Lyle's obvious discomfort), Wuya elaborated. "I'm trying to give dear Azula an idea of what exactly we're planning with Kimblee. I prefer people to know what they're getting into." She had paused, thinking of her intentions for Dib. "Well, generally on a case-by-case basis. Besides, I _like _exposition. Who doesn't?"

"I don't," Azula had said indifferently. "What does the stuff in the syringe have to do with this guy anyway? Something he invented? Turns people into bombs? Becauses if your little story is any indication, there are easier ways of doing _that_."

"No," Wuya had said, deciding that her taste for the dramatic was lost on her. "That _is _Kimblee."

There had been yet another long pause. "Do you want to run that by me again?" Azula had said after a moment.

"No, I hate repeating myself. You remember what I told you about how the Philosopher's Stone is created with the lives of humans?" Azula had nodded, understanding dawning on her face as they had walked down the corridor. "Do you know the ways a homunculus is born?" Azula had shook her head. "Well, I don't know too much about it myself, but a homunculus is effectively made by creating a being around the Stone, turning it into the homunculus' heart. Most often, a core archetype is infused within the Stone, usually an emotion or attitude of some sort, and a personaliy develoups alongs those lines. Then, there's what the original homunculus calls a human-based homunculus; by injecting a liquid-form Stone into the bloodstream of a human, it is possible that the human will absorb the stone and _become _a homunculus."

Azula had given the Joker-or rather, what he was carrying under his coat-a startled look. "You mean that thing was a Stone?! With Kimblee's consciousness the directing soul or something like that?"

"Again, no. But quite close, really; a few months ago, I recruited a talented scientist into our ranks. Professor Hojo. He had a theory, you see, after he learned about homunculi; if it was possible to transmute lives into the Philosopher's Stone, than it might be possible for the essence of a sentient being to be condensed into a similar state without killing them. Evidently, he got the idea from his world's practice of harnessing the planet's energy into crystal orbs. He proposed it as a form of immortality: transform them into these dormant liquid states, where they would simply exist, unchanging and asleep, until such time that a suitable living body could be located to house them. With one small snag; the veseels often reject the foriegn substance, tearing their bodies apart even as the soul attempts to take control. Even the ones that survive generally burn out, unable to resist the strain."

From the glint in her eyes, Wuya knew that Azula truly understood what the talk of a 'vessel' had been about and what they intended to do. "Ah," Azula had said, smiling sinisterly.

That had been the end of Azula's short education in the matter, and from there, it had been a short trip to the secluded cell they kept Kevin Eleven in.

As soon as the airlock-style door opened, it was clear that the room was small, but not uncomfortably so, if only so that all the diagnostic equipment, humming generators, arcane machinery and force field generators that lined the walls could fit. It was lit with a unpleasant light timed to go on and off at unpredictable intervals to throw off any sense of time, and that sickly yellow light illuminated an enclosure at the back of the room, that on the other, _was _uncomfortably small. It was not unlike the ones in the lab they had just spent so much time around, but in addition to being small, was also much more of an obvious cage; it was an ugly thing, thick slabs of heavy blackened metal alchemically melded together, dozens of tubes and pipes going into the machines around the room. It was built so that it was actually part of the room itself, rising from the floor and meeting the ceiling, and was almost completely obscured by the machinery around it. There was no door, of course, only another force field over a gap in the front.

The lift, locked into place so they could step into the room from the vast chamber the lift had navigated to get them there, detached as soon as they had entered the room and the door closed behind them as a security measure. As soon as the pressurized hiss of the closing door died down, and something stirred beyond that force field. In the dim light, it was hard to make out, and considering what _could _be seen, that was probably a good thing. There was a general sense of great size, that it was far too large to fit comfortably into it's cell, the green energy crackling around it, bright and almost alive, shining off chains-soaked with the blood of kyton chaindevils and given a portion of their life-wrapped painfully tight around it, moving around in a clinking mass to accomodate their prisoner's mass. That same green energy was continually crackling around it, dimly illuminating it as it _changed,_ it's body continually in flux; spines and spikes grew from massive shoulders, turning it's outline demonic and twisted as erratic patches of living fire appeared on it, brightening the cell and giving them a better look at it than was probably advisable.

Wuya snapped her fingers and the glow-orb over the door brightened enough to illuminate the entire room. The creature in the cell hissed, mismatched hands instinctively lurching towards it's face, the chains looping around them and pulling them back down while it's mutant face turned aside, eyes shut so tight it must have hurt almost as badly as the sudden flare of light. Wuya examined the thing, her lip curled in distaste; _thing _was the best word for what this mutant creature was, at least in her opinion. It was just plain ugly, even by her own rather loose standards. Monstrous, even; if it wasn't for it's uncontrolled shapeshifting, it would look much like a patchwork nightmare put together by grafting the pieces of dozens of aliens into a single roughly humanoid shape. It was in distinctly bad shape as well; badly healed welts, burns and scars crossed it's bizarre body like a badly drawn roadmap, the trauma that had inflicted them beyond the constant regeneration his state of flux granted. Dried foam flecked his changing muzzle, and the absurdly human hair falling to his shoulders was a tangled mess, bloody crusts pockmarking it and nearly calcified by the grease in it. His body flesh, no matter what it's coloration or shape, had an unhealthy pallor to it, and Wuya briefly wondered how many months it had been since she last allowed him to feel natural sunlight. His left arm was in particularily bad shape, blatantly broken in no less than four places, the chains wrapped tightly around it like a cast.

That wasn't even taking into consideration the machinery almost literally grafted into his body; thick tubes drilled into his flesh and supplying precious nutrients while tiny mechanical insects equipped with vicious mandibles literally _ate _into flesh that continually regenerated itself, harvesting the ever-changing supply of alien DNA samples he made available to them. A small mass of machinery was placed over where his heart presumably was, topped by a large crystal glowing with the same green energy he produced like a living generator. At least a dozen simliar crystals, artificial rather than the alien-based ones he sometimes manifasted, were driven into his body very near his pressure points, glowing bright green. Almost all of this, by this point, was largely unnessicary, but Wuya liked hurting people.

The monster adjusted to the light fairly quickly, probably because of it's constant state of shifting, and it raised itself up to glare at her. Dull gray flesh, hardening into armor while small prickles sprouted everywhere, heaved in a labored breath. It's eyes narrowed at the sight of her, even as one became a bulging and utterly dark Furon eye and the other became a Taxxon's stalk-eye. A huge orange furred-arm, bulking up as diamondlike shards spread through it in large spurs, pulled him further, small tentacles budding on his body and stabbing into the ground just enough to pull him without upsetting the chains. A mouth like something from a oceanic killing machine from prehistoric times bared massive sharklike teeth and growled sullenly.

This beast was battered and abused. He'd been damaged goods long before he'd ever become the thing he now was. Logically, he should have given up a long time ago, if not outright descended into inhuman savagery and madness years ago. Yet here he was, as defiant as he was when she'd first claimed him. Wuya felt momentarily annoyed; he was no hero, the furthest thing from it, but there was a certain intractability that was as bad as the Xiaolin Dragons.

"Good morning, Keven Levin," Azula cooed with false kindness, moving her hand so that more of what must have felt like violently bright light flashed into his eyes; it flinched. "Still as deformed as always, I see. Won't even put on a pretty face for a pretty lady?"

Another growl, rumbling strangely as the mouth it came from compacted, swelled and sprouted finned spikes. Something interesting happening in his throat. "You ain't no lady," Kevin finally said in an exhaused voice, every word a titanic struggle against the forces twisting his body out of control. As if to compensate, one of his eyes slid up his head, a spiked ridge flowing out over it.

Azula scowled, and for a moment, looked as though she was going to burn him. It wouldn't have been the first time. "Do you really think your opinion means anything here?" She spread her arms out, gesturing at the dank surrondings.

Kevin chuckled darkly before stopping, hissing in pain as his body twisted, shrunk in itself and swelled out again, new razor-edged scales sliding out over the incredibly musclular yellow-green flesh of a Lowardian. "Looks like it matters to _you_."

"Don't argue with the prisoners," The Joker said snidely before Azula got angrier. "It gives them ideas. Makes them feel like people."

"That's rich," Kevin said, hissing louder, trickles of saliva leeking between his teeth and dripping over dried crusts on his jaw. "Coming from a freak that dresses like a clown." He broke out into a choking fit, his throat convulsing and thickening, the vocal cords twisting into some chaotic amalagation that made speech impossible.

"Says the freak that likes pretending he's human even with a face that would make his _mother _scream," The Joker said back, punctuating Kevin's physical pain with an emotional slight. "Oh, that's right, she already does that, right? Before she died, squealing like a pig when she got _eaten_?"

Kevin growled angrily and thrust his head aside, his expression momentarily recognizable, twisted though the face was, as a wounded little boy's. His hair swished in his face, and Wuya found herself wondering yet again why his hair never changed like the rest of him did. Nearly shoulder-length, straight and black, it was beautiful even with the blood, filth and grease layered into it, and she supposed that perhaps some part of Kevin's psyche kept it from changing, instinctively clung to this last remaining vestige of humanity. It was very likely; except for his hair, there was no vestige of the boy that this monstrosity had once been. Not his eyes, not his general shape, not even his voice.

Just the hair.

Mr. Lyle snapped his forefinger and remaining thumb, producing a small cold black spark. "Hey, kid. Remember me?" Kevin stared at him and snarled, something massive and clawed that might have been a leg or muscular tentacle bunching under him. It wasn't very much. "Oh, good. I was worried I might've broke your head a little on my last visit a few days ago." Kevin made another wordless sound of rage, and Wuya glanced at the numerous breaks in Kevin's left arm. Even without the mechanical bugs eating at them, they were festering. In a way, it was lucky for Kevin that the process lying in wait for him would heal his injuries.

Mr. Lyle bent down a bit so that he was eye level with Kevin, or at least at the median where Kevin's eyes kept drifting around. "Well, still haven't considered my little offer? Sure you don't want to leave this little cage, do whatever we need for fun and profit?" He smiled wide. "You could get _out _of here. Forever. Away from the machines and out of the dark." He smirked maliciously. "Not to mention away from this _thing _you've become. This abomination. And trust me when I say that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to things of nightmares. And you, kid, are just plain _nasty_."

Kevin glowered at him. Wuya thought it strange that he didn't growl or froth at the mouth or suddenly almost dissolve in biological chaos of sharpness and bestial wrath. He'd done those things before, but never this sullen stare.

"And these experiments on you have been Hell. Nothing personal about it, you know. Bad luck for you, I guess. Or maybe I should say karma; you weren't exactly a sterling example of humanity, even when you could look the part. Killing people to get money, electrocuting everyone that pushed you around and going on vengeful rampages?" Keven simply stared at him, a dull twitch in what Wuya chose to think of as his lower jaw for lack of a better anatomical reference. "Mind you, I'm not saying anything negative. We all do what we have to survive." Mr. Lyle glanced at his thumbless hand for a moment. "Some just have to do worse, to survive even worse." He peered at Kevin, to gauge his reaction. Seeing that he wasn't really getting much, he went forward. "But that still didn't give that Tennyson kid an excuse to turn you into..." He gestured vaugely at Kevin, who now looked mildly surprised at Mr. Lyle's information. "_This_."

Kevin finally spoke again, struggling through his physical limitations. "My fault," He grumbled, glaring at Mr. Lyle "How the hell do..._you_...know?"

Wuya raised an eyebrow. _What does he think he's doing? _She wondered.

Mr. Lyle smirked maddeningly. "You know the saying 'Hell knows, Heaven suspects'?" He paused for a reaction. He didn't get one. "It's not just a saying." He shifted position, carefully watching Kevin. "Anyway, back to my main point here. You help us willingly, you can _join _us instead of rotting-possibly literally-in this hellhole. We could help you, remove that energy in you and let you go back to being human. Or a resonable fascimille, anyway." Mr. Lyle extended his thumbless hand, as if to shake. "What do you say? Want to cause a little havoc for your freedom? And humanity?" He paused, glancing at the Joker significantly. "Or we could always go to Plan B. Which would be _very _unpleasant for you."

There was a long pause as Kevin considered Mr. Lyle's offer, thinking on it's various ramifications and options. Then he narrowed his eyes and raised the shifting mass of his right arm. The hand, now a furry paw with stubby fingers tipped with thick claws, turned, back of the paw towards Mr. Lyle, and extended the middle digit up.

Mr. Lyle shrugged and stood back up. "Fine. Be that way. But be sure to remember; I gave you a _choice_. Whatever happens to you from here is your own fault." He paused. "Oh, yeah. I lied. Plan B was what we hand in mind anyway." He shrugged apologetically. "Nothing personal."

Wuya rolled her eyes and glanced over at her apprentice. "Azula? Care to do the honors?" She said aloud. Kevin's mismatched eyes narrowed, his lips peeling over teeth sharpening to needle points.

Azula smiled cruelly. It was an expression she was very good at; iron maidens looked downright innocent compared to her. "If you insist." She glanced at the Joker, making a 'gimme' gesture with her hand; he pulled out the syringe again and, with another dramatic flourish, handed it over to Azula.

She smiled again at Kevin. It was not a nice smile, but that went without saying. It was crooked, more than a little insane, and promised nasty things to the universe in general and Kevin in specific. "Do you have any idea what this is?" She brandished the syringe for Kevin's inspection. He stared at it, not saying anything. "Well, I suppose I _could _go on a long-winded story that didn't go anywhere, like some people-" Wuya grimaced. Some people just didn't appreciate backstory. "-But I believe in _showing,_ not telling."

Kevin glowered at Azula, clearly not liking what she was saying. It was hard for Wuya to get the gist of what he was thinking; his bizarre face was almost never structured like a human's, making his expressions difficult to understand, and the incredible energies concentrated in his body made a sort of background noise in the back of his mind that rendered telepathy equally taxing. Even so, the raw waves of emotion twisting around him were unmistakable, and easy enough for her to sense; a considerable surge of fear intertwined with hate and a curious measure of sullen resignation. He was used to treatment like this, Wuya had realized long ago, and for a moment, the weariness wore against his mental defenses just enough for the energies around him to subside, and she-

_A young teenage girl, a year younger than him, with a a pretty face framed by red hair pulled back over green eyes shining with pink-purple energy, and something has changed in the way he thinks of her; not an enemy anymore, not an obstacle in his stupid obsession but one of a few people that have never hurt him outside of self-defense, people resent him not because of the half-human freak he is but because of the horrible things he's done. A small distinction, but words can't describe what it means to him, and it tears him up inside, thinking of her and what could have been when her brown-haired cousin made his offer._

_"You can come with us," he had said, and he could have, but he was too STUPID, too angry at the world and everything in it for treating him like an animal for so long that he became one long before he turned his powers on the boy's alien watch and turned himself into a more obvious monster. The weight of it tears at him, rips his mind apart the more he thinks about it, but it gives him a strange comfort: he had a chance, an oppertunity to be somewhere else than he got himself to, and he could have joined them, but he had no one to blame but himself for his stupid decisions this time._

-got a brief flash into Kevin's mind, and she raised an eyebrow at the disjointed thoughts therein. It was slightly disappointing, actually; he didn't seem nearly as broken as so many others under her control, and he could have been an excellent agent for her. She'd made the offer more than once, before Mr. Lyle had ever come along, and had gotten the same reaction, in varying degrees of vehemency that had grown less violent and more stoic as time had gone by. Ironic, actually; he hadn't ever had a choice in serving her, whether it was her scientists mutilating his freakish body in search of whatever secrets it might yield and what she had in mind right now.

Wuya wasn't aware of it, but Kevin was actually closer to the edge then she was aware of; the torture he'd endured under her scientist's cruel minstrations was bad enough. Slowly losing control of his own body was worse, something contributing to his mental troubles for a long time even before the experiments inflicted upon him had tore the energies within him completely out of control, turning his body into a chaotic parade of nearly every species in over a couple dozen worlds from one galaxy alone, but the worst of all was the loneliness. Kevin had _hated _being ostracized when he was younger, and being confined in a tiny space, unable to significantly move around was slowly driving him insane with cabin fever.

And then, when all other sounds went silent in his cell, without footsteps outside his door or the mocking of evil people or even his own screams to drown it out, was thevoice. _It's_ voice. Something cold and rasping, like the voice of a demon pulling itself from Hell on the back of the screaming masses. It had been there, in one form or another, since he'd tried to absorb the energies of the Omnitrix and succedded all too well. Impulses and ideas darker than any he'd ever had before, not just killing people to get what he needed or wanted, but killing them just because he wanted to, because it made him feel better to lessen his misery by inflicting it upon them with the monstrous strength his newly-inhuman body afforded him. Hunting down Ben Tennyson and tearing him apart limb from limb for making it possible for him to taste the power of the alien watch on his right hand and turn him into a monster was one of those ideas.

In time, his desires became different, more chaotic and gradually less sane, and they _evolved_, or maybe it was better to say that they didn't just influence him. After he had been trapped in the Null Void with that alien monster Vilgax, they had stopped being vauge feelings and became _voices_, evil words, suggestions and taunts coming from every dark shadow and unknown corner when he wasn't fighting for his life and escaping things that snapped and bit and wanted him dead for just being there. The voice had grown stronger, more alive, and he soon realized that it wasn't some part of him amplified by the alien powers, given strength and purpose by the alien forces in him like he'd once believed. It _was _one of those alien forces, something evil and obsessive, that only thought of dominance and control and felt like something _dead_.

The name of that dead dread thing was Ghostfreak, or so Ben Tennyson had named it. It was _evil _in a way that Kevin had never really understood, and as he had come to realize that it was _Ghostfreak_ who had compelled him to use his twisted power as viciously as he wanted to, control and use everyone around him with fear and violence, not Kevin himself, or at least not as completely as he'd thought. To that thing, Kevin wasn't anything more than a puppet, a pawn for it to use in it's stupid obsession with controlling everything around it. He hated it, _loathed _it more than anything else in his life, more than he'd hated Ben. It was so much worse than anything that came before.

He could hear Ghostfreak right now, the feeling of utter coldness unrelated to anything around him that heralded the rise of it's consciousness within him. _You sicken me, boy,_ Ghostfreak whispered, and even though there was nothing there, he still felt spindly fingers like long jointed claws touch his cheek, so cold it made his skin crawl and sent small spurs shooting around his face. _You lie in this chamber like a dead thing when you could join them and be free_.

Kevin didn't bother to answer him. He rarely did these days. To him, it was all a fight, always had been. He'd been fighting, it seemed, since he was old enough to look into his stepfather's eyes and see the disgust there; fighting his personal war first for the approval of a mother who didn't love him enough to protect him, the imagined respect of a long-dead father, than simply to survive on the streets of New York. Later, he'd had someone to fight, pinned Ben Tennyson and his family as something to direct all his embittered agression against. Now he fought _everything_; fought his own treacherous body for control. Fought whoever experimented on him that day for the sake of denying them his screams. Fought Ghostfreak and Azula and everyone else for the sake of his sanity, however tenuous it was. His reality was war, and he was set against a universe bent on making him suffer.

It was a losing battle. He knew that. One day, he was goingto lose. He would die, probably. It could be worse; they could finally break him and use him however Ghostfreak or Wuya or whoever wanted. He didn't even want to think about giving in, following orders and fighting for his tormentors just to escape. But he was equally certain that it wouldn't be _this _day, and he didn't want to give them the satisfaction of giving up in any way, not without a fight.

So, ignoring the words in the back of his head that itched like carnivorous worms in his skull, he chose to fight.

Wuya made a strange gesture, like she was weaving a cat's-crade with one hand, and the force field in front of Kevin faded out. Even with the chains holding him so tight it hurt, he managed to move into a squatting position, bracing himself for any defiance he could muster, no matter how pointless. As his entire body uncontrollably shifted into an even broader shape, a black insectile exoskeleton growing over a predatory Yautjua's broad muscles, the chains tightened around him, almost making him cry out in pain. Azula silently stepped into the little cell, an intolerable smugness in every motion. She didn't know what was going to happen, Kevin was sure of it, but it didn't mollify his rising panic at the horrible glee in her eyes. As she came closer and closer, his every instinct screamed at him to attack her, kill her if he could, just strike out with all the impossible strength he could find in his mutant body; perhaps sensing this, the chains tightened even further around him, winding around him like boa constrictors.

It hurt. Everything hurt, from the labored inflation of his lungs to the burning of his flesh as it constantly rearranged itself without warning, consistency or relief. And the memories of what he could've had hurt worse, Ghostfreak's cruel scorn making him mad enough to kill something, and the anger _hurt_; he was sick of always being mad and feeling like he was burning into ash from the inside-out. It wasn't fair, none of it was fair, and he was so tired of being so wound up from fear and anger and stress that he felt like a single tap would drive him insane-

A small feminine hand lightly touched on a shoulder that was trying to grow back-jutting spikes and blades at once. Something snapped in him (_not her, never her, don't ever let her touch you) _andKevin roared and twisted, foamy saliva streaming from knife-long killer's teeth as his mouth opened impossibly wide, turning his head and lunging, wanting so bad to make someone pay for making him more of a monster and Azula was so close and he moved to _bite_, to kill and crush and hurt-

Cold metal choked him, a loose loop of animate chain winding over his neck and squeezing until a small pitiful noise escaped his throat, a scream bled of air and noise until it was just a puny gasp. Kevin's head rolled back, all thoughts of desperate vengeance forgotten. He gasped for breath, flinching as Azula unworredly stroked the roiling flesh of his cheek with a finger. "I'd hate to see you at the doctor's," She whispered, and Kevin recoiled at how _close _she was to him, and the smell of burnt flesh and ozone she carried around her, coming through whatever floral perfume she was wearing. "You're so very picky about who touches you."

He was so distracted by her, so revolted by her touch and afraid that at any moment it was going to turn into more blinding pain that he didn't see her other hand hold up the sinister syringe, thumb pushing lightly against the plunger. Then there was a small pinprick on his neck, followed by a peculiar stinging in his neck. "You tell me if this hurts or not," Azula said primly, and slowly pressed down on the plunger of the syringe now stuck in his neck, injecting the contents of the syringe directly into Kevin's bloodstream.

For a moment, Kevin blinked, nonplussed and wondering what the slight pinprick in his neck was. Then, as the red fluid instantly diffused and spread across his entire circulation system, the Omnitrix energy reacted to it just as his natural powers reflexively absorbed it.

For an instant, nothing changed. And then everything changed, and he was falling, he remained in the same place, but he felt like he was still falling, falling into an abyss and it was so _cold_, so bitter and dark and _empty_-

Everything went white with pain, just like the first time he'd lost control of his own body, and another voice latched it's claws into his fractured sanity.

And this one was worse than Ghostfreak.

------

Mr. Lyle and Azula took a step back as Kevin reared back and _screamed_, his body warping and bending in a bizarre flurry, a biological chaos even more out of control than before.

"Guess it did hurt," Azula murmured as Kevin writhed and shrieked, his flesh thrusting out in foot-thick tentacles studded with barbs before bursting into flame, one side of his face contorting and compressing into a human face, high-cheeked and narrow. The syringe popped out, muscular contractions forcing it, and landed unceremonious on the floor, a drop of red clinging to the needle's tip. "Is this supposed to happen?"

Wuya smirked in satisfaction. "Yes." She said simply as the green energy around Kevin coiled around him, turning him a radiant green mottled with the dark red of the soul-stuff, or whatever you might call it. She had seen this before, watched this process at least four times, but never with someone with Kevin's unique body, and watched with interest at the bizarre changes occuring to him, watching the weird things his hands were turning into, apparently undecided between being burning magma-hands or techno-organic paws with the features of a dozen species visible on either, frantically reaching for his face, the human side of it looking mildly surprised as opposed to Kevin's bewildered agony.

"_NO!_" Kevin howled, vocal cords reasserting themselves, his jaw reconfigured itself in a series of sickening crunches, turning into something more human, the absurd array of fangs already becoming smaller and receding behind his lips. "_Not again not again not again, NOT AGAIN! My body, not your's, it's mine, all mine stop trying to CHANGE IT!_" His neck abruptly started heaving from the left to the right, becoming smaller, and at the same time, she could see the transforming energies around him sinking into his body. The machines in and on him started detaching, responding to preprogrammed signals, the crystals dropping off while the tubes retracted. The mechanical bugs retreated en masse, melding with the cell walls and vanishing on contact.

Mr. Lyle cocked his head, interested, as Kevin's broken arm completely and flawlessly turned into the circuit-streaked black liquid-flesh of a Galvanic Mechomorph, broken bones and damaged muscle transforming into living nanotechnology, than glowing dimly as it turned into a human arm, pale and slender, looking absurdly small on Kevin's immense body. At the same time, patches of similar humanity were appearing all over his body, increasing in frequency as Kevin's distress got worse. He was fighting a war within himself, that was obvious, and he was losing it very quickly.

His entire body began shrinking, becoming more human with an escalating series of crunches and noises. His remaining alien bits were already becoming smaller, random mutations happening more slowly and less dramatically. As immense spines burst from his back only to slide back in, his hair changed, develouping a blue tint, falling more wildly over a face that was rapidly becoming entirely human. Kevin screamed again, louder this time, and recoiled as though someone had struck him, his remaining alien eye wide in absolute horror as razor teeth flattened and reset themselves into jaws contorting into a more human shape, his muzzle seperating into a mouth and nose.

His legs twisted, growing smaller and more human, his back-bent ankles crunching as they became more humanlike, clawed toes shrinking into proper toes. With another loud crunch, his entire upper body twisted, turning into sinewy muscles and all traces of inhumanity vanishing in flickers of emerald energy before red overwhelmed the green, flashing over his energy body for an instant. Wuya saw the outline of a body in the red, humanlike except for a weirdly distorted head reforming as she watched, and a loud roar, a monster's voice that suddenly changed just like everything else, becoming the croaking rasp of a young teenager, perhaps the true voice of Kevin Levin, yelling something inchoherent and hard to make out except for the clear and surprising defiance tinged with absolute horror-

The red flashed again and Kevin's body slumped over, hair falling over his face and the chains loose around him, only just tight enough to keep him from falling over himself. His body was completely still, though clearly breathing, and clearly an adult's, wearing only the ragged pants that had been the only clothing that could survive the constant transformations of Kevin's mutant body. He looked fairly tall, even kneeling, and slender. Like a knife, Wuya thought, or some other lethal weapon. His blue-black hair, even longer than it had been, hung down over his shoulder blades, and moved slightly as red-tinted green sparks flickered around the man's body.

The Joker bent down and snapped his fingers in front of the man's face. "Hey, wake up! Wake up, will you? Which one are you, huh, which one are you?" Wuya found his phrasing odd, but didn't comment.

Slowly, very slowly, the man looked up. His face was angular, with a thin chin and slanted yellow-brown eyes. What emotion showed on his face was completely mild; mild confusion, mild interest at his surrondings, and mild distaste at his condition. "Hey," He said softly, recognizing the clown in front of him. "Long time, no see."

"What's your name, huh? Know your name?"

The man laughed, a single hard noise almost like a snap. "Kimblee. Solf J. Kimblee." He paused, and when he next spoke, he did so slowly, as if savoring the words. "The Red Lotus Alchemist."

Wuya started to move forward, sure that it was a success, but the Joker held up his hand, a finger held up in the universal sign for 'hold on'. "What's the 'J' stand for?"

Kimblee tilted his head back. "Nothing. It doesn't really mean anything at all. Bit like life, really." He glanced at himself, properly registering his location for the first time. "Is there a good reason for me to be in chains?"

The Joker stood up, and clapped a few times. "Yup, that's our man. Your theory was right on the money, Mr. Lyle; the kid's absorbing powers worked like a charm."

Wuya rolled her eyes. She heard the chains clinking, and saw that Kimblee was focusing on her, his eyes slightly narrowed like he was peering down a bombardier's scope. Except that analogy wasn't completely right; Kimblee _was _the scope, the bombardier and bombardier's weapon in one, a perfect weapon.

"Do we have to do this every time?" Kimblee asked. "Every time, it's the same thing. _Twenty Questions_, but even more pointless. So sick of having to swap bodies every time one burns out on me." He paused. "What happened last time, anyway. One moment, I was doing the job. Yeah, the job. Than I was dying body-death again, and then...nothing." He paused. "There was screaming. Yeah. So much screaming, men and boys and girl and women and babies, a backdrop against the explosions of an entire world going up in flames...it was so beautiful. _So _beautiful..." Kimblee began to whisper, a solitary tear leaking from the corner of his eye. He frowned, and cocked his head. "Who's talking? Stop yelling, _geez_, you're loud! And the other guy, stop whispering, I can't hear you..." He paused again. "On the other hand, go back to whispering. You sound remarkably unpleasant. Hey, don't take that tone with me, kid, I don't care, it's my damn body now, I'll do whatever I want with it."

Azula raised an eyebrow. Wuya looked sharply towards the Joker and Mr. Lyle: the former was paying a great deal of attention to a stain on the ceiling while the latter tried to look innocent, a feat at which he failed extravagently. "What's the matter with him?" Azula whispered to Wuya. "Should he be this...unhinged?"

The Joker shrugged. "You tell me. You're the magic-lady, not me. I lack the requisite equipment." He snickered at his own bad joke. "Could just be that the Kevin kid's still running around in his own head, now that Kimblee's in charge. It's happened once or twice in some of the old bodies we installed him in, but not ones as together as Kevin Elevin."

Azula considered Kimblee's mumbling and muttering to people who quite clearly weren't there. "I wouldn't call that kid 'together', in the mental sense."

The Joker shook his head. "You should have seen some of the others. Compared to them, the Levin kid was downright sane. Distasefully so."

Wuya cleared her throat. "Kimblee." The alchemist in question looked up at her. "I have another job for you. Feel up for it?"

Kimblee frowned faintly with a nod. "Certainly. But I _do _feel like I got hit in the head by a lemon wedge wrapped around a brick, for some reason." He glared at the Joker. "I _told _you I didn't want to drink the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster on an empty stomach, but _nooo_, you had to have hard money riding on it." He paused, looking at the chains around him. "Wait, did I die? Is this some kind of stupid New Age-y ironic Hell? Oh, _crap_, don't tell me the Ishbalans were actually right! Damn it, my agent at the Interworld Evil Management Agency told me atheism had it's risks in a universe _obviously _replete with supernatural forces."

"...No," Wuya said after a short pause. "You're still alive. Technically. I meant, how do you feel about the job, regardless of what it entails?"

Kimblee chuckled softly. "Is that so?" He smiled crookedly. "You can count me in."

Azula cocked an eyebrow. "Don't you want the details beforehand?"

Kimblee shrugged indifferently. "Nah, not really. As long as I get to make my war-music, it's all good." He paused. "And maybe getting out of these chains. That would be good too. I think I'm losing circulation to my shoulders. Which is very painful. The prickles are a little soothing, surprisingly enough."

"Isn't it though?" The Joker said. Mr. Lyle glanced at him disapprovingly.

Wuya gestured, and the chains slipped off Kimblee, still clinking longingly for the feel of weak living flesh. He slowly got up to his feet, joints popped and creaking. "This body's been through hell," He muttered, slicking his hair back and grimacing at all the grease, filth and...things in there. "Feels...inhuman somehow." Green energy sparked around his fingers as his nails grew, thickening into black claws. "Ooh, that's new." He looked somewhat different than Wuya remembered; he was taller than he was supposed to be, and a little broader, particularily at the shoulders. His face wasn't as lean and narrow, too, and his skin looked too light, though his eyes were the right amber shade. It was, she supposed, a consequence of merging his essence with Kevin Levin's unique body.

As she had realized when Mr. Lyle had told her of his choice in a vessel, Kevin's absorbing powers would have reacted to the soul-stuff Kimblee had been condensed into by simply, well, absorbing it. As a consequence, there had been none of the tedious rejection messiness that usually resulted with such things, though it appeared that the soul-stuff had reacted with the Omnitrix energies in a way Wuya hadn't foreseen, imposing Kimblee's shape on Kevin's body as usual but not completely, for some reason. Instead, it appeared that this form was a mixture of Kimblee and, most likely, what Kevin might look like at Kimblee's age.

"Mr. Lyle was right. This _was _a lot of work just to get a field agent," Azula said quietly, looking Kimbley up and down with clear physical interest. "And what if Kevin Eleven burns out too, like those other bodies you mentioned?"

"Maybe," Wuya replied, thinking that Kimblee was rather pleasant to look at. "But always go for the best, I say. Unless you're low on cash. Besides, Kevin's more or less useless to me now; I've already collected all the DNA I need from him. And if my projections are accurate, his body has already perfectly adapted to Kimblee's body, with his innate powers as well as the energies within him."

Kimblee examined himself, evidently displeased with a body that hadn't been cleaned in...a very long time, actually. Even filthy as his body was, Azula and, disturbingly, Mr. Lyle, were still quite interested in it. He looked at his palms, disappointed. "I'm going to need some paints. And some more appropiate clothing." He tugged at his now-loose pants. "These work for prisoners, but are completely unsuitable for someone of my stature. And I need to get cleaned up. I don't like being unclean." Abruptly, his skin started shedding in large, thick flakes weighed down with the dirt, filth and other stuff Kevin's imprisonment had acclumated. Kimbley blinked as green sparks flickered around him, his skin shedding in large patches and revealing new, pinkish skin beneath. "...Maybe just a quick shower, then." He muttered, scratching absently at a particularily large fold of shedding skin on his cheek.

"Yeah, you do that," Wuya said before glancing at Mr. Lyle and Azula. "You two. Get Kimblee prepared. Give him the details of his mission and..." She paused heisitantly. "Transport." Kimblee gave her an openly pleading look. "Oh, and a change of clothes." Kimblee grinned in a way that would have been happy on someone who wasn't so emotionally dead. She looked at the Joker. "Don't you have something else to do?" The Joker shrugged. "Then go back to whatever it is that you do. And no details; I was sick for hours the last time you said anything."

"Okie-dokie," The Joker said cheerfully as he left the room. "Back to proving that you _can _nail Jell-O to a tree! Oh, that reminds me, your work force is down fifteen percent. I warned 'em not to get in the firing range, but nooo, they just had to get involved, huh? 'Course, it was probably a bad idea to put the tree in the Founder barracks, but that's their problem, isn't it?" He continued rambling to himself as a dark portal opened up around him and disappeared, taking the Joker with it.

"Yeah, he is insane, isn't he?" Kimblee said amicably. "But he's still fun."

"He says the same thing about you," Mr. Lyle replied playfully.

Wuya opened a dark portal for them, the six-foot high egg-shaped vortex of darkness expanding from her shadow. "This will take you to the appropiate place." Nodding understandingly, Mr. Lyle, Kimblee and Azula walked into it. As they did so, Azula moved slightly too close to Kimblee, saying, "You doin' anything tomorrow, war flower?"

Kimblee gave her a mildly confused look. "...How old are you, exactly?"

Azula grinned evilly. "How do you wanna find out?" Kimblee blinked, looking mildly frightened. Mr. Lyle snickered as he took hold of Kimblee's arm, the alchemist glowering at the uninvited physical contact and yelping in dismay as Mr. Lyle pulled him into the dark portal, Azula grinning evilly as she followed.

Wuya chuckled to herself, and wished she could have watched the mess that would undoubtedly ensue, but she still had business to take care of. "I really should get more people to handle the little things," She mused to herself. She blinked. "Why am I talking to myself?"

She devoted at least five minutes to the question before she decided that it wasn't worth thinking about and went on her way, opening another dark portal, this time directly around her person, and vanished in a flurry of shadow and blackness.

She reappeared in another part of the same laboratory complex, but not in the brightly lit and expansive spaces she had spent far too much time entertaining Mr. Lyle's erratic interests in; her eyes took a moment to adjust to the much dimmer quality of light, the ever-present glow-orbs she liked for lighting much darker than usual.

Wuya tapped her staff against the ground, and the glow-orbs brightened to a more comfortable level, at least for her; loud raspy screeches and howls echoed around here almost immediately, rising for a brief moment above the background sounds: the _gloop_ of blood-tinted liquid running through a complex maze of glasswork machinery in the machinery, electrical humming just below the slightly louder buzz of computers and other machines doing their work, the dripping of bodily fluids dropping into specially arranged collection trays and more.

The sounds of things that were actually alive were louder. A near-constant chorus of whimpers and screams, the savage roars of massive things slamming and crashing into another, the wet crunches of lifeless bodies busily being torn apart and eaten by those still barely alive, futile sounds of flesh hitting force fields and coming right back again and again, mismatched footsteps ecohing in tune with heavy distorted breath. Sometimes, there were words, but more often, they were only whispers, both mad and inchoherent:"_It's so dark here, so wet and sharp, how it burns the bright and warm, burns it so bad_..."

Wuya took several steps forward, moving around a decsicated and almost mummified corpse that no one had bothered to move, and thought that it was probably unsanitary. The area around her was small compared to many of the places around her domain, a large hallway connecting to several smaller rooms, danker, darker and dirtier than normal, looking like a mixture of a large and very unkempt apartment suite and a mad scientist's laboratory, and for good reason.

She grimaced as she passed an enclosure much like the ones throughout the laboratories. Two sallow things that had probably once been human savagely tore at each other, clawlike nails raking into their flesh while they bit and snapped, hideously distended and yellowing sharp teeth biting deep. They hissed and cowered from the light, rolling back into their little cell, their skin steaming and boiling like melting wax at the light, thin lines of uttermost darkness on them like infection marks. Their eyes glowed bright yellow, and for a moment, Wuya considered that their stunted stances, various sharp protruding bones and natural weaponry reminded her of Soldier Heartless.

She tried not to look at some of the other things she saw. She had done many great and terrible things over her life. She'd enjoyed most of them. But there were..._things_ down here, things that could make even her stomach churn if she thought about them too much. Worse than in the laboratory complex she had gone through, worse than the seemingly endless series of corridors and barricaded half-mad prisoners. Down here, there were no prisoners, not really; just what was left of them, and more often than not, the only word fit for them was _monster_.

And not all of them were in the cages they belonged in.

"Tucker!" She called out, fighting to be heard over the noise all around her. "Are you in here?" She hoped so; he didn't like leaving his private domain for various reasons, but he did have occasional moments when he ventured out over some pretext or another.

She glanced around, hoping that a Founder might spontaenously appear and point her in the right direction. Many of them worked as small scale technicians and laboratory assistants, and some of them actually liked the somewhat nastier things they could do under her scientist's direction. But then again, the Founders were somewhat adverse to spending any time around in this particular lab, and rarely came in here except when they had to. There was the odd demon who chose to be a lab assistant down here, but they were very much in the minority.

No one answered her. Either absent, or simply too busy. Both possibilities annoyed her.

She considered summoning up her abilities to see auras again, but decided that one, it'd probably easier in the long run to simply follow the freshest trail of grotesque sins against nature, and two, much less traumatizing, given what she would be privy to when looking at the deep resonances the auras embodied.

The idea worked; after searching fruitlessly through at least four room, all of them in varying degrees of messiness and just storage for the horrible experiments withiin, she found herself passing a large enclousure filled with furless werewolves with the perpetually grinning heads of deformed humans ferociously brawling with equally ugly things best described as eight-foot high ambulant tumors that bubbled and sloshed as they moved and a smaller one inhabited only by a insectile nightmare with a thin powerful body and a long stinger-tipped tail, reading a large book of haiku and chirping cheerfully at Wuya when she went by. Not far from the unusually culture-conscious alien, Wuya saw an adjacent door with light streaming out from under it.

She quietly opened the perfectly mundane door and walked into a small room, lit slightly brighter than normal, at least in this laboratory. It was much more innocent looking than several of the rooms she'd passed through; there was just a large cage holding two severely damaged children with warped and elementally twisted bodies barklike and overgrown with plants or metallic and churning into the likeness of living machinery, hanging from the ceiling just above her, four enclosures of varying size contained a red ooze-thing about the size of a shoebox and the same shape, somehow screaming extremely loudly dispite the lack of a mouth, vocal cords and other important organic bits, much to the displeasure of everyone else.

Next was a humanoid elk with three necks, coyote heads on the outer two and a smaller, headless human-sized neck inbetween. Across the room in the other two enclosures was a mobile mass of hair, like several dozen wigs somehow stitched to another, stumbling over each other in a frenzied search for something, flashes of wickedly pointed fangs glinting in the light.

Most disturbing was an apparently empty enclosure, aside from the Founder she'd named Bob earlier hanging in mid-air, screaming in agony as huge gashes and cuts ripped themselves into it's flesh, at least one arm, several toes, one ear and other bits missing from it and rolling around on the floor. As Bob screamed and periodically paused to comment on the lack of artistic detail in it's torture, insane giggling echoed from every corner of the cell, going louder as more blood splattered against the enclosure's floor. And walls. And ceiling. Bob, apparently, had a lot of blood to go around, though obviously not as much as he'd had before he'd been caught by whatever it was that lived in the enclosure.

Wuya was relieved. The things in here were _much _less disturbing than some of the other specimens and experiments scattered through this particular private lab.

At the back of the room, furthest from her, was an autopsy table with a decidedly strange set-up; various collection drawers were set up around it in odd places and already housing a number of withered things almost unrecognizable as organs, four magnifying glasses large enough to mistaken for mirrors had been hooked to it by unstable-looking extensions that seemed to be dozens of thick hinges connected by thin metal rods as long as a child's finger, all of them set up at bizarre angles that, given the way one would have to bend to reach them, would have made even a master contortionist grimace. Strangely, there were no surgical tools at hand; no scalpels, scissors or anything at all, as though the one in charge here was either woefully incompetent or simply didn't need them.

The proper answer was the latter; the scientist conducting the autopsy was hunched over the table, at least seven feet tall and dressed completely in a full-body protective suit not unlike the uniform her Founders and other low-tier workers wore, except this was probably white under all the badly cleaned blood and other stains and a lot of grayish ribbed padding spread over it, with small pockets holding various odds and ends strapped to them. The...man, or whatever you might call him, was much thinner than he should have been, his heavy work-suit hanging in folds and clothen lumps on a body that was only vestigally humanoid, various large lumps squirming just under the surface amid a constant chitinous clicking. He was continually adjusting his weight as he worked, probably because one of his legs was much thicker and shorter than the other, a uniquely-shaped boot protected a bent-back ankle, while the other one looked human-shaped if slightly bent to the left, with an bulky boot with a supporting brace built into it.

The shape of the body, barely visible under that work-suit, was just wrong, and Wuya repressed an instinctual shudder as she stepped silently closer to him. It's whole body, at least what could be guessed under it's fortunately thick work-suit, was animalistic, and oddly distorted, as though something had tried to blow it apart from the inside-out some time ago. And there was something about it's back that was sickening; sharply hunched upwards, slowly rising and falling like it was breathing, the faint markings of thin abdominal muscles clearly in the wrong place, insectile shapes squriming over them before disappearing elsewhere, thin shapes that looked horribly like shoulders twitching and flexing as the scientist worked, ignoring the _chewing _sounds from under it's work-suit.

It's body, compared to it's height, seemed weak-looking, but the arms were thick enough around the shoulders, equipped with not one joint per arm but _five;_ one just after the shoulders, another at the usual place that split into two pairs of forearms so thin that the sleeves covered them like thick blankets, two more on each arm shaped like pivots so that the forearms could twist around a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, and a final similar pivot-joint halfway across the upper forearm. All four of it's hands were dispoportianately thicker, equipped with nine-fingered hands too brutish too be called fingers, stubby and yet articulate, blessed with four pivot-joints, and they were all busily at work on W.R. Monger's body, now roughly hoisted up on the autopsy table. They were moving, working, twisting with all their impossible dexterity, not needing any scapels as small but unmistakable knife-blades slid out of special slits in the gloves, slicing through the dead general's calcified flesh and steadily opening up a large cavity for the scientist to explore.

Bad as the suggestion of it's body was, the voice was worse. Wuya knew her monsters, knew her demons and hell-things, and vaugely thought that if you were a thing of nightmares, you should at least have the dignity to have a voice that _sounded _like it belonged to a monster. Something deep, harsh and gutteral seemed right. Or maybe almost charming, if you ignored the coldness in every word. Alucard's voice was good, she admitted.

This thing didn't have a voice like that. It's voice was a rasping whisper, falling every so often to a heaving wheeze, and it was often hard to make out, as though it had been severely damaged. Wuya had heard of a villian from the ancient days with a wheeze like that, but at least his voice had been intimidatingly synthesized. This man, monster, whatever he was, sounded like his vocal cords have been torn out and beaten, stomped on, stuffed inside stress relief punching bags, used for target practice by blunt arrows and than bequeathed to medical science before medical science they didn't like the look of them and had reinstalled them back in the unfortunate creature's throat.

"Yes, yes," He said fixedly to the numerous recorders set up around him, no doubt to help catch his whispering voice. "Here's something unusual: the inner chest cavity is severely traumitized; the walls have been affected by the same elemental effect throughout the body, fusing partially with the ribs and breastbone. Several spurs, composed of the same sillicate-based material much of it was transforming into, have torn inward, quite rapidly from the abrasions and other internal wounds. I believe I'm seeing the remnants of very bad internal bleeding, which no doubt contributed to Mr. Monger's death, the poor man. Strangely enough, the heart appears to be almost totally unaffected, aside from some minor changes that may have eventually been for reasons of biological efficiency; a more extensive vein network that. hold it, I'm snipping it-" He leaned in, right arm moving in, and sure enough, a hurried series of snipping began. "Done. The veins were thicker and harder than I expected, but not entirely rocklike. They were simply hardier, perhaps as a consequence of the general superhuman adapations present in the body." He reached in. There was a small and unimportant wet noise. "The heart is slightly withered, but still in good shape." The creature diposited a fist-sized organ, the more messy and organic sort of heart, on a collection drawer just under him.

_Shou Tucker, the Sewing-Life Alchemist, busy at work,_ Wuya thought sourly. Or at least, she added, what was left of him.

"Tucker," She said quietly, trying to curb her impatience. She wasn't normally this short with her minions-barring some sort of catastrophic incident, anyway-but frankly, she just didn't like Shou Tucker. It might have been the man's attitude, his grotesque appearance or simple gut instinct, but there was something about him that was frankly irritating.

He jerked and whirled around towards her. Wuya grimaced; his weirdly contorted front was worse than the view from behind, possibly because it looked even more wrong. The head, for instance; the top of it was thinner, coming to a point, with a small breathing mask at the top, while large eye-lenses were located near the bottom, like his head had been literally twisted around. "Miss Wuya," Tucker wheezed, "I-I wasn't expecting you-"

"Yes, you were," She said flatly. "I sent you a Founder with instructions to the effect that you should expect a visit from me."

Tucker frowned. Possibly. "I believe I would remember something like that-"

"The same Founder, I note, currently being eviscerated by one of your experiments."

"...Ah," Tucker said after a moment. "He _was _trying to tell me something, after he dropped this body off, but he got too close to the wild Zephyr we captured from the world of the North Wind. A savage wind-spirit, you know? And...er....I'm afraid the Zephyr was feeling bored."

Wuya shrugged. "Oh well, no harm done." The background screaming peaked a little louder before it suddenly dropped, eclipsed by a peculiar sucking noise, like air being drained out of someone's lungs "Well, no harm to anyone important. But that doesn't matter right now. I have something important that you need to get to work on immediately. An experiment, involving a new acquisition of mine."

Tucker paused for a moment, his scientific curiosity roused. "...What kind of experiment?"

"Ah, a little pet project of mind, you could say. An improvement of several techniques I used with Azula, along with more technological variations. It's a bit magical, a bit science-y...and that's right in your department."

She couldn't see anything of Tucker's expression, but his manner certainly seemed startled enough. "Me? But why? You have more experienced people than me, whole teams that know more about techno-science that I do! I'm an _alchemist_, not a doctor-"

She waved a hand, cutting off his protestations. "Enough. I know you, Tucker, and what you're capable of. You're good enough to warrent your own laboratory, and I know that you've got a reputation for biological alchemy for good reason. I need you to apply these skills in a very important project." She paused. "And do keep it quiet. Just our secret until we get results, you understand."

Tucker nodded, after a moment. Or at least, his head slowly bobbed up and down in a affirmative manner. With his body construction, convential body langauge was amiss at best. "Well, if you think my expertise is ideal for the job at hand, I'll...do what I can." He paused unhappily. "Not, I suppose, that I have much of a choice."

"No," Wuya said cheerfully. "You don't. I suppose you checked those X-rays, medical read-outs, aura examination and other scans I took recently?"

"Yes, of course! The boy you brought in, the one everyone's talking about?" Wuya nodded, though she wondered how Tucker knew about that when he rarely left his laboratory suite. That everyone knew was obvious; she'd made her intentions for him more or less clear to her inner council the night before, when she'd shown them Dib, and no doubt several of them or their minions had talked. "I did notice a few irrgularities."

"Oh? Like what?"

"Well, the boy's basic physical structure is...different from a baseline human. It's hard to put it in plain words. Nothing that would stand out to the layman's eyes, but it's still very strange. I'm still trying to determine the extent of the differences, but it's already clear that he's much more physically durable than any ordinary human being should be. Much stronger but lighter bones, a more efficient nervous system...things like that. The durability would certainly explain why he's still alive after wandering around in the Wastelands in our current location."

"Or maybe he's just more resourceful than he appears," Wuya mused. Tucker had made an interesting point, though. She had sensed altogether different about the boy when she'd met him, but she'd put it down at the time to the fact that his gears were clearly a little stripped at the time.

"And it is fainly familiar," Tucker continued, pausing for a thick wheeze. "I'm actually reminded of a Nightroad's base physiology. Nothing on _their _level, but-"

"Like the Nightroad's, you say?" Wuya interrupted keenly. "Well now...that's _very _interesting." She thought for a minute, deciding she was going to have to recalibrate her original plans for Dib, though thankfully not by much. "I've an idea. I want you to pull our files on Operation: Rebirth and the Dark Warrior Program and see if you can use anything from them. I have an idea with using elements from them. While you're at it, see if we can use what we've discovered from Crusnik nanoites. If his body is more durable than normal, he might be more receptive to him than, say, that." She gestured at W. R. Monger's body for emphasis. "Understood."

Shou Tucker nodded, looking uneasy. Or at least as uneasy as he could look fully covered, anyway. "Yes, Miss."

"And don't forget that a powerful connection to darkness _will _come into play, if my own experiments go well. I want you to test what sort of end result this might have."

"Of...of course."

Wuya frowned faintly at Tucker's slight heisitant attitude. "What's the matter with you?"

Tucker paused for a moment, and said, almost helplessly, "But Wuya...he's so..._young._"

There was something strange in the manner Tucker said it, and at the forefront of his mind, Wuya sensed the face of a young girl, round-faced with big friendly eyes, brown hair tied into two immense braids, a face beloved by Tucker. A moment later, with a sharp twisting pang, it was replaced by the face of a bizarre creature like a dog but slightly larger, snowy fur tinged with longer strands of brown along the back, a rounded snout surronded with hair so much like the girl's, it's eyes the same as the girl's and twisted in bewildered pain.

Wuya leaned in towards Tucker, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "But Tucker," She said coolly. "That's never stopped you before." Tucker flinched and wheezed again, thick and deeply, and he abruptly bent over, choking and coughing. Wuya stood over him, arms crossed, impatiently waiting for him to finish.

The choking attack continued for over a minute, growing in violence as Tucker fell to the floor, whimpering inbetween his increasingly wet coughs, a hint of red spreading from under his face-hood. He stopped hacking and slowly got back to his feet, shaking weakly. Wuya rolled her eyes and turned around. "Don't allow your limitations to detain you," She called back, paraphrasing a tyrant from a world that she admired.

------

Kimblee, even in a culture posessed of the most grotesque form of moral relativity as possible, would have been considered criminally insane. He resented the idea; in his experience, everyone else was insane, with their hypocritical delusions eating at them and having the gall to bawl about it when they were challenged. He'd been through a lot, and quite apart from his own innate coolness, wasn't an easy person to disturb, upset or emotionally affect at all.

Mr. Lyle's constant subtle come-ons and Azula's slightly clumsy if forward style of attempted seduction were doing all three, and he was starting to feel an emotion that he was sure he had never felt before, and it was starting to bother Kimblee that he couldn't put a name to it.

"...So this one vampire, I forget his name, was completely convinced that he was theoretically invincible, dispite being caged," Azula said from Kimblee's right, smiling fondly. "By then, I'm sick of him bawling over his girlfriend and little vampire family being eaten by Heartless, so I start finding ways on making him dead. I do a little, heh, 'hand's-on' research, and it turns out that dismemberment and burning do the trick. And not exactly in that order."

"Yeah, I've heard of those vampires," Mr. Lyle said from Kimblee's other side. It wasn't a pair you wanted to even know about, let alone be in their care. "They get all..._sparkly _in the daylight. Sometime about how their vampiric transformation crystallizes their skin. I've met some _real _nasty vampires in my line of work. Like the Baal. Or the Brujah; they're like supernatural vicious bikers on steroids. Or the Tzimisce. Talk about _nasty._ Even _fairies _are worse than sparkly bloodsuckers."

"Depends on the fairy," Azula said knowledgebly, flickering her head so that her hair lightly flipped over Kimblee's jaw. He flinched; he _hated _uninvited contact almost as much as he hated fangirls. "On the one hand, you got wish-granting nitwits that aren't good for much besides draining and feeding to the demons. On the other hand, you get things like the Unseelie, or the Fair Folk; fairies that eat the dreams of mankind and leave soulless husks when they're done. Or just kill people for the hell of it. They're always fun to have around."

Kimblee wished he could have pushed them away or move to a more comfortable distance, but they were insistent on being at either side of him. He wished even more that he could just blow them up, but he was aware of the reprecussions of doing so; it would cause needless structural damage to the nice fortress of doom he'd found himself in. And it might upset Wuya; Kimblee wasn't eager to test her.

The three of them were walking through a massive room easily the size of the entire laboratory Azula and Mr. Lyle had been in not so long ago. It was, basically, the essence of a hanger bay distilled within a aeriel-themed laboratory; small Gummi Ships, double-seater Zoomers and flying cars flew through the air over them, weaving through a complex maze of walkways, tiered floors overhead, and elevator lifts. Kimblee could just barely see the myriad figures up high on the walkways, moving along the many levels in the place, so high up it was mildly dizzying. He wasn't even sure if the top of the place was a ceiling at all or the floor of a level reserved for espicially large aerial war machines, but suspected that it was the latter.

Large structures were placed at regular intervals throughout the place, squarish and designed with airlock-style doors at the easy and west sides along with a larger opening atop roofs that reached the first few levels around them, and the rather obvious nature of them as workshops for ground-based war machines had led to the nickname 'Iron Sheds', according to Azula. Between them, the hastily erected workshops around various downed aircraft that had no doubt been shot down in random dogfights and the occasional mighty death machine rolling out from the Iron Sheds, they had a fair bit of trouble moving around: things kept getting in their way.

Kimblee, even though he was largely disinterested in the actual point of what Wuya wanted him to do was, knew quite a lot about warfare. It was what he believed he had been born, and to a certain extent, remade to do. All the heavy metalwork around, the continual clamor of construction, the flares of energy weapons being tested and the strong smell of whatever they were using to fuel their machines were all musical notes to him, the preliminary drumbeats before the song began in earnest.

These people, it was obvious, were gearing up for war. One on a scale Kimblee almost couldn't imagine.

He smiled at the thought of it, and blinked, realizing that his...'entourage', he supposed, were talking. Rather loudly.

"A bit ostentatious, don't you think?" Mr. Lyle complained, gesturing at a large shell-shaped tank with a large plasma cannon built into it, a focusing lens fixted to the front and surronded by the muzzles, nozzles and barrels of many smaller energy-based firearms, each pointing to a different angle for tactial reasons. Massive treads propelled it surprisingly quickly for such a large machine, set against an almost fluid black substance that was in turn supported and turned by large steel spheres fit snugly into the lower sides of the tank, grooves cut into them so that they locked into each other like gears.

"Have you ever been on a battlefield?" Azula asked him coolly, eyeing the tank with an almost fond look. "Does it matter what it looks like as long as it works? We based that model on the Fire Nation design from before the war."

"Are you serious? Your world doesn't even have access to technology of this scale."

"True, but even so, it's still a superior design to most tanks around, even without the improvements we've made." Azula looked almost patriotic as she added, "If you _really _want your war machine to run smoothly, get gears made in the Fire Nation."

Kimblee made a slight dismissive noise. "I'd still put my money on Amestris-issue. My country was born for the sake of war. We're very good at it, with all the practice we've got." He gave Azula a look. "And have _you _been on a battlefield? As just another soldier, little more than a statistic set loose to either whittle the enemy away or die hard enough so that enemy is too weak to put a meaningful resistence from the next wave?" Azula looked at him sourly. Kimblee smirked. "That's what I thought."

Kimblee felt strange, much stranger than the last time Wuya had set him loose, but it was a _good _kind of strange. Azula and Mr. Lyle had provided him with a more appropiate change of clothing, though he had a strong suspicion they had watched him change through a conviently located peephole, and with good reason: he'd heard them arguing over which of them got viewing rights. He was wearing an outfit much like his old military uniform, though colored all in dull unobstrusive black: a long coat that fastened like a jacket, with darker ribbed padding along the lower part of the coat and forearms, with metal-edged shoulderpads; a short-sleeved high-collared jacket with a pocket across the lower front like a sweater; slim leather pants with deep cargo-pockets going down his outer thighs and knee-high boots with steel-capped toes and spiked soles.

Kimblee liked it; it was sort of a 'punk-meets-military' look. He'd cleaned himself up as best he could with only a fifteen minute shower, which the inexplicable shedding had helped a lot with and had slicked his hair back and tied most of the slightly ridiculous length of hair in a manly ponytail. At least his hair was completely clean; Kimbley disliked being dirty. He'd had quite enough of that in Ishbal; he really had no idea how those red-eyed fanatical savages had survived in that sun-scarred wasteland or fought so hard to take it back even after they'd been reduced to scattered pockets of life around his country.

His look, he felt, would have complete if he'd had his old State Alchemist pocket watch; he'd had fond memories of the old thing. He'd cheated the psychological examination to get it, which was the only real trouble he'd had with the certification, given the extent of his alchemical skill. But it'd been stripped from him, like his freedom, when he blew up a few petty commanding officers rather than give up his piece of ultimate power, (and because he felt like it) along with his rank and title.

He'd had his share of bodies since he'd volunteered for the experiment to become theoretically immortal, at Hojo's invitation. It had hurt, but pain didn't particularily bother Kimblee. Boredom did, and he was apprehensive at the darkness between suitable vessels, and he hoped that this body would last him. It felt stronger than any other vessel he'd used, stronger than his old body, and the incredible energy flowing through it was focused so much by the soul-fluid flowing through his new body's veins that the wildness this body seemed to have no was no longer a factor; he'd probably have to wing it in actual combat, but Kimblee believed that he could control it without much effort.

The voices in his head, on the other hand, were both new and unpleasant-

_The boy screamed and railed and shouted hate without words, rage without sense, a promise to turn Kimblee's life even blacker with pain than his own was, he knew what Kimblee wanted to do and he didn't like, oh, how he HATED it, and the other voice, the one that tasted like death less sweet than the music Kimblee spun and felt like every nightmare from a childhood he barely remembered except in fevered dreams, whispered strange promises, suggested strange plans and pointless ideas that he summarily ignored. Ignoring was the order of the day; he ignored the child's voice that thought it was a monster even with it's essential fear laid bare, and he ignored the dead demon voice, refusing to remark that it's stupid desires of control were so, so pointless and empty, just like everything and everyone else in the whole general mish-mash of being except for his death music-_

-but Kimblee made a point of not visibly reacting to them anymore.

Azula and Mr. Lyle, on the other hand, were worse than the voices in his head. The voices he could ignore, but his entourage wasn't so easily dealt with; they'd been continually flirting and hitting on him, and Kimblee had too little experience in dealing with romance to dissaude them. He couldn't just pretend they weren't there, and since redecorating the walls with chunky bits of them wasn't an option, he was reduced to being snide. Not that it seemed to do much good; Mr. Lyle and Azula's attraction to him outweighed any anger his insults and remarks might rouse in them, and that just seemed _wrong _to the poor Red Lotus Alchemist.

They continued on their way to...somewhere. Kimblee wasn't entirely sure just what they were doing in a hangar bay to begin with: couldn't they just open a portal to wherever it was they wanted him to go? And for that matter, he was mildly annoyed that they still hadn't told him what he was supposed to do. Concerned with the matter, though not overmuch since he was uncomfortable with taking emotions to extremes, Kimblee said aloud, "Where, exactly, am I going?"

"Traverse Town," Mr. Lyle told him. "Ever heard of it?"

"No." Strictly speaking, that was a lie; Kimblee'd had business with people from the town before, even though he'd never been in it properly. He'd heard a little about their town from those people, about the borderline state of chaos it existed in and the strange species-crossing cameradie between it's inhabitants. He also knew more about it's history than it's current inhabitants did, and why it and so much of the world it was built upon had been empty. He _knew _why those sensitive to psychic currents were so uncomfortable in the scarred wilderness outside town, knew about the evil so great that even now it still echoed in the stones and winds of the landscape, bringing nightmares and horrifying thoughts to those who could sense it.

But the townsfolk, he thought, didn't. It was so funny, he couldn't help but smile.

Before Mr. Lyle could say anything, Azula said, "Thumbless here screwed up, and we want you to pull off that messiness you do so well."

Mr. Lyle scowled and hastily told Kimblee about the specifics of what he was needed to do, skating over whatever personal responsibility he had in the matter. When he was done, Kimblee nodded sagely, ignoring the way Kevin screamed and raged at his helplessness in the back of his mind, a prisoner in his own body. "Ah. Chaos. Destruction. I love it. And how, exactly, am I supposed to be getting there?"

Mr. Lyle answered this time. "Dark portals are a bit iffy right now, and you're still not totally adapted to them, not being connected to the dark like we are..." He paused, as if considering his statement. "Well, you're not literally drawing your power from the dark undercurrent of all reality, so it's not quite safe for you to use their little 'gifts'. A ship would be too noticable since we're dropping you right in the district, we haven't figured out how to hotwire the Stargate on that planet, so the only viable option is the teleporter we stole from the Richards guy before he could patent it."

"What teleporter?" Azula said suspiciously as they came to a clearing amid the mess. "We don't have a teleporter in the hanger bay."

"Then what do you call that?" Mr. Lyle asked, pointing to a large machine not far from them. It was slightly larger than a small room on it's own, being a raised square platform covered in a slightly translucent material Kimblee recognized as what you got when you smelted Gummi and coated ceramic with the resultant substance. It was bordered on all four sides by tall machines shaped vaugely like ornate tuning forks, tubing and cords connecting into the base of the machine. A clear shield covered the platform in a large dome, and more machinery formed a perimeter of sorts around it; Kimblee wasn't much of an expert on computers and machinery in general, but these looked like the controls of the...whatever it was. Founders, sharped fanged dwarfish figures and various other humanoids were busily standing at attention, watching them anxiously and giving Kimblee, who was _very _experienced when it came to frightened underlings, the impression that they had just finished doing something important.

Kimblee inspected a nearby plaque attached to one of the computer-things. "This thing says 'Multiphastic Universal Relay Harmonic Generator'.'"

There was a long pause. "Well," Mr. Lyle replied, in the patiently plodding tone of someone trying very hard not to start a fight. "We appreciate that the...uh..." He paused in thought, and shrugged. "The Manifold Personage Yoyo Relient K Hula Hoop Jingler doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so I call it a teleporter. It's a big machine, it moves things around, it's a teleporter, okay?"

"You're confusing actuality with semantics," Azula remarked. "And you got the name wrong. It's called the Multiple-Personality Ululating Rapper Hurting Guillotine."

"No it's not," Kimblee said, always happy to make fireworks of any sort, whether the kind that blew people to bits or the kind that could lead _to _people getting blown to bits. "It said Mandy's Principle of Utilizing Residual Horror Portafuge." He paused in thought. "And it looks like what we'll get if someone ever does bring disco back."

Azula stared at the machine speculatively. "No, no, that makes no sense. Both things you said, I mean."

"I do," Mr. Lyle said suddenly. "Look, there's a disco ball on it. Or something that looks like one." Sure enough, there was a multifacted crystal hooked into the top of the dome, level with the tops of the tuning fork machines, that bore an unfortunate resemblence to a disco ball.

"You're all wrong!" Said a computerized and overly chipper male voice echoing from the computers. "My names MURPHY G., not...those other things you said."

There was a significant pause.

"Did you hear anything?" Azula said.

"No," Mr. Lyle said quickly.

"No," Kimblee added, shaking his head firmly.

"Nope!" MURPHY G. chirped. "Wait, do you mean _me _talking?"

Azula ignored him. "Good," She said. "Neither did I. And," She added, a distinct threatening note in her voice. "We will continue to hear absolutely nothing from artificially synthesized voices that sound like they used to be in public broadcasting. Am I clear?"

Kimblee and Mr. Lyle answered in the affirmative. "Hey!" MURPHY G. whined. "I was too talking!"

"And if we should hear those voices again while we are, in point of fact, _not _hearing them," Mr. Lyle added decisively. "I will go to the teleporter's main computer banks and reprogram them with several pounds of plastique. And machine-eating bug-robots."

"...That's a little extreme..." MURPHY G. whimpered while Kimblee and Azula agreed very enthusiastically with Mr. Lyle's idea.

_And what's with you people? _Ghostfreak asked Kimblee, an entirely metaphoric eyebrow raised. _Always ignoring voices that are quitely clearly there and want to be paid attention! That can be very hurtful, you know._

_Shut it, all of you,_ Kimblee thought back.

_I hate you all, _Kevin thought mutinously from a tiny, lonely corner in his own head. It wasn't something he actually, more like a raw wave of mingled despair and rage that translated into those four simple words. Kimblee and Ghostfreak both ignored him, resulting in another, slightly more vehement blast of hate.

"Well, whatever you want to call it, this is what we're going to use," Mr. Lyle told Kimblee. "It's been programmed to drop you in the general area for your mission. Somewhere a bit out of the way, but close enough."

"What about when I'm done?" Kimblee asked. "But however will I get back? You want me to hijack a ship?"

Mr. Lyle actually looked thoughtful for a minute. "No," He finally said. "If you decide to head back here, make contact with one of our agents in town. They're mostly in the Underdistrict, but some of them live topside. We've got a man from one of the organizations allied with us, the Akatsuki, in the First District. Name's Deidara. Blond, runs an art gallery, has a thing for artful demolition. Just like you!" Mr. Lyle told Kimblee his address and paused, grinning saliciously. "And, between you and me, he looks like a girl. A _very _beautiful girl..." Mr. Lyle waggled his eyebrows suggestively in a way Kimblee just _knew _was going to give him nightmares. He turned aside to Azula for assistance and immediately decided that none would be forthcoming from that demonically smiling girl and a look in her eyes that was as disturbing as anything Mr. Lyle said.

_Wait a minute, _Kevin said abruptly, now speaking actual words instead of emotional bursts. _He said 'if', not 'when'. I don't like the way that sounds._

_Of course not, child,_ Ghostfreak said snidely. _You no longer have the drive for power that once drove you. Pity. I had such hopes for you..._

_Bite me,_ Kevin snarled.

_...That is an anatomical impossiblity,_ Ghostfreak observed after a moment. _As our body is no longer under either of our control. Also, even if I were in a position to masticate you, I am not certain that my teeth would break the skin._

_If you were a position to WHAT?_

_Masticate, _Said Ghostfreak patiently. _Masticate. As in chewing?_

_Oh, _Kevin said, mollified. _Okay then._

Kimblee repeated Kevin's observation, though without the mutant boy's opinions and the other stupid bits. "Oh, c'mon, isn't it obvious?" Mr. Lyle teased. "We're giving you a larger-scale assignment after you're done with the main job: stirring up the criminal element in the town, blowing stuff up for fun and whatever pleases you. I imagine it'll be like a vacation for you."

"That it will," Kimblee said, smiling wanly.

"Good, good." Mr. Lyle threw an arm around Kimblee's shoulder. Kimblee looked at it like it was a half-tame python. "Now, I have a small favor to ask, okay? You agree, and I'll see to it that certain..._parties _that might want you in their clutches for reasons you'd find unpleasant might be otherwise inclined."

Kimblee raised an eyebrow. "What did you have in mind?"

"I'd like you to find a certain man," Mr. Lyle pulled out a picture and gave it to Kimblee; it was a black and white photo displaying a small room with nice furniture. Prominent in it was a man glowering at the camera. "His name is Jarod, and he, along with his rather unique skills, belong to an organization I used to work with. They're _very _interested in reclaiming him, for a variety of reasons I'm sure are of no interest to someone like you. He's a master at hiding, and there's no telling what sort of skills he's got, or what he would do with them. He's sort of a sociopath with a conscience."

"That's a contradiction," Azula remarked.

"Still accurate." Mr. Lyle scowled, but not at her, as if in memory of this Jarod man. "But I believe that with certain...qualities of your current body, tracking him down from the ballroom where the fight took place last night will be someone of your talents, Kimblee, taking him down should be no problem. Er, without actually killing him, I mean. Bring him to me, and I could make life very easy, and interesting, for you. What do you say?"

Kimblee pocketed the picture. "We have a deal," He said softly and shrugged Mr. Lyle's arm off and walked over to the machine, jumping onto the MURPHY G.'s raised platform, his boots clicking oddly on it. "What are you waiting for?" He snapped at the nearby technicians.

They flinched. "It's all automatic, sir," One of them said. 'Just wait for it to memorize your DNA!"

The disco ball, or whatever it was, shimmered brightly, and Kimblee was suddenly bathed in a warm orange-hued light originating from the ball. His skin tingled at the contact, and he heard computers busily working around him, and the light abruptly vanished, just as more machinery started cycling to life, various lights on the four large tuning fork-shaped machines glowing brighter, a distinct crackle of electricity in the air.

"INITILIZING PHASE-SPACE ENTRY AND LOADING COORDINATES," Said the voice of MURPHY G., now cold and robotic, devoid of any humanity. Kimblee envied it, and wondered for a moment just what it meant. The disco ball hummed, the computers made the distinct sounds of machines at intense work, and Kimblee's perception of things around took an abrupt skew; for a moment, it was like looking through water, and then things outside the MURPHY G.'s perimeter stretched, colors bleeding into each other and gradually blurring out of focus. Kimblee frowned momentarily, correctly believing that the space within the machine was warping, affecting his sight.

The various protrusions and forked tops of the 'tuning forks' around him shimmered, a more intense form of the warping he percieved occuring directly around them. Kimblee's awareness of the energy around him, worn blade-sharp by his experience as an alchemist, buzzed dangerously at the sight. Everything around him took on a sudden bright glow, the edges of colors he'd never even imagined creeping in at the periphery of his vision, and he saw half-glimpsed shapes all around him, moving just out of sight, and he felt himself _unraveling_, making him feel like he was being deconstructed in an instant, spun out into everything, into the nearly-infinite reaches of all the worlds and feeling the beginings of a strong pull-

There was a sudden harsh tug, and then he was gone.

The bright light faded, and Azula and Mr. Lyle blinked, their eyes itching from the flash. Chromatic wisps fizzled out over the machine, the floor of the machine still glowing, and there was no Kimblee in sight. "Was that supposed to happen?" Mr. Lyle said to no one in particular.

"I hope not," Azula growled. "I almost went blind." She glared at the technicians, none of whom were bothered by the flash, and they all cowered in abject fear. "You. One of you, tell me right now what just happened! Did Kimblee make it through or not?!"

The technicians immediately ran to the monitors, frantically poring the data read-outs. "No worries," One of them cried out. "He made it through. Complete success!"

There was a distinct undercurrent of immense relief. Not out of concern for Kimblee's well-being, certainly; none of the technicians wanted to take the blame if anything had gone wrong. "Congratulations," Azula said coolly. "None of you have to die horribly." They all sighed in relief. "But that doesn't mean I can't."

Screaming ensued. And a little carnage, focused on the ones that hadn't really done anything, happened to be awaiting punishment detail, or just looked ugly. Mr. Lyle joined in; he was feeling bored.

If Azula and Mr. Lyle hadn't decided to do that, they probably would have been made aware that there wasa slight irregularity with the read-out regarding energy imbalances within the subject's body, but that was really _their _fault.

------

_Elsewhere..._

"Aw, _horseshit!_"

"How uncouth of you," Remarked a roughly humanoid fiigure, a mechanical life-form about seven feet tall and nearly four feet wide, his entire body an exoskeleton of green-hued metal plates laid over an intricate system of small wheels, multifaceted gears and other delicate looking machinery. Most of his body was covered by a plain red outfit that looked like a mixture of a toga and a monk's robes but suited for heavy-duty action, and what could be seen of his body was a mixture between what a citizen of Amestris would have called automail and a suit of powered-armor out of a steampunk comic. His arms were massve gauntlets nearly as wide as his entire body, his feet were enormous steel boots fitted with spikes on the toes and mysterious diodes and piping on the sides, and his face was a surprisingly expressive mess of protrusions, moving plates and other things in the rough shape of a noseless human face, finlike shapes for ears and a pair of large eye-lenses, glowing with a brilliant blue-white light. His overall apperance was fearsome, but it contrasted with his obviously kind demeanor, and it certainly didn't dissaude several small kittens sleeping around his feet. "Remember, my friend, self-control is the essence of sentience. Well, one aspect of the essence of sentience anyway. There are so many. Like common compassion. The ability to look above and seek the face of God. And a decent sense of humor. People always underrate the sense of humor..." He trailed off for a moment, then blinked. "What was I talking about again?"

"I dunno," Said a much smaller and more humanoid creature: he was cloaked in a heavy white trenchcoat that wouldn't have been out of place in Traverse Town, obviously patterned after an Amestrian uniform. The man's head was covered by a detachable hood, casting his face into deepest shadow, with only a pair of glowing rectangular shapes were eyes might be, and the suggestion of bangs. He appeared to be of average height and built, a bit broad across the shoulders, but not obviously so. Golden armor, intricately desigened and enlaid with holy symbols, covered a good deal of him; large rounded epaulets over the shoulders, overlapping plates on the outer arms and connecting to a broad pair of clawed gauntlets with spiked knuckles. More armor went down his back, built into his very clothing and over his completely covered body, a massive pair of wings formed of six tendrils of light folded close to his body. His pants were almost completely clothing, heavy-duty work pants with clipped pockets everywhere, covered from the knees down by large fighting boots made of the same golden metal as the creature's armor. "When you start babbling, I stop paying attention."

"Guys," Growled a massive leonine humanoid, the man who had exclaimed just a moment ago. "Focus? We've got some _serious _evil going on! Don't tell me we're just going to watch and let it happen, like _always!_" He was nearly eight feet tall, every inch of his bristling with powerful muscle and covered with thick black fur and wearing a black uniform trenchcoat and uniform startlingly like what Abel Nightroad wore when on the job, except this lion-man didn't wear any kind of shirt, just an open vest under his coat. His dishplate-sized hands were clothed in thick fighting gloves equipped with metal-studded knuckles, the glove's fingers cut away to make room for his massive claws. He didn't wear any kind of shoes, but they probably didn't make any that would fit his large bent-back ankled paws. His head was a lion's, the fur on his short snout lighter than on the uniform black of the rest of him, but still somehow human. The ears poking through his wild mane were pierced with at least six earrings, and as a final accessory was a gothic cross on a chain worn around his neck, just like Abel's. His annoyed demeanor aside, he seemed like the sort of man who could flirt with a woman just by looking at her from across the room.

"I am aware of the situation," The machine-man said coolly. "And your assesement is indeed correct: evil is afoot."

"You sure about that?" The hooded one wondered. "Because I've always seen it as more of a clawlike shape, myself. A stinger maybe."

There was a long moment. Both his friends stared at him. "...What?" The lion said after a moment.

"You know, a stinger! It stings you, injects it's foul corruption into you and you die. It works!" The hooded one paused in thought. "No, no, wait, claw is definitely better. Think about it!" He curled his fingers into one hand, raking at the air and hissing. "'Beware the Claw of Darkness'! Rawr, growl and other mildly intimidating noises!"

Lion and machine exchanged looks. "I'm not sure where to _begin _correcting you," The machine-man finally confessed.

The lion-man tapped on the hooded man's head a few times. "Dude, you have got a few gears loose. Was it the stress of dying or have you always been this loopy?"

The hooded man blinked. Or the lights in his hood dimmed momentarily. "So...you _don't _think evil is a claw? Because evil being a foot makes no sense. Except in the sense that evil carries you to terrible places that shouldn't even exist. Like a foot that supports and takes you places."

Two loud smacks, one of them metallic: the other two had just facepalmed.

The three odd beings were sitting in a small room, possibly on a ship of some sort, judging from the steady rocking of the place. It was weird, in a vauge but certain sense: the walls weren't made of metal or wood, but some sort of glassy, pleasantly glowing material, like light made solid. Strange shapes flowed in them, serpentine and beautiful, changing colors as they swam, shifting across the visible prismatic spectrum and throwing colors all over the room (but not obstrusively so) interacting with each other in a beautiful lightshow. There was no apparent door, but there _was _a large magic-looking glyph floating just in front of one wall, and there was a large window on one wall, made of something like translucent crystal, showing what appeared to be wine-dark water, glowing gently against the window. Half-glimpsed creatures swam in and out of sight, peacefully and quick.

The floor was slightly thicker than the rest of the room, less vibrant and more apparently solid, probably to avoid a sense of vertigo. The three beings were positioned in a rough circle in front of a device that wasn't espicially comprehensible to mere three-dimensional beings, but various components of it were mechanical, crystalline, the same light-stuff as the walls, glowing lines of pure magical force, and plant life, all forming a table-shaped thing raising off the ground a few feet, an immensely complex magical array projecting from the top.

This wasn't the tricky, mind-bending bit. The tricky, mind-bending bit was the fact that the multi-dimensional image radiating over it was showing Kimblee's departure, Wuya's talk with Shou Tucker, several displays of life in Traverse Town, and at least a dozen other things all _at the same time. _They weren't overlapping or hovering around each other or switching around in order of importance, they were all the same image at once. Looking at it for about five minutes would be enough to drive an ordinary mortal to bewildered gibbering in about five minutes, but the beings watching didn't seem to have any trouble.

"Ah, forget it," The lion-man growled. "Look, you know what's happening. What's _going _to happen!"

"Yes," The machine-man said, sounding sad. "I know."

The hooded one seemed to grimace, a deep and knowing anger leaking through his goofy demeanor. "Monsters," He spat. "Kimblee should have died years ago at the hands of Scar. I thought Pride _ate _him. I can't stand him still being alive. Not after what he did in Ishbal." He glared moodily at the projection, mind awash with bad memories. "That's Murphy's Law for you. _Real _people die and leave their friends and families alone, and the bastards keep going on...and on...and _on_."

"Not always," The machine-man said. "But far too often." He glanced at the hooded man, who knew what he was talking about only too well.

"So what's the plan?" The lion-man asked, crossing his well-muscled arms. "Don't tell me...we're going to just sit here and _let _it happen? Let the bastards kill people, let more people die, just like we always do, like we _have _to."

"Yes," The machine-man said quietly. "And you know why."

The lion-man snarled in frustration and stomped on the floor. "Yeah, but I don't like it!"

"You know what's at stake. The Balance-"

"_Screw _the Balance sideways with a poleaxe!" The lion-man almost literally roared, white-fire flaring around him.

The hooded man raised an eyebrow. Maybe. "That's not hygenic, sanitary or possible."

"I don't care,' Snapped the lion-man. "I say we go down to the Prime, rip Kimblee out of that poor kid's body and throw him to the demons like he deserve! Forget the damn Balance!"

The machine-man sighed. He didn't need to, being a mechanical lifeform, but sometimes you just have to sigh, regardless of your metabolic structure. "I understand how you feel-"

The lion-man made a disbelieving noise.

"But, regardless, we _must _not interfere. Not until we absolutely have to." The machine-man's voice grew darker. "Don't you dare forget that the Balance isn't in place for our benefit. That stalemate is the only thing preventing the fiends from turning on the Prime plane! Do you _really _want to risk the entire structure of reality, and more importantly, all those _lives_ for your own satisfaction!?"

The lion-man heisitated. "...Damn. I _hate _when you bring out logic."

"Sometimes," The hooded man said quietly. "The logic of the right thing is more cold and hard than it is warm and fuzzy."

The machine-man nodded glumly. "Too true, my friend. Though I wish it otherwise, their fates are largely in the hands of the mortals themselves."

"It still sucks," The lion-man complained. "The devils broke the Balance already when they sent their emmisary to Wuya's stupid organization. Why can't we return the favor?"

"Because he _isn't _in violation of the Balance," The hooded man said patiently. "Not yet, anyway. Until he unveils what he really is and frays the fabric of mundanity, all we can do is respond in kind."

"Working by indirection," The machine-man recalled. "Speaking in dreams and visions. Acting in ways subtle and quiet."

"I don't _do _subtle and quiet," The lion-man quipped, seeming to calm down.

He leaned against the nearest wall in thought. For a moment, they watched the projection. "Respond in kind," He muttered. "Heh. Maybe that's it."

The hooded man glanced up. "You have an idea?"

"Sure. Look, the devils sent Mr. Lyle to Wuya, yeah?" The other two nodded. "So maybe us on the opposite end ought to return the favor?"

"You think we should advise the Keybearer?" The hooded man said skeptically. "We'd have to be careful about it."

"Maybe so," The machine-man said. "But it could work. Yes, we shall have to think of this. But," It added. "Not yet. We have a meeting to attend shortly enough."

"Oh joy," The lion-man said sarcastically.

The three of them sat down around the projection, watching intently. It was all they could do, and it gnawed at them, but they knew that soon enough, an oppertunity to do something more proactive would likely present itself.

As they reviewed the events in Traverse Town that had occured at the same time as Wuya's own business, a saying came to the hooded one's mind, amid his own wondering how so many significant destinties could have interlaced in that single town.

_'The sole irony of evil is that it inspires men to do good_'.

* * *

Well, that's another long-awaited chapter finally posted. It had a bit of a weak ending, but hey, set-up is usually like that, right? Raises lots of questions.

Questions like: what, exactly, is Kimblee going to do? What is Wuya planning for Dib? Is Dib going off the deep end, at least moreso than usual? Who were those three weird guys at the end? And what was Zim and co. doing while all this was going on?

Some of the questions will be answered next time. Others...are a bit more long-ranged.


	8. Red Lotus: Picking Up The Pieces

Sorry this thing's so late, people; I've had all kinds of problems. Including consistent Jabberwock attacks, but I deserved it. I'll spare you the sordid details, but suffice to say that it was a mixture of me having difficulty nailing this one down and other stuff that I said I'd spare you.

What do we have for this chapter? Seeing what our heroes and assorted fellows were doing while Wuya and such were doing evil stuff. And what Kimblee does when he gets to Traverse Town. It ain't pretty.

Also, I've recently seen the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. AND. IT. WAS. AWESOME. There are no other words. That's all I can say without going on and on and on and on and on about it.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that isn't mine.

...

It was a source of pride to the residents of Traverse Town that their home was situated on a perfect position to be greeted by the morning sun; the sunlight backlit against the mountain range north of town, building up until it eventually spilt over in a virtual flood of solar radiance, turning the inland sea the Beach District had been built around into a shimmering expanse of glassy beauty. It was, in fact, better than an alarm clock; due to the unusually powerful and strangely aspected magical field extending some several dozen miles around the town, light was slowed down considerably. When morning came, the rising sun seemed to take a while to show, and when it did it came like a flood, crashing all over town and flashing through every available window like molten gold, only without the wealth or massive loss of life than an _actual _flood of molten gold would encur. Metaphors are not as reliable as most people assume.

In most narratives of this sort, such an opening is usually followed by remarks to the effect that 'the town usually got up early' or 'the people woke up with the sun' or something to that effect. As a matter of fact, this wasn't neccesarily true; while many people _did _do just that, they were generally people who worked in the factory-dojos housed in the Underdistrict, a massive winding underground complex of tunnels underneath the town like the roots of a tree, an accurate simile the Underdistrict supported the town's manufacture industry; everything they couldn't make at home, they just traded for, and that wasn't a very large area. As a result of the town's varied population, seemingly bizarre technologies and ingenious inventions were commonplace. But in terms of waking-upness, not everyone did. The town tended towards a slightly lazy feel, which a lot of tourists felt jarred with the town's proud image of a wildly adventure-prone always on the verge of tipping over into the less malevolent sort of total chaos but never quite doing it owing to some impressive police work on behalf of the dominating factions that didn't so much control the town as guide it and keep the shrapnel from hitting anyone.

Of course, it helped if your window actually _faced _the sun. Obviously, it couldn't stab you in the eyes and wake you up if it wan't direct. And it was for that reason that Hobbes alone was still in the room they had borrowed last night and was deeply asleep, his mind throwing up mental sequences that weren't dreams, that is random figments of his imagination, but fragmented memories from his early childhood.

They weren't happy ones.

_Dust._

_Dirt._

_That's all he knows these days, all he can remember. It's a shame, worse, it's an humiliation; he used to pride himself on his memory. He used to be able to remember things when he was a kitten-cub with eyes shut closed. know what fresh snow felt like on his fur, what it was like to eat food that was warm and steaming and not cold and desperately preserved by the few of those here who still care that he's alive and aren't so desperate to save themselves they hoard food like rodents in winter._

_Pride is important to him. Grandfather tells him it's a part of being a cat; for a cat, he says, pride is part of your honor, and your honor is the bedrock of your higher soul. Without honor, he says, you're little more than a beast, a monster. Always left unsaid is the assumption that the lack of honor explains humans, but if they catch you talking bad about humans, bad things happen to you, your friends, your family and anyone around you that isn't already dead._

_Grandfather has warned him about that. Once Grandfather disappeared for weeks and came back with half of his face _wrong_, burned and scarred and missing and eye and his whiskers gone, but he's still proud of it. "Mikiyok," his grandfather calls him, nicknaming him after the word for 'small' of their people; it's his personal joke about his grandson's small size, his name for him and his way of keeping their dying langauge alive. "I did not let them hear my pain and I offered them no satisfaction. They think me broken, that I have suffered too much to hurt anymore." Knowing that his own grandfather refused to admit weakness to an enemy is something to be very proud of._

_But now he's forgotten many things. He can't remember enough of his homeland to keep him truly sane. He can't remember what it was like to live in a place that wasn't a hell of impossibly high metal deathtraps where it's too easy to lose your footing and fall to your death and screaming and dirt that cuts your feet if your fur isn't long enough and the humans, those demons with evil flat faces and nightmarish things working behind their faces when they do what they do, and oh Spirits, it's so wrong when they come to work. It's not because they're killing his people one by one. It's not because they violated his people's language-_their sacred tongue!-_and use words they have no right to and call him and everyone else '_angutiriyok'_ because they think it's funny to call them 'stubborn' in their own langauge. It's not because they're slowly killing him and his grandfather, and although it's very close, it's not because they're erasing everything he is, taking the language and culture and history and stories of his people and tearing them apart, deconstructing them and leaving nothing behind for them to claim._

_It's because they _laugh_. They smile. He knows something is terribly wrong the first time he sees them smile when they do their terrible work, the first time they slice the back of his neck open and put a machine to stop him fighting inside, when they drag off the bodies of the dead to strip them of their valuables and have their skin taken away to make pretty clothes, and he knows in his heart that it's wrong for anyone to smile like ordinary men at work when they do such terrible things._

_Sometimes, when the pain is too much to bear and he sleeps through the night, he prays to the spirits and God and whoever might listen to wake him up, to make the nightmare stop. It was a year before he realized that it wasn't a nightmare, but he still prays. The semblence of hope is still something for him to cling to, like a drowning man to driftwood, and he _must _hang on to something or drown. He will not die like the others have, exhausted to death or shot in the head for impertinence or simply out of human boredom. He will endure. He will survive._

_A child's hope, a child's logic (_I will not die because I am _me_)_, but it is still something to drive him onwards. His grandfather is there, and he approves of his only surviving family's fierce drive to live. He does not say that he is troubled by his grandson's growing rage, but instead counsels him to tend to his anger and release it when he must do so or perish. His grandson heeds it._

_And today, on that vast field of twisted and dusty metal they made to keep his people contained for some mad reason, that man comes again. He is not old, but he is younger than he looks, years younger, barely older than a boy himself, blonde hair darkening to brown and heavy glasses fogging eyes turning blank with shock and numbness, and a nose that looks like it has been broken before, and strange heavy bangles on his wrists, four of them, two on each arm, overlapping each other and covered with strange symbols._

_This man is not like the others. He comes sometimes, and every time he returns he looks older than before, like something is slowly ripping the life out of him. The young tiger has little sympathy for humans, but he has some to spare for this man; he looks like he is quietly going mad. He never smiles over the carnage; he just looks away and shivers sometimes, but mostly he just watches, like piece of himself rot with every atrocity he sees, and oh, there are so many for him to see. It's not the kind of insanity he's used to from the ones that just start screaming and don't stop until the humans shoot them dead and carry the bodies away. It's like there's a light behind his eyes and it's burning his soul away._

_The little tiger-boy wonders what set that light to burning._

_He comes to them, sends the guards away so no one can see them fraternizing and risk death, and Grandfather speaks to him, speaks with the tightly controlled rage that he will always employ with humans and he says strange things in the human's stranger languages. The man talks back, quiet and desperate._

_They do not talk for long. Grandfather's anger abruptly stops soon after the man reluctantly says something, his eyes shadowed and ashamed. Grandfather asks him something, quietly, so quiet the young tiger can barely hear him. The young tiger is frustrated, he can't understand a _word _they're saying, and in his annoyance, he notices that the man smells very faintly of blood, and that blood reminds of someone. Two someones._

_He later hears that for humans and cats alike, smell is a potent jogger of memory. He can't remember their names, but he faintly remembers what his parents smelled like, and he suddenly knows enough, too much and-_

Hobbes' eyes came open, one hand still clutching his blanket so tightly his claws made holdes in it. He stayed the perfect stillness of a rock, his eyes staring and blank.

He breathed. Slowly, heavily, the blanket lying on him shifting slightly like a big soft heavy thing stuffed with cotton and stuff. Which stood to reason. Because that's exactly what it was.

Hobbes blinked heavily, trying to get the horrible, _horrible _images out of his head. Shivering like a bunch of metal shavings caught between two sloppily arranged magnets.

He tried to focus on the here and now. The softness of the pillow. The warmth of the sunlight. The cozy looseness of his vest, hiding his back from sight, should anyone dare to look at his marked back. Okay. That made him feel a little better; softness, sunlight and the absence of shame had been unheard of in that evil place of his early childhood...

Aw crap. Now he was thinking about it again.

Sighing to himself, Hobbes sat up, sloughing the blanket off and putting a hand on his face. He was trying so hard _not _to think of that place of nightmares, that atrocity zone, that even now drew the memories of his surviving people like metal to magnets if only because of the horrible _things _that happened there and deserved to be remembered and acknowledged by people for as long as there were people to do it. Even in his memories, it was a black hole made of human evil and despair instead of gravity, drawing any light into itself and consuming it forever, and given what black holes actually _were_, all devouring things made when a star collapsed under it's own weight and became something strange and alien, it was an apt comparision if you know your history.

Again, Hobbes shivered and pulled his vest tight around his body.

Few people had gotten out of that nightmare alive, and no one had escaped unscarred. Espicially him. The thought of his _grandfather _alone, of how long it had been since he'd actually spoken with him, been able to look at him and not be ashamed of what he had become...

Trying his hardest not to cry, Hobbes stepped off his bed, noticing that he was alone in the room; Calvin and Zim were nowhere to be seen, and all their stuff, little that it was, had vanished. A thought occured to him, and he remembered that he'd forgotten Morte, who also wasn't there. He was completely alone.

Hobbes blinked. "Where'd everybody go?"

He drew upon his experience with this sort of thing. "Okay," He said to no one in particular. "Obviously, we offended the guardian soul of the house by running around and smashing stuff. It was Zim who did that, but spirits are known for being indiscriminate. Or maybe it was some sort of elritch abomination that followed us from space and sucked them into an evil dimension of torture, mind...violation, and general unpleasantess."

He continued to rant. "And if it's anything like that thing that time in one of the old Imperium holdouts, we'll have offended a bunch of holier-than-thou sociopaths _completely _by accident, thus requiring us to bring in the Sixtieth Foe-Tossing Ork Brigade, with their giant robots and really really big chainsaw-swords and a general lack of mercy regarding everyone who's a foe, resembles the foe, happens to have grown up with the foe or looks ugly. Hah, we showed them traitor Space Marines though. Serves them right for trying to take us back to the days of the ancient Imperium. It's been over a few thousand years, get over it." He glanced at the table. "Is that a note?"

It was, and held done with what appeared to be a small wiggling rock with crudely painted eyes. Hobbes picked up the rock, only to have a mouth open on it and it's painted eyes look at him. "Yo," Said the rock.

"Hello," Hobbes said, having too much experience with weirdness to be bothered by a living pet rock. "What are you doing?"

"I am a messenger from the Anti-Zim Residence-Defending Home-Defense Colition," The rock said gravely. "I was sent to warn you all that there would be trouble."

"Is there now."

"Yes. That happens, when you break into people's rooms and set their stuff on fire. Seriously, what was that about?"

"Oh, he was just having a bad day," Hobbes said, not bothering to point out just how mind-breakingly awful it was.

"Hmph. And then the blond smart-aleck decided to use me as a paperweight for that note there. And here we are?"

"Uh huh. And you didn't try to wake me up because...?"

The rock looked uncomfortable. Hobbes had trouble believing that he was actually _thinking _that. Uncomfortable looking rocks weren't an easy concept to get across even a weirdness-inured mind like his. "Er, I thought it would be funnier to have you wake up, pick me up and panick over me?"

"Well, that kind of fell through, didn't it?"

"Tell me about it. Most people that I pull that scam on, they're all 'Help! Help! A talking rock with painted eyes that move, I must be going crazy, send in the Mindwrenches,' that kind of thing. Then I, using the Yen Buddhist style of arguement, convince them that their earthly attachment to money is causing them enough stress to make them hallucinate. They're so freaked out, they actually do it! Mostly works on tourists."

"Yeah, I've pulled ones like that before. What's a Mindwrench?"

"Psychologists, psychiatrists...mind doctors. Wrenches are what we call doctors, on account of referring them to mechanical-types."

"...That doesn't make much sense." Hobbes glanced and picked up the note.

"What's it say? My employers didn't say."

Not altogether sure why he should read it to the rock, Hobbes started reading. "_Hey, You. Woke up earlier and found Zim doing stuff outside. Left you to sleep in while I try to control him a bit, or failing that, not be bored. We're going to look for his friends afterwards, so you'll probably find us with them. I made sure to rub the letter all over my body so you can find me easier. Good slaps and badgers up the nose, Calvin. P.S. I left you some food on the counter._" Hobbes directed his attention to a small plate of bacon, sasauge, ham and other assorted breakfast meats on the table. "Aw, he does care!"

"...Your friend rubbed that note all over his body?" The rock said, disturbed. "That's creepy."

"To each their own," Hobbes said amiably, not caring enough to point out that Calvin had done that to make his smell as strong as he could and make scent tracking easier. He'd also left out the parts where Calvin had mentioned that Zim had apparently decided to practice his fire-powers on everything in sight and a few other incriminating details; the rock _had _been sent as a warning by some new enemies, so he saw reason in avoiding the telling.

Hobbes put the note into a pocket, doing a quick search of the room to make sure nothing was left behind and didn't find anything, and prepared to leave. "Hey!" The rock complained. "What about me?"

Hobbes considered it. On the one hand, he could just leave the rock behind. With any luck, such trouble that might track them to the room would be pinned on the rock. But that didn't seem right to him; the rock was a bystander, really. But on the other hand, the rock _had _shown up to threaten them, sort of. If Hobbes let people here think they could threaten him with impunity...well, if they were ever going to come back, as he suspected they would, it would simply not do. He'd learned the hard way not to let people push him and his family around. So...he had to do something decisive but not dishonorable. It was a quandary.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide defines a quandary as such: quandary. Noun. From the Latin 'Quando', while not being clear about it being the latin of ancient Rome or the country of Sto Lat on the Discworld. It goes on to refer to it as a state of difficulty or perplexity; a _predicament_. There has been some legal bickering over the fact that the definition was almost entirely cribbed from the _Heterodyne Dictionary of Nifty Concepts,_ and it can be concluded that the editors of the Guide are very lazy, rabid fanboys of peculiar things, mildly insane, or any combination thereof.)

Hobbes made up his mind. "You're a tough little rock, right?"

"Yeah, but I don't see what that's got to do with-" Hobbes opened the window. "Aw crap," The rock said when Hobbes picked him up and lightly threw him out the window.

Hobbes watched him skid out the window and bounce off the slanting roof, which he noted would make for a series of good footholds if he wanted to use them for that. "Ow!" He said as the rock bounced over an old tile. "Ooh!" The rock smacked into a ventiliation pipe. "Ouchie!" Hit a statue over the gutter that complained loudly about the ill-treatment. "Wow, that looks like it hurt." It skidded down the gutter, into a pipe, hit a woodchuck at the bottom that used super-chucking powers to throw it back up the pipe and _over _the gutter, hit a passing bird known as a Spearow, was mercilessly savaged by the Spearow's flock, and hit the ground with such an impact that it made a small crater.

Then the mighty woodchuck ran over and mightily chucked it into the air, commanding his mighty chucking powers to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe to cast the rock into an alternate dimension. An instant later, the rock returned, now having transformed into a small craggy stone creature. "At last!" The rock cried. "Freedom of movement! The ability to walk under my own power! No longer shall I rely upon a friendly hand to cast me on my way, or the power of persuasion and charisma! Now, I can sing! I can dance!" Just to prove it, he did a very nice dance that was so good, Hobbes would never be able to accurate remember what it was, ever again. It was just that awesome. But it had a bit of the river-dance and whatever dance Russians are supposed to do, so you know it was good, espicially for one without any choreography at all. "_TO THE UPPER DISTRICT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF MY SECRET DREAM TO BE THE DARLING OF THEATRE AFFICIANADOES EVERYWHERE! MY THANKS, MIGHTY TIGER-MAN! I SHUN MY OLD LIFE OF SHAMEFUL ODDJOBS AND VAUGELY WORDED THREATS THAT COULDN'T POSSBLY BE CONSIDERED THREATS UNTIL YOU LOOKED BACK AND REALIZED HOW OBVIOUS IT WAS BUT ONLY IN HINDSIGHT! I, WINSTON WILHELM WICKTICK, DECLARE A DEBT THAT I SHALL UNDOUBTEDLY REPAY TO YOU IN A CONTRIVED MATTER AT A LATER DATE! FARE THEE WELL!_" The rock ran off, still ranting and scaring a few random bystanders. They'd just been there to watch a talking rock get pulverized, they didn't deserve all that crazy nonsense. The mighty woodchuck scratched his head and made a mental note to stop throwing people into the Zone of Contrived Evolution That Doesn't Really Follow Evolution But A Heavily Narrowed Perception of It. (Some people have lobbied to give that zone a shorter name, but all alternatives have been shut down as not being awesome enough.)

"...Huh," Hobbes said. "That was unexpected. But on the other hand, he's happy, so...eh, I have no idea where I was going with this." He turned his attention and ate it in a hurry; he was very hungry.

After he left the room and responsibly deposed of the food's plate in a manner not important enough to go into detail about, Hobbes amiably walked down the hall, feeling a little better about things. His life to date, the probably weird and harmful things that were going to happen to him, and the horrible things he'd half-remembered in his sleep. Bad, yes, he decided, but all in all, things could be worse.

He hadn't gone very far before he noticed that the door to a nearby closet was being hit time and time again by an interior force, punctuated with slightly muffled complaining. "-Dag a rag-sag flip a dingaling! Why!" Pow! "Won't!' Fow! "You!" Zow! "OPEN!" Cow! Wait, that's not a sound effect. Hmn, just pretend it was a suitable sound effect and everything will be nice and not intrusive at all.

Hobbes believed in narrative casuality. He knew when it was at work and when running into an ally out of nowhere was not a coincidence but fate making things easy on you. Shrugging a bit, he opened the door. Unsurprisingly, Morte came right out, and had, with uncannily horrible timing, started charging at the door right as Hobbes had opened it and consequently slammed right into the wall, denting it a bit. "Ow," Morte whimpered. "Oh, it's you. Bit of help?"

"So _that's _where you've been since last night!" Hobbes said. He'd awoken earlier in the middle of the night, plauged by horrific nightmares (well, more so than usual) and had briefly noticed Morte's absence at the time before he'd gone back to sleep, assuming Morte was off being stupid somewhere. "What were you doing in there?"

"Being stuck. Like I am now. Hint?"

Hobbes picked him out of the wall. "So. What _were _you doing there?"

Morte shook himself free. "Eh, nothing important, nothing at all! A bit of this, a bit of that, maybe I got in a spot of trouble but nothing important, yeah?"

He seemed oddly defensive. "Were you spying on women?" Hobbes asked. It seemed in character for Morte.

"Yes! I mean, no! Well, okay, yeah, a little bit, but it was a happy side-effect of what I was actually doing."

"Which was...?"

"Tracking down those punks that our new boss ticked off, figure out what they might be planning and get a counterattack planned before the boss even has to know."

Hobbes was impressed and suspicious. That didn't sound like Morte at all. Then again, he had to admit that he didn't really know Morte at all. "That would be constructive. But how does spying on the fairer sex translate into that?"

"Hey there were girls there, right? I was watching them plot without their knowledge. That counts as spying. Well, that and some other stuff." He laughed. "I had to do something on the way there, yeah?"

"And all this has something to do with you being in the closest, I assume?"

"Well, maybe I found them lying outside in a backed-up septic tank 'cause of a trapdoor and followed them to the showers-"

"You watched them in the showers!" Hobbes said indignantly. "There were girls _my _age in there! Is that even legal!"

"Hey, hey! What do you take me for, a deviant? I didn't watch the underagers in the wash, thank you! Or the men, I ain't like that." Hobbes raised a eyestripe. "...But the older girls...well, I'm a guy, what do you want?"

"Some self-control?"

"How about a bit of essential masculinity?"

"You're a skull! You don't have any...er, meaty bits, how can you discuss masculinity when you're not bothered by testorone and other such hormones?"

"It's all state of mind, kitty-boy."

"And the closet?" Hobbes pressed, ignoring the 'kitty-boy' remark.

"...I'll admit it, I'm not very subtle. I got caught by the girls and they took it personal." Morte shrugged, as if to say that it was all right with him, that stuff happened and women had their rights to do what they wished, a notion that still seemed vaugely misogynic as it should've gone without saying. "Still, I found out a few things, so it was worth it."

"About the girls, or...?"

"The evil plot against us! Although, it's not so much a plot against us as a lot of general ill-will and some muttering, but there _are _some things they're planning."

"Oh. Like what?"

"I don't know, I got caught before they went that far. Also, thanks for the assist. I tried to come out of the closet on my own, but I just couldn't do it. I needed the help of another man to do it." Morte waited. He loved set-ups.

"Okay," Hobbes said. "As long as you can say so."

Morte wondered if Hobbes had fallen for the bait or dismissed it and meant that sentence honestly. Hobbes grinned, and Morte decided that the joke had been turned on _him_.

"You are a worthy opponent," Morte said.

"I've learned well," Hobbes said. "Though to be fair, my usual verbal sparring partner generally gets both of us to degenerate into a name-calling lunacy."

"Ah, you mean that kid you hang around. So, you want we should find him or...?"

"He'll be with Zim," Hobbes said. "So...let's go do something else, okay?"

"...What?" Morte stared at him. "I'd think you'd be all for hunting them down and stopping them from doing something stupid."

"You remember last night?" Hobbes said flatly. "In the course of looking for Zim, we, in the process of wandering over this 'district', wandered into two gangfights, offended three elritch abominations, accidentally attacked a giant suit of powered armor that was alive, blew ourselves up, got really lost, blew ourselves up again, got so lost we fell into a parrarel dimension of living clothing armed with spears that tried to kill us, and a whole bunch of other crazy stuff before we wandered into that construction site or met that sand-ninja Gaara and those kids."

"Yep, we certainly got into a lot of messiness before anything particular important actually happened. Or before we met anyone interesting."

"My point is that I was there for all of that, and nothing I did stopped any of it!"

"Like when you crashed into a casino and totally demolished it," Morte reminded him. "I'll bet you anything that place was owned by a criminal outfit. And then there was Bloo blowing us up that third time, but that happened out of the blue, heh, and no one could have done anything about it."

"You're not helping. My point, again, is that when we _did _meet Zim, we immediately had to fight a giant monster. On our way to Fosters', idiot tour guides notwithstanding, we wandered into a giant obstacle course, a little green thing started following us and I don't even want to _think_ about that...incident with the nuns in a station wagon loaded with weapons of mass destruction. That _transformed_. Both weapons and station wagon which was named Ironhide. And when we _did _get to Foster's, we got stuck because of a yo-yo, and then Zim wandered off. And when we finally caught him, we spent forever wandering around like idiots before he got mad and started punishing people for being there when it was inconvienient for him. Thus ensued a mob rush. And after we finally escaped them, a weird guy showed up out of nowhere, taunted us and our new friends with knowledge he couldn't possibly have without connections and then sicced Heartless on us. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

"You're all very danger-prone?"

"Yes, but that's not my point. I mean, we were there the whole time! Nothing we said or did made the slightest difference in stopping the chaos! So, it's pretty much inevitable that Zim and Calvin will get in trouble. Painful trouble. If we do our own thing for a while, we'll avoid getting the fallout for stuff that's not our fault!"

"Ooh, that's sneaky! I like. But isn't that kid your friend? Brother? Some weird thing like that."

Hobbes shrugged. "If I had to stop every thing he brought on himself from hurting him, I'd be a nervous wreck. He can handle himself, and if not, I'll undoubtedly wander over by then and bail him out. That's the way it always works."

"...That sounds kind of cold."

"I'm aware of that, but...I don't know if theres some sort of spirit pushing things around, if it's my fate to watch out for him like that or if it's just that chaos theory he's always ranting about breaking apart systems of narrative complexity and resorting to the same situation resolution over and over again, but it just happens that way." Hobbes shrugged. "So. What do you want to do?"

"Wanna find food and outdo each other in weird experiences?"

"Okay. Wait, you eat? How do you intend to do that?"

"By chewing it up and swallowing, obviously."

"But..._how_? Where does it go?"

Morte shrugged. "I've been around a while, and trust me when I say that some questions, it's better not to ask. Some answers aren't worth it, you know? All I know is, I can eat even if I don't need to, I can taste it and it goes..._somewhere_."

"I suppose it's the same question as how it is you talk without a tongue...which you need to taste things, I might add...and on the subject, how do you float?"

"Dunno. Guess I gotta move _somehow_, right?"

Hobbes wisely decided to drop it. It seemed entirely pointless. "Okay, I think we can find somewhere to eat downstairs; I smelled stuff like that last night. You should know, I once fought a psychopathic atavistic sharkman with only a knife in my jaws and both arms broken."

"Tch, that's not a weird experience, that's badass. How about this? I once met a devil who'd

been doomed to an eternity of doing charity work because a sneaky angel tricked him into signed a contract to make him do it!"

"Ooh, that is pretty weird. I've met a few angels. All I can say is that the wings-and-haloed-human thing is _way _off. They look more like eldritch abominations! But pretty. Weird, isn't it?"

"You know what eldritch abominations look like?"

Hobbes laughed sourly. "Oh, do I. Let me tell you about the Noodle Incident..."

...

The Noodle Incident was something Calvin was one of three things Calvin was absolutely certain he was never, ever going to live down. The other two, respectively, was his inability to do _anything _with complicated machinery without something insanely destructive eventually occuring and his issues with being scrutinized by people he didn't know but apparently had reason to consider him completely insane. (Granted, he was a happily self-confessed mad scientist, but it was so annoying when people wouldn't get their definitions of madness straight. It wasn't like the light of genius had burned his humanity out and left him a science-crazed sociopath. Yet.)

This was the reason why he sincerely wished he had something to put between himself and the small band of Zim's friends that had cornered him and Zim not far off from the now burned, torched and generally fire-blasted-to-death area that Zim claimed to have spent all night training in. Something like a good suit of powered armor, or a loyal _kaiju_ monster; he'd even settle for Hobbes, even though he'd just be likely to completely ignore him and cozy up with the three girls there. And their vauge distrust annoyed him; alright, Aang seemed to like him (though Calvin got the impression that was just because he existed and hadn't done anything to destroy it yet) and his girlfriend Katara seemed to be waiting to make up her mind, and Danny...well, he was an odd one. He kept drifting in and out of current events, like he'd been hit hard in the head with a hammer and was still reeling.

"So," Said Sokka, a vaugely Inuit wiry teenager with tanned-brown skin and longish brown hair worn in a high ponytail (or wolftail); he quitely clearly liked blue, wearing a water-blue hooded jacket with white seams and accents over a blue-sleeved black shirt with abstract water designs on it, dark blue pants with metal kneepads and reinforced areas from the knees down. On his hands were long dark blue fighting gloves with black worked in, complemented by a pair of short black boots. He was also armed, a large metal boomerang clipped to his belt, not to mention a longsword sheathed on his back. "You're Zim's new sidekick, huh?"

"Sidekick?" Calvin said in utter horror. He stared at Zim, the alien grinning at him like a jerkass. "You actually said I was your _sidekick!_"

"You're going on an adventure with me because you were told to, and doing so for a reason that benefits only me with no obvious gain for you," Zim said. "Thus, sidekick!"

Calvin came up with a few words and said them under his breath, causing a few new spirits to be born in order to embody the concepts he'd just created.. "This is a new low for me...even worse than what happened after that experiment with Blue Eco and the mutagenic alteration foruma I suspended in a free-form life-inducing matrix, while during the full moon during the winter solstice on land consecrated to St. Snodgrass, patron saint of improbable and horrifying occurences. I _still _think there are mutant beavers out there, ravaging the land with their armies of biker-scarecrows." He reflected on it. "Okay, maybe not _that _bad, I mean, no one's on fire and no hideous mutations have erupted from common sea life and I don't have an angry mob out to make marry their scariest daughter, so...yeah."

Sokka snorted. "What, that's it?" He said, unimpressed. "You should see some of the crap _Zim's _gotten up to. You remember that time you tried to send us back home in a spaceship?"

"Look, it'd been a good sci-fi expo, I was feeling good about myself with hiding in plain sight as an alien, we thought we could get into space and beyond, they found homes for all the giant kittens and Zuko didn't have to go to federal prison for tax evasion!" Zim screamed. "We decided to drop it, okay!"

There was much shuddering. "Psst!" Aang whispered loudly to Calvin. "Don't let Zim drive, ever!"

"That whole idea was stupid, anyway," Muttered Zuko, a grouchy looking Japanese-looking teenager with long unkempt dark hair, fire-yellow eyes and a hideous burn scar covering nearly half of the left side of his face, twisting his left eye half-shut and pulling part of his mouth into a permanent grimace. In Calvin's opinion, put together with his outfit (a sleeveless dark red long coat with intricate designs all over it, a black shirt with dark blue on the front, red-and-brown combat gloves, black cargo pants with red belts, pockets and reinforcment padding on them and a pair of combat boots), he looked like the coolest person he had ever met. Calvin suspected that Zuko was royalty; he'd met nobility in his time, and Zuko seemed to fit perfectly into the sub-type of 'Royals Who Actually Do Something'; plus, he had a weird little noisy badge on his coat that looked like a crown made of fire and went 'foom!' when you poked it. "We're from another dimension, not just a different planet."

"I always thought we were from a seperate continuinity of reality-substrate," said Katara; even if they hadn't already said so, Calvin would have pinned Sokka as her brother. The two of them looked too much alike, and her hopeful optimism constrasted with his continued skepticism with all the ping-pong physics of family social dynamics. Then again, you could say that about all of Aang's friends, Calvin had noticed, even though he'd barely known them for five minutes. "That's what that smart kid used to tell us. Johnny Neuron?"

"Jimmy Neutron," Zim corrected. "And why did you bother listening to him! My theories are far more likely to work than his ever were. And I wasn't trying to go into space, really, I wanted to get us so lost we'd break through the heavens themselves and by virtue of your sympathetic connection to your home world, what with Aang being a kung-fu action messiah, there would be an instability in that moment of transit and toss you back home!"

"Yeah, but what would _you _have done?" Zuko said while Aang started muttering a little song that sounded a lot like _'Kung-Fu Action Jesus'_ under his breath. "We'd have a reverse situation! You, stuck on _our _world!"

"Ah, I see your point," Zim said. "Wait. You don't want me on your world?"

"What, no, of course not, I-" Zuko stopped. He sighed. "I should have worded that more carefully, shouldn't I?"

"Oh yeah," Aang said.

"Uh huh," Katara said dryly.

"You're really bad at explaining yourself," Sokka observed.

"You kinda suck at it," Danny said, in a rare moment of focus. His friend Tucker shrugged, as if in support of Zuko's cluelessness. Danny's girlfriend Sam, on the other hand, gave him a look that suggested she was used to this nonsense.

"Seriously," Said the last of Aang's friends, a girl Calvin's age named Toph. (Much to his annoyance, she was still taller than him despite being the smallest in her group. He hated being short.) She looked Chinese, with long black hair pulled back in a thick pony tail and bangs falling freely around green eyes glassy and blind, though she certainly didn't _act _blind. (Calvin had already theorized that she wasn't blind, but incapable of perceiving anything less awesome than she was.) Her clothes were practical and hard-wearing; a high-collared green vest with a large zipper down the front, a short-sleeved tan shirt, thick green fingerless gloves with metal studs at the knuckles. Her knee-long pants were a paler green, with clip-closed compartments on the lower ends, and probably to protect her legs in a fight, the front and sides of her pants were reinforced, tougher overlying areas colored a darker green and elaborately patterned. She wasn't wearing any shoes, just a set of strange metal rings looped around her ankles. "You need to get a speech writer or something, Sparky." After a moment, she added, "Not that he's the only one," and directed a shameless grin at Calvin that made him feel unaccountably flustered, panicky and like his insides had gone twisty.

Zim, for his part, didn't appear offended. "Why?" He asked Zuko. "Do ye fear the unaccountable destruction and havoc I would undoubtedly wreck on your world, cultural norms and foodstuffs? Because I would, y'know. Also, I would import Canada." He paused. "Is that what you're afraid of?

"Yes," Zuko said. "Wait, no, _no!_ Eergh, this is pathetic, I can't put it right..."

"That's what she said!" Sokka said, snickering like an idiot. Everyone looked at him. "What?"

"Do me a favor and shut up," Zuko said. "Zim. Uh. I, er. That's." He sighed. "I wouldn't want you trapped on our world. You wouldn't like it."

"Would too!" Zim said.

"You'd like being trapped on a world not your own?"

"Sure, why not."

"You're just saying that to be contrary, aren't you."

"Make me!"

Zuko grumbled. "Why are all my friends idiots?"

"At least you _have _friends now," Katara said loftily. "That's a step up from a few years ago."

"...Why are all the good points at my expense?"

"You make it too easy!" Calvin said. Everyone looked at him. "What? I don't even know him and I've already noticed that he goes out of his way to get the universe to sucker punch him!"

Zuko and Zim frowned, the latter on behalf of his friend, but neither of them bothered to contest the point. Zuko had hinted that he'd had an incredibly bad night, starting with being seperated from his friends during the attack of the Heartless on Zim's Earth, followed by him appearing in a completely different part of Traverse Town from everyone else, and he'd mentioned something about a staggeringly huge gang war he'd accidentally triggered through a series of ridiculously convulouted and improbable events that had ultimately climaxed in part of Traverse Town briefly warping into another dimension where up was down, left was right, Tuesday didn't exist and cats talked in a weird but freakishly adorable pidgen. Fortunately, he hadn't earned any noterierty, because apparently that sort of thing happened all the time here. Zuko claimed to have escaped sleeping on the streets thanks to the timely intervention of a pair of ninja named Naruto and Gaara, who'd met Zuko after they found him trailing after Zim's whereabouts, probably because he didn't have anything else to do. They'd forced him to crash on their couch for the night before sending him off to Foster's, where he'd reunited with his friends before returning to hunting down Zim. (Apparently, the fact that he was obsessively tracking down his friends was a bit of an in-joke among his friends that Calvin totally missed.) To summerize, he was in the beginings of a bad mood and the explosion would burn the very bedrock of a mountain.

Tucker cleared his throat, probably to change the subject. He was a dark-skinned nerdy teen with a pair of thin glasses, wearing a neat brimless red cap that had a few random badges sewn into it; a red vest with an incredible amount of pockets that he'd stuffed to overflowing with all kinds of absurd devies, gadgets and machines; a pair of brown cargo pants with even more pockets and machines in them; and a pair of short boots. Boots were fairly popular, apparently. "So, uh, you guys had a pretty crazy time last night, huh?"

"Crazy?" Calvin repeated. "Crazy, _crazy_? You wanna talk crazy, ooh, don't you bet I can! You know how we got here? When that brother-best friend who is bonded to me in some weird and recursive familial loop crashed our spaceship into a casino and collapsed the whole thing! We got here by smashing a _building!_ And then it just got worse!"

"Not for me," Zim said. "I just woke up in an alley. Being watched by a dog with a tongue like a salami." He paused. "On the other hand, my _departure _from Earth..."

"Can we not talk about that?" Danny said, looking uncomfortable. "I _really _don't wanna think about that stuff yet..."

There was a thick, awkward beat. "Well," Sokka said. "All of us showed up in this town, seperated from each other and you know what? Each and every one on us got into some kind of crazy trouble! I ended up in a scrapyard run by a giant transforming robot named Ratchet and smaller transforming robot buddy Rhinox, while they were fighting off an invasion by a rival gang of scrapyard mangers who were all well-spoken rats, hyenas and other disliked animal-people who resented Ratchet's good press! I jumped up just as soon as they were gearing up for all-out war, but thanks to my intervention, timely assistence and a few quiet sneaky bits on the side, I resolved it all for my new buddies Ratchet and Rhinox with the power of dance." They looked at him. "We had a dance-off. You've never seen break-dancing until you've seen a twenty-foot robot transform parts of himself for the moves."

"That's nothing!" Toph bragged. "_I _showed up in the middle of another gang war, between two big bad outfits, the Si Xiong Triad and the Axe-Slinging Genociders! These guys were _badass!_ I mean, on one side, you got a bunch of classy gangsters with a ton of hi-tech gadgets and kung-fu powers that should at least be called Realitybending! And the other guys were...well, a bunch of raving maniacs with axes. Really big axes. Like bigger than Sokka's completely unjustified ego."

"Hey!" Sokka said. Zuko snickered.

"Or Zuko's issues. All of 'em put together, not when they're lining up to get noticed."

"Hey!" Zuko said. Sokka snickered.

"I think at least one of these axes was made from a car door and a lamppose, actually. But enough of that, it was freakin' awesome! One guy got kicked so hard he flipped into another dimension and came out as a girl! And this one axe-guy kept swinging his axe so hard his cut went on for a few yards and cut a _building!_"

"Wait, how could you tell?" Calvin asked her. "You're blind."

"I am? And I thought my eyes had been closed for too long," Toph said sarcastically. "I'm an _Earthbender_. I can feel things and stuff through vibrations in the ground. I can find detail just fine."

"What, really? Cool."

Toph blinked. She looked nonplussed. "What? You actually believe me? And you're interested?" Calvin nodded, remembered she couldn't tell, probably, and told her that he was. "Huh. That's a first." She looked faintly embarrased, which was _definitely _a first, judging by the other's looks of shock. "Uh...like I was saying, I solved the whole thing with a very localized earthquake. Earthquakes make everything better."

"There was no earthquake!" Zim accused. "I would have noticed! Probably."

"Okay, geez, so maybe it was a bit of artistic licsence and I just tore the ground out from under them and dropped them into some kind of underground place beneath this city! Earthquake sounded cooler."

"I wound up in a mad scientist convention," Tucker volunteered. "And it was awesome! They mistook me for one of their own, and with all the Fenton tech I salvaged in an attempt to fight off those shadow-monsters, which almost _worked _by the way, I single-handedly sped up the technology curve of all paranormal studies at least five years ahead of time! They made me some cool stuff too, and gave me these snazzy clothes. They said it was like a club card but more awesome."

"I wound up in, uh, don't laugh, a _vampirism rehab clinic_," Said Sam; she was a pleasant looking girl with short dark hair, light skin and was wearing a dark purple minidress with criss-crossing shoulder straps over a sleeveless black shirt, the lower sides of the minidress split over a pair of black pants with an absurd number of belts built into them like an outer layer around her pants, and a pair of knee-high boots. She was wearing a lot of belts for some reason, even around a pair of black-and-white stripped gloves with a single large opening for her fingers. "Something about getting them off the blood-thirst thing and replacing it with obsessing over something more socially acceptable. And they were all wearing black ribbons. Well, apparently girls that look like me are to deprived male and lesbian vampires what fast food is to savage grease junkies on a diet-"

"Hey!" Sokka, Toph, Tucker and Zim all said, mortally offended at the 'savage grease junkies' remark.

"Fortunately, I got out of that problem with only three rubberbands, a statue of St. Boniface the patron saint of small spikey things and carnivorous plants, a semi-automatic portal generator and what I learned from a two-week enrollment in the annual She-Fu martial arts retreat," Sam said. "The carnage was horrible, but luckily, no one was really hurt. Or went on a feeding frenzy. I was feeling ticked, so I gave them all a good long talk about why it was wrong to feed off the blood of other living creatures without permission or to become shamelessly addicted to it _and _making it into something they think is sexy, not to mention the whole mess of wrongs with turning themselvse into something glamourous. I mean, they're animated corpses that suck people's blood. They're, at the absolute _best_, tragic figures who are going spend all of eternity hating themselves unless they come into a balance between who they were and what they now are, and at worst...well, it's a toss-up between being ravening demons that slaughter people for kicks or the ones that...sparkle. Euch."

"Didn't we go to a world with those kind of vampires once?" Aang asked. Zuko shuddered.

"Still, we completely threw their world into a brief chaos from which every single living human ended up becoming the better kind of mad scientist, a superpowered hunter bonded with an angelic spirit of pure awesomeness or came back from the dead with archetypal ghosts piggy-backing with them," Sokka said. "So it's all good! Espicially after the _really _crazy ones in Rome tried to eat us. Fortunately, they were flammable." Zuko, still unhappy with that memory, grinned viciously.

"I thought you went from your world to Zim's," Calvin said to Aang. "At least, that's what I heard."

"Say what?" Aang looked at Zim. "Hey, are you going around telling people our backstory for no readily apparent reason? Again?"

"It was for context!" Zim said. "Probably."

Katara sighed. "Zim, the last time you did that, you had half the world convinced that we were extradimensional things that looked human because you left out important details."

"I only suggested that you were from a higher plane of existence and were so mighty that to be called 'gods' would be an insult to your magnificence, that you could all make the world cease to exist in a moment's pause if you pleased," Zim said innocently. "Besides. This time, I told it to some people that helped me a bit and I told them the important parts of Aang's journey. Not how it ended, though. Or who any of you were. Or about Zuko."

Zuko groaned. "You got more people thinking I'm a bad guy, don't you?"

"No. They don't even know who you are."

"...Oh." Zuko said. "I...guess that's better. Sort of."

"And I made sure to tell them about the Air Nomad and Fire Nation...issue," Zim said delicately. "So they'll probably be exta-nice to you. Give you money and stuff. Maybe you'll get a giant robot of doom! I want one. But they'll probably hate you when they find out you're Fire Nation," Zim told Zuko. "Oh, yes, they'll instantly think of you as one of an entire countryful of genocidal monk-killing maniacs with bad hair! Who like burning stuff."

"Zim!" Aang and Zuko said. "You didn't have to tell them that stuff!" Aang continued.

"You didn't even bother to give an unbiased report about my people!" Zuko nearly screamed. "That my great-grandfather intentionally spread propanganda about the Air Nomads before he rallied the army to doing..._that?_ That my people were resentful towards the Air Nomads because we lived on islands and were constantly terrified of hurricane season when they ruled the wind and weren't bound by loyalty like we were! That excuses nothing, but you should at least give people historical context!"

"It's not historical for _me_," Aang said, still looking extremely uncomfortable. Zim was quite interested; he'd never heard much of that before. He only really knew that the Fire Nation had some sort of loyalty to their leaders related to their spiritual link to fire; to break loyalty was to extinguish your spirit's fire and die. Aang had never spoken much of the Air Nomad genocide, for obvious reasons. "Just...ugh, the people you told are going to have the wrong idea all over! My best friend before the war was Kuzon and he was _from _the Fire Nation! Zuko's part of my family! Both spiritually and by Air Nomad terms of connection, of course. Just...just who did you tell? Please don't tell me you told a bunch of crazy people again!"

"Oh, don't worry, it was just four people! And their pet talking mole rat that doesn't look anything like an actual mole rat. Let's see, there was these two teenage crime fighting secret-agent types, a guy and girl with unusually appropiate names, and the guy had a monkey tail! Also, hideously tramuatic lives. And then there was Abel, who apparently I have met before but didn't know it. He's a secret-agent priest that seems good at killing things, really good at killing things! And freaky shadow-based powers, like the Heartless but less ominous and more awesome. And I'm pretty sure he's some kind of weird vampire. Did I mention the giant cross chained to his back and he's prettier than all you over there are put together?"

"Hey!" Sam, Katara, Toph and Aang said. The girls stared at Aang. "What?" He said defensively. "Where is it written that a man cannot be pretty!"

Katara sighed. "Aang, you're not pretty." She gave him a hug from behind. "You're adorable, okay?"

"Awww!" He whined. "I wanna be good looking! Is that too much to ask? Really, I'm a person of mass destruction, can't the spirits gift me with something that doesn't revolve around killing people or hurting them!"

"Also, a fourth guy that's really weird and is supposed to be an urban legend," Zim finished.

"Who was also following me and my buddy while he had a obnoxious imaginary blue blob and a talking evil mad scientist baby on his shoulders. Wearing a trenchcoat," Calvin said.

Sokka and Zuko groaned. "I don't believe it," Zuko said. "Did you go and look for the least stable people you could find?"

"It's going to be Area 51 again, I just know it," Sokka said despairingly. "Interrogations! Uncomfortable examinations! Constant threats of vivisection! _Prison food!_ Which wasn't that bad, really."

Toph shrugged. "Ahh, you guys are overreacting." She went over to Calvin. "As for going from our world to Zim's, it wasn't exactly a linear process, lemme tell ya. One day we were just looking for Zuko's mom, we found some crazy ruins in this dingy little island no one has ever heard of, which was weird enough since even the _Spirits _Aang talked to didn't know anything about it; there weren't even local spirits of the place to personify it! So we find this giant ring thing and Sokka and Zuko somehow turn it on, and boom! We're sucked into some kind of crazy interdimensional rift and we wind up in another world. I think it was called 'Alagaesia' or something. We, ah, really made a mess there. We had no idea what was going on, what had happened to us, if it was just a crazy spirit-dream or real, and then we ended up in the middle of a huge fight between a big evil empire and some other guys.

"And then we did our thing and beat everyone up because we had no idea what was going on, and Aang got kidnapped by crazy elves who wanted to study him and it got mesy when they tried to be all flat-earth atheists on him when he's the freaking _incarnation of our planet _and then Zuko tried to take over the rebellion in the place because he didn't think they were doing a good job and he got into a huge problem with this kid with a dragon and...well, they weren't used to Bending people who didn't get tired fast. Not that they could Bend right, or figure out how we were Bending and stop us. It was only a few days, though, before whatever catapulted us there snapped and launched us to a different world. That one was called Middle-Earth, and we ended up in some place populated by short guys called hobbits. It was pretty sweet."

"Yeah," Aang said dreamily. "But then a evil wizard showed up and did an evil industrial Revolution on it, so we decided to go beat up the big bad guy that was causing all the trouble. I think he was some kind of evil spirit, or something, everyone called him Sauron." He frowned. "We...we saw some awful things on our way." He brightened. "But everytime we met a band of Orcs, we talked some sense into them, somehow got them loyal to Zuko and convinced them to become civilized warriors of justice and other nice things!"

"We've never been in any world very long until Earth," Toph said. "It was at least...a year? Maybe more. Time's gotten weird for us since we left home."

"Yeah..." Katara said wistfully.

"At least you have a home to go back to," Danny said quietly. Tucker and Sam flinched.

The others winced. Except Zim. "Oh yeah, good point," He said. "You other guys are tactless."

Zuko gaped. "Did _ZIM _just call us tactless? Oh, this is a new low."

"Indeed," Zim said. "I mean, that's just embarrasing. I did nothing to even compare to that! All I did was run around like an idiot and get in a fight with a vampire, get told a lot of stuff I still don't really understand, get into a huge fight with a shadow-monster that looked like a living suit of armor for no readily apparent reason, charge all over the town following the vampire from earlier and an obnoxious imaginary friend, get even more lost trying to find a single room in this asylum they dare to call a home, pick fights and destroy property out of frustration, get chased everywhere by an angry mob I utterly brought upon myself, get taunted a lot by an evil intruder we don't know but knew impossibly private and damaging things about all of us, fight a huge fight against a massive number of weak but sort-of-skilled Heartless, have some more boring not-going-anywhere talk, practice Firebending or whatever it is I can suddenly do all night and commit more property damage in the process, most while being partnered with a moody mechanist with magic powers, a lazy tiger-man with kung-fu powers of Facebending and a talking skull with no other apparent use than to annoy everyone."

"...Huh," Danny said. "All I did last night was get lost, find my friends and try not to go crazy from almost everyone I've ever known and cared about dying and being turned into monsters. And being horrifically traumatized, can't forget that."

Zim looked at him. It was hard to tell, from the apathetic lok on Danny's face, but he thought that the realization of what had actually happened was starting to get to Danny worse and worse; Sam and Tucker seemed better off, Sam moreso, but both of them seemed to be treating the loss of their world as something too big to fit. He _did _notice that everytime the subject was brought up, Aang and Zuko looked sick and the rest of Team Avatar wasn't doing much better. Zim had no idea why; it wasnt like _their _world had been destroyed or anything. He supposed people they'd known had died too, but they hadn't said anything about it yet, so he dismissed it until further notice.

Aang hung his head. "'M sorry, Zim. Danny. Sam. Tucker." His balance shifted, like an anvil had dropped on his back, and he hit the ground in a unsteady jerk. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..." His friends crowded around him, like a loosely questing organism will contract around itself in times of trouble, and Zuko bit his lip and looked away from the survivors of Earth, like the sight hurt him.

"For what?" Tucker said heisitantly.

Aang's faltering nerve failed him and he dropped his gaze fell to the ground, ashamed. Zuko managed to look at them and said, "For letting this happen." He again looked away, unable to watch them react, the reminders of his and his friend's utter failure. "You guys...you're like, no, you _are _part of our group and we couldn't stop any of this..."

Zim remembered that nothing like this had happened to any of them; they had tried to return to their world for so long now, but they hadn't truly lost it. They had been to many worlds since then, foughts scores of battles, befriended dozens of people, but according to them they had never remained in a single world as long as they had in Earth, and no one had come into their group as closely as Zim and Danny had. They had failed sometimes, and terrible things had come of that failure, but never anything as drastic as the obliteration of an entire world. And each of them had their own ways of interpreting this horror; Sokka and Katara, from the familial Water Tribe, had lost their mother and dozens of their people and were undoubtedly thinking of how many family members their friends had lost. (Zim had noticed that Danny hadn't spoken of his sister or parents at all.) Toph, ignored and dismissed nearly all her life, was probably feeling like she had abandoned her Earth-friends. Zuko, who'd once lost everything in an untimely act of goodwill, likely saw it as a failure unsurpassed by anything he had done, a betrayal of trust. And Aang, who was the lone survivor of an act of genocide that left him the last Air Nomad in the world...Zim just _knew _he was thinking about that horrible act of mass murder and was applying it to Earth.

Zim felt guilty for making them feel bad. Samael popped up by his head. "Dude. Everyone's getting bummed out. Do something to distract the angst!"

"Uh...give them a minute," Zim whispered to him. "They'll get over it! I hope."

Samael pointed at them again. Zim blanched; Aang looked on the verge of tears and Danny, whatever mental defenses he'd constructed to hold off the horror just behind him, looked like he was about to collapse into a miserable little pile of grief, his friends even closer to the edge. "Ah. I see. Okay, we can-"

"Hey!" Calvin said, poking Zim hard in the back of the head. Zim stared at him. "I'm bored now and you smell like wet ugly. Let's you and me fight!"

"What?" Zim said. "I'd love to beat your smelly, ugly, self-satisfied, smelly, arrogant, overconfident, smelly, oversized and smelly face in, but is this quite the time?"

"You said smelly four times."

"You are quite smelly. Four times smellier than anything else I could say."

"That doesn't even make any sense!"

"Neither does your face! Which is smelly."

Calvin felt he was losing control of the argument. "Well...your hat is stupid!"

Zim gaped at him. Katara and Tucker gasped. Sokka and Toph immediately starting making bets how how bad the beatdown would be. "What," Zim said flatly.

"Yeah, yeah!" Calvin said, remembering that Zim had been a little defensive about his hat last night. "What's with that thing, anyway? It's like it can't decide whether it's a beret or a cap. What's it made for, looking stupid?"

Zim's eye twitched. He took his hat off his head and put it away in his Pak. "You have said the unkind words," He said in a quiet voice. "Now I must make your brains go squish."

Calvin braced himself for the inevitable, but he was still surprised when Zim lunged at him like an arrow, screaming a fearsome battle cry of '_Spoon!_' and hit him once with a solid kick to the gut, a punch to the chest, grabbed Calvin by the arm and spun him around before kicking him in the back and sent him skidding along the ground before he hit a tree.

Everyone winced. Zim got a few angry looks. Calvin twitched a little. Zim winced. "Ah. I, er, may have overreacted..."

Calvin groaned and sat up; above him, the tree trembled a bit and in accordance with the laws of humor, several large clumps of leaves fell on Calvin's head. "Ow," He said, getting up and dusting himself off. "I'll say."

"Look, see, he's fine!" Zim said hurredly. "And...not hurt at all dispite being kicked in the stomach and hurled into a tree. What, are you made of iron!"

"Could be," Calvin said, stretching his arms. "But are you made of marshmellows? 'Cause you're soft! And you probably get all crispy and nice in a fire, but it's hard to roast you on a stick and when you try forks you never get the gunk off." Calvin frowned. "Okay, I lost hold of what I was talking about there, but you get the idea."

"Was that a threat?" Sam wondered.

Zim shook his head. "No, he's just an idiot."

"Hey!" Calvin said. "That's it, verbal assaults that were tired and boring before you came around to muck around in them, like a toddler in a swamp? C'mon, I thought you were better than that! But you're not! You suck!"

Zim bristled. Zuko put a hand on his shoulder. "Calm down. I don't like the idea of you beating up a kid."

"Shows what you know!" Calvin yelled at Zuko. "I could beat you up with two hands behind my back, my legs belted up and a ironing board strapped to my head! And your hair's stupid. It does nothing to make your face look better."

"I've gotten over my reluctance," Zuko said. "Beat his face in!" He self-consciously patted his hair. "...I'm getting hair comments from a guy with anime hair..."

"Sporkmonsters of sylvian footwear!" Zim yelled for no apparent reason, rushing at Calvin, his shoes spontaenously bursting into sparks and flames igniting around his arms.

Danny watched him go. He sidled to Aang and said, a little uncomfortable from Aang's confession of unwarrented guilt and said, "So, I don't really know what you guys do and all...but he's doing that same thing you and Zuko do with fire now. Is that normal where you come from?"

Aang frowned in thought. Sokka slowly shook his head. "Nooo, no, I really don't think so. I mean, he _can't _be Firebending."

"He's doing it right now," Sam pointed out; Zim and Calvin were now trading ranged attacks, Zim furiously punching blasts of fire at Calvin, ragged and weaker than anything Zuko or Aang ever did, but as Team Avatar noticed, far stronger than anything even the most talented novice Firebender could bend without external fire. Calvin, on the other hand, had retrieved his hammer from his dufflebag and transmuted into a hefty staff, redistrubuting it's mass across the whole thing for a painful-looking bludgeon; he was actually dispelling the flames, waves of force rippling along the staff before it blew the fireblasts apart and kept going enough to hit Zim more often then not; they were pretty big, and Zim wasn't accustomed to his newfound agility to dodge them easily.

Toph felt the heat washing over them, felt Calvin and Zim's furious footwork on the grass-laden earth while blasts of fire and and that very grass flattened under the blasts of air-pushing force and wither under the fire. "Sure looks like it," She said.

"Stop making blind jokes," Sokka scolded her. "No, what we mean is he _can't _be a Firebender! He's not from the Fire Nation, he doesn't have that element thing going for him, he's not even from our world!"

"Maybe his contact with you guys has forged a link to your world that let's him Firebend?" Tucker suggested. They looked at him. "Hey, I've heard stupider ideas in crossover fanfiction that justifies stuff like this."

"Bending comes from the spirits," Aang said unexpectedly. "In part, it has to do with how the spirits influence my world, and Bending capability...it's complicated, but a lot of it has to do with how the philosophy of your nation is channeled. I think that's part of why most Firebenders these days aren't as strong as people like Zuko and me; they've forgotten what fire actually is and don't channel it right. Life, energy, will, not destruction and hate."

Zuko nodded and frowned. "But...it's weird. Whatever he's doing, it's _like _Firebending. Watch him."

"Shouldn't we help that kid?" Katara asked nervously. "He could get hurt!"

They heard another loud blast of force that cut a slash in the ground, frayed grass falling everywhere and Zim lying at the end of it. "Three five six and space, here's more telekinesis in your face!" Calvin yelled, hitting Zim sqaurely in the side, the blast of force sending him flying right into a tree; the same one Calvin had hit. Leaves fell on Zim's head.

"...I think he'll be okay," Toph said dryly. She raised an eyebrow, enjoying the fight. "Ooh, that was a nasty hit! Go lower, knock him off his feet, Firebenders hate that!"

"_TOPH_!" Zim yelled furiously. "YOU ARE NOT HELPING!"

"Thanks for the advice!" Calvin said. There was a thump, followed by Zim yelling some more in frustration.

Still too surprised by the sudden fight, everyone forgot the horrors of last night at least for a while, fear and remorse and guilt buried under simple bemusement at Zim Firebending in a fight with a kid Aang's age who was throwing blasts of telekinetic force that were a little similar to Airbending but lacking the basic principles even Zim's odd fire-powers bore to true Firebending. They watched them fight, Aang, Katara, Toph and Zuko taking notes on their styles while Danny, Sokka, Tucker and Toph (pausing in the studying) made bets on who was going to win, and Sam wondered why she was alwyas surronded by idiots.

She also wondered why, aside from a few curious bystanders that Sokka and Tucker soon managed to trick into buying 'admission for the show', no one had turned up to investigate the noise.

...

Inside Foster's, it was pandemonium.

The word may be a bit misleading. In the epic work of fiction where the word was first coined, it was simply the lair of all the fallen angels as they transformed into demons, and functioned somewhat as a literally hellish bereaucracy. (It is widely believed that this piece of fiction has basis in fact. This is partially correct.) In current events, the word has come to mean a place of complete and total ravenous chaos, perhaps because when one considers what a place inhabited only by backbiting, self-centered and delusional personifications of corruption would actually _be _like, a constant state of ferociously insane violence punctuated by moments of horrifically worse violence springs easily to mind.

Whenever Spike was involved, such scenes were certainly to happen.

"Is that all you've got!" He bellowed, hopping off the head of an unconscious Primeape (a creature looking something like a round and very hairy thing with a pig's nose and oversized boxing-glove fists) and ramming boot-first into the chest of a small guard with big geeky glasses and the steampunk-styled snap-up purple vest over a black jumpsuit that was the uniform of the Foster's Security force. The geeky but tough guard stumbled back a bit, gasping in pain when Spike, hands on the ground and pushing him up, locked his feet around the guard's neck, levered himself and threw the poor guard halfway across the hallway into a suit of armor, hitting it hard enough to send it falling over right on the poor guard.

Spike stood up, breathing heavily and grinning like a monster under his protective clothing. He was in a serious spot of trouble, yes, but he was having _such fun_. Ordinarily, he would have been a little wary of the sunlight streaming through the windows, but that was ameliorated by his outfit, which was something he wore in the daylight hours; all-black and made of a material like leather and rubber, covering him head to foot in a bizarre arrangement of layers over a coverall jumpsuit, buckled at various points to keep the numerous parts of the outfit together, a matching pair of metal-capped boots and gloves, and a knee-long black coat that would probably have looked incredibly cool in a gaslamp romance sort of way if it wasn't buckled closed in defiance of all the laws of badass longcoats. Owing to the denseness of the outfit, he was completely shielded from the sunlight, espicially his head; he wore an attached hood-mask equipped with a pair of narrowed goggles over his eyes.

He cocked his head curiously, like a cat noticing a mouse proving to be a small wolverine as the guard, Kain Fuery, got up to his feet with surprising speed, given that he had just had an entire suit of armor fall on him after he'd been thrown into it. "You're a tough kid, Fuery," He said, taking a moment to look at the nametag on his vest. "You ought to sign up with a more lucrative outfit than these jokers." Spike thumbed at a number of other guards lying around the hallway, mostly humans with a few other inhuman sentients known collectively as Pokemon, all of them wearing the uniform, if altered for their body shapes.

Fuery brushed himself off and held his arms up. "I don't do this for money." He said simply as glowing circuit lines appeared on his sleeves before the nanotechnology imbedded in the fabric reacted to his elevated heart rate and body activity, replicating and unfolding into a set of overlarge mechanical arms over Fuery's own, equipped with special motion-sensing machines folding over his major muscle systems and connecting to muscle-power amplifying transistors, huge mechanical fists flexing as his own fingers, somewhere in the lower arm region of the arms, pressed and pulled on a motion-transference rig. Spike cocked his head, wondering where he could get gear like that before he whirled around on another guard that had been sneaking up on him and grabbed him by the wrist before throwing him across the hall at Fuery.

"No! My doctor said I'm not supposed to be weaponized before twelve in the morning!" The guard wailed. Fuery, perhaps realized the stupidity of grabbing a person out of the air with giant machine-arms designed to make things hurt very badly, lowered his arms and moved into his way, cushioning the projectile man's impact. "Ow! What are you trying to do, break me like the fine china your mother always puts right where you just _have to run into it!_" The man complained, falling off and lying on the ground. "Also, what do people in China call the fine china?"

"The nice plates?" Spike suggested; he'd spent some time in China during the Boxer rebellion and it now occured to him that perhaps he should have indulged in a little research instead of brutally slaughtering everything in sight for his insane girlfriend's approval like he'd actually done. "What do they call 'em where you're from? Fuery? Wait, where _are _you from?"

"Amestris," Fuery said. "I think they call the 'fine China' the 'fine Xingese'. It's also...uh...fairly crude slang for Xingese women." He paused. "Wait, why are we talking about this? I'm supposed to be fighting you."

"Not doing it very well, are you?" Spike said. Fuery frowned and grabbed a table and threw it at Spike with such force that when Spike narrowly sidestepped it, it shattered across the wall and sent splinters flying like small daggers. Spike didn't bother dodging them, just let them stab into his shoulder without even ripping his outfit.

Spike cleared them out just in time to see Fuery rush to him; there was a complicated series of motions involving a horribly painful crushing impact in his chest, ending with Spike being smashed _through the wall_, Fuery's exoskeletal hand spread over his body and holding him painfully tight. "Okay...maybe you're doing a bit better," He admitted, wincing. Being squeezed by a machine-fist while splinters as big as knives and about as sharp were pressing into your shoulder and your head was pinned between a metal pipe and plaster fragments wasn't fun, even with his clothes providing a measure of armor.

"That's enough from you," Fuery said when Spike started kicking and thrashing in a fairly pointless attempt to get loose. "I don't really feel like hurting anybody today-" A lucky kick hit him in the shoulder, knocking him off-balance enough for his glasses to slip. "Hey, my glasses!"

Between his oversized armature, his position, and his hands in the sensitive grips so he could operate his exoskeleton, Fuery couldn't manuver himself effectively enough to fix his wayward glasses, and his awkward attempt to fix this gave Spike just enough leverage to kick the machine-arms in the elbow; it was hard, with the way he was being held, but it was enough to dislodge himself, and a simple matter to flip himself over Fuery's back and kick him into the hole he'd made. "Now stay there for a tick, right?" Spike said, pushing Fuery into the wall more thoroughly; the amplified strength of his arms meant nothing if he couldn't actually move the bulky machines in such a cramped space.

"Hey, get back here!" Fuery yelled, realizing he could hear Spike walk away. "You're not supposed to be...aw, it's going to be trouble for me, I just know it...Commander-Admiral Mustang's never going to stop laughing at me..."

"Probably," Spike said, running through an open door and leaving Fuery and his fellow guards behind. Almost at once, a roaring four-armed humanoid Machamp named Tetro threw himself at Spike with a Megaton Punch technique, fists glowing with power and hitting Spike dead-on, the vampire roaring with pain as the inhumanly strong blow nearly smashed him through the wall again, the force of it spintering one side of the hallway and knocking a few doors off their hinges. (They weren't weak or anything, Tetro was just a very tough Pokemon.) He clumsily shoved it away, getting back onto his feet and narrowly ducking another mighty punch, avoiding a third incoming punch by grabbing the offending arm and pulling the startled Machamp into the air, spun around and threw him back the way he'd came with a strength that easily matched Tetro's own.

Spike swallowed the blood in his mouth. "Why do guards and their like always get tougher as you go along?" He wondered.

"Probably because an increasingly dangerous threat encourages a greater response," Tetro said weakly. (Unlike many people, Spike had bothered to learn Pokespeak. He was surprisingly intellectual under his veneer of brutish punkdom.)

"It was a rhetorical question, you git." Spike turned and went on his way, well aware that the noise had attracted more of the guards now heading after him.

"Let's see, here...I'm in the east wing, ground level, administration set..." He muttered to himself a few hallways later, hopping off the head of a an incoming female guard and tapping her shoulder with a secret technique he'd learned in Tibet at tank-point, messing up the flow of her energy and knocking her unconcious instantly. Spike could be quite gentlemanly when he felt like it. Unfortunately for her, he didn't much feel like it and, taking advantage of the fact that she was as stiff and immobile as a statue, grabbed her and proceded to use her as a bludgeon in a short fight against three of her friends, which unfortunately all happened to be large trollish brutes made of solid rock. (Not actual trolls though, those were from another world that hadn't fallen to the Heartless yet.)

"One day, I will find you," She said afterwards, her friends all lying on the ground and blocking the hallway back, effectively cutting off pursuit from there. "I will find you and friggin' castrate you. If only because of this damn headache I got now!"

"So long as I'm forewarned," Spike said amiably, dropping her on the ground and going on his way, ignoring her amazingly invective curses and wondering distantly if women had actually invented the concept of cussing; this one certainly sounded like she had a dab hand in most of them. "All right. That's...several dozen guards down, at least half of what Herrimen's got in stock, so I'm nearly in the clear. Probably." He shrugged and went on his way.

A few hallways later (and at least fourteen badly concussed guards), he stopped in the middle of a hectic fight with a twelve-foot-tall robot and six halflings (humanlike people about half his size and twice as tough) as Bonnie Rockwaller, Zaphod Beeblebrox and the anonymous vampire (the ringleaders of the Zim-hating mob from last night he assumed), charged in from down the hall, viciously fighting yet _more _guards, whose uniforms were much less ostentatious than the ones Spike was dealing with, signifying they were of a lower rank. Their sudden intrusion was as much to the halfings and the robot as they were to Spike, and that was probably why they didn't react in time to stop Zaphod from seizing his oppertunity to ram a nearby chair into the robot's knee-joint and give it a hard enough shove to push it onto the unwisely charging guards; predicatably, the robot hit them all, unfortunately pinning it under it's weight and unable to get itself up after Zaphod locked up it's other joints with a series of small things he found around the hallway and stuffed in during the course of half a minute; a painting, a bust of Madame Foster, a rather inexplicable pinata, two of the halflings...

"Oh great, it's you," Spike said sourly, glaring at her while she was decking a female guard in the stomach with a oversized weapon best described as a combination of a staff and a rather nasty mace with the spikes sawed off. "Of all the inconvinient nuisances...what'd you do this time, eh?"

"I could say the same thing!" She said, flipping onto another guard's head and hopping off, her mace-staff flailing around in a intricate pattern that happened to involving smashing into the heads and sides of three other guards, knocking them to the ground, into the walls, and at least one through the ceiling. "You've got a lotta nerve showing your face in here after that stunt you pulled last night."

"Technically, he's not showing his face," The nameless vampire said. "He's wearing a mask...hood...facial protecting...thing. Whatever you call it."

Bonnie groaned and facepalmed. "I really hate literal-mindedness. And you guys."

"But I love stealing stuff from random guys and selling it," Zaphod said. Bonnie and the nameless vampire stared at him. "What?"

"So what's going here?" Spike asked Zaphod. "What's gotten _your _little party rolling?"

"Oh, nothing much, a minor disagreement with Mr. Herrimen over the treatment of newcomers that cause a lot of trouble and things got out of hand." Zaphod shrugged. "You?"

"Got blamed for another rumble I was actually late to. Herrimen wanted me to work off my debt and I wasn't bloody going to take that."

"That explains the guards chasing after you," Bonnie noted. She looked down Spike's path and winced. "Kind of a lot of them."

"The rabbit takes discipline entirely too seriously." Spike frowned under his mask...hood...thing. "Wait a tick. Where's the rest of your headbangers? Thought there were more of you running around."

Bonnie snorted. "Yeah, you noticed? After you dropped us down a trapdoor, the rest of us got sick of the whole thing and went to get Damage Control insurance cashed in." She smirked. "Not us."

"Actually, I don't really care, but this sounded like fun," Zaphod remarked.

"And owing to legal complications, I'm technically her man-servant," The nameless vampire said. He shrugged. "And that's why you never try to prevent Van Helsing hate crimes by hiding around doors with large frying pans." Bonnie rubbed her head and scowled. Catching her look, the vampire said, "I said I was sorry!"

"Whatever you say...uh...you...guy who you are...that's...look, what's your name again?"

The vampire froze. "I'd rather not say."

"Go on, what's the harm?" Zaphod said. "It's not like you've got something hideously stupid for a name."

"My name...it's..." The vampire shuddered, swallowed and slumped a little. "My name is Tarquin Tiesenhausen Tickgrass."

There was a significant pause. No one laughed, perhaps in pity of such a damnably bad name. "Oh, you poor unfortunate soul," Bonnie said. "Kind of sucks that you actually deserve your name."

"...Hey!"

"Well, you are a jerkass," Spike remarked. He learned around and noticed than another round of guards was coming. "Well, it's been right fun wasting time with you, but I expect you have a beating coming 'round." He jumped over Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass' head and left through an adjacent hallway.

"Dammit!" Bonnie screamed as four elite guards, who weren't wearing vests but _long coats _of pure concentrated awesomeness, glared at them with such ferocity that Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass fainted. Wait, that's not very manly. He blacked out. "How could this get any worse?"

"Excuse me, but I'm not really sure you should talk like that," A quiet voice said behind her. She turned around to see Kain Fuery standing behind them, surronded by a surly-looking Machamp and an angry woman touching her forehead tenderly. He kneeled down and turned the robot over, freeing the halflings and incidently dislodging the stuff Zaphod had stuffed into it's joints. "I didn't know you guys were in trouble too." He shrugged. "Sorry about this." He and his companions rushed, and much pain was inflicted upon the tattered remnants of the Zim-hating mob.

Spike, on the other hand, was only peripherally aware of it, being busy down the next hallway looking at the doors, in a bit of a hurry but not quite frantic. "Cleaning stuff storage closest twenty-three-A through twenty-three-F...Auditorium four, featuring documentaries for what not to do if you don't want your head handed to you...shoe depository...secret public entrance to that alternate dimension Madame Foster installed last week...ah, confiscated goods and retired documents!"

He came to a stop before a door. It was not a happy door. It was big, solid, and artfully painted to look like bricks with chains on, for some reason, and a big sign on the front that read _Absolutely No Admittance Ever Granted Now, Tomorrow, Yesterday Or At Any Point Prior To The Heat-Death of The Universe, Except For Special Permission from House President. This Means You, Bloo._ Spike kicked the door in, taking a moment to consider that if Mr. Herrimen had been truly serious about keeping people out, he could have put a sign that said something like _Do Not Obey This Sign_. It was logically impossible, absurd and could tie your brain in a knot, and anyone who saw it would be too confused to wonder what was behind the door. Obviously, Mr. Herrimen didn't care _that _much about it.

He entered a long and somewhat cluttered room, the wall lamps dimly lit, possibly for effect. It looked a lot like a room for storing unwanted things; there were old metal boxes with rusted locks, a lot of disassembled machinery lying around in open boxes, and the walls were lined with old filing cabinets that, Spike supposed, were all full of the names, files and offenses of long-dead imaginary friends; in the gaps between the cabinets were huge clockwork shelf devices, containing no less than four shelf compartments each, hand-cranked machines designed as part of the walls and floor, probably to save space. They were certainly big enough, with each compartment filled with smaller sliding drawers folding into each other in a sort of geometric puzzle. You had to have a mind like Mr. Herrimen's to design something like this, Spike thought. Orderly and neat while being mindbendingly complicated at the same time.

Hoping that whatever Mr. Herrimen had taken lately would still be in the open, he searched through the nearest ones as quickly as he dared without being incautious; he knew he had little time. In short order (in fact, at the right-hand rotator at the front of the room), he saw a familiar sword hilt lying just under a ragged blue child's blanket. Roughly pushing the blanket away, he grabbed the hilt and swung it out, freeing it from the collection of daggers, short swords, gunblades, big freaking swords, punching claws, arm cannons, axes and other assorted weapons that Mr. Herrimen had confiscated from brawls over the last few years. Spike almost admired him for the sheer volume of it all. And because he never wasted an oppertunity, he grabbed a few throwing daggers and tucked them into his sleeves, gingerly placed ten finger-claws on his gloves, took at least six daggers and knives of varying sizes and put them into sneaky hidden compartments in his clothes, all before he sheated his sword into the collection of rough straps on his coat's back. He didn't intend to use any of them right now, he just liked sharp things.

Quickly grabbing a few other cool looking stuff from the other rotators and stuffing them in his pockets, just because he could, Spike left the room and strode into the hallway, unsurprised to see a large crowd of guards and officers waiting for him, led by none other than Mr. Herrimen himself and the commanding officer of the Private Foster's Security Team, Captain Jake 'Razor' Clawson, accompinied by Acting-Lieutenant Cassie 'Stature' Lang (an unusually tall teenage girl with long blonde hair and black goggles), Second Lieutenant Freya Crescent (a pretty humanoid rabbit-rat Burmecian with a slightly pointed snout, elongated ears and a long spear) and Warrent Officer Andre (a green-skin-and-hair humanlike Jagermonster, with monstrously overgrown fangs and a snazzy dress fez), all of them wearing the longcoat uniforms of the elite, with a few variations on the higher ranked Stature and Razor.

_(The Hitchhiker's Guide had detailed articles on all four of them, even though they were, for the most part, the unseen people that keep things moving, that help the overall plot of the world going without affecting it in a obvious way. Captain Razor, for instance, was once a tech-savvy police officer in a world of humanoid cats, working alongside his partner Chance 'T-Bone' Furlong in the Air Force Squadron of the Enforcers, the local law enforcment division of their world, the pilot and gunner of a fighter plane who had a repuatation as being really good at causing headaches for their superior officer Commander Ulysses Feral, mainly for their problems with accidentally blowing stuff up, taking insane chances with their own lives and generally being annoying, hitting a peak when they accidentally destroyed their own command headquarters and were sentenced to lifelong community service in a military junkyard. _

_(This didn't quite work as expected when they realized that a lot of the stuff there was perfectly usable; Razor scavenged what he could and built a high-tech fighter jet so he and his partner could get back to doing what they loved; fighting crime, putting supercriminals in their place and working on giving Commander Feral a premature anyeurism. They took on the codnames Razor and T-Bone, referred to themselves as the Swat Kats, and went back to work, until their archnemisis Dark Kat begun experimenting in pan-dimensional portals to recruit alternate-but-still-evil versions of himself, only to accidentally pull in Killer Croc, a horrifically-monstrous human from a world of noble superheroes and foul supervillians; he was doomed to gruadually mutate into a reptilian form similar to a crocodile's, growing superhumanly powerful even as his condition worsened, becoming a cannibalistic horror that was more man than monster descending into madness and savagery. _

_Fascinated by the massive reptilian monstrosity, Dark Kat recruited him as a henchman, and Killer Croc complied, mainly because he had no idea how else to get home; in short order, the other villains the Swat Kats faced 'disappeared', their savaged bodies cropping up in pieces here and there, parts of them eaten. And it got worse when Dark Kat begun recruiting more villains from that other strange world; Scarecrow. Bane. Mr. Freeze. Deathstroke. These new villains were too much for the Enforcers and even the Swat Kats to fight effectively, culminating in the appearance of a scarred and sadistic nihilist clown called the Joker; his first act was to arrange the deaths of every single Enforcer, starting with the televised murder of Commander Feral's niece by way of Killer Croc and his...appetite, followed by all-out war as the otherworldly villains switched to following the Joker, stating that 'where we're from, when supervillains want to scare each other, we tell Joker stories'. In the end, Commander Feral died trying to stop the Joker from opening a very specific pandimensional portal, unleashing the horror of the Heartless upon that world before he and his fellow supervillains merrily went back home, the Heartless sparing their world for a while longer. Razor was the only survivor of his world, and he continued doing what he'd done even when his partner died trying to take down the Heartless threat; saving the world, one idiot monster at a time._

_(Cassie, on the other hand, didn't have such an illustrious past; she was a human girl from a world of marvels, of superheroes and villains who were defined by the horrible state of their world; racism against superhumans ran rampant and bad things tended to happen to everybody with the wrong set of genetic code. She grew up idolizing her father Scott Lang, a scientist who designed a serum after studying mutants with the power to shrink or grow to incredible sizes, devising a formula that would endow a human with the ability to shrink to the size of an insect or grow to enormous sizes; he tested it on himself, whereupon it was a complete success and moonlighted as the superhero Ant-Man, much to his daughter's awe. Both of them were unaware that second-hand exposure to him during the process of his transformation into a metahuman had given her similar abilities, though they took longer to manifast. She never discovered her powers until after she came to Traverse Town, in the wake of her world being one of the first to be attacked by coordinated armies of Heartless and stranger things. _

_(Her father was one of the superheroes, few at the time, who responded, alongside the embittered mutant Magneto, his friend the telepathic Charles Xavier, the legendary Captain America, Magneto's reality-warping daughter the Scarlet Witch, the monstrous and heroic incredible Hulk, and Miss Marvel the energy-controlling super-soldier, forming a team of heroes to avenge the thousands of people already dead. They fought back against the Heartless and the evil men and women that had brought them: villians like the angry and arrogant sorceror-technologist Doctor Doom, Thanos the lover of Death herself, the Darwinian mutant-supremicist Apocalypse and the Red Skull, a man so evil that he decided that being a Nazi was lame and switched to anarchy. Story cut short, the Heartless overrode their boundaries and devoured the world of the marvels, and those that survived the devastation were scattered far and wide across the worlds, and Cassie's dad was among the dead; the lucky few that wound up in Traverse Town had formed the bulk of the protective arm of the adventurering community, and Cassie for one upheld the ideals that her father believed in, and put them to good use once her mass-shifting powers develouped. Being a guard was just a job; she and her friend Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man and one of the few teenage heroes to fight the Heartless, were two of the founding members of the local youth hero group, the Teen Titans._

_(Freya Cresent was originally from a world known as Gaia, where she had been a renowned Dragon Knight, a warrior who emulated the ways of the dragons, from the rainy land of Burmecia. Her lover Iron-Tail Fratley had disappeared during a journey into foriegn lands, and not being the sort of woman to take her boyfriend's apparent skills into considering, she set off to find him and beat some sense into him if he was alive, and if he wasn't, she'd find his body and scare his spirit into coming back for terror of what she would do if she died and found him there. While visiting a hunting festival in the technologically marvel-city of Lindblum, she reunited with an old friend: Zidane Tribal, a chivalrous perverted thief who'd kidnapped the princess of Alexandria to sneak her into Lindblum under the name Dagger so she could meet her 'uncle', the king of Lindblum, Cid, and had picked up her stalwart knight Adelbert Steiner and a young but powerful Black Mage named Vivi Orinter. After the festival, and Dagger's running off with Steiner to parts unknown, Freya decided to join up with Zidane. This was quickly followed by them journeying to her native Burmecia as it was being ravaged by Black Mages under the command of Alexandria's Queen; Black Mages, much to Vivi's horror, were artificial creatures born to be weapons, and they were very good at it. When they tried to stop Beatrix, the ruthlessly loyal head of the powerful knights, they were soundly beaten before being mocked by Kuja, the queen's adrogynous and very nearly unclothed arms dealer._

_(They next tried to take refuge and help the surviving Burmecians escape to their neighbor city of Cleyra, a massive city-tree where their pacifistic cousins had left to years ago. Freya's attempt to take part in a ceremony to revatilize Cleyra's protective sandstorm ended disastrously, with their mystical harp breaking and the sandstorm vanishing forever. This was shortly followed by Queen Brahne unleashing wave after wave of Black Mages upon Cleyra, killing hundreds, before she commanded her own daughter's stolen spirit-ally Odin to utterly destroy the entire city of Cleyra; Freya barely escaped with her life, as did her friends and several dozen Cleyans and Burmecians. With little left to lose, she vowed to stop Brahne, particularily after she learned that Iron-Tail Fratley was alive, but had lost his memories and had no clue who she was. She and her team found many things across the continents of their world; that the Black Mages were innocent and naive constructs that develouped empathy and intelligence in time and had retreated to a little town far to the north where no one could hurt them or force them to kill, that Vivi was doomed to one day 'Stop' like them and die; that Kuja had arranged Brahne's war to fuel some hideous plan..._

_(Brahne died, and they soon found out, after a series of harrowing adventures and trials, that he and Zidane were both creatures from another world called Terra, a dry and dying world; they were both artificial creatures called Genomes, created to bring death to Gaia and harvest the souls to restore the people of Terra and give the empty shells of the Genomes life. Kuja learned that Zidane was to be his replacement, that he himself was going to die soon, and had a cosmic temper tantrum culminating in a mission to kill everything else out of spite. Somehow, this involved a trip for Freya and her friends into a trippy realm of memories and other stuff, a huge fight with Kuja, him intentionally allowing them to hammer him to a pulp so he could go into a super-mode and unleashed massive devastation before making them all travel back in time so he could destroy the original begining of the universe: somehow, a monstrous entity of death called Necron showed up and they had to fight him to stop everything dying. It worked, they went back home, and Zidane stayed behind to save Kuja, though he showed up at a play a while later after there was happiness all around: Vivi made more Black Mages so his people wouldn't die out owing to their killing the Iifa Tree that produced the soul-stuff that manufactured them, the sort-of-last Summoner Eiko Carol was adopted by CiD Fabool and his wife Hildegard, Freya started dating with Fratley, their bizarre friend Quina Qu became a famous chef after his/her/it's quest to become one, Steiner and Beatrix became lovers and the reformed assassin Amarant went into bodyguard work. But a few years after Zidane and Dagger got married, the Heartless showed up, they did their thing, and everyone died; Zidane. Dagger. Steiner. Amarant. Quina. Fratley. Everyone but Freya, Eiko and Vivi had died, the poor Black Mage's children and the rest of his race included, but they were still alive, so that's life for you._

_(Andre, unlike the others, didn't have that much of an epic story. He had been a decorated soldier in the service of the Heterodynes, an notorious family of deranged mad scientists in a world full of mad scientists, or Sparks as they were called. He earned the right to partake of the Jagerdraught, a potion made partially of the stuff of the River Dyne, the unusual river from which the sentient and homicidal home of the Heterodynes drew the immense power it required. Most people who drank the Draught died if they were lucky. Some went insane. Others mutated in interestingly horrible ways. And a lucky few became monstrous super-soldiers, somewhat like the stories of the man who became a creature of pure evil, except these monsters replaced 'evil' with 'undiluted deranged awesomness': Jagermonsters. The top of the Heterodyne's family's personal army, the monsters that struck fear into the heart of other monsters, and for some reason had a cult of personality centering around cool hats._

_(The Heterodynes were insane, even by Spark standards, and were extremely gifted inventors. This, in a spark, was not a good combination. This all changed when the next generation of Heterodynes arose; Bill and Barry Heterodyne, brothers who channeled their family's madness into good-natured heroics, journeying around their native Eastern Europa, righting wrongs, fighting monsters, stopping mad plots and saving girls with the help of their patchwork flesh golem constructs Punch and Judy, as well as their dignified but ill-fated friend Klaus Wulfenbach, leaving the Jagers to protect their hometown of Mechanicsburg from harm. For a while, it all went well; the world became a little bit safer, the Jagers got to be a bit more socially acceptable and cheese wasn't very expensive. And then bad stuff happened, possibly involving Bill's mysterious wife Lucrezia after Klaus disappered; an entity called the Other attacked Castle Heterodyne, irrevocably damaging it and driving it insane-er. Their son Klaus, named in honor of their missing friend, was found crushed, and Lucrezia missing with her lab in shambles. Bill and Barry both went a little crazier and set off to hunt down the Other, who was infecting random people with slaver wasps that transformed them into shambling zombielike revenants._

_(In time, the revenants were largely gone, though the slaver wasp hives remained. The Heterodynes disappeared, and the Other was presumed defeated, what with the lack of horrible shambling hordes and all. And with them, there was a powerful vaccum ready to be filled by bloodthirsty Sparks, bloodthirsty nobles, bloodythirsty Spark nobles and foriegners. and then Klaus Wulfenbach showed up, his infant son in tow, and he immediately set off on fixing the problem by taking advantage of the fact that he was a Baron, rallied what troops, fighters and machines he could make and created an empire of sorts based exclusively on telling everyone to quit acting like idiots and obliterating everyone that said 'no'. He employed the Jagers, since they were out of work at the moment and super-soldiers are always handy, on the provision that they have a few wild ones out and about to search for the Heterodynes and satisfy their loyalty to House Heterodyne. So, things were pretty good then; Baron Wulfenbach was an benevolent overlord, operating on the principle of 'Don't make me come down there', and otherwise ignoring people, provided they didn't mess around with artifacts of the Other. _

_(Andre was one of the Jagers that signed up with Wulfenbach, and settled down happily as one of those faceless mooks that does his job and has fun with it, busying himself with constantly hitting on the sadistically homicidal but motherly construct Von Pinn and keeping his fellow Jagermonster Gorb from being too stupid. Aside from meeting Agatha Heterodyne, the long-lost heir to the now-heroic house of Heterodyne, he hadn't done much important. Surprisingly accurate rumor had it that his world was just fine, he'd somehow got involved in an ill-advised experiment with ancient ruins, a banana peel and a overactive thinking engine, getting him stuck in Traverse Town until he could get back home and rejoin his brothers; as a Jaegermonster, he was going mad from the agony of seperation from the pack. On the other hand, he'd come to think of the Foster's Security Team as his new pack, so there's that.)_

Mr. Herrimen looked at Spike, his mustache twitching. "The game, as they say, is up, Master William."

Spike took a good long look at the assembled people around them. A lot of them were passingly familiar, in the sense that they had smacked his boots, fists and various improvised weapons with themselves. Most of them had the bruises and vaugely dizzy expressions to show it. Tetro the Machamp shook two fists at him, while a robot and six halflings opted for menacing glares. A whole two-score of human guards of varying genders (the women far, _far _less hurt than the men) made a number of threatening gestures at him. A good number of Pokemon were less reserved, growling and snarling and hurling vitrolic insults at him. A low background murmur saying mostly unkind things and promises of dispoportionate retribution would have made most people very nervous.

Spike spread his arms wide, as if to say _Is this all_? "Well, now this is a proper change of pace. Hate fighting one-on-one, I do. If you're going to send your little security team, you ought to send the whole thing, yeah? A proper one-on-all beatdown, that style of thing."

"Things aren't as one-sided as they look!" Kain Fuery said indignantly, near the back.

Spike blinked at him. He had certainly _not _been expected to see him there. "Oh, you've gotta be putting me on. I put you half through a wall! After you did the same to me, but not half as well."

Fuery frowned. One of the numerous women covering him like an honor guard (or a fanclub), one Warrent Officer Risa Koizumi, stood up and angrily said, "Yeah? And he _still _managed to get out on his own and follow you, help all the guys you knocked around, pull them together and meet up with the rest of us!"

Spike gave Fuery a dubious look. Fuery shrugged, looking slightly embarrased. Mr. Herrimen coughed. Startled, Spike looked at him again. "If I may, Master William?" Spike shrugged, indicating that he wasn't bothered one way or the other. "You've wasted quite a lot of time here. I am offering a chance to return to your assigned duties and repay your debt to the house, as you were _supposed _to before this ill-timed attempt to escape. And apologize to the fine men and women-" A few people that weren't human, animal or mineral but still capable of taking offense coughed. "Ahem. And others, that you assaulted."

"'Assaulted'?" Spike said. "They were trying to capture me, you remember. I think a little fighting back is warrented under the circumstances, yeah?"

Razor tapped Mr. Herrimen on the shoulder with a claw before the rabbit could say anything. "Mr. Herrimen?"

"Yes, Captain Clawson?" Mr. Herrimen said.

"There's a thing, sir," Said Razor. He was a tall, lean anthropomorphic cat with short tan fur, and signifying his rank was his outfit, which wasn't dissimilar to Spike's, aside from being primarily green with yellow undertones and a long purple coat. And a nice pair of black goggles. They were almost as nice as a good hat. "Much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Pratt-"

"_Spike_," Spike said empathetically.

"Yeah, that too, he has a point. Technically, anybody who can be said to be fighting back against an opposing force that moved first can't be considered to be commiting a crime."

Mr. Herrimen frowned. "What? Are you quite sure?"

"I do get a special corrospondence from the Judgemasters whenever they have an official law amendment made," Razor said, somewhat reproachfully. "Helps to have contacts in their ranks."

Mr. Herrimen groaned. "Then I suppose it would be unlawful for me to punish him for that, exactly. Whoever thought that a law like that would be a good idea?"

"If memory serves," Acting-Constable Stature said, "Field-Admiral Gibbs proposed it six months ago. I thought the same thing as you, sir, and checked the minutes for that hearing. His rationale was that street fights are so common that it'd be a waste of time trying to get someone arrested for roughing someone else up, espicially the courts, and that criminals were actually using it as a defense against vigilantes that took them in. I believe the whole idea is part of the town law's idea to leave people alone unless it gets _really _out of control or is actually dangerous to other people than the ones involved. Let them bother themselves and leave the courts out of it."

"I still don't think that's very sensible, and I told them so!" Mr. Herrimen glared at Spike. "So, what will it be, Master William? Please tell me you'll do the intelligent thing and kindly surrender yourself and return to your appointed duties. And return all the items I confiscated from you. They'll be returned to you _after _you absolve your debt to the house, which is much greater now with the damage you've caused." His bushy eyebrows furrowed, wondering just why one man required so much manpower to recover.

"That's _unlawful_ indebted servitude," Spike said flatly. "For one, it's a thing to make a body serve his debt to you and this place by doing some chores, fix the damage he did and maybe take some of the pressure off the ones that _do _work here, and then it's another to force him to do it when he didn't even do what you're condemning him for!"

"Oy, not this again," Tetro the Machamp groaned. "Mr. Herrimen found you in that ballroom with the place wrecked, right after you dropped a damn _chandilier_ to the floor!"

"Hy alvays t'ought dat dose t'ings is trubble," Andre said in a thick, Germanesque accent. "Hyu get big chandy...chandolor...chandi'liar...big hanging fancy t'ing, summun's gun knock it down for de laffs, yeah? Hy do it all de time!"

"That explains the mess left in your wake," Freya said. "And why you've been fired from sixteen cleaning companies on this continent alone."

"Oy, there were extenutatating circum'tanses!" Andre replied. He spoke like spelling was something optional. "Hy got certain instinks, hyu know? I see guys runnink, Hy gots drop de big hanging fancy t'ing!"

"Perhaps," Freya acknowledged. "But it's the principle of the thing. It's practically common manners to drop it on the opposition, not to make a mess."

"I already told the rabbit the first time, there _was _a big fight!" Spike said. "All right, I'll admit I dropped the chandilier for kicks and laughs, but most of the damage had nothing to do with me. The cut-up bits, I'll own up to."

Mr. Herrimen sighed. "Master William. Will you kindly give up on this cockanamie story about some fiend that ambushed a number of new refugees and three perfectly respectable public-good fighters? I have seen the place, and I have no evidence of a massive Heartless attack!"

Quite a few people shuddered at the thought of so many Heartless in the building, even if most of them didn't believe it. The very thought was going to give them nightmares; more than a few of them still remembered nearly invisible killers entering their homes and houses, turning their homes into gore-splattered slaughterhouses even before they let loose the flood of the dark. "Besides, no Heartless can enter the house anyway," Freya said. "The security sensors would lit up like infrared in a firestorm."

"Actually, the security system is down," Razor said glumly. Kain Fuery, being the man assigned to repair it until Spike's escape attempt had required all availiable hands to capture him, nodded. "We're still working on who did it and bringing it back up."

Mr. Herrimen cleared his throat loudly, neating cutting the near-panic at this statement in the bud. "Be as that may, we have little to fear from _those _monsters. We have quite enough of our own strength to defend ourselves even without the aid of pointlessly complicated machinery. Oh, and Master William?"

"What?" Spike said, already long tired of this pointless stand-off.

Mr. Herrimen reached into his vest and pulled out what looked like a small round device made of tightly wound brass parts. He lightly tossed it at Spike. "Catch."

Spike caught it purely from reflex. "Eh? What's this thing-" He felt the device start clicking and _moving_. "Oh hell." With a loud flurry of clicks and snaps and other mechanical noises, the little device suddenly unfolded, exploding into a number of large, long spider-leg shaped waldoes that snapped into position around him in a flurry of movement that ended with them tightly wrapped around him in a small round cage, perfectly locked into each other and immobilizing him completely. "I refuse to believe that actually worked."

"Well, seeing is believing," Stature said cheerfully.

"No it's not. Seeing is the moment when believing no longer actually operates. You can't believe in what you know to be true."

"Don't be so literal-minded." Stature said while Andre kicked the side of Spike's cage for laughs. "Not bad work, Mr. Herrimen."

"Well," Mr. Herrimen said with quiet pride. "Overly complicated machinery _does _have it's moments. Shall we, gentlemen? Also, you may be interested to see that you're not our only difficulty."

"Eh?" Spike said.

Mr. Herrimen gestured as two guards came round, dragging three cages behind them on wheels attached to the cages for the lazy warden on the go. "Hey" Bonnie said sourly as she was dragged over to them by another guard. Zaphod and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass, locked in two other cage-traps, said their hellos.

"Ah, they caught you lot too, eh? Not surprised, me."

"You know, the odds of a whole team against a few guys like us aren't _nearly _as one-sided as they are in TV," Zaphod said. "Or in my case, personal experience. I should sue whatever planned my life out. That's false advertising!"

"But it _was _completely one-sided," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said, puzzled.

"Yeah," Stature remarked. "We totally whupped you guys. Score for the guards!"

"But it's supposed to be the other way, though!" Bonnie protested. "A few people against a dozen guards _always _ends up badly for the guards!"

"Unless it doesn't, for the sake of humor," Said Mr. Herrimen, who knew more about the nature of reality than he let on. He paused. "I say, did one of of you call back-up?"

"Nuh-huh, sir," Andre said, puzzled. "Evervun's right here!"

"Then who is this?" Mr. Herrimen said as a young teenage tiger-boy came around the corner with an animate skull following him, both of them wearing comically oversized sombreros fitted for their heads.

Hobbes came to a stop. He stared at the hallway filled to the brim with very tough guards of all shapes, sizes and varying weaponry, few of them in a semblence of a good mood and clearly raring for someone weaker to beat up. In cages were four people that had been getting on his nerves, and only one of them was technically an ally, and Hobbes only thought so because King Garfield had said so.

There was a long awkward silence.

"I swear, it's not what it looks like!" Stature said hurredly, instantly concluding from the tiger-boy's bemusement, awesome clothes, good looks and general aura of quiet suffering at the hands of the universe that he was a Good Guy.

"You mean you don't have over a few dozen highly skilled guards crammed into a single hallway with a young girl, an idiot, an idiot vampire and another idiot vampire in wheeled cages looking beat up while you lounge around like jerks?" Morte said.

"Which idiot vampire am I?" Spike wondered.

"Okay, it's exactly what it looks like," Stature admitted.

"Hin our defense, it vos all warrented!" Andre said defensively. "Most uf us vere after Spike, since he's so very really toff, and all uf us started chasink him ven we noticed vot was goink on, and den dose other idiots made trubble and ve had to ketch dem too and-" He paused. "Gott's leetle feesh in trousers, vy am Hy tellink you this!"

"...I'm not sure," Hobbes said slowly. "I'm having trouble understanding anything you say."

Andre glared. "Hyu sayink dere's sometink fonny about de vay I talk?" He said suspiciously. "Hy talk just fine in spite uf speaking clear German when everyvun else is saying the Eenglish or votever language dey're sayink! I dun talk fonny, you all talk fonny! De whole stinkink _vorld _talk fonny! _Und you eet too many cheeseburgers!_"

"...Is there someone else we can talk to?" Morte asked.

"No. Now go avay or Hy'll taunt you a second time."

"But you didn't taunt us," Hobbes pointed out. "You just ranted a bit."

"...Den go avay or Hy'll taunt you the first time. Better yet, go avay and get a nicer hat!"

Hobbes tapped his sombrero. "But I like my hat...I just bought in a vending machine in the hall. I didn't know they made machines that could dispense stuff like this."

Mr. Herrimen got over his shock. "I say, who are you!"

"Us?" Hobbes said. He glanced at Morte. "We're...uh..."

"Hobos," Morte said.

"Ninjas," Hobbes said. They glanced at each other. "Hobo-ninjas. Very well-dressed hobo-ninjas. Our friends call us Not-At-All-Well-To-Do-Well-Dressed Ninjas."

"And we're on our way to...the North Pole?" Morte said.

Mr. Herrimen tilted his head. "You're very lost. This _is _the southern continent."

"Is it? Er, of course, of course. We'll be on our way?" Morte said to Hobbes pointedly. Hobbes didn't answer, as Spike had squirmed around and gotten a good look at him.

"You!" He shouted. "_YOU!_ Of all the damned lucky coincidences! You get me out of this mess! I did you a favor, you're going to leave me here, eh? You call that honorable? 'Cause I don't!"

"What is he babbling about?" Mr. Herrimen asked Hobbes. "Do you know each other?"

Hobbes didn't say anything. He was thinking. So Morted spoke up. "Can't say I do, never seen him in my life, wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him if I had arms to throw him with, we'll be going now. Right? _Right?_"

Hobbes still said nothing. On the one hand, he could do the practical thing and run away very quickly. It would cause little trouble, and he could grab Calvin and Zim, get them out and find someplace else to annoy people. On the other hand, that would be leaving Spike behind. And that..._that _was wrong. He had helped them, in his own way, annoying and reluctant though it had been. And the King had said to go to him, and the King understood people.

Hobbes shifted position. When you put things like that, there was only really one choice. A scale only slid one way in his point of view. "Of course," He said dreamily. "Yeah. That's what we'll do."

"Good, let's go and stop bothering the nice people!" Morte said.

"Okay. Let's not forget our luggage though." Hobbes sprang. There was a inhumanly fast and jarring series of movements that left crumpled footprints in the walls and ceilings, a brief yank that resulted in Spike's cage disappearing from Mr. Herrimen's easy reach, and another bunch of jumps and bounds across the walls made with such force that they left more imprints on the surfaces of propulsion. In the space of less then two minutes, Hobbes was back in his original position, down to his exact stance, only he was now holding Spike's cage by a handy bar. "There, I got it. No problems."

"What-what?" Mr. Herrimen yelped in mingled horror and amazement at the impossible thing he had just seen; a person moving so fast the only evidence of his movement were the impacts on the walls and Spike's altered location. Razor made a signal, and the other guards moved into position behind Freya, Stature and Andre. "Now hold just a moment, that man is wanted for crimes against this house! What do you think you're doing!"

Hobbes heisitated, but only for a moment. "What I must," He said.

"What's that supposed to mean!" Bonnie said from her cage, finally squirming enough to see Hobbes.

"You owe us too!" Zaphod said.

"Actually, I'm fine with this," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said. "Being all pinned up by pretty girls like this makes me feel warm and fuzzy." Several people moved away from him.

"Uh, no," Hobbes said. "You guys tried to hurt me last night. I spent all night running away just because I was associated with another guy! And I think you guys are jerks."

"It's a fair cop," Zaphod admitted.

"...Ah, fine, I get where this is going, let's get the idiot chase started and the ass-kicking fight filled with awesome-sauce started then," Morte said. Everyone looked at him. "I've been around a while, I know how this sort of thing goes."

"Actually, I thought you'd be opposed to a rescue at all on grounds of inconvience," Hobbes admitted.

"Tch. I'm a studied jerkass, not a _bastard_."

"Ah," Hobbes said. "Bye now!" He said to Mr. Herrimen and the guards, hopping on top of Spike's cage in an awkward squat, digging his claws into the nearest wall and pushing them off with all his strength, sending them screaming down the hall with a tortured noise that suggested the wheels of the cage were going much faster that they were ever intended to, that carpet was being shredded and the force of their speed was knocking statues, armor and other decorative stuff all over the place.

The guards stared as Morte glared at Hobbes, still floating in the hallway by himself. The mechanical shrieking stopped abruptly, replaced by a meek squeaking while Hobbes wheeled his way back to Morte and picked him up. "Stuff like this is going to happen a lot, isn't it?" Morte asked.

"Probably," Hobbes said sheepishly.

"Hmph." They went back through tearing down the hall faster than was strictly neccesary.

"Well," Freya said after a moment. "That was unexpected."

"Even in this town," Stature agreed.

"Shouldn't you be chasing after them?" Mr. Herrimen asked.

The four elite guards blinked, embarrased. "Oh, right," Razor said. "Sorry, sir."

"And why was it you four that beat us up?" Zaphod wondered. "I mean, you guys are big-time elite guards. Spike fights you guys, well, it's anyone's guess who'd win but you could have at least got him cornered, yeah? Why'd you waste your time on small-fry like us?"

"Er, for de braggin' rights?" Andre said uncertainly. "Dispite you three bein' not dat toff?"

"Who are you calling small fry?" Bonnie said indignantly. "Do I _look _small!"

"He meant in terms of your capacity for violence and disruption, not your body shape," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass, the vampire with a name so unforunate and goofy it deserved to be repeated at every oppertunity, said.

"Are you calling me fat?" Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass groaned and banged his head against his cage.

"That does it," Mr. Herrimen said. "Master William has been running amok for over an hour now, Miss Frances refuses to curtail him, he's diverted all personal from attending to other crises that might have arisen, someone appeared out of nowhere and absconded with Master William while all of you stand about bickering, and I hardly need to bring up that business with our latest batch of newcomers and the plants in the aviary. Nothing could make anything worse, and that is an absolution that will never be contradicted ever."

"Sir, you don't keep plants in an aviary," Freya pointed out. "That's a arborium. Aviaries are for birds."

"It _was_, until this morning."

"Ah."

"Let's just catch those guys, okay?" Razor said. "They're probably halfway across the house by now!" In fact, they had actually paused at a malfunctioning vending machine because they were all hungry, but he had no way of knowing that.

"To needlessly overcrowded battle where the laws of the conservation of ninjutsu need not apply!" The less important background guards cheered.

...

"Well, that was an absurdly epic and dramatic fight with little basis in rationale," Zuko said after Calvin and Zim had stopped fighting.

"Yep," Danny said. "Espicially after they both got fighting staves from that tree-reshaping thing Calvin did, lit their ends on fire and spun off fireballs at each other while flipping around a series of earthen pillars Toph got them to fight upon. I can't even remember what we were doing or thinking before all of it happened."

"And it must remain that way forever," Calvin said. "And if it doesn't, I shall shoot you in the face with a bazooka. Have a meatpie." Danny did, and pronounced it delicious.

Calvin's gambit to get everyone's mind off the horrible demises of almost all their friends and almost certainly that of Tucker, Sam and Danny's families had worked. Zim had eventually caught on, and they both endeavored to make the fight as dramatic and awesome as possible, just to get their attention. It had worked extremely well, and in fact a crowd had appeared around them before anything particularily exciting had happened; Sokka had managed to make a lot of money from admissions sales, and when people had pointed out that anybody could just see them fight without paying anyone, Sokka had threatened to sic Toph on them, a threat that would have cowed even a rampaging oliphaunt.

And for some reason, a number of imaginary friends had seen fit to set up a bunch of stalls offering delicious food right by the fight, presumably to cater to the early-morning snackers. None of them understood how the stalls had gotten there, when they had been built so fast or even why someone would go to that kind of effort for such little potential profit, but it was a convienient means for them to get some kind of semblence of a breakfast. (Well, Calvin had stopped by the Foster's dining hall earlier to catch some breakfast and get some to Hobbes, but they were probably closed now and he saw no reason to point this out to anyone, because he wasn't feeling in much of a jerk mood. Yet.)

"Get your meatpies! Hot happy-making meatpies!" Cried Wilt the imaginary friend, from behind one stall, wearing a billboard sign around his neck that said something to the effect that this stall had meatpies, they were good, cheap, and in rather smaller print claimed that they probably weren't stolen from the kitchen and you _might _not be punished for being accomplices in theft and it was probably best not to ask when, hypothetically, they had been stolen and where they'd been kept until now. Either way, the pies were still good. "Uh, Bloo?" Wilt said to the small blue imaginary friend behind the stall, selling the pies and making change. "Is this, I don't know, on the level? It seems kind of fishy to me."

"That's just Eduardo's barbequed fish you're smelling," Bloo said dismissively. "You've read your sign, you know it's all good!"

"That's the thing. I was created to teach how to play basketball and good sportsmanship," Wilt said. "I know all about lousy contracts, legal loopholes untrustworthy schemers use to exploit people and stuff like that! And, Bloo, this doesn't seem right to me..."

"Ah, you worry too much. The food is fresh, sort of, people are getting what they want and I'm getting money. What more good anyone want?"

"Proper compensation for being your slave labor?" Mac said sourly. Bloo had forced him to wear an apron for no apparent reason while he sold 'advice' to people at his particular stall. Bloo thought that people wanted that sort of thing early in the morning, and most of it tended towards the nature of 'buy more stuff from Bloo'; it was Bloo's idea. He thought consumerism drove the spirals of economic happiness.

"Silly, silly Mac," Boo said kindly. "Slaves don't get paid! That's part of the definition! They do what they're told and they deal with it! They don't need money, just the satisfaction of a job well done! Like trained chimps."

"Coco co co coco co!" Coco squawked. Minimoose, the latest addition to their group, squeaked.

"Whattaya mean, 'trained chimps like to go crazy and eat their trainer's faces off'?" Bloo said, confused.

"I'm sorry, but Bloo's not good with subtlety," Wilt said to Minimoose.

"What's that suppoed to - hi, how can I help you?" Bloo said as new customers approached.

"Oh good, it's you," Zim said with a complete lack of enthusiasm, followed by Aang, Katara and Tucker. "I was so looking forward to seeing you again. _SO I CAN SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A WAVE MOTION GUN!_"

"Already tried that on the one ballroom back in the house?" Bloo said slyly.

"Say what?" Katara said. "What's he talking about, Zim?"

"Nothing!" Zim said quickly. "He lies, with the chicanery and falsehoods and subterfuges and proposals for spin-off series that promise to be good but almost always suck."

"What?" Wilt said.

"Huh?"

"I heard that _someone _ran amok in a ballroom, crashed a chandilier and totally trashed the place," Bloo said cheerfully. "And since there's a bunch of guys around that want to beat you up because you broke into their places and lit their stuff on fire, doesn't take a genius to guess that it was you making trouble."

Aang, Katara and Tucker stared at Zim. "You have issues," Tucker said after a moment.

"Can't we go anywhere without you inducing a lynch mob?" Katara asked Zim angrily.

"Well, there was that one time in the mystical paradise of Shangri-la," Aang said. "Wait, no, that doesn't count, not after all those reanimated corpses and that thing with the cyborg-llamas. I wonder what the llamas were doing there?"

"This mob," Zim asked Bloo. "They're not around here, by any chance, are they?"

"Nope. Most of them either went over to Damage Control to get their insurance cashed in, commit insurance fraud or move to another continent. Something about Spike dumping them into a trapdoor that led into a septic tank, I don't know. I know Zaphod, Bonnie and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass wanted to beat you up, but eh, they're not that bright, you know?"

Katara giggled. "I'm sorry, but what was that name again?"

"Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass?"

Katara and Aang both laughed and Tucker snickered like an idiot. Zim tilted his head. "Who?"

"Idiot vampire, hangs around Bonnie Rockwaller, smells a little bit like a dead fish. Because he baths in dead fish to ward away the clowns that live under his bed."

"...Is that so."

"Yeah, the clowns are filing for joint custody of the house-"

Minimoose shoved Bloo aside and squeaked in joy. "Minimoose!" Zim said as Minimoose tackled his chest in the closest thing the robot could come to a hug. "What are you doing here?"

"Ow," Bloo said.

Minimoose squeaked. "You had a delightful adventure with your new...girlfriend, involving many interesting furry animals, the majestic moose and the answering of the question of the maximum air-speed velocity of an unladen African swallow carrying a coconut? And fishing?" Zim said.

Minimoose squeaked. "And then you followed Coco and reunited with her small band of imaginary friends and human boy Mac, had further harrowing adventures that you now suspect to be related to the troubles I caused?" Zim listened and Minimoose squeaked. "And what makes you think that I may have accidentally awakened an ancient spirit of chaos and spite because the extent of how lost I got in my own travels generated a time-space flux that disturbed the higher planes? Oh, it told you so. And then it went into outer space to get away from me and my being-lostness? Okay, so how'd all this get here?" Minimoose squeaked. "Really. With a hyperspace cube that looks like a ball?" Minimoose squeaked. "They did it without wrecking the fabric of the universe dispite invoking the power of ancient creatures never meant to be awakened before the stars are right?" Minimoose squeaked. "Hmn. And you wish to remain here for the interim to collect more information?" Minimoose squeaked. "Oh, very well, if you must."

"This really hurts," Bloo complained. A force field flashed under him and blasted him into the air, and he fell back into the ground. "...That hurt more..."

Ignoring him, they bought some meatpies from Minimoose (and after checking them with Irken instruments to make sure Zim could eat them) and left. "So, you had an eventful night, huh?" Tucker said dryly to Zim.

"You've no idea," Zim said, twitching a little. He was never going to look at mansions the same way again. Of course, he'd used to view them as extravagent sources of firewood, but this was probably a healthier view.

"Hey, over here!" They heard Calvin yell from around another stall, where he, Zuko, Danny, Sam and Sokka waiting and eating the food they'd gotten.

"So, that was a pretty good fight you guys did," Aang said to Zim. "Like that bit when yor friend shot you with a cannon he made from the ground but it backfired and almost ran him over."

"And I used the fire from the explosion to hit him around like a lash smacking a pig," Zim said dreamily. "Until I lost control and it backfired on _me_."

"You try too hard to control the fire," Aang advised. "Don't try to force it to do want you want. You sort of want to _guide _it, make yourself a channel for it. Aw, it's kind of hard to put into words..."

"But would Firebending technique apply to what I'm doing?" Zim asked. "I'm not sure if I qualify as a Firebender."

"Let me clarify our decision," Zuko said. "Do you shoot fire?"

"Yes."

"Do you control fire?"

"A little bit."

"Do you feel like..." Zuko patted his chest awkwardly, trying to put some difficult concept into words. "I guess, like a fire, but inside of you. Like your _spirit's _on fire, but it's a good thing, like the marrow in your bones burns like the sun, and when you're in the heat of the moment, every single part of you is roaring to do what you have to?"

"...Yes," Zim said after some careful consideration. He wondered for a moment about the incredible heat he'd felt periodically from inside him, like an internal furnace had set up shop when he wasn't looking. Right now, it was barely noticable, a comforting pulse echoing his heartbeat, but when he had been fighting, when he had drawn on his own body heat and amplified it into bursts of fire he shaped with wild abandon, it was like he _was _a tiny part of the sun, gloriously alive and unstoppable.

_Is this how Zuko and Aang feel all the time?_ He wondered. Zim had always wondered how Zuko could be so withdrawn one moment and be such a explosive bundle of enthusiastic drive the next, but this certainly explained a bit.

"Then you're a Firebender," Zuko said flatly. "Or close enough. I noticed a few interesting things during your fight."

"Like what?" Calvin asked.

"You bend like we do," Aang said. "You make fire by amplifying your own internal heat and transform it into energy within yourself. It's not quite like we do-" Aang exhalted, breathing out a brief stream of fire into the air above them, giving a few people a start. "I didn't see any particular emphasis on breathing, and all Firebending that me and Zuko know about involving breath control. I think it has something to do with it mixing with your own internal heat, kind of like what I think you're doing."

"Is it?" Zim said. Calvin looked very interested. "Hrm...I wasn't really thinking about how I was doing it, but that sounds right, I think."

"Also, your style isn't unlike the Dancing Dragon," Katara said. "Except it's a lot more...how do I say this nicely...unpolished?"

"Hey, I'm only doing what I've seen Zuko and Aang do in fights," Zim said irritably. "And I know little about the actual spiritual physics behind their moves or whatever this magic nonsense operates on." Katara stared to correct him. "Yes, I know, magic isn't bending, icebergs are not for sleeping, I've heard it before, big deal! So how does all that explain him?" He gestured at Calvin. "He's no Firebender."

They looked at Calvin, who looked uncomfortable with the scrunity, rather like a little kid who traveled to a lot of different schools and expected to be beat up by the cool kids on principle. "That's...a good question," Aang said.

"He definitely doesn't fight like anyone I've seen," Toph remarked, fully aware of the mental slapping her 'seen' comment invoked. "He really likes moving in a fight, a bit like an Airbender, but that...that whatever he was doing with blasts and stuff wasn't anything like Airbending."

"Looked like it though," Sokka observed. "Except whenever he did it, it looked like he was...moving with something. Like when you guys mess around with magic water or fire."

"Or they could ask me instead of talking like I'm not here..." Calvin muttered grouchily.

Toph had better ears than he expected. "Then explain," She asked him.

"...What?"

"Explain. How'd you do that stuff you did?"

He hadn't expected that either. "Oh. Uh..." He didn't often get the chance to explain how he could do his special skills, or a captive audience. (Though he sometimes _did _get a literal captive audience. He was a mad scientist, after all.) "Well...I don't really know how Bending operates, and since that's what you and I suppose Zim are most familiar with, you'd probably get in best in those terms, but..." He shrugged. "What I was doing was pretty basic theurgical skills. I was just transfering kinetic energy and the power of my muscles into bursts of telekinetic force." He shrugged. "Not that hard, once you get the hang of it, though I've never gotten the hang of precise, sustained telekinetic manipulation."

"Theurgy?" Danny asked. "What's that?"

Calvin frowned. "I guess...'holy magic' might be close enough, but it's more of a branch of theologically-aligned philosophy from my country's history that's hung on for ages. It's pretty complicated, goes on with things like the universe is probably alive in and of itself owing to the function of the spiritual growth of living worlds (that is, worlds that have life upon them, not neccesarily sentient worlds even though they exist), how the whole of the universe is a massive flow of concensus belief originating from the background level of reality cohesion from the Will that holds the universe together...wait, I'm losing you, aren't I?" Sokka and the others nodded, though Aang and Sam looked quite interested and were following it well enough. "Okay. Basically picture a relaxed priesthood that's been hanging around forever, isn't very pretentious and has been doing it's part to keep the nations of my world-system from killing each other since forever while silently guiding spiritual develoupment of cultures and people. Like the nicer kind of secret society."

"We might know a thing or two about that," Zuko said dryly.

"Cool. Now, one thing they've passed on here and there is the study of psychotheistic skills, mind-and-body disciplines and fields of magical study collectively known as theurgy or, if you want to get formal, the 'Divine Art of Harmonious Drive' . It's one of my main fields of research; for one thing, it has a lot of practical applications, such the physical disciplines as allowing you to selectively bend the more boring laws of physics as long as what you're doing is interesting enough. Like superpowers you get from training in martial arts all the time." Calvin shrugged again. "What I did was a fairly basic technique that involved diverting forces and stuff and shaping it into blasts. It's the basis of a martial art called the Royal Guard Form."

The Benders in the group looked at Calvin with interest while the others worked it out. "Cool," Toph said. "You're a Realitybender."

"I am?" Calvin said.

"You are?" Zim said, alarmed. Why did this boy keep outclassing him at everything! "Oh come on, you didn't do _anything _like that all the times I saw you fight last night!"

"Did too! All fields of natural philosophy have a starting point, and mine was theurgy!" He paused. "Of course, you could say that about just about everyone with metanormal skills where I come home. Theurgy isn't exactly secret. I mean, the old regime of the Comic Kingdom was a sadistic madhouse run by mad scientists and bloodthirsty warlords that liked destruction too much to stop adding worlds to the ol' empire even when it wasn't about collecting resources, and the technical title was Theurgist. Still is, actually. My dad was one back then-"

"Oh come on, you just said it was a secret society! How can a secret society's secrets be out in the open!"

"You mean like how only a dedicated martial artist knows how to turn his entire body into a lethal weapon but any idiot can karate chop and not hurt themselves if they're lucky?" Calvin said. "They _liked _spreading knowledge and the basics of, uh, _Realitybending_ like you said, so people wouldn't be killed in crossfires, rampaging monsters and target practice by bored military-types!" He paused. "Also, the guy who taught me and Hobbes? Big member."

"Wow," Sokka said. "Your homeworld sounds like a real shithole. No offense." He glanced at Zuko. "He makes the Fire Nation sound almost humane."

"Not post-war Fire Nation," Zuko said darkly.

"Yeah, sure, that too."

"Oh, it was an awful place to live," Calvin said. "It didn't even start to stop until King Garfield and his rebels beat the snot out of the psychos in charge, took power and tore down the old structure one festering, atrocity-striken, genociding piece of evil at a time." He paused. "And that was when I was _six_. I picked up skills like that as a matter of neccisity. In those days, you knew how to protect yourself or you died." He heisitated. "If you were lucky."

"...Ah," Zim said slowly while the others gave Calvin surprised looks. Except Zuko and Toph, the two of them just looked incredibly impressed. "I suppose that's why your friend...brother...person-thing that you don't hate is so tough?"

Calvin flinched, like Zim had punched him. Zim briefly wondered if he'd said something wrong. "...Don't ask Hobbes about that stuff."

"Huh?"

"Just...don't. There's three things you _never _do in the Comic Kingdom. You don't try to pick a fight with a Void-Knight, you don't make fun of the way Orks talk, but you never, _ever _bring up the tail-end of the Evil Era around a cat that was there during the Scrubbing Business, espicially if they're tribal. You just...you just _don't_." He shivered.

Zim had seen haunted people; he looked one in the mirror all the time. Calvin, for a moment, looked every bit as tortured by private demons as Zim himself did when he thought about the logical ramifications of gleefully commiting genocide as the Irkens did, or like Danny was looking recently whenever someone mentioned their parents or family; like someone who had a hole opened up in them by something too monstrous and unkind to accept and stay sane, and something had crawled inside and made a neat little home. Something with fangs and claws and little slimy tendrils. He suddenly looked a lot older than twelve or thirteen or whatever he really was.

Under other circumstances, questions would have been posed. Understanding would have been found, possibly. But that only happened in a few other alternate universes (and at least one where everyone had reversed genders for some reason), and in this one, a loud blast, punctuated by yelling, panicked screams and a little inhuman roaring totally killed the moment.

There's a certain innate incapability for humans, Zim had noticed, to never avoid stating the blindingly obvious. Whenever _anything _like this happens, if you have a human around you can always count on them to point out what _everybody _knows, possibly as some sort of mental punctuation. Perhaps they had to remark on it to get it across to their brains. Thus, he was completely unsuprised when Tucker, Sokka, Toph and Danny all said, with outstandingly perfect unison, "What's that?"

Calvin glanced around, casually sidestepping a falling cart as it was knocked down in the crowd's rush to see what was going on. "I'd know that wussy scream anywhere." Sure enough, the roar came again and Zim recognized the hoarse timber.

"Is that...Hobbes?" Zim said, peering at a distant figure wildly fleeing in the distance. "What's he doing?"

"Running away," Toph said. "Wow. That guy's _terrified_."

"...I saw him tear off a Heartless' arm and beat it to death with it before he shoved the claws into a flame-spewing abomination's face last night," Zim said. "Cowardice is not something I associate with such a warrior."

"Hobbes has always been a bit jumpy," Calvin informed him. "Wonder what he's gotten into."

"Ooh, ooh, I'll see, I'll see!" Aang volunteered, practically hopping off the ground with one hand in the air. Since no one objected, he took that as a overwhelming affirmative (air, being the element of freedom, was not known for it's restraint) and dumped the stuff he'd been carrying into Danny's arms before he called a massive gust of wind, shaping it into a compact ball no larger than his head that he manuvered himself onto in a squat; it just nearly touched the ground before spinning like a top and sending him roaring across the grass, knocking a few people over on accident.

"Wow," Calvin said as Aang zoomed into the distance. "That was cool!" He tapped his fingers in thought. "Hrm, maybe if I created some sort of suction device to imitate that thing and compressed the air with some kind of central ammunition tank, maybe powered by a steam engine...yeah, air bullets of mass destruction!"

"Why is it everyone you bring over is a mad scientist, a person of mass destruction or both?" Sokka asked Zim.

"They resonate with me," Zim said dreamily. "Except this guy, I just wanna punch him in the face." He did.

"Ow!" Calvin complained. "What was that for!"

"I gave you ample warning! In the form of an observation."

A dustcloud made it clear that Aang was coming back, and Hobbes appeared to be coming with him. "Hey!" Calvin yelled as they neared. "What's going-"

"_RUN AWAY!_" Hobbes and Aang screamed as they rolled right through the, flattening all the stands misfortunate to be in their way. For reasons of contriviance, they were both on sperical things; Aang's construct of air, Hobbes on a small round cage with someone in it.

"On," Calvin finished.

Danny stood there in the wreckage of one such stand. "...They made me drop my breakfast." He didn't say it like it was a particular issue, but wanted to have it known. "I'm having a bad week." Sam and Tucker patted his shoulders. Their hands passed right through him, with a suggestion of transparency. "Sorry." (He felt bad that he was so bad at being heroic he couldn't let his friends comfort him properly for being the failure he was. He wasn't, really, but he felt like one over the whole 'letting Earth get destroyed and almost everyone he had ever loved or even known die' thing.)

"From what?" Sokka said.

"Those guys?" Toph suggested, pointing at a sizeable number of people in snazzy uniforms heading their way and looking incredibly annoyed. Also very tough.

Zim stared at them as they charged, a general tension going on around. The stomping of several dozen pairs of feet reverbeted through his legs like the preliminary rumbles of an earthquake, sending worrying messages to his internal organs, generally along the lines of warning them about an imminent injury. "...Oh, come on, I didn't even do anything this time! I think. Why is there an army coming here!"

"It's not an army, more of a squadron," Zuko corrected him. "Looks like private security. Aside from the uniforms, they don't seem very well organized to me."

"But shouldn't we run-" Katara started to say.

"_MR. HERRIMEN'S CAUGHT ON!_" Bloo screamed, making nearly all of them jump out of their shoes. (Except Toph, who was both unbothered or wearing shoes.) The little blue blob frantically ran from stall to stall, emptying the cash registers and shoveling the contents into his arms, which were malleable enough to make a handy carrying tray. "_RUN FOR IT! RUN LIKE YOU'RE BEING CHASED BY WEREWOLVES WITH FRICKING LASTER BEAMS! OR BEES FROM THE DARKEST DEPTHS OF PLACES WHERE NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND GOES BECAUSE EVERYTHING TRIES TO KILL YOU THERE EXCEPT MAYBE YOUR PILLOW! _Or, I dunno, some twisted combination of the two. You know what I mean."

"_Esta es una cosa terrible que suceda_!" (This is a terrible thing to happen!) Eduardo screamed. "Why Azul's money making _los regímenes de_ always be ending in the wacky hijinks that hurt?" Zuko twitched at the name 'Azul'.

"Law of narrative casuality, no doubt, sorry, but you're the casualty, bye!" Bloo said, shoving a few empty cash registers into Eduardo and Wilt's grasp. (In Wilt's case, he had to make a lucky throw.) "Giddy-up!" He said, jumping onto Mac's back, biting the back of his apron and kicking him.

"Ow!" Mac ran away with Bloo, leaving Wilt behind to awkwardly follow after them.

A panic immediately broke out among the customers who hadn't already fled. "Okay, I _really _think we should-"

"Pardon me," Said a humanoid rabbit in a nice vest and tophat.

"Go," Sokka finished sullenly. "I can't help but notice we're surronded by armed guys. And girls. And guys and girls who aren't armed but could probably kill us all without needing any."

"Yet again," Katara noted warily.

"Ah, have you lot seen a young tiger-fellow riding a cage containing a surly man indebted to this household?" Mr. Herrimen asked her, not sounding particularily interested in fighting. "He was accompinied by a vocal skull with quite the coarse attitude. I'm afraid he absconded with Master William for reasons I'm not quite clear on. I'm reasonably sure he came this way."

"And he wrecked a whole lot of stuff in the hallway!" Yelled Captain Razor. "And he didn't do it with any style at all, that really bothers me!" Mr. Herrimen looked at him. "And, uh, that's really very terrible. Because...no one appreciates how hard it is to set up old-fashioned bric-a-brac in a studiously whimsical manner. Yeah."

"T'ough to be fair, he didn' blow a hole in de house, dat vas my fault," Said Andre. "Und Hy luffed every moment again, und Hy'll do again und again und again ontil Hy'm bored! Den Hy'll hug de kitties, because Hy luff kitties. Und kultural eksibitions. But Hy HETE tradink kard games!"

"...I'm sorry, what?" Zuko said. "I didn't understand half of the things you said and the other half were only extremely confusing."

"Could we kindly hurry this up?" Freya asked impatiently. "He could be very far away from now! Did you see him or not?"

"Um...no?" Zim said hopefully.

Mr. Herrimen stared at him. "...I apologize, but I don't quite believe you," He said.

"Aw, damnit!" Sokka screamed. "Why is it we can't go anywhere without _someone _inciting some kind of crazy mob that wants to kill us all, cannibalize us, subsume our spirits into an artifact of mass destruction and make us listen to bad home videos! It's like all that Internet backlash since Zim's stint as an internet movie critic and that other alien who reviews games almost lead to World War Three! _AGAIN!_"

"...I'm sorry, what?" Stature said.

"Nothing, nothing!" Katara said hurredly. "He just, uh, has a condition! Sometimes he says loud and inflammatory things for no reason and at random!"

"...Random."

"Yeah!"

"Even though what he said was a complete sentence and fit perfectly into context. Aside from that last part."

"...Yes?"

"Alas, but for that horrible miscreant," Zim said, getting an idea. "I've an thought. We shall accompany you to apprehend that fiend and retrieve your captive, following a circumfluos route unescorted by any other of your minons and ensuring that you will _eventually _relocate them again. _Eventually_."

"...No," Mr. Herrimen said.

"That was a _stupid _idea, Zim," Zuko told him.

"Better than anything you had to say," Zim said. Mr. Herrimen's ears twitched.

"Pardon me," He said. "But...did you say his name was Zim?"

"Yes."

"Then...some of you are...and that tiger-boy was..." Mr. Herrimen sighed. "I have made a misfortunate error in judgement."

"Sir?" Captain Razor said.

"Call off the search. I believe...I have some difficulties to address."

"_HEY, HOBBES!_" Calvin yelled. "_THEY'RE NOT GOING TO BEAT YOU UP! GET BACK OVER HERE!_"

"_AANG, YOU CAN STOP RUNNING!_" Katara called after him. "_WE GOT OTHER THINGS TO DEAL WITH!_"

"Oh, come on," Freya said. "They can't possibly-"

A tremendous blast of wind interrupted her; Aang and Hobbes, their various burdens with them, landed on the ground in front of everyone. A number of guards sheepishly followed them, looking variously beat-up but much less than Spike had left them; a good majority of them even seemed grudgingly impressed with Hobbes and Aang. "Hey," Aang said.

"I may start panicking now," Hobbes said. "And I don't know when I'll stop."

"No need for that," Mr. Herrimen said. "And I apologize for hunting after you because of what I believe to be a truly noble act on behalf of Master William."

"...Oh."

"Hooray," Spike said wearily. "Sense. You've found it."

"None too soon," A guard remarked. "Having a cage occupied by a psychotic vampire thrown at you like a bowling ball and knocking everyone down is even less fun than it sounds."

"Though that bit when he bounced it off us, ricoheted off the walls, kicked it off again, hit more of us, ricocheted back and kicked it one more time and somehow _set it on fire _was really really cool," Stature said. A number of other guards, mostly girls, agreed, and Hobbes basked in the admiration.

"Where were you guys?" Toph asked. "Went back to the stables with Appa?"

"Nah, we went to that place where Zim went all pyro...er, that place where an unidentified pyromaniac went crazy on your lawn, sir," Aang said to Mr. Herrimen.

"Say what?" Mr. Herrimen shifted a bit. "...Well, it wouldn't be the first time, I suppose. Fortunately, I have insurance relating to malicious vandalism, misguided vandalism, vandalism which serves to beautify the neighborhood and vandalism that is an act of rudeness on behalf of God or gods, so that should cover any of that."

"Can someone let me out now?" Spike said.

"Okay," Toph said, stomping over to his cage, grabbing two bars and bracing herself before she tore the whole thing into two halves, slamming them together and Metalbending them into a small, contorted ball between her hands, all in under a minute.

Spike stared at her. Hobbes and most of the bystanders there gaped. Calvin was staring at her with a mixture of intense wonder and awe. Morte scoffed. "Eh, I've seen better."

"I haven't!" Toph said cheerfully, Earthbending a rock out of the ground and at Morte. Zim found his scream of surprise very cathartic after all his annoying remarks.

"Can we take her with us?" Calvin said unthinkingly. Hobbes grinned knowingly at him. "Uh...I mean...it'd be good to have someone that can shut him up like that? Why are you looking at me like that? Stop looking at me like that."

"Ow," Spike said, standing up and stretching with audible pops. "That was one of the less pleasant things I've experienced. Now I know how a hamster feels in them ball things. Tch, no wonder the little rodents are so bad-tempered..."

"Does no one care about my pain?" Morte said under the rock; Toph had been nice enough to render the ground under him absobant enough to muffle the blow. And his voice.

"No," Zim and Calvin said.

"I hate you all."

"What did I do?" Hobbes complained.

"Ahem," Mr. Herrimen said, feeling the waterfall of freewheeling comments, remarks and brief arguments was possessing everyone. "I would like to discuss something when you, Master Calvin, Master Hobbes and Master-" He made a strange noise that sounded like a cricket, a guitar riff and a burst of machine gun fire all at once.

Zim gaped at Mr. Herrimen pronouncing his name in perfect Irken. "How do you know what my name really sounds like?"

"I am quite skilled in _many _forms of decorum," Mr. Herrimen said. "Well, sirs, I would greatly like to speak to you about the matters of last night." His eye narrowed. "_Both _of them."

"What? Oh, right, the huge fight and the rampage with fire and wanton destruction and tacos," Zim said. "Wait, there were no tacos! My memories LIE!"

"Why is he yelling?"

"He's, uh, a little touched in the head?" Aang said gently.

"Nah, the gears are turning but most of 'em have slipped," Tucker said. "What, it's true!"

"Ah. Well, it would appear that Master William's story that he told to me when I discovered him in the ruins of the ballroom last night was not the fabrication I assumed it to be. So...there really was a fight there? I'd greatly appreciate it if you would explain it to me."

"Okay," Zim said.

"Wait, you are?" Calvin asked him. "I thought you'd want to fight your way out."

"Me too, but that's life for you."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"That's because I try harder."

"If you would come to my office?" Mr. Herrimen said. "I would prefer to discuss things in there."

"Okay," Zim said.

"You do that, I'll just toddle off-"

"You're coming too!" Razor said, tripping him. "He is coming too, right?" Mr. Herrimen nodded. "Whoo hoo!"

"Then let's not waste anymore time," Mr. Herrimen said. He turned around, only to find Zuko standing right in front of him. This was not a pleasant sight; being menaced by a scowling boy radiating elemental heat while a face that appeared to have been savaged by a blowtorh was quite close rarely is.

"He's not going anywhere without me," Zuko said. Mr. Herrimen couldn't help but notice the small flame that rolled out of his mouth.

"A-ah, very well," Mr. Herrimen said, trying not to react. "Friends of yours?" He asked Zim.

"From Earth," Zim said. Danny flinched again. Mr. Herrimen's expression softened and he made a gesture that might have meant 'if you must'. Getting the hint, the others gathered around them as Mr. Herrimen issued orders to them about returning to their posts and stuff, soon leaving Zim, his friends, Calvin and Hobbes, Spike and Mr. Herrimen alone.

"Also, find Master Blooregard and his tagalongs," Mr. Herrimen told Razor. "This is a deplorable mess."

"What makes you think it was-"

"It's _always _Master Blooregard."

Razor left with Andre, Stature and Freya, and Zim's group and assorted followers went after Mr. Herrimen as he led them back into the house; Zim was uncomfortably familiar with the problems that arose after they'd come into the foyer last night, and with uncanny repetition, they went along the same exact route he had taken to that hallway where he had ran into Aang last night, something both Air Nomad and Irken took note of, and this time they actually went through the big official door Zim had seen and disapproved of.

Past it was a large but tastefully decorated office, most of it occupied by things no doubt required to keep things organized; rotating filing cabinets, storage closets, a bookshelf full of what Zim assumed to be handwritten journals regarding Foster's affairs (Spike pointed this out to Zim; apparently he was in here a lot) and other bereaucratic things. In place of pride was a large portrait of a matronly woman with a strong resemblence to Frankie Foster, just behind a large heavy desk made of solid mahogany, positioned so that the portrait was the first thing anyone would see entering the office, or that anyone sitting in the desk would see getting up, based on it's position to the wall. There was also, Zim noticed, a large board covered with plaques commerating various people that had done services to the house, along with a heavy number of memorials.

Mr. Herrimen indicated the five seats in front of him. "If you would please seat yourselves..." He paused, awkwardly. "I apologize for the lack of seating, but there are quite a lot of you."

Zim took a seat, as did Calvin, while Hobbes offered his seat to Sam, while Danny sat on the floor by her. Aang and Katara managed to awkwardly share a seat (though Aang's smaller size made it doable), and Zuko got to the last seat before Sokka, Toph happily squriming into his side while Sokka fumed and sat on the floor alongside Tucker and quietly plotted revenge. Spike, being a badass, chose to stay standing and looking awesome. "We-ell," Zim drawled. "I suppose I could start when I got to this place of utter insanity, I mean mansion of abnormal geometric patterns..."

Mr. Herrimen didn't look offended, and only listened carefully as Zim, with some interjections from Morte, Calvin and Hobbes, told the story. They probably had to, what with the rampant exaggerations, lack of detail and occasional lies put in to make Zim sound better and make everything more awesome, but that's to be expected.

...

"You know, I feel I don't get enough respect," Abel Nightroad complained; he'd foregone his uniform and the creepy cross thing on his back, opting for a black shirt, a long sleeveless coat with the Union Jack on it and black cargo pants, sitting in the backseat of a large car sitting outside a large warehouse with the symbol of a stylized dragon biting it's own tail on it. Cars, as a rule, weren't all that common in this part of Traverse Town, but this one was special; it was basically a powerful engine attached to two canisters of extremely efficient Blue Eco, four wheels and large seats with a supportive and stylish exoskeletion built around it and painted blue. "Neither of us!"

"What makes you say that?" Asked Ron Stoppable; as the driver's boyfriend, he claimed shotgun a long time ago, and he had happily cashed it in, Rufus playing in the backseat with a unusually small panda no bigger than a small housecat, named Xiao-Mei. Ron himself had foregone his mission outfit, opting for his favorite short-sleeved ret net-shirt over a long-sleeved black shirt and brown cargo pants with that Traverse Town touch of awesome but impractical design ethic.

"We're sitting here in your girlfriend's car while she and my partner help out Mr. Yao," Abel said. He threw his hands up into the air. "They just left us behind like deadweight!"

"Well, bascially we _are_," Ron said, not very bothered with the concept. "There's some kind of horrible thing going on there, a twisted mockery of science that should never have been."

"Jumba Jookiba did apologize in advance."

"My point being is that your partner is a highly trained warrior-monk with super-alchemy powers of awesomeness while Kim..." Ron paused, grinning like a person of being in the rare position of dating someone they hero-worshipped. "Aw, words can't pin down all the awesome she is. Let's just say she's the anthropomorphic personification of awesome and leave it at that. Not even close to good enough, but hey, it's a start!"

"True," Abel acknowledged. "But we're pretty good too!"

"We are?"

"You're the destined hero of an ancient order of mystical monks and blessed with stupidly-context sensitive powers that function by doing whatever you feel like doing," Abel said flatly. "While I am an indestructable death machine. That eats _other _death machines."

"My powers aren't too reliable," Ron said. "I don't know if I've got problems...you know, facing up to what I can do or just Fate being a jerk and holding back the awesome, and you...uh, nothing personal but you're freaking terrifying when you actually do something useful."

Abel sighed. "It sucks being a load of useless until things get so bad that you have to run wild." Ron nodded glumly.

Rufus and Xiao-Mei looked at the humans (if Abel counted) and made a short remark on it. Xaio Meng stated that humans were lucky to get their attention, lower life forms that they were. Rufus acknowledged this, but pointed out that strange beings though they were, they were rather nice to have around. Xaio-Mei reluctantly conceded the point.

They passed a short while talking about nonsense things that didn't matter, like how Ron was doing in school before summer had led out (badly, like Abel had done when he was a kid), how Kim's adoptive parents Field-Admiral Jethro Gibbs and Izumi Curtis-Gibbs were doing after that unfortunate incident with the platypus-goblin (they were on the mend, if only Gibbs could stop that persistent problem of his leg randomly turning into a bazooka every six hours), if Kim's younger and unhinged brother Jim had stopped hallucinating about his dead brother Tim yet (the answer was no), and the possibility of Ron getting into Abel's faction, the heroic inter-religious order of the Crossguard, as a member of the Judaistic sector, the Seekers of The Truth (Abel quite frankly thought that Ron had it in him to join today and pass the training and psychological examination in a week, but this wasn't encouraging; while the Crossguard heavily encouraged a relaxed mind and an open-minded approach, the fact remained that their membership primarily consisted of reformed mad scientists and half-mad social misfits that channeled their issues in the service of their fellow sentients but not often very well.) No doubt interesting stuff was going on in that warehouse, with transforming horrors and transmutation reshaping the world into things that cut and bled and acrobatic feats to put a gecko-spider-thing to shame, but for Ron and Abel, it took a turn in words.

"Hey. Abel. Is there anyone I remind you of?"

Ah, Abel thought in the privacy of his mind though lately that space had become crowded with strange impulses and dark mutterings. That old game. He shifted in his seat and thought hard, clicking together fingernails with a sound like steel snapping. For reasons of politeness he chose not to say _My brother Cain before he went crazy_, even though it was true, and he didn't say himself, because Ron had never been an antisocial sociopath that would've liked to watch the world burn, so Abel said, "Ion...Ion Fortuna."

"That grouchy vampire royalty kid?" Dispite his complaining tone, Ron had no problems with the comparision; he listens to Abel's stories of his dead friends like he listens to everyone else, piecing together bits of everyone's past lives from those forgotten people. He knows enough about Ion Fortuna to know the face to the name, a too-pretty face of a boy who'd been born a vampire with girlishly long blonde hair so light it was nearly white, eyes the red of dying soldiers and a royal brat attitude you could shove a barn over with. Abel's stories of him had put even a voice to it, and Ron could almost hear a Russian-accented voice, growling _You're not so bad for a Terran_. "Why do I have to be a racist vampire-ambassador? You said Kim's like that girl you used to know, Esther."

"We can't all be asskicking warrior-queen nuns with shotgun powers," Abel said. It was a happy tone, light and easy; talking about all the people he'd known, all the friends he'd buried, more often than not soaked in their blood, invigorated him instead of weighing him down. For a moment, there is solemness; Esther Blanchett, brave and fierce girl she was, went out like royalty out of legend, like a flame against the darkness: her light was snuffed out, but she burned the hand that did the deed and Cain said he was sorry after; even his damaged and ruined heart had room for pity.

Sometimes they ran and died. Sometimes they laughed in the face of the dark and died. It's always beautiful when they fought and died. Everyone died, everyone but them, and that was because the ones who can remember ran away and they can't forget the ones that didn't. They remembered until the tears came like knife-cuts in bare skin, until their thoughts ran ragged and sharp like the most remorseful confessions of guilt and sorrow and _oh God, they can never stop crying._

Abel's thought, disjointed and strange though they were, was sidetracked by the background noise from the warehouse going silent. "The BGM stopped," Ron said. "That's either really good or really bad."

"Wanna go check it out?" Abel asked.

Ron shifted uncomfortably. "They said to stay in the car, it would only take a little bit."

"Aw, why let them take all the awesome moments?" Abel said. "I say we go."

"Ah, okay. You guys wanna come?" This was directed to Rufus and Xiao-Mei; Rufus considered this and shook his head. Xiao-Mei growled, and when Abel tried to get her to change her mind by poking her in the belly, she bit his finger off, causing a small amount of fuss involving Abel getting it out of her mouth and putting it back on the joint so it could heal. "Fine, suit yourselves, and Abel! Leave the panda midget alone!"

"She started it!" Abel said childishly, his finger still bloody but reconnected, all the sinews and relevanted muscles reformed. Regeneration is one of the more useful superpowers.

"C'mon!" Ron said, opening the warehouse door, leaving Abel to hurry speedily after him. They found themselves in a small entry room that looked like an ordinary office, a sizable hole in the wall revealing a wide staircase alongside a built-in rolling track, probably for very large boxes to be slided down.

And there was also Lin Yao, a tall Asian teenager Ron's age with narrow eyes and his hair pulled back, wearwearing a snazzy long black coat over a snapped-up yellow vest, white pants and lightweight boots. Ron walked over to the chair he was dozing in with his feet on a desk and poked him in the shoulder. "Hey, Lin! Wake up!"

"Eh? Eh? Wuzzat?" Lin blinked. "Oh, it's you guys. Are they done fighting yet?"

"...I don't know," Abel confessed. "They should have been done by now."

Lin gestured at the starway going down. "If you want to give it a shot, you're welcome to it, yes? I'm not fighting that thing."

"Aren't you some kind of indestructable evolved human?"

"Psh, I'm far from indestructable. And while I'm a deft hand in a fight...have you _seen _Jumba's latest monstrosity? I'm not touching _that!_ Which is why I called you guys in to handle it. Lucky I got Miss Possible and Scar with her, since you were all together for some reason, eh?"

"...Yes, so lucky," Ron said, a little down that Lin seemed to be completely ignoring the contributions Abel and him could give. They mostly amounted to either distraction or horrifying slaughter, but they were still contributions. "Why didn't you just get your ninja bodyguards to do it?"

"Hmn? Oh...well, they wouldn't want to touch it either. Besides, they're...how do I say...out on totally legal business elsewhere..."

...

_Meanwhile, in the Underdistrict..._

Gangs of criminals ran wild, screaming in fear and dismay from the giant robot smashing through their places of illicit businesses and shooting at anything that moved, which is a common reaction when a black market zone is attacked by a giant robot that resembled an utterly black demonic figure with prominent fangs and weird red circuit lines all over the place.

"Dude, I can't believe we're actually getting paid for this!" shouted Deadpool in the cockpit, a hideously scarred man wearing a fullbody uniform similar to the outfit Spike had, only red and black, along with a pair of katanas sheathed on his back. "Heh. Someone said 'cockpit'."

"Shut up now," Said Shego, a mint green-skinned woman wearing a similar outfit but colored green and black, the hood unzipped. She was piloting the giant robot, her hands gripping the steering rods in her little pilot's pod as green plasma-like energy streamed down her arms in spiralling waves, powering the robot itself and thus doing away with any other power sources that would have otherwise taken up valuable space they happily filled with more and more weaponry. "Don't you have any concept of mission ettiquette? Banter is for the enemies, not the partner."

"Tried ettiquette once, didn't like it. Stuck in my teeth and tried to eat me in my sleep." He spotted a number of smaller mechs headed their way. "Head's up, enemies at two o'clock unless it's Daylights Savings Time! AND THEY LOOK LIKE HOW WET STUPID SMELLS! EAT HOT PLASMA WHAT COMES FROM HOT MUTAGENIC WOMAN!" His hand slapped down on a big red button with a big smiley face on it. At once, all the giant robot's ranged weaponry fired. Even the one that just fired disproved theories of science. (It was a very advanced robot.) "I AM BEAMSPAM MCMUPPET MAN! FIRING LASERS! ALL THE TIME! LOOKS LIKE A PUPPET! BORN FROM A MOP!"

"You're an idiot," Shego grumbled.

"And you have major Les Yay issues," Deadpool said cheerfully. "Say, I got an idea. We should do a buddy-cop show!"

"You already do," Shego said. "You sold the idea to a studio after you kept teaming with that lunatic Rorschach."

"No no no no, hear me out! Think about it! The song is perfect! 'Shego and Deadpoo-ool! A girl and a foo-ool! Sheee's pretty much just a pretty face! Heee's a mental case! Da na na na! Da na na na! Copyrighted Deadpool! Steal and I'll suu-uuue! I! Think the song should end right here!'" It did.

"...That's the Rorschach and Deadpool theme song with words changed," Shego said.

"Picky picky. You're almost as snarky as the narrator, but with better lines."

"What?"

Deadpool pointed. "Hey, look! The Si Xiong Triad are getting in on the action!" Shego observed that another giant robot their size was coming their way, resembling a demonic panda bristling with manner of horrific weaponry. "Yup. Pandas are evil."

"You!" Yelled Panda Bubba, the pilot of the panda-mech and the undisputed leader of the Si Xiong Triad. "Servants of that double-minded freak, Lin Yao! Which one sent you, eh? Was it Lin Yao or that _thing_, Greed the Avaricious!"

"Like we'd need an excuse to come down her and kick a talentless idiot like you around?" Shego said.

"It definitely _wasn't _Lin Yao!" Deadpool said loudly. "Yeah, he's most definitely _not _a power-hungry for the right reasons guy that's getting all his criminal rivals eliminated so he can take complete control of it and tear it apart from the inside! And he's definitely _not _aiming for you specifically because you're the worst criminal he knows! And because you make fun of his accent. Even though you're both Chinese or a fantasy counterpart culture of Imperial China. Yeah."

"I have had enough humiliation!" Panda Bubba yelled. "First, my attempts to take out a rival are derailed by a little blind girl! Then you motley minions appear to destroy my base of operations! _THIS WILL NOT BE IGNORED!_ _FACE THE WRATH OF THE URSUS MAXIMUS MK. 4!"_

"Pity," Shego said. "I'm already doing that."

"I've had enough! Prepare to battle!"

"Fine with me!" Shego grinnned, her eyes burning green as her mutagenic power flared in a brilliant green flash. "_Show me what ya got_."

He did.

...

"They're probably not doing anything _untoward_," Lin Yao said innocent.

"I'll bet," Abel said. He twitched.

"You okay?" Ron asked, concerned.

"Eh, I'm fine, I'm fine!" Abel's eyes flickered red, and in the space of moments it took to speak, half his teeth sharpened to razor-sharp point. A paperclip flew onto his head and stuck there, followed by twenty-dozen other paperclips, a number of highly amusing tacky mugs, three clipboards and all their magnets, a computer tower and two large desks, all plowing through the webs.

Ron and Lin wisely threw themselves to cover before it all hit. Ron timidly got up after the noise died down. "I realize this is a stupid question, but are you okay?"

"Fine an' dandy," Abel said, muffled under all the metal stuck to him like magnets on a fridge; being sandwiched between two desks didn't help. He concentrated and all the metal fell off him with a loud and annoying din; under the metal, his eyes were blue, his teeth were normal and he didn't look remotely inhuman. Aside from the prettiness.

"Oy!" A loud, vaugely accented voice yelled. "Is that you two buffoons being up there? Get down here, we are having a serious problem!"

It came from the spooky underground entrance. "This is going to be gross, isn't it?" Ron said unhappily.

Abel nodded. "I'm a bishounen, the universe is supposed to treat me like a delicate flower. Not someone in a show about jobs that _someone's _gotta do."

"Like _Icky Jobs, _I love that show. And I thought you hated being a prettyboy."

Abel shrugged. "I'm like a guy in an unconventional training montage; I wax on and off."

"Well, have fun with that-" Lin Yao said.

Abel and Ron grabbed him. "You're coming too!" They both said, dragging him down the stairs.

The three of them went down the creepy staircase of probable doom which led to a small elevator lift that they took down into a wide space that looked like it had been converted from one of the buildings of the Underdistrict.

It was a fairly standard lab devoted to making a mockery of all that was science and throwing it into the bound of utter lunacy. It had it all; huge vats of bubbling organic material, great transparent capsules, humming machines lining every corner of the wall like engines stripped bare and serving uncertain purpose, banks of computers monitoring the experiments, crackling electrical instruments, and a large soda dispenser. The only incongruity was a poster of an affronted kitten hovering above a tree branch with a ray gun and hand, with the caption of the poster making it's feelings clear: _Screw Narrative Convention and Get A Damn Jetpack._

Sadly, most of it had been wrecked by the hideous monster now rampaging around the lab, presumably having previously been in the bio-tank in the middle of the lab, now in pieces. The creature was not pleasant to look at; at least fifteen feet tall, it was not even vaugely humanoid, with it's upright body a mottled gray flesh with plates of blackened armor twisted into faces, their mouths howling and screeching with every breath, webs oozing out of their mouths while the massive pincers at the end of thick tendrils for arms clicked out morse code for some hideous demand. The thing scuttled around on six armored crab-legs, slightly bent forward from the weight of the rows of long and smooth tentacles on it's back. Behind it was a huge gruesome pile of..._something,_ like some monstrous form had burst open from the inside.

"Okay, I'm going to throw up now!" Ron said to no one in particular.

"Could you dely that shortly?" Lin Yao asked after they dropped him. "Cleaning this place is going to be enough of a mess as it is."

"Aw, let's just watch and pick our moment!" Abel told Ron. "Our moment...to be big damn heroes!"

Unaware of their sidekicks showing up, the three active fighters continued their battle against the twisted mockery of science.

"You've improved, Dr. Jookiba, you've stopped making giant monsters with three legs!" Kim shouted; in concession to the lack of official business, she was wearing a light red sleeveless shirt that showed off her toned stomach, a pair of conservative shorts and busily laced up shoes. (Apparently, knowing how to ties laces was a rare skill in Traverse Town.) The monster roared at her, all five mouths, and using it's multistereo roar as a sound effect, swiped a claw at her; she bent back nearly doubed, the massive pincer passing inches over her. Before it's momentum could carry it back and let it strike again, Kim backflipped over a table laden with all sorts of chemicals and fizzling tubes and gave it a good solid kick; owing to her abnormal strength, it went flying across the room and slammed into it's underside and the true beaked face between it's legs and surronded by over a dozen mismatched eyes, the chemicals smashing together and not exploding as expected; that would have been preferable, given the sizzling noise, the awful burning smell and the creature shrieks of agony. "Than again, tripods are easy to knock over."

"Miss Possible!" Jumba Jookiba shouted, a massive gas-fired mechanical monstrosity like a chainsaw and a broadsword in one called a chainsword in his hands, hanging back while he adjusted the massive clamp fixed to one side to ensure a better carving angle. Jumba himself was a hulking and slightly rounded alien that Ron had never bothered to wonder the species of, mostly covered in light purple fur under his labcoat and striped pants, his short snout of a face offset by two pairs of eyes; two large ones in the usual place, with a smaller pair behind them, possibly for improved peripheral vision. He might have even put them there himself. "Stop with the kicking of mine lab equipment! This is not being easy to replace!"

"That's because I bought it for you!" Ling yelled at him. For a moment, his voice changed, becoming a darker rasp; his narrowed eyes opened wider, his pupils slit like a cats and a dusky purple. "Tch, mad scientists."

A flash of blue light indicated that the third and final fighter was doing something, followed by part of the floor coiling around one of the creature's legs and staying there. A short distance away was Abel's partner, a man who refused to give his name but was called Scar for obvious reasons. He was a large and intimidating dark-skinned man with the silver-white hair and red eyes of an Amestrian Ishbalan, every aspect of him carefully maintained and groomed, down to the shaven sides and back of his hair; his face was gruesomely mutiliated, a massive X-shaped scar criss-crossing through his brow and meeting on the bridge of his nose and cutting to under his cheek bones, the scar tissue blistered and badly healed, possibly the reason his face was set in a grim scowl; it was partially paralyzed. He was wearing similar clothes to Abel, although he had chosen a dark green trenchcoat with a massive cross on the back, a white sleeveless shirt and heavy-duty hiking boots.

"It won't hold for long," Scar said, his voice rough and harsh. Alchemic sparks still flickered around his fingers, and he raised his right hand; while both hands were calloused and worn from years of hard labor and life in both slumbs and deep deserts, his right hand didn't look right. It was just a little too small to fit on his strong frame, the fingers too delicate; it was the hand of a scholar, not a warrior-monk who spent as much time training for battle as he did meditating.

"She just burned it's face bad," Jumba pointed out. "And you got it's leg. It's not going to-"

The creature roared and wrenched it's leg out, shattering it's restraint and shooting globby bits of webbing from it's various orifices and missing absolutely everything that would have been a conceivable advantage in its fight, perhaps explaining why the room above was covering in it's webs; the creature's aim was _that _bad. "Ah," Jumba said as the creature tore a chunk of concrete out of the ground and threw it at him. He didn't move, he just swatted the chunk aside with his chainsword, denting the poor thing a bit. "Hmph, stupid unimaginative beast-thing. I knew nanoites were a bad idea, but no, lousy university students are wanting to make biological computer database! You want biological computer database, you get ugly monster that eat people! I have whole seminar about it. Was very tragic, no one listened."

"Hey, my brother Jim was there," Kim said. "He talked about it at dinner that night."

"He don't count. You brother is crazy. Touched in head. Got gears messed up. Lights are on, but space is for rent. He sees dead twin and talk to him, need I go on?" Kim glared at him, and the monster cowered from the force of it even though it wasn't the recipent. "Shutting up now!"

"The next time you do something stupid like this, I'm feeding you to the monster as bait," She promised him. "And why _is _this thing attacking us anyway? Is it just berserk or...no. It's not _intelligent, _is it?"

Scar froze, a look of deep horror on his face. "Is as simple as that?" He turned to the monster, which paused to asess the threat. "Could you please stop trying to kill us? Why do you attack?"

The creature appeared to consider this. It twitched, rumbling with some sort of internal seizure and all it's mouths opened wide, clicking and snapping and _crying _and said, "_I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different-_"

Scar bowed his head, and for a moment he trembled in the grip of some apocalyptic hate. "I truly despise mad scientists," He said hollowly.

"Classist," Jumba said. "Let's...let's just be putting this thing out of it's misery, yes?"

"I think we should go in now," Ron said. "We've already seen enough to establish that the fight is not going well. And...well, I'm scared of Kim fighting that...thing. It's got tentacles. Everyone _knows _what happens when pretty girls get attacked by tentacle monsters! I mean, Lin, you're Japanese, aren't you!"

"Ron, what are you doing here?" Kim asked. "I told you it wouldn't take long. Aw, never mind..."

"What happens with girls and tentacle monsters?" Scar asked curiously. Everyone stared at him.

"Actually, I'm not Japanese," 'Ling' started to say before he twitched; his eye turned brown again before he closed it again for his affable look. "But I'm something like that," He said in his usual voice. "Though if there is a counterpart culture to your world from my native empire of Xing, it's ancient China, but I digress. Your dear friend has nothing to fear from _this _horrible tentacle monster."

"Oh?"

"Sure. _You _have more to fear from it than she does. In fact, we all do, which is why we requested you guys and got Scar and Abel as a backup!"

"Huh?" Abel and Ron said.

"It is being female," Jumba called out. "And straight! And very very...ah, 'frustrated'. If you are knowing what I am meaning."

"I don't," Scar said. "Not that anyone seems to be bothered enough to enlighten me."

Abel and Ron both paled at the implications and ran for cover. "Not again!" They both screamed.

Lin watched them go. "Whatever happened to being big damn heroes?"

"It's not worth tentacle violation!" Abel yelled at him.

Lin shrugged. He twitched. "Eh, it's not that bad," He said in his other voice. He twitched again. "Quite you," He told himself sternly. "Make me!" "I'll cut off your Shego time." "I'll be good." "And quiet?" "Screw you." "Ah, well, you may dream of it, but it's a physical impossibility." "Oh, shut up." "Make _me_."

"_I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different-_"

Scar grunted. "What does violation have to do with tentacles? Whatever. I'm already sick of this." He flexed his right arm, his sleeve slipping enough to reveal a black-inked and incredibly awesome and elaborate tattoo that a skilled alchemist could recognize as a restructuring matrix, a transmutation array or whatever you want to call it, and slapped his mismatched hand on the ground, blue alchemic light flashing from the ground as the power of the earth itself was funneled by the power of his tattoo and the ground shattered, tearing itself apart all the way to the ground at the monster's feet, completely shattering deep enough for it's legs to slip into like fabled quicksand all the way to it's knees but not deep enough for it's claws to reach the ground and tilting it's face at the ceiling, leaving it defenseless.

Kim shrugged. "Well, I was expecting a more climatic way of holiding the monster down, but I'll take what I get."

Scar looked at her. "And fighting this thing for over fifteen minutes wasn't enough for you? Just looking at this thing sickens me."

"_I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different.._" The monster groaned from all it's many mouths, sounding a lot like a draining grease-trap with a living slime caught in it.

Kim shuddered. "Ew. Alright, let's just finish this." She and Scar went to make it suffer while Jumba hung back, revving up his chainsword.

Abel and Ron carefully went back to Ling, who had finished his internal dialouge. "You know, I don't care about tentacle horrors anymore," Ron said. "We came here to be big damn heroes, and I say we go and do it!"

Abel frowned. "You really want to risk it?"

"Abel, dude. Do you want to cower here like an idiot or do you want to be something awesome!"

"I'm fine with cowering."

"Normally, so am I, but come on! We came here, knowing nothing about the horror within. We arrived at the peak of the action. We're fulfilling all the criteria, except for doing anything remotely interesting! And that's terrible."

Able started to come around. "Yeah...yeah! Does this mean...big damn heroes?"

"Big damn heroes," Ron confirmed. "Let us give fear the extended middle digit of defiance, drop the crouching moron and be the hidden badasses we all know ourselves to be!"

"Okay!" Abel said, fired up by Ron's surprisingly good speaking powers. "Let's do some good-"

There was a large thump and a hideous groan. Lin tapped Abel on the shoulder. "You're a a bit late for that."

Abel and Ron turned around to see that the Horrible Thing That Should Not Have Been But Unfortunately Was lay on it side, beaten, unconscious and oozing a yellowish pus from swollen wounds all over it's body. One leg was missing, it's claw had been hammered into one of it's mouths, and Kim appeared to have torn off a number of it's tentacles to make a truly epic flail with the help of a bubbling vat of acidic chemicals. Scar and Kim were watching the creature suspiciously, while Jumba was hanging back with an air of patient inevitability. The poor thing was still weaking muttering to itself, and it could, it might have cried. "What," Abel said flatly.

"Just when we were all revved up to do something heroic," Ron said sadly.

"I would be feeling bad for them if it was not being so very really funny," Jumba said. "So I shall laugh!" He did.

"Shut up," Scar said seriously, catching the thunderous look Kim was aiming at Jumba. "Jookiba. Can this thing be cured? Or is there nothing we can do for it?"

"Eh? No...no. It is basically being an ambulant fungus that serves as an organic supercomputer...it is not being truly sentient, but it is being close enough to know madness, yes? I am not thinking that therapy would help."

"A supercomputer."

"A.I. is, how you are saying, a crapshot. Actually," Jumba added reflectively. "I am remembering the nanoites that make it's mind were being overloaded with the soundtracks of new popular movies appropiate for that hip-hopping music. I am thinking, hearing those tracks playing over and over again drove it's mind into suicidal impulses and it erased own behavior limiters to escape. And...yes, the nanoites were on the cusp of evolving! It almost became sentient, but didn't actually make it. Thus, we have this thing."

"It commited intellectual suicide out of annoyance?" Kim said, bemused. "I always knew hip-hop was evil."

"Me too," Scar said. He held his right arm back, flexing his fingers. "Stand back. This will be very messy."

"Ack, don't, I could be reusing the organic components!" Jumba complained. "The nanoites are a loss, though. Try to keep the damages internal!"

"...Jumba." Scar held his right arm up. "With this arm, I deconstruct. I _destroy_. And destruction is rarely precise or carefully aligned, and I don't know if I care to make the effort for the sake of your idiot experimentations."

"They are not idiot experiments, they are being _mad genius!_"

"A distinction without a difference."

"Ooh, ooh, I can do this!" Abel said brightly, running over to the fitfully moving monster. "I can be useful, really!"

"Ah, I'm not sure that's such a good idea-" Kim started to say.

"Humor him," Scar said tiredly. "Otherwise he'll be annoying us all day about this."

"You're quite right I will!" Abel said brightly. He cracked his knuckles, grinning like a maniac, some of his teeth sharper than was logical. "_Crusnik 02,_" He said in a rather different voice. It was deeper and harsher, like the noise of something ancient and monstrous rising from the dirt and a past alien and terrible. "Power regulation, deactivate ten percent." Deep inside, on a level sub-atomic where molecues were giants in their own universe, something changed. Things that were dormant, awaiting the right stimulus. They received it and a tiny percentage of them came to life, and then Abel Nightroad, who was biologically human except for various physiological improvements, was not strictly _human_.

The changes were subtle, and only someone who knew what to look for would have seen them. His hair changed in texture a little, like something mettalic, his teeth sharpened to predatory points and it was a good things his eyes were closed, given how they turned a bloody red.

Gently, he laid a hand on one of the monster's legs, trying to keep his nails from lengthening into black claws, to ignore the persistent itching of his shoulderblades wanting to lengthen and free themselves from their old shape. He had practice; after dozens of lifetimes being...what he was, it was almost easy to let the dark lightning flow through him, to let his less admirable side flower in him and be bent by him before it could compell him. It was hard; emotions ran hot and deadly when he let one of his other aspects free, espicially this one, and controlling them was like harnessing lightning, strapping a saddal to the fury of the heavens itself and aiming it the way he wanted. But he could do it. His control was slipping lately, but he could _do it_.

With all the deceptive ease a man took in breathing, unaware of the many complicated biological processes going on, Abel let the lightning flow through him, let it become another force entire, and feeling the pulse of the tiny metal bodies scattered through this creature's body like little brains - _calling to him_ - he let that call reach both ways, and the song they sang in the realm of shimmers and wavelengths flickered. Their minds, already strange to begin with, had gone mad. There _was _some sort of crude overmind there, the beginings of true consciousness, and it was close enough to be aware that it wasn't something that should have ever existed. It was enough of a scrap of rude consciousness to wish for death, and to react with blind brutishness.

"Bloody hell," He said in a voice not quite his own. "Hip-hop does a nasty number."

His power flashed out, invisible to normal eyes, and because of the mass of metal in the creature's body, it strained against it's bonds while Abel spun a wave of binding forces, gently scrubbing the little nanoites free of the troublesome and botched programming. Not another death, but dormancy, lulling them into a sleep so deep it was nearly death, and without them to animate its strange organs, the monstrosity they had animated could not remain a living thing, and moments after it's various heartlike organs stopped beating, it's short and bewildered life came to an gentle and painless end.

For some reason, this caused a number of interior pus-filled bladders to violently expunge their organs and flood various internal chambers, making a noise like 'spl-urrch'. "It even _dies _with a gross noise," Kim complains.

"There, problem solved," Abel said, pulling back from the misshapen thing's body, letting go of the brief surge of power that had let him shut down a monster's body from the inside out (but too much of it drove you mad, mad and crazy and smiley-insane like Cain), and the things inside _him _went back to sleep, quietly remaking his body by the instant. The changes reverted, so subtlely that no one noticed, and if not for his regenerative powers and a few other odd traits, Abel might have been nothing more than a low-level metahuman. "And _I _did it without blowing it up into meaty bits." Scar grunted, indicating a general lack of interest in how the job was done provided it was done at all.

"Is it over?" Lin said from behind a big box.

"You could have helped," Ron said. He was sitting right next to Lin.

"What part of '_I'm not going to touch it_' did you not hear?"

"Everyone else attacked it! Or whatever Abel did."

"Except you, the guy hiding right with me."

"Hey, you don't have to get snippy, I'm older than you!"

"And between us, who's got a seat on the Council of Insert Nomenclature? Oh, yeah, it's me!"

"Meh, get a guy a position on the political circle that practically rules the town and he acts like he's royalty..."

"I am royalty! I'm the son of an emporer! A prince!" Lin paused. "Then again, given the image most princes have, it's probably better that most people don't know that."

"Well, now that that's done, we can go and do some more good," Kim said, dusting herself off and shuddering at the oozing thing behind her. "Uh, right?" She directed this at Jumba, who was paying no attention at all. He was trundling over to it's remaining pincer arm and holding his chainsaw up. "Uh, what are you doing?"

"Collecting the spart parts," Jumba said, trying to rev up his chainsword without much success. "What, you think I just am throwing away dead mockeries of science? Nightmarish wonders like this aren't exactly cheap to manufacture! Recycling is economical, yes? Cut off the good bits, melt them down into organic slush, sell some to cloning industry for profit and use the rest to start making more experiments for little 626. He and loud little girl like the brothers and sisters."

Abel gave him a disturbed look. Scar frowned at him. "I feel that I should object to creating sentient life for reasons best defined as 'why not'," Scar said.

"Yes, probably," Jumba said absently. "And some will be going to fast food industry. A little processing, a lot of mincing and time in deep fryer, you never notice!"

Kim looked sick. "You mean stuff like _that _goes into fast food! Ron, we are never eating at a fast food place again. Who knows what horrible side-effects it'll cause?"

"Make people transform into giant monsters and kidnap random bystanders?" Abel suggested.

"Hey, that only happened to me twice!" Kim said. "And the first time was probably an accident." Everyone stared at her. "And the second time I didn't actually scare Ron when I grabbed him and climbed up a building for some reason."

"That was kind of fun," Ron said cheerfully. "It was like being manhandled by an elevator!"

"Wow," Lin said. "You guys have issues."

"Don't you share head-space with the anthropomorphic personification of the sin of greed?"

"Hey, only the personification of an eldritch abomination's greed!" Lin said. "For family and friends, I have to point out. Because he's being _very _loud about that point." He twitched. "Damn straight!" He said in that other voice.

"Right," Kim said dubiously. "Let's just go before something else unfortunate happens-"

Jumba's chainsword roared. A meaty tearing swiftly ensued. "Aha! Is now _carving time!_" Jumba yelled.

"Ew," Kim said in distaste. "Too late." She ran up the stairs as fast as she could, Ron making a hasty retreat behind her.

"Be sure to salvage the nanoites!" Abel called to Jumba. "I will be checking on that, and I mean it! _I'm a man of my word_."

He left. Jumba looked at Scar. "...Should I be quivering in instinctive terror like all my childhood terrors just promised to stalk me?"

"Yes," Scar said flatly. He left Lin and Jumba, the latter confused and frightened, the former merely amused and also carrying on a conversation with the entity he happened to be the host of.

...

"...And that's what happened," Zim finished. "Absolute unvarnished truth, top to bottom, no problems."

"I...see," Mr. Herrimen said, a bit baffled. "Ah, I don't recall any invading space fleets, armies of demonic ninja or an epic musical number with a chorus consisting exclusively of cherubim. I'm sure I would have noticed."

"You can tell because cherubim don't look like babies with wings on," Aang said. "To start with, they're pretty big and have a lot of eyes. In all the wrong places."

Mr. Herrimen ignored this and gave Zim a very hard look. Zim, being to body langauge what a rock is to reverse psychology, didn't take the hint. "'Unvarnished truth'?" Mr. Herrimen said, resorting to less finely chiseled words to get his point across.

"Even unvarnished surfaces require a little waxing to get some of the scratches and stuff out," Zim said. To his credit, he did so with a straight face.

"...Could I listen to someone else for a bit?" Mr. Herrimen asked.

"Hey," Spike said, raising his hand.

"Someone I haven't already listened to excessively and know to be an trickster?"

"Ooh, ooh, me!" Aang said. "Pick me!"

"You weren't even there!"

"Wasn't I?"

"No!"

"Oh, okay then."

"I'll do it," Hobbes volunteered.

"Me too!" Morte said. Calvin and Zim gave the skull a dubious look; Morte hadn't been present, precisely, during the big battle with Mr. Lyle or at least the interesting and action-y bits. They didn't raise an issue though, obviously wanting to get this nonsense over with. So Morte and Hobbes quickly but carefully relayed the events of last night as it pertained to Foster's, starting with their haphazard arrival there guided by Spike and Bloo and their quick seperation from their guides owing to boredom and Zim's short attention span. (Both of them went out of their way not to mention any detail of the apparent conspiracy that had been waiting to help them last night. They didn't know if Mr. Herrimen was a part of it, just a powerful authority or something else entirely; they made it sound like they'd ran into Bloo and Spike as a result of a fight Zim'd had with a giant Heartless, which was already apparently common knowledge, according to what they'd overheard during their jaunt around the house before the guard's attempt to capture Spike had required everyone shunted out of the relevant areas except for them, who had simply gone unnoticed by being very good at it.)

They were better at it than Zim, who was obviously prone to making stuff up to spice up the telling, exaggerating genuine occurances for his own amusement or downplaying things he felt had little relevance (like Mr. Lyle being some sort of omniscient dirty secret guy). Hobbes and Morte tag-teamed the story, relaying the absolute bare bones of what had happened while phrasing it in a way that would convey a little more information to Zim's friends, who Hobbes suspected would want to know more. Mr. Herrimen was more polite with them, only interrupting a few times to have them clarify a point or two, or ask them if something they said related to a previous point. Hobbes thought they'd hit a rough spot when they inevitably came to the problem of Zim's brief rampage, but Mr. Herrimen didn't seem to care to read too much into it. As he primly said, "I wouldn't give too much credibility to Miss Rockwaller and her malcontents. They enjoy causing trouble like this, and if there was some sort of ruckus, I would think you all could sort it out without involving higher authorities. Outside of the house, of course."

Morte was more perceptive than he let on, and suspected that Mr. Herrimen was deliberately overlooking Zim's transgressions for some reason that he wasn't making clear. And Mr. Herrimen didn't seem the type to do _anything _like that. Morte knew people like that; people who were generally more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit and were sticklers for doing things by the book even if the book was big, inwieldly and no one read it. He managed to breach the subject in the form of subtext under when he got to the bit with the quickly assembled mob of the offended parties, their roommates and their friends, all with the use of a clever analogy to a brick, a dismantled pool table and all the myraid ways butterflies annoyed people with bad applications of nonlinear mathematics.

Mr. Herrimen appeared not to notice, or at least he wanted it to _look _like he hadn't. "My dear protectorate has taken a bit of a hurting lately," He said, clearly refering to Foster's. "We're often at the epicenter of whatever mad scheme unsavory sorts concoct - I could tell you such stories of the _things _I've found in abandoned rooms - without the tendency for the warring bands that live outside town and sometimes find their way here in spite of their own misgivings, which always leads to a fair bit of devastation. And just last night, a thief stole my personal cache of carrots! Owing to a mix-up involving the fact that 'carrot' sounds identical to a term for a diamond's value, of course, and that cosmic in-joke wasn't funny the _first _time it happened to me. I had to go to prison. Again. Though they were returned to me some time later. I hope that thief got what was coming to her!"

"Carrots?" Zim said. "Thief? She was teenaged, had a cat theme?"

"Why, yes! You apprehended her?"

"In a manner of speaking. I prevented her from absconding with them, but then a Heartless came out of nowhere, killed her and consumed her heart, no doubt throwing her soul into some monstrous dimension of weaponized angst where her soul was subjected to tortures foul and unnamable, her psyche torn apart and rearranged in ways it was never meant to be, the darkness in her heart let out roaring and screaming until it consumed her." He reflected. "That would explain why another Heartless showed up so quickly! You'd think transforming people into Heartless would be a gradual process. Of course, I lack information."

Everyone was staring at Zim, horrified. "...Where do you come up with this stuff?" Zuko asked.

"TV, duh."

"Ah," Mr. Herrimen said hoarsely. "Well...ah...good Lord, that's..."

"You did want what was coming to her," Calvin said. He got a full rounded of revolted looks. "What? I've seen worse!" No one dared ask just _what _he'd seen that could be worse.

"And I've _been _through worse," Morte said. The silence was louder than a scream. Pleased that the interruptions had stopped, he continued on, passing by most of the rather pointless intervals of running from the mob, wandering fruitlessly through occupied hallways and being really very lost. "Then we hit a trapdoor, fell a long way into the catacombs of this place and met, ah, what's ther names, Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable and Father Abel Nightroad. Funny guy, that last one. Didn't act much like a priest. Not very serious at all."

"He's fairly typical for one of ours," Spike said unexpectedly. Alone of the others, he hadn't been espicially bothered by Zim's remark or any of the following ones. This begged the question of what _he _had seen. "Got a whole faction full of priests like him. Mad scientists and rejects from mental wards, the lot of 'em. Nice guys, for the most part, but not very interested in being sterotypical 'corrupt church' or stern humorless berks. They _hate _people thinking of them like that."

"Ah, so that actually happened?" Mr. Herrimen said. "Hmn. I'd heard that they'd been seen around here recently, but I'd put it down to simple gossip. If they really are involved-"

"Which they are," Zim said.

"-Then I am inclined to give you more credit. They are not...easily suggested, if you follow me. I hold high respect for the three of them: Miss Possible's father, Field-Admiral Gibbs, is one fo the highest ranking officials in what passes for true authority here, and she is very clearly following in her footsteps. Master Stoppable...well. He's a bit _off _in his thinking, but he is a socially responsible and kindhearted young man. As for Father Nightroad, he's a good man, certainly. Though I'm reasonably sure he's an undiagnozed schizophrenic, but of the harmlessly off-beat sort. If I didn't know better, I'd assume him to be Master Stoppable's father!"

"Abel's a priest," Zim said.

"Father Nightroad's group sees chastity as a personal choice and regards procreation as a joy and something to be embraced," Mr. Herrimen said primly. "I don't see the point in such interest in the provision of future generations myself, but I suppose, being incapable of performing such, I am not suited to have an opinion."

"You can't have kids?" Katara said, stunned. The Water Tribe put a heavy emphasis on family, Zim remembered; it was like Air Nomad freedom, Earth Kingdom tradition or Fire Nation loyalty. To break ties like that was, often, to die. Spiritual gifts had their drawbacks.

Mr. Herrimen continued. "By any chance, was Father Nightroad's companion there? A large, unfriendly fellow with red eyes, white hair and an unseemly scar on his face. People tell him he should get facial reconstruction, but he's not keen on the idea..."

"And why should people _have _to get their faces under the knife just to look pretty?" Zuko said harshly.

Mr. Herrimen stared at Zuko's horrific burn for a few instants too long. Zuko's glare tightened. "That's besides the point," Hobbes said. "We never heard anything about this guy. Even when Abel volunteered help today - not that we've heard anything from them - he didn't mention anyone like that."

"Maybe he forgot?" Spike suggested. "Abel's not the most alert bundle of nerves around. Half his brain's like a rickety clockwork soldier with half the springs gone rusty and most of the gears are mostly slipped." He didn't say what the _other _half was.

"As Master, er, Hobbes was it? As he said, that is besides the point." Mr. Herrimen put his fingers together in a particular steepled way. "Then what happened?"

"Er? Then I showed up," Spike said. "Had a bit of a talk with the Possibles and Nightroad, told them the situation and my deal with the new lot-"

"Some deal," Calvin complained. "Also. 'Possibles'? I don't like either of them very much, but c'mon, they're not related."

"They're practically married, ain't they? And I can tell you that when it does roll, _she's_ not taking _his _name. Bloke's practically a doormat when it comes to her." This would have probably caused no end of angry feelings, mainly from Aang, Zuko and Hobbes, who had a tendency to become somewhat passive when it came to the girls they liked, except that Spike sounded wistful about it. Spike kept going. "Anyway, we had a bit of a conflict, but Nightroad sorted it out quick enough..."

Not going into detail about the..._dark _powers Abel had displayed to do that, Spike skipped to the part where the mob had smashed a wall open to get at them, forcing them to beat a hasty retreat. Spike paused to give Mr. Herrimen a surprisingly comprehensive roster of names of the people who had been involved, naming at least seven people who had been high in the informal and brief hierarchy of that mob, with that Bonnie girl at the top and Zaphod at an informal between position. Dispite the fact that he apparently had little reason to be there.

"I see," Mr. Herrimen said. "Thank you for the details. Please carry on."

And, as it turned out, there wasn't that much left to go into detail about; Spike managed to turn the small level of chaos Calvin had spread in the form of hastily created traps to slow the mob down into the mob causing destruction in their haste for dispoportiante retribution (though to be fair, you have to go really far to go overboard on avenging yourself upon a guy that broke into your place, trashed your stuff, yelled at you and left, not neccasarily in that order), and then filling Calvin, Hobbes and Zim in with the mystery of what had happened to the mob: he'd tricked them into followed him all the way to a trapdoor that he'd dropped them down into. Apparently, it led somewhere horrible. Spike wasn't sure, but he hoped it was a dimension of unending noise or a one-way pocket dimension or a septic tank.

"That _does _somewhat corroborate with what Miss Rockwaller and her allies told me of last night," Mr. Herrimen said slowly. "Though the details are certainly different. I don't recall them saying they caused _that _much destruction. Rather, they blamed it all on Master Calvin and insidious devices he constructed to do them harm."

Calvin squirmed. "Hah, yeah...good thing you believe us, not them, right? Right?"

Mr. Herrimen gave him a long, steady look. "I'm still weighing the evidence," He said evenly. "Master William?"

Spike shrugged. "After that? Made my way back to where I'd left everyone else. Huge fight going on, like I _told _you. I joined it, and they know more than I do."

"Okay," Calvin said earnestly, eager to deflect suspicion by actually being honest for a change. This would probably be worse than lies. "So me and everyone else went into the ballroom to wait out the trouble and get our new, uh..."

"Friends?" Aang said to Zim hopefully. Zim shrugged.

"Allies?" Hobbes suggested.

"Eh, Hobbes' work. For some reason, those two teens really rub me the wrong way. I just can't stand smart-aleck, sanctimonius, self-centered people who think they're the best at everyone when most of their success has to do with that one guy that always tags along and does something to make everything work out!"

Hobbes whistled innocently. "Yeah," Morte said. "Imagine that. So, like he was saying..."

Morte explained to Mr. Herrimen, and now the entirety of Team Avatar and Team Phantom, that they hadn't gone long in the ballroom before a mysterious and stylish stranger had appeared: a charming man missing a thumb and named Mr. Lyle. Morte explained, fairly briefly, that Mr. Lyle had tried to act courteous before he began to reveal bizarre and damaging things; horrific incidents in their pasts, parts of their personalities that weren't right to speak of, unhappy things they'd done...Morte, gracefully, spared the details while getting his point across. Zim's companions at once gave Zim concerned looks, mostly mingled with anger that someone had come out of nowhere to bring up _that _to hurt their friend. (Zuko just looked angry. He was good at it.) Hobbes looked exceptionally downcast, looking listlessly at the ground as Morte told Mr. Herrimen.

Mr. Herrimen seemed quite interested in all of this. "You're certain that this man was absolutely correct? None of his information was flawed in any way?"

"Yes," Calvin said. "Everything he said was right on, and it seems that in some cases he shouldn't have been able to know by any logical means. He...he knew stuff about my friend. Personal tribe stuff." Calvin frowned. "And...does the name 'Cain Nightroad' mean anything to you?"

Mr. Herrimen didn't flinched. But his demeanor cracked a bit. "Ah...ah yes. I should say so." He looked uncomfortable. "This...this Mr. Lyle spoke of such things?"

"Well, yeah," Hobbes said. "He went into...unneccesary detail. He said he was Abel's brother?"

"That he is. Not that many believe him to be anything other than a clever cipher." Mr. Herrimen sighed. "I'd rather not speak of such things. Not here. If you do wish to learn more, I'd advise to abandon it. There is a thing as propriety, and if you are indeed acquainted with Master Ronald, I wouldn't delve into such things out of curiousity. It is not something...something to be _interested _in. My Lord, no."

"Alright, alright," Calvin said uneasily. "I just wanted to make sure that Lyle was being honest."

"Ron and Abel said he was right," Zim said, a little disapprovingly.

"Abel's half-insane and Ron should just put the words 'wipe your feet on the Ron'," Calvin said harshly, irritated that Zim was so quick to defend people he barely knew while being overtly hostile to the guys that wanted to help him. And Calvin wasn't sure he really felt like it anymore. "I wouldn't go with anything they said further than I could throw them. And I'm not much bigger than that metaphor made sense."

"You know, you're kind of a jerk," Toph observed. Calvin grimaced, but did not overreact and yell like he normally would.

"Any_way_," Hobbes said, leering at Calvin and making a few words in hand language that aptly summerized his feelings about Calvin's odd behavior towards Toph thus far. "We yelled at Mr. Lyle, he made fun of us, and then he did this weird thing when he threw this card and used it to summon Heartless. A lot of Heartless."

"So many Heartless, it was like jumping into a tank full of lobsters at the aquarium because Sokka bet I wouldn't," Zim said dreamily. "Except these lobsters didn't have rubber bands on their claws. And were generally a lot bigger than me. And sometimes flew or blew fire at me. And combined periodically. And came from the darkness, were born from the corrupted remnants of dead people, or both, I'm still not clear about that. And they never sang Christmas songs like mop-puppets do. And they weren't seafood."

Sokka sulked. "That was twenty dollars I didn't see again..."

"So we fought," Calvin chimed in. "Big time fight. It was all epic and stuff, like frit-choo and ba-boom and me contramanding the laws of mass-to-energy conservation because I'm just that cool! But the destruction we wreaked was worth it because we were fighting soul-eating monsters that also eat hearts even though they haven't burrowed into chests in my experience so far. And uh, they did all the damage. So yeah." He and Hobbes then proceeded to tell Mr. Herrimen _everything _they did there, from Calvin's ice-slides and rains of icicles while Hobbes had gone on a savage mass-brawl and Zim had done feats of great acrobatics, stabbity-action and fire. Lots and lots of fire. Though, as Calvin pointed out, not very well.

"Wow," Aang said, impressed. "You got to have all the fun last night! _I _just got everyone trying to keep me from running off."

Zuko sighed, as though being pushed to a decision he'd been thinking about for a while, and looked hard at Zim. "You need proper instruction."

Before Zim could ask him to elaborate, Spike said, "Then I came around when the fighting hit a peak, I think. I show up, we beat the beasties back hard and good, and this Lyle bloke shows up again. Starts talking smart, doing the same mind-twisting bit with the unfortunate bit of information he shared. I do my part to stop him doing that and we manage to get him into a corner after some work."

Hobbes grunted. "And then he goes and slips out. Some kind of portal thingie like the Heartless do, I don't know. We left after that, and that's pretty much it. Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad went their seperate ways, and we finally found a room for the night, and that's that."

"Ah, I see," Mr. Herrimen said. "Thank you for volunteering with a minimum of exaggeration, Master Hobbes."

"Wait, you forgot Jarod," Zim said. "He showed up with a gun made of pure awesomeness and in a ship that went invisibile and pierced the barriers of _reality!_ Or something to go through walls. And he knew Mr. Lyle from somewhere, sandworms and stuff."

Mr. Herrimen chuckled. "Oh, come now, Master Zim! I know you'd like to joculate at a time like this, but seriousness should be called for in fact-giving. I can hardly take you seriously when you say that an urban legend appeared to fight with you and take down a wrong-doer."

"...Yes," Morte said. "Stop kidding around, let's be serious."

"But..." Zim heisitated. He hated hypocrasy. On the other hand...Jarod was considered an urban legend. The Guide had said so. "Bah, there was a guy named Jarod that we met earlier and he was there, and I am prepared to argue this with an increasingly deranged set of insane troll logic until nothing makes sense anymore! Espicially linguistics."

"No," Calvin said, with unexpected insight. "Because _Jarod_ is an _urban legend_. So stop kidding around, okay?"

"Never!" Zim said. "And there is nothing to stop me from-"

"Zim, look at the wall," Zuko said, Firebending a small flame in his hands and making a weird shadow puppet at the wall.

"Oh, shadow puppets!" Zim said, immediately forgetting about the Jarod thing. "Go on, do Deformed Rabbit, it's my favorite!" Zuko did. "Ee hee hee! Sad grotesquery used for comedy. Classic!" Zuko smirked, considering it a job well done and dissipated his flame. "Aw, it's gone. And now I haven't the slightest idea what I was talking about before."

"Yes, we are all absolutely despondant, I'm sure," Mr. Herrimen said dryly. "And that is all the information you can volunteer?"

"Yep," Morte said. "That's what happened, and that's all we know. The guy said something about working for a place called Wolfram and Hart. From what I know, it's a law firm that gives lawyers a bad name. Keeps _real _monsters off the streets and in power, gets the real innocents a hard time." Morte didn't have a face to give a look of absolute disgust, but he could radiate it pretty well. "The stuff that makes guy like me want to keep out too much law so you don't get stuff like that happening."

"That's why you should avoid too much law _or _chaos," Aang said wisely.

Zuko nodded. "Too much law, you have people that use it like a club to beat people they don't like into submission or twist it so it does what they want. Too much lawlessness, though, and you have warlords and barbarians running rampant, doing what they want to whoever they want."

"Was that a shot at the Water Tribe?" Katara wondered. Sokka shrugged; all the nations of their world had sordid histories, or at least ones that hadn't been rewritten for the winner's favor.

"It's even worse than that," Spike said. Everyone looked at him, surprised. "I've dealt with them before. Back before I was set to wanderin' the worlds, I hooked up with a group called Angel Investigations. Team Angel, they called themselves, on account of the self-righteous brooding pouf that ran the thing. Me old grandsire, see, after he went good-crazy and turned his heel face-up. Know what I mean? Thing was, there was a real mess for them. A goddess with low opinions o' mankind showed up and brainwashed the damn world into happy-shiny idiots that did everything she said, loved every word and went obidient at the sight of her. S'pose it counted as peace of a kind, but I still don't like the idea."

"That's not peace," Aang said, disgusted. "That's _slavery_. It's not peace unless people chose it and work for it."

"True," Spike acknowledged. "Not a bad mind on ya, kid. Anyway, they killed her, right? More like they broke the thing and events eventuated, but still, they killed her. They stopped world peace. Angel and his folk didn't think of it like that, or at least tried not to, but the Wolfram and Hart lot did. See, before she came? That goddess pulled a huge gambit on the way there, involving wiping out Wolfram and Hart's Los Angeles offices. So they got Angel and them to take over the offices, saying that maybe they could twist it from the inside. That's the evil lawyers talking. Now _their _thoughts, the lawyers I mean, was that they'd corrupt some of the greatest heroes in the world by making them do what they had to keep the clients coming." He smirked. "Like hell they did. That came to bit them in the ass damn hard, but, anyway, I joined Angel after but I know my share of Wolfram and Hart's dirty business. These Lyle fellow seems like he'd fit right in there. Extortion...murder sprees...protection for baby-eating monsters from hunters...real estate dealing for demons...providing black voodoo magicians with the messy bits they need...contracts for the worst sorts of deals...they did it all." Spike gave them a hard look. "I wouldn't rush into looking for him without a gameplan. Someone with Wolfram and Hart? Them's dangerous. Like rushing into hell with a sword and guts."

"Sometimes that's all you got!" Zim countered, Zuko, Sokka, Danny and Calvin all looking like they agreed perfectly. "And if you do, do you dare back down for fear of superior forces? Give up and abandon your honor simply because you're _afraid _of dying? If it gives the forces of evil even the smallest of pricks, you _must _rush to evil's lair with all the weaponry you have, even if it's nothing more than your own resolve! You remind them _exactly _who they are dealing with and how much it will cost to risk battling others like you!"

"Even if you go out, you do it in a blaze of glory!" Zuko said fiercely. "And if you burn in the attempt? Let yourself burn and destroy everything that touches you and make them _remember _just who they were fighting in you."

"Go heroic resolve!" Calvin said.

Spike smiled, the first time Zim had seen him doing so. It was surprisingly warm. "Yeah! Just what Angel and the others said, to that effect!"

Mr. Herrimen's mustache tweaked in a smile. "You're either recklessly rash or an admirable party. Perhaps, both, yes?" He sat back and tapped his fingers. "I will give this matter some thought, but in the meantime, you are free to leave. I'm not quite certain I believe your story, but I think it's worth considering."

"What, too outrageous?" Toph said.

"Actually, it's not quite outrageous enough to be a true Traverse Town incident," Mr. Herrimen said apologetically. "Now, if you'd constructed a war machine the size of a castle that fired bursts of exploding magma fueled by weaponized willpower at a fleet of mechanical dragons fueled by the souls of unwise real estate develoupers commanded by this Mr. Lyle, then I'd have good reason to believe you, if only because that sort of thing is a regular occurance. But...what happened to you sounds so...well, rushed together, I'm sorry to say."

"What?" Hobbes said.

"Oh, come on!" Morte said indignantly. "Half the stuff the Boss said was ten times crazier than that!"

"Yes!" Zim said. "In my version, I used the weaponized power of CHEESE to set the UNIVERSE on fire, willed the universe back to normal before I took all the fire and smacked Mr. Lyle with it!"

Mr. Herrimen gave him an annoyed look. "The problem with plausible lies, Master Zim, is that there's a very fine line between business as usual in our fair town and outrageousness. Someone like _that _has only happened once."

"...Wait, _what?_" Danny said incredulously.

"This place is freaking badass!" Toph said. "I'm gonna like it here."

Mr. Herrimen tilted an ear. "Well, I should hope so, but-" His phone rang. "Pardon me a moment." He took off the ringer by the wrong side, accidentally dragged the whole thing off the table, put the wrong parts on his mouth and ear and had a frustrating few moments trying to put it the right way. Obviously embarrased, he got it right just in time to start talking. "Hello. Ah, Miss Frances. Erm, no, I didn't have any trouble with the phone of communication! Hah, no, that only happened four times, that's hardly a negative indication in _my _culture, thank you!" Aang and Toph looked a bit concerned at that. Four, to their cultures, was not a pleasant omen. "Er, no, we don't need to go to the voice-horn. I miss when we used them exclusively. Wait, come again? Miss Possible, Father Nightroad and Master Stoppable are asking for a Master Zim, a Master Hobbes and someone else they can't quite recall? Hmn. That _is _interesting. Tell them I shall be there shortly, Miss Frances. I have a few questions for them. Wait, come again? They left? Where did they-"

A knock came at the door. Then another one came from someone else. The first knocker, evidentally feeling challenged, rapped out the familiar 'barber-surgeon' knock. The second one knocked out an elaborate series of taps, taps and palm-slaps that could have been scored by a poorly funded orchestra. A pair of rather louder knocks cut it off, followed by two male voices complaining, "Ow! Head damage!"

Aang and Danny shot important looks at Zim; he shrugged in deference to the workings of fate. Mr. Herrimen sighed. "Hold a moment. This will not take long."

He left the room. They shortly overheard a brief but loud barrage of questions coming from who Zim recognized as being Ron and Abel, cut off by Mr. Herrimen. "I'm sorry to be brief, but did you meet a trio named Zim, Calvin and Hobbes last night?"

"Yeah," Kim said. She sounded worried. "They're not in troube, are they?"

"That remains to be seen, but...did you battle a mysterious, sinister and well-informed man named Mr. Lyle last night? Who summoned a great deal of Heartless?"

"Yes."

"Did you fight off these Heartless?"

"Yes!"

"They did way more damage to your ballroom than we did!" Abel chimed in.

"Did you attempt to bring him into custody only to have him vanish in the way of the Heartless?"

"Yeah!" Ron said. "That's not fair. I hate when bad guys escape the clutches of the protaganist's in some contrived and overly convienient way. What do you call a deus ex machina when it's a bad guy thing?"

"A diabolus ex machina?" Sokka suggested loudly.

"Yeah, that sounds right," Tucker said.

"Thanks!" Ron said. "Wait, who said that?"

"Please hold on," Mr. Herrimen said. "Hrm, wait, that's all the relevant information. Wait. Did you engage in hostilities with an angry mob that wished to battle Master Zim over personal grievances?

"Oh yeah," Kim said.

"Uh huh," Abel said.

"I really, really wish they hadn't," Ron said.

"...Oh," Mr. Herrimen said. "Then I suppose that lends some credence to what Master Zim's lot has told me."

"YAY!" Calvin said.

"...Except for the fact that you both independently made reference to the Heartless doing more damage to Foster's property than you did. That suggests you rehearsed a story!"

"DANG IT!" Calvin yelled.

"Yes...well...Jarod showed up and did stuff, don't pin it all on them!" Ron said quickly. "...Not that he did anything damaging..."

"Oh, for pity's sake," Mr. Herrimen said. "If you _did _rehearse a story, you could do a more plausible one than that! Miss Possible. The _only _reason I'm willing to consider this, besides certain evidence and what Miss Rockwaller's band of malcontent have told me, is that I know you to be a plainly honest young woman. If _you _stand by this story firmly, I will have to consider it."

"Oh," Kim said. "That's...good, then?"

"One should hope so."

"Can we go now?" Zim called.

Mr. Herrimen sighed from the other side of the door. "Yes, fine, I've heard all I care to."

Moments later, the door slammed open: Zim, Calvin, Danny and Aang came screaming out. "FREEDOM FROM OBLIGATION!" They yelled, going right past Kim, Ron, Abel and a fourth guy they didn't know with a tiny panda on his shoulder. Abel and Ron ran after them, joining in the pointless screaming. Hobbes, followed by Zuko, Katara, Tucker, Sokka, Sam, Toph, Morte and Spike, sauntered out. "Hey," He said to Kim.

"Hi," She said cautiously. "Friends of your's?"

Hobbes glanced at the guys behind him. "I think so," He said. "Friends of Zim's, at least."

"Hi," Zuko said warily.

"Hi!" Kim said to him, smiling. Zuko made a show of looking at the ceiling awkwardly and trying to hide his scar. Kim pretended not to notice it. "Um, hi, who are you guys?"

They introduced themselves, except for Zuko, who was last to speak, and the grim looking guy with Kim. Zim and his brief band came back before either of them could say anything. "Who the heck are you?" Zim said to the fourth guy.

"Hey, don't be mean!" Abel said indignantly. He hooked an arm around the other man's shoulder, minding the ferocious little panda. "This man's my main man, my head comrade, the guy whose stern and serious persona contrasts my goofy dumbass ways! He's...er, well, he doesn't like his name being thrown around, so we just call him Scar!"

"I...see," Zuko said, noticing the man's large X-shaped scar. It looked like it had been gouged into his face.

"Because he has a great big scar on his face and he has reconstruction matrix tattoos on his arms," Abel added unneccesarily. "Tattoos are like scars, right?"

"Abel, you're touching me," Scar said. "Why are you touching me?"

"...To reinforce our heterosexual life partner charm?" Abel said hopefully. Scar lightly hit him on the back of the head. "Ow! You're nearly as touchy as Lilith. Oh, she liked smacking things around, I can tell you..." Abel appeared to reconsider that. "Don't take that the wrong way."

"...So," Zuko said to Scar, one facially mutilated survivor to another.

"So," Scar said.

They looked at each other, exchanging looks that basically dared each other to beat each other in terms of scar awesomeness.

"War wound," Scar said gruffly.

"_Agni kai _injury," Zuko said. "...A fire duel."

Scar nodded. Zuko nodded back. They stared at each other, offered small but significant body langauge speech and retreated. Abel, though, grabbed Scar by the arm. "No you don't! Team Dad stuff is too deadpan! I wanna see some awesomeness!"

"What?" Scar said.

"You two, Sparky!" Toph said, jumping onto Zuko's back and kicking him forward. "You don't get to avoid people this time! I'm gonna make you socialize if it kills you!"

"Get off me!" Zuko said indignantly. "That hurts!"

"That what you tell Mai?"

"How'd you know that...I mean, don't say stuff like that!"

"Come on, I'm sure it won't kill you to make friends," Danny told Scar and Zuko. A smile ambled to his face and squatted there. "We have ways of making you nice."

Scar grimaced slightly more than usual. "I'm not going to like today, am I?"

"No," Zuko said flatly.

On the other end of the communication spectrum, Aang and Katara were introducing themselves to Ron and Kim. "So you helped our friend out last night?" Aang said. "Thanks for that." He grinned. "You know what that means?"

"What?" Ron asked.

"A friend of Zim's is a friend of mine!"

"Awesome! Wait, he considers me a friend? You sure?"

"Has he tried to set you on fire, launch you into outer space or transform you into something monstrous?"

"No."

"There you go!"

"So...your boyfriend's not quite what I expected when Zim told me about you guys," Kim told Katara, looking at Aang. "I pictured someone a little more, I don't know, like him." She gestured at Zuko.

"We get that sometimes," Katara said dryly. "What'd Zim tell you?"

Kim fidgeted. "Not much. Um...he told me about what happened to...his people...and that you guys beat someone really evil and stopped a horrible war. Aside from that, I don't know anything about you."

Katara shrugged and smiled. "Well...it'd be nice to be around sane people for a change. Would you mind showing us around?"

"Sure thing! And not to burst your bubble, but _my _boyfriend's not exactly sensible or anything..."

"DUDE! THAT'S AWESOME!" Ron screamed as Aang showed off his rotating marble trick to Ron.

"I know!" Aang said excitedly.

"Hey, what are you guys doing?" Tucker and Sokka asked, walking over to them.

Katara winced as the four socialized. "This will not end well."

"You're always running interference too?" Kim asked.

"Oh yeah. You wouldn't believe the stuff these guys get up to."

"Oh?" Kim said challengingly. "You should see what happens when Ron gets up to fixing stuff and weird stuff happens! Or when his ninja friends Naruto and Gaara show up! Or when he does _anything _on missions!"

"What're you girls talking about?" Sam asked, wondering over and a bit lonely.

"Figuring out whose circle of friends is dumber," Kim said. "You want in?"

"You guys are _so _going down." The three girls quickly put that challenge to the test, bonding over the stupidity of their boyfriends and male friends. And brothers.

Zim blinked at all the friendships being formed. "Wow. That was fast. I certainly didn't expect _anyone _to hit it off that fast. Aang, obviously, but no anyone else."

"Aw, I think it's nice," Hobbes said. "Your friends are already getting a little more comfortable with their new home! Making new friends and entrenching your circle of bonds."

"I have emotional bonds?"

"Yes, now shut up and go with it."

"You guys don't seem very put out," Calvin said to Morte and Spike.

"Eh," Morte said. "I'm a floating animate skull. I'm used to being ignored. Or screamed at. Or attacked by paranoids. Or obsessed over by guys that think I represent new horizons to existence or some other nonsense."

"And I'm wearing a faceless protective suit for no apparent reason," Spike said. "Would _you _go up to a guy like that?"

"That's a protective suit?" Zim said. "I want one!"

"...Oh. Well, this was donated by Abel's bunch, but they sell 'em at _Burning Subject Matter _down at the mall-"

"Yes, yes, this is very nice and all," Mr. Herrimen interrupted. "But you all kindly clear off? I have work to do!"

Zim blinked. "Oh, yeah. Hey, who wants to get out of here!"

"ME!" Calvin, Spike, Morte, Hobbes, Ron and Abel yelled.

"Then we leave!"

"_FREEDOM!_" Came the resounding scream, the pull of it's bonds of friendship pulling the others into it when they were too reserved or annoyed or depressed to otherwise be interested, and they all ran off in the general direction of the exit.

Except for Spike, who Mr. Herrimen had caught. "Don't be so hasty, Master William!" Mr. Herrimen said. "You still claim to have crashed the chandilier for no good reason..."

"For drama, it was."

"Oh...well, I'm still quite annoyed with you regarding that!"

"Eh, normally I'd be annoyed but I'll take my lumps when I ought to."

"Very good."

Mr. Herrimen pulled Spike back into his office, no doubt for some horrible and overly long lecture about responsibility, care for his property, and why it was a bad idea to smash six-hundred pound pointed things for dramatic purposes. "Hey, why didn't you call out Zim for doing the stuff he pulled?" Spike said, mostly to distract Mr. Herrimen.

Mr. Herrimen paused. "...Master William. Do you think me a cruel man?"

"What?"

"Do you think me a man, well, imaginary friend, to be unbendably stern towards a soul suffering and unfettered?"

"I'm guessing no."

"You wound me. Master William, think of it. That young boy...alien...whatever he is, he experienced something terrible and unnatural. He undoubtedly saw dear ones be torn apart and turned into foul monsters. His world broken down and consumed by darkness itself. And he went _through _that darkness to come here."

"...You're being _soft?_"

Mr. Herrimen looked sternly at Spike. "Those of us that are lucky enough to survive the people we cared about never forget it. And when come here...we are seldom in a state to act rationally. We all do things unreasonable. Is it not cruel to treat them the same as people who have learned to bear the loss of their world, their countries, their people and very way of life?"

Spike didn't say anything. Then, "What about that burned-up bit on the grounds I heard of? He's a pyrokinetic, you know. And he'd looks like he wanted to practice?"

"What? Oh...bah, I'll not contravene myself...Master Zim is not in his right mind now, and I shall not hold that over him. You though, and Miss Rockwaller and her fellows," Mr. Herrimen seemed to smirk. "Well. You cannot lay claim to such excuses, can you?"

"Of course," Spike said tiredly.

If Mr. Herrimen had been the cackling sort, he would have laughed in a truly manic manner as he dragged Spike into his office. It would have been full of harsh giggles, cackles sharp as cactus needles and roaring into an animal howl near the end. Mr. Herrimen did not approve of excess, though, and settled for a small snort of amusement.

"At last!" Zim said loudly as they left Foster's front entrance. "We're finally free of this pit of madness! Even though I could have left at any point earlier. Yeah."

"What are you, an idiot?" Morte said. "You're so enthusiastic about everything. It's creepy."

"Hot-blood is what powers the _gears of history!_" Zuko said. Everyone looked at him. "What?"

"It is!" Aang said.

Sokka rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm begining to see how Zim fits as a Firebender..."

"Ah, being shamelessly oozing with passion about everything," Ron said knowingly. He paused. "Wait, I thought Firebenders were _bad guys_."

Team Avatar flinched virtually as one. Except Toph, she just snickered. "Ah," Katara said. "Uh. The thing about that...is..."

"The Fire Nation was force-fed propaganda for the entirety of the war and before," Zuko said bluntly. "We had no idea what the rest of the world was like. They told us the Earth Kingdom was a close-minded dictatorship, the Water Tribes were brutal cannibals and the Air Nomads were self-centered sociopaths that either didn't bother to tell us about one of the worst hurricanes in history to hit the Fire Nation, which I may point out is a chain of _archepelagoes_, or even made that hurricane. Fire Lord Sozin, Azulon and my...er, Ozai told the whole Fire Nation a lie that we were conquering the world for it's own good, and we believed them." He make a sharp noise between a _tch! _of disapproval and a growl. "And I have my reasons to think that either Sozin stopped the Western Air Temple Nomads from getting word to him about that very hurricane, or worse, spirits did it to instigate the Air Nomad massacre."

There was a long, horrified silence. "Well, I feel like a jerk," Ron said.

"You're not the only one," Aang said bitterly. "That happened _before _I after fell into the water and froze myself into a block of ice like a complete idiot. And what your great-grandfather did...I wasn't there to help my people."

"...Wow," Abel said. "The fact that you're still psychologically stable after barely escaping something like that either means that you have reserves of inner strength that go over nine thousand...or you have serious issues that you ought to get looked at." He nudged Scar, who'd been carefully watching Aang with a subdued look of shared horrors. "See, look at this guy. Nazis with transmutating circles of doom genocided _his _people, or came too close. He had a really bad freak-out afterwards." He paused. "Wait, was that insensitive?"

"Yes," Scar said, annoyed. "And genocide is not a verb."

"I can make it one! I have the technology! In my guts and stuff."

Aang looked at Scar with renewed surprise. "Uh...wow. I...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring it back up-"

"It is no trouble of your's," Scar said gruffly. "Do not think yourself responsible for things that you had no control over. There is little point in agonizing over what could be or what might have been. There is only _what was _and _what can be_, and those alone are worth consideration."

"I think you're right," Aang said. "Thank you."

"This guy's smart!" Zim said to Abel. "A pity it hasn't rubbed off on you."

"Yeah, all my friends make me look like an idiot!" Abel said cheerfully. "Or they would if I had more."

"I'm starting to get the feeling everyone here is messed up in the head," Calvin said to Hobbes. "Either they survived genocide, barely avoided it or were involved in it somehow."

"We're not!" Tucker said.

"Yes we are," Danny said sadly. "Remember last night?"

"...Well, damn it. Now I'm depressed."

"Well, there's a cure for that," Abel said. "All we have to do is go around long enough and-" A part of the ground uncurled, revealing itself to be a mattress-shaped monster with big teeth and centipede legs. It roared and tackled Abel headlong, snapping like a overpowered bear trip. "OHFORTHELOVEOFSUGAR, WHY DOES THE GRASS BITE ME!"

"And now I'm not!" Tucker said. "Nothing like comedic sociopathy to take the edge of lingering grief and supernatural invasion."

"Just as planned," Abel said casually, pushing the monster off. "I figured you guys would be feeling bad, so I set that up ahead of time to surprise and amuse you."

"You owe me," The monster, rolling back into place on the ground.

"I gotta say," Kim said. "When I brought the guys here, I wasn't expecting this many of you. We're definitely not going to fit into my car!"

"That a fact?" Toph said. "Where'd you plan on taking us, huh? And what are we going to do there?"

Everyone stopped in mid-step. "Wait a minute!" Sokka said. "I know we like to make things up as we go along, but come on, we're going somewhere and we don't even know what we're doing!"

"Worked for me last night," Zim said.

"And how'd that go for you?" Sam asked him. Zim conceded her point.

"Well," Hobbes said heisitantly, earning a full round of expectant looks. "Well...uh, we, meaning Zim, Calvin and me-"

"And me," Morte said.

"Yeah, him, need to get properly equipped for our adventure. And by that I mean spamming the spending thing to be on the safe side." He looked at Kim. "And since she volunteered to help outfit us last night..."

"That's pretty much it," Kim agreed.

"Well, we don't _all _need to go to do that," Toph said sensibly. "We could just head up there, split up and meet up together later, right?"

A short deliberation ensued. "That sounds doable," Zim said, summing up the the majority feelings. "We can get more breakfast there, because meat pies do not simply do for morning feasts, and then we can...uh...split into several groups to leave town, locate hidden robots fueled by fighting spirit and commandeer them to conquer whatever great villain tyrannizes the other people of this world? Only to unleash a greater threat later that we still smash through!"

"How about sightseeing?" Aang said.

"And I could check in with that Cyborg guy to see how our ship is doing," Calvin said.

"I call dibs on shopping!" Sokka said.

"Or we can do that," Zim said. "But that still doesn't answer how we're going to get there in a single car."

"Ooh! I know!" Aang said. He caught Sokka and Zuko's attention. All three boys grinned deviously. "_To the Sky Bison!_" They cried out and ran off.

Ron watched them go. "What's a Sky Bison?"

"Oh, you'll find out," Toph said, smirking. "But at a distance, mind."

Abel picked up a stick and started poking Scar in the head with it. "What are you doing?" Scar said, speaking like a bear that was contenting itself with allowing a wolf to annoy it and edge closer to suicide.

"Poking you with a stick," Abel said. "For he is a stick, and a stick is he, and it is his people's way to greet others with poking!"

Scar slapped the stick away, breaking it in half. "Oops," He said flatly.

Abel gasped. "_NOOO!_ _MR. STICK!_ How could you! My dearest friend, you killed Mr. Stick! _YOU'RE HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER!_ Well, you and whoever that it would be a good idea to start shamelessly churning out movies based on timeless classics for money."

"Er," Scar said, feeling a little guilty about it. "Mr. Stick had a brother." He pointed at the stick's other half. "Named...Mr. Stick. Pronounced with a lower inflection."

"Oh good, a happy ending," Abel said happily. His air abruptly flopped over his face. "Hey, the wind's really picking up!"

Grass tore out of the ground as gusts of wind hammered the dirt, flattening and churning soil into streams of soil fanning around them, the air winind around itself into a nearly solid cushion that softened an oncoming massive beast larger than a tank; white-furred, it's brown markings recalling Aang's Airbender tattoos, it's six-legged body holding equal elements of bison and manatee with a powerful beaverlike tail pounding the air into a spiral around it and throwing another mighty gust that nearly knocked them all head's-over-heels when it hit the ground.

A stunned silence from everyone who had never seen a Sky Bison before commenced. Ron broke it first. "OhmiGod, OhmiGod _THAT IS THE COOLEST THING EVER SINCE GIANT DRILL ROBOTS!"_

"Wow," Kim said numbly. "That's...that's just...wow."

"Incredible," Scar said, his usual expression of stoic disinterest utterly shattered and replaced with something almost childlike in it's wonderment. "Is that some kind of chimera? No, it's...it feels of the spirits. Like the wind given a shape and face."

"Oh, _come on!_" Abel said. "Is everything with you guys ridiculously awesome or what?"

The beast himself, Appa, the last of the Sky Bisons and fellow fragment of the lost Air Nomads alongside Aang rumbled his disapproval of these many strange people. Aang patted his head reassuringly, whispering introductions to him while behind Aang, Sokka looked smug and Zuko did his best to help Aang. Appa growled, looking at them mistrustfully until his gaze stopped on Ron, grinning up at him, the small creature on his shoulder staring at Appa with a gleam of mutual brotherhood of protected ditzy owners, and then on Scar, the little panda on his shoulder gaping up at what looked like a godlike being from her perspective. Appa reconsidered his position and bowed his head respectfully to them.

"Is this what you have in mind?" Hobbes said, awed. "This guy's gonna transport us?"

"Oh yeah, this is gonna be one for the books!" Calvin said excitedly. "Did you see the way it landed, with the air and the spirals and blasting and it was awesome!"

"But how are we supposed to ride it? I don't know how to ride giant air-monsters! Only giant _sea-_monsters! They didn't cover this in theurge-warrior boot camp!"

"I'll _make _something we can ride in!" Calvin promised.

Aang gracefully jumped down from Appa's head, landing in way much like Appa himself had, though he lacked Appa's restraint and accidentally knocked Abel over. (Abel didn't mind, he was too overcome by the awesome that was Appa.) "Everyone, Appa, my Sky Bison, the original Airbenders and the ones who taught the precursors of the Air Nomads the sacreds art of becoming like the wind. Appa, everyone." He clapped his hands. "Okay, that's settled." A chittering interrupted him; a small creature resembling a large lemur with Appa's fur coloring and patterns jumped off from Zuko's shower and glided down on extended wings like a bats extending from it's arms and swooped onto Aang's shoulder. "Also, Momo. My _other _sidekick! Besides Sokka."

"_Spiritsdamnit, I'M NOT A SIDEKICK!_" Sokka screamed. Zuko laughed at him.

"OhmiGod, it's a horrible incarnation of all that's monkey to kill us all!" Ron screamed.

"What." Aang stared at him. "Momo's not a monkey, he's a lemur. They were trained to retrieve Air Monk staves."

"Same difference!" Ron threw himself behind Kim, trusting himself to his much more dangerous girlfriend to save his skinny butt and grabbed his knees and trembled as childhood phobias rung his neck. "A monkey is not a nightmare spider. A monkey is not a big scary clawn in transvestite wear. A monkey is not a librarian ape that's really touchy. A monkey will not bite me and throw me in the basement..._OR WILL IT_?"

"Uh...wow," Sam said to Kim. "Is he gonna be okay?"

"Probably," Kim said. Momo squeaked and she flinched as he flew overheard, intrigued by this strangely acting human, and landed right on his head. "Ron, wait, don't-"

"_WAAUUGH!_" Ron screamed in utter horror, his voice cracking windows and disturbing ancient spirits; one moment, he was there on the ground, and the next, he was tearing off around them and trailing blue auras born of terror, moving so fast he was tearing up the ground behind him and making the grass spontaneously combust, the wind spiralling behind him at speed's approaching Appa's gusts of wind. "_Getdditoffame, gedditoffame gedditoffame-_"

Toph lightly kicked the grond. A large wall of compact soil rose out of the ground and Ron ran right into it with such force that he effectively displaced enough of the soil to make a neat cookie-cutter image of himself. Momo, of course, flew over the whole thing and avoided that.

"Thank you," Hobbes told her. He rubbed an ear gratefully. "He was giving me such a headache!"

"Eh, it was nothing," Toph bragged, cracking her knuckles.

"You're awesome," Calvin said faintly. Toph faked a cough, looking embarrased. It was not a familiar emotion. "So!" He said to Aang loudly. "How are we gonna ride on this guy? Bareback riding?"

Aang faltered. "Uh...oops, I hadn't that far ahead. I used to have a litter for people to ride in, but I lost it a while ago." He gave Zim a look.

"That eldritch abomination was not my fault!" Zim said. "Besides, how was anyone supposed to know it ate everything starting with the letter L?"

"Never mind that, what are the specifications?" Calvin asked. "The size, precise measurement, what it's made of, does it have stirrups?" Surprised, Aang gave Calvin a brief description of what it was supposed to look like before Calvin ran off to the largest nearby tree and scratched something into the back with a small knife he had in a belt-pocket. (It was a transmutation array, actually, but Aang wasn't to know that, nor that it was impressive that Calvin was going to transmute a complex system like a tree.) There was a flash of blue light, a moment of morphologica inexactitude before a good part of the tree detached from the rest and hit the ground in the shape of a large litter such as Aang had descriped. Only it had cupholders now. And was expertly designed to resonate with the air to stimulate air conditioning. "This good enough?"

"...Yeah, I think it'll do," Sokka said faintly. "What the hell'd you just do? What was the flashy! The breaking bits and then not being broken!"

"Was that Energybending?" Aang wondered. "It...felt like it."

"No," Scar told him. "That is alchemy."

"Alchemy?" Danny said while Sokka, Zuko and Kim moved the litter onto Appa's back, Ron trying to help them and quivering in terror; while recovered from his panic attack, Momo had decided to make Ron's head his new resting place and simply _wouldn't go away_. Rufus seemed fine with it though.

"A field of science from my world, dealing with the understanding of the structure of matter and the use of manipulating the energies of the world to break it down and reconstruct it as something else." Scar grimaced. "The people of Amestris - the country that attacked my people, the people of Ishbal - used a blasphemous form of it that was utter disregard for the nature of existing structure. The alchemy of far eastern Xing, on the other hand, was more harmonious. Amestrian alchemy uses the movement of tectonic plates to fuel transmutations. Xingian _rendanjutsu_ on the other hand, uses what they called the dragon's pulse, or the very energy of the world. They don't tear apart and bring twisted things together from the remains, they..._bend _it, I suppose you."

"Nice play of words," Toph told him. "That sounds a bit like Energybending, actually. If you bent the energy of the world around you, instead of your own or someone else's." Aang took out a notebook and jotted down a reminder to put that notion into practice later, right between _Get Sokka and Zuko to do the ancient Air Nomad ceremony of blood-sharing so we're officially blood brothers instead of ones in spirit _and _Earthbend mountain range so that it spells out love for Katara to the universe_.

"That so?" Calvin said, walking over to him. "I've heard of Amestris before; the guy who taught me alchemy and other stuff talked about it and his family there all the time. I don't think he was actually from there, but he mentioned stuff about it." He frowned. "_Rendanjutsu_? That's what he called the alchemy he taught me, anyway, and the basics of Amestrian alchemy?"

"There are other people from my world out there?" Scar wondered. "Hmn, I wonder-" He froze. "Wait. You don't mean...you use mixtures of Xingian and Amestrian alchemy!"

"Yep. Why?"

Scar's face froze. "Does this...does this look familiar to you?" He held his arms and let his sleeves fall; both arms were covered in elaborate and stylized tattoos from below the shoulder to the wrist. The right arm, a little smaller than it ought to be and somehow _wrong _for him, was marked with black ink; on his upper arm was a large symbol resembling a stylized conjoined snake with a halo and flanked by what could have been dragon's-wings or just cool looking curves. On his lower arm was three lines, the middle one thicker, and thin loops intertwined with them like two-dimensional spirals, the words _terran _and _aer _in those lines. On his wrist for three narrow arrowhead points, a curving line around the rest of his wrist, and a similar design was around his snake-dragon-pattern thing, and there was a vauge semblence of flowing in the overall design, what with the arrrow-shaped points down the front of the whole tattoo. His left arm was similar, only in white ink, and the design was flipped; ther arrowpoints were around his upper arm and the abstract dragon-thing was on his forearm. The words on that design were _ignis _and _aqua._

Aang whistled, impressed, and tried to show off his own intricate Airbender tattoos as nonchalantly as possible. Then he actually paid attention to them when Calvin pointed them out. "Wow!" Calvin said. "These are...yeah, this looks like a replication and refinement of the 'dragon's pulse' concept of _rendanjutsu_." He pointed at the conjoined snake thing. "That is the male-and-female-as-one form, or a conception of a perfect being." He looked at the wings. "Those resemble reptillian scales...the dragon's pulse?" He pointed at the arrows. "Those guide the flow of power and represent the outward nature of it. Then those loops there, which, I would guess, represent the cyclical nature of alchemy; replicating the nature of existence itself, which is that things die and feed other living beings, making innumberable tiny things without which the greater whole could not exist. Alchemy reproduces that cycle in miniature...hmn..."

"And these," Aang said, pointing at the words on Scar's arms. "Earth. Air. Fire. Water. In most worlds, they represent the classical elements thought to make up all forms of matter. Earth for substance...air for freedom...fire for life...water for changeability. And the four elements of Bending in my world, the cornerstones of the Four Nation's philosophies." He put a hand to his chin. "I wonder if there's some kind of connection in my world."

"There are legends that the man who discovered Rendanjutsu knew of other worlds," Scar said heisitantly. He did not look at all comfortable.

"That might explain it," Calvin said. "_My _teacher never said anything about anyone like that. Hmn...and your left tatoos...the order is reversed to represent the _inward _flow of power. Wow...I've never thought of stuff like this, but the overall principles behind it, they're like the alchemy _I _use!"

"You use the same style my brother created?" Scar asked.

"Apparently. Wait, your brother?"

"In Ishbal..." Scar's expression tightened. "My brother was a scholar and a teacher. He believed alchemy could be used to improve the lives of our people, and knowing of our ancient disgust with Amestrian alchemy, because of the blasphemous way it distorts the world, he had to go to many lengths to import Xingian books of _rendanjutsu_ from the far east. He studied both disciplines, applied his fields of natural philosophy to both and created a revolutionary field of alchemy." Scar brandished his arms again. "These reconstruction matrixes are the product of his research, and the pillar of _Ishbalan _alchemy!"

"Cool," Aang said.

"Your brother sounds like a real genius," Calvin said. "I created my own branch of splinter alchemy like that, but I never made an entire new field. Do you suppose I could speak to him?"

"He's dead," Scar said.

Everyone paused in their prepping of Appa and stared at Calvin, who abruptly felt like a heel. "Uh...I'm sorry?"

Scar shook his head. "He died years ago in the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign," He said bitterly. "Long before the Heartless came." He paused. "But if you are interested in his work...well, I have published his research into alchemy so that his work would endure long after him. I am not the only one in Traverse Town with markings like these."

"Oh," Aang said, one genocide survivor to another. "Erm..."

"Your tattoos are interesting," Scar said to him, killing the awkwardness. "What do they represent?"

Scar, Aang and Calvin quickly began discussing the origins of Air Nomad tattoos of Airbending mastery, representing the nature of their element, their respect of the Sky Bisons who taught their forefathers, how the truly poweful master's most complex tattoos were actually encoded 'how to' lessons in skin and ink...Zim and Abel watched them talk with smirks on their faces.

"Heh, I thought the boy would make everyone hate him," Zim told Abel.

"And I had no idea Scar would open up to _anyone _for so little reason," Abel said. "You've got some unusual friends, to let the Alchemist Slayer of Amestris talk to people about his brother's work."

"The what slayer?"

"Nothing you need to hear about! And if I tell you, I swear Scar will kick me off a cliff. Or shoot me in the face with a bazooka. I hate when people take advantage of my immortality."

Zim considered that immortality. "Are you a vampire?"

"Yes. No! I mean no! Of course not, how could you be...so...you saw me drinking the blood last night."

"Yep."

Abel shrugged. "Okay, fine, I'm a vampire. The technical term is Crusnik, but that's unimportant."

Zim looked up at the sun. "And yet you don't burn. Everyone knows vampires burn in sunlight. Except for..." He froze. "No. _No_. Are you wearing oinments so you dont _sparkle!_"

"Oh good God no!" Abel said, horrified at the very notion. "Urgh, never! I'm just not that kind of vampire that burns in sunlight. Well, not when I'm just a guy like this, you know? I have to be an _active _vampire."

"I haven't the slighest idea what that means."

Abel looked ashamed. "I'd rather keep it that way," He said quietly, and looked old.

"So how old are you?" Zim asked, master of the rude and impolite question.

Abel looked like he was going to say something that wasn't a _technical _lie, but Kim shouted, "Alright everyone, we're going to figure out who's going where, okay!"

"Ooh, that's our cue," Abel said rushing over to where everyone was already arguing about who had to ride on Appa and go in the car.

After Aang managed to get some order, mostly by shooting huge gouts of fire because fire is too _awesome _to ignore, they confered for a minute. "Okay, here's the way I think it should go," Danny said. "We have four Traverse Town natives here, meaning we can split up into four groups and do stuff with guides around."

"And therefore, Zim's group can get the stuff he needs for this journey he's going on while the rest of us can figure out what sort of town we're actually in," Zuko said. He paused. "Also, we're going to need to talk to you about that." Zim pretended to be interested in a passing cloud. Actually he _was _quite interested in it. It was so poofy...and an interesting shade of white tinged with blue...and it looked like a big pancake. He loved pancakes. And making twisted mockeries of science. But he just _hated _Peruvian llama-slayers. He didn't know why, he just did."

"So that means we need a group to go shopping," Katara said. "A group to go sightseeing, a group to check on this ship Hobbes tells me you have in arrears, and the last group to take Zim somewhere and hammer some Firebending basics into his head."

"Yes!" Zim said. "Wait, what?"

"We saw you fight earlier," Aang said. "And...well, I'm not sure how to saw this nicely..."

"You suck horribly at it," Zuko said, more blunt than Aang ever would be. "You suck worse than a centipede-leech with an eating disorder. You have all the Firebending restraint of..._Zhao _with none of the actual skill."

"Hey!" Zim said angrily.

"Even Zuko when we first met and he was an angry jerk with a ponytail was better at it than you," Sokka said.

"Hey! I worked _hard_! Lousy Water Tribe little..."

"Shut up! Spoiled Fire Nation military suck-up!"

"Uneducated Water Tribe barbarian!"

"Mama's boy!"

"Daddy's boy!"

"Hah, my dad could beat up your dad!"

"You lie! Wait, do you mean my biological father or my uncle who I think as a father?"

"Uh...you know, I'm gonna give this up right now. Though as he is right now, my dad would totally _whup _Ozai. The Phoenix King of Guys Who Don't Win!"

"That was a bad name-call then and it's a bad name-call now," Toph remarked.

"Uh, right," Kim said. "Okay, let's figure out who's going with who..."

"Does it have to be four?" Calvin said uneasily. "Four is not a nice number. We could tempt the fates and get this whole district destroyed by something, because the fates are mean-spirited and quick to take bad timing."

"Don't be superstitious," Katara said dismissively. It was, perhaps, bad for someone who was not only blessed by the spirits with awesome hydokinetic powers but also had _met _a lot of them to not be a little superstitious, but hey, hindsight.

Arguing quickly ensued. Zim complained about his friends being too brutally honest. (Though he would prefer it to a gentle lie.) Abel privately made notes about these new people, quietly thinking about things ancient and forgotten by civilized men, wondering if perhaps they were finally unfolded and hoping against hope that they were. Scar, instead of skulking off in the dark, had been pulled into the argument too quickly for him to realize how gut-smackingly weird that was. Appa, Rufus, Momo and Xiao-Mei all gathered together and started bonding, pondering ways to make Ron stop freaking out whenever Momo looked at him. (Kim's car would have joined in, except the least spirit of it's archetypal function had yet to properly awaken. A few minutes in Aang's presence would probably rectify that.) Even Danny, the one most badly affected by the loss of his world, was feeling better. Not very much, but Tucker and Sam were relieved at it. (Neither of them were quite as badly off, since the loss of Earth was just too big for them to feel and they were choosing to deal with it by pretending it hadn't happened. It was probably going to bite them in the butt later on.)

They paused, of course, when Bloo, Wilt, Mac, Eduardo, Coco and Minimoose ran by, being chased by Captain Razor, Freya, Andre and Stature. Seeing a bunch of fictional creatures being pursued by a cat-person, a rat-kangaroo-thing jumping to the roof and back, a hunter-monster person and a girl that had grown to nearly fifty feet for some reason will do that. Minimoose squeaked a hurred promise to meet up with them later and they went on their chase.

"...Huh," Zuko said. "Was that your other sidekick being chased by those four guard leaders from earlier? Along with whatever those things were?"

"Yes."

"Life's not going to be normal again for a very long time, is it."

"I expect not."

Zuko sighed. "I was afraid of that." Kim patted him on the shoulder. And then everyone went back to arguing about what they were supposed to do.

...

_The uncertainty of spacial trans-coordination._

_Feeling like his stomach, heart and assorted organs were occupying spaces not consistent with his own._

_The merest sight of all the other possible universes and quantum-point fluxations, coexisting and being a single point of being._

Zolf J. Kimblee was in negative-space transist for so short a time it could hardly have been said to have happened at all, but it was still enough time for him to decide that he hated it forever and that one day he was going to find the asshole that thought it was a good idea and blow him up so hard the _universe _was going to look around and wonder where that explosion had come from.

_In the potential For an instant, seeing himself in all the other ways he could have been; being devoured by Pride (but then helping Edward Elric kick his hypocritical ass), getting his chest blown open by Scar, being forced to marry the homunculus Greed or some corrupt officer named Archer or Roy Mustang..._

Kimblee shuddered at the information crackling in his synapses, bursts of insight acquired from himself being oriented in phase-space while the universe tried to sort out which Kimblee he was and where he was supposed to be. Those last ones were the worst; for some reason people expected him to be a depraved deviant and that really offended him. He was an asexual sociopath and _proud of it_.

_Okay, what the hell was that?_ Kevin demanded in his head. Not so much in words, of course. _Why did I see me in the future being...a total freak of nature! With a kid I beat like a dog? I was a thrill-seeking criminal, an occasional psycho for hire and a mutant in all the ways that count but I wasn't THAT bad! Right?_

"How should I know, I barely know you," Kimblee muttered.

_Bah, he complains too much,_ Ghostfreak scoffed. _That one universe where I was a quiet hero of the Omnitrix? Someone knows little of my character! And that's terrible._

"Please shut up," Kimblee told his occupants. Mercifully, they did. Groaning, he sat up and did a quick examination of his surrondings, realizing that he was some kind of alley.

He stumbled out of discarded newspapers and out into the sunlight, smoothing out his rumbled clothing and realized that he probably should have specified white. He liked white. Oh well, too late for it now-

A man walked by. He was completely unimportant to Kimblee; for the Red Lotus Alchemist, his face was a blank. His body was a triangle. His arms and legs were blurs, only meant to telegraph movement and get this nonperson about and into his universe. But on his head...was a _HAT_. Wide-brimmed. A flat, slightly creased top. A black bandana wrapped around the top.

_Well, _Kimblee thought smugly. _That is convieient_.

"Excuse me, sir," He said in his most courteous voice. The man turned. "Might I have a word with you in that alley over there?"

"That alley, right over there?"

"Yes."

"The one that, due to a archetectural mish-mash of errors, happened to be completely blocked from sight from nearly any angle unless you're inside it?"

"Yes."

"With you, a strange man wearing clothing with a vaugely Nazi-esque feel and a smile that doesn't reach your eyes. Which themselves are the eyes of a man who is not nearly the man behind the bomber's scope, but the scope itself, and one that loves it's work."

"You have it in one." Kimblee liked honesty.

"Hmn. Well, all the evidence is screaming that I should run away like a maniac, but I see no reason why not."

"Very good sir." Kimblee led him into the alley.

He came out five minutes later whistling cheerfully and wearing a totally awesome white hat. He held in his hand a bloody knife that he lightly tossed into a nearby garbage can, grateful he left no fingerprints and annoyed that he'd actually _forgotten _to get his transmutation circles reapplied, thus depriving him of his art. A trip to a tattoo parlor would solve that right up. "Well, that was unusual."

That man whose hat he'd taken came out of the alley behind him, straightening himself and rather bloodied. "Who would expect muggers to be waiting in alleys like that?"

"You're not very clever, are you," Kimblee muttered.

"Nope. Incidentally, can I have my hat back now? Only you took it off the ground when those muggers knocked it off and you did quite inventive things to them with that knife." He paused. "...I shan't forget _that _in a hurry."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Kimblee said honestly. _By the Shadow, this fellow is annoying, _Ghostfreak said. _Kimblee, you seem a cooperative sort. Relax your body._

_My body_, Kevin snarled.

_Not now, child._

Kimblee did. His arm jerked, pulsing just under the surface, and unexpectedly swelled to twice it's size, his clothing growing with it and _merging _with it as flesh and bone transformed into solidified solar flame thickening to magma in solid plates like an exoskeleton: the arm of a Pyronite. "Huh."

"That's interesting," The very unfortunate and _exceedingly _Genre Blind man said.

"I suppose it is," Kimblee said. "Please come back into the alley with me? I haven't said my piece."

"Is it about my hat?"

"You could say that."

The man followed him into the alley, and as soon as Kimblee was sure that no one could see, he seized the man's neck with his Pyronite arm, pulling his off the ground and burning half his jaw off at first touch.

The man almost screamed, betrayed and horrified even though it was stupidly obvious Kimblee was evil. Kimblee squeezed, his altered body's instincts sufficient to focus the heat to the man's throat. The heat soared until his arm blazed, a contained inferno, hot enough to melt through steel, let along cook the man's throat and vocal cords almost instataenously, killing any semblence of a scream. Skin and flesh burned through, and a strangled wheeze died in Kimblee's burning grip, whistling out holes in what only resembled a throat now.

"The strong survive," Kimblee told him as he twitched and jerked. "The weak perish. That is the shape of the world. Both your's and mine." He gave a gentle shove with his Pyronite's wrist, releasing a stream of fire that lanced through the man's head, cooking his brain from the inside out; when it was done, the man was dead, his face was a crispsed mockery of a human's countenence, lips burnt away and revealing his teeth bared in a desperate grin. Some sort of liquid was pouring down his cheeks, and Kimblee supposed that had been his eyes. Tufts of burnt ashes touched the ground; hair burned and gone.

Kimblee's arm returned to normal, clothing reappeared and fitting comfortably again. He kneeled close to the man's face and jokingly poked him in the forehead, his finger sinking in a bit. "Ah, now your face becomes clear to me. Have no fear. I shall remember it well." He heard a noise, quickly hushed, and turned around. Behind him were two small children, no older then five and younger than six. Kimblee wasn't good with kids. They were staring with eyes wide and strangely blank, as though their minds were breaking trying to comprehend what they had seen.

Kimblee looked from the children to the corpse. "Ah," He said, standing up. "I assure you, this isn't what it looks like."

"Grandpa?" The older child, a girl said. Her voice was quiet, hoarse, and in the grips of some unfamiliar emotion, twisted.

"Hrm? I'm not your..." Realization dawned on Kimblee. "Ah, you mean him." He gestured at the corpse. "Hmn. This is awkward, isn't it." He shrugged. Cleaning up the witnesses was an unavoidable chore. "A little more assistance, er, Ghostfreak?"

_Certainly_, Ghostfreak purred while the ragged bundle of tortured memories and distraught sentience that was Kevin Levin howled.

Kimblee's hands twisted and grew, green light shimmering as flesh gave way for sillicon structure, pale skin and blood twisting into glass-hued crystal: his hands were that of a Petrosapien's. Kimblee raised his hands out, a single finger pointing out, more unfamiliar instincts emerging. Unusual processes occured in those transfigured hands, and from each finger a single large shard of diamond-hard crystal swelled out and fired. The children jerked as green crystals suddenly appeared into their foreheads, blood welling up around them, and fell over. They didn't move again.

Hoping there wasn't anyone else he'd have to kill to eliminate witnesses, Kimblee quickly dragged them out of sight, put them next to their dead grandfather, one child for each other. It seemed respectful. As an afterthought, he grabbed a nearby newspaper and dipped a discarded glovefinger into their blood and scribbed a note: _I did not kill these children. Signed, The Guy Who Did_. _(Please give credit where credit is due, hapless interloper.)_ He needed to use the dead children's remaining blood supply in their cooling bodies to get fresh ink for the note, but the quantity of sharp things made it easy.

_Well done!_ Ghostfreak said approvingly. _Expertly done. None of that savage brutality I see these days. Almost gentlemanly!_

_You are a sick monster_, Kevin said sullenly. _And this is ME telling you that. I once tried to blow up a train to get at the money in another one. On the other hand...what the hell was that guy thinking! You're obviously a sicko! And what were little kids like that loitering around for him or whatever and not being directly with him!_

Kimblee ignored them and climbed up a suspiciously convieient ladder and climbed up to the adjoining rooftop, whereupon he located an elevator to the building inside; a kind of supermarket that made it easy to wash off the blood in a bathroom without anyone noticing. That messiness down, he went on his merry way to start off his plans. And he had plans, but he wanted to get some people he knew in town first.

This was going to be _fun_.

After Kimblee left the alley, the souls of the two children and their grandfather got up and examined their dead bodies with some interest, but not too much; dead shades tend to be a bit touchy about their mortal shells, no matter how badly tended they have been.

"Well, I feel a bit of an idiot," The grandfather said. Illusions are the first thing to go in death, aside from your life. It's a prerequisite.

"Duh, grandpa," The younger girl said, her horror fading away mainly because she was dead and nothing makes things better like realizing that, barring certain theological implications, they can't possibly get any worse by default. "Don't you watch cartoons and stuff."

"I did, once. That's what led me to my recent and apparently short career as the Animation Snob! And I didn't even have an elaborate and pointless fued with any other comedic critics either...the Cartoon Guy looked promising, even though he's the lesser of his team with the Film Lady."

YOU HEAR INTERESTING REMARKS IN THIS JOB, a strange voice said behind them.

They jumped. It was not a normal voice. It sounded like leaden slabs falling into place, sliding into their minds without bothering to go through what, given a lack of proper terms for the anatomy of the soul's form, one must call their ears.

They turned around, saw their fate waiting for them and relaxed. It was not as frightening as they'd expected. "I expected you to be taller," The grandfather said.

HEIGHT IS VERY SUBJECTIVE.

"You're not as scary like pictures say," The younger girl piped up.

I REALLY TAKE OFFENSE TO POPULAR PERCEPTION, I DO. The voice had a wounded edge. I DO THIS FOR EVERYONE.

"I thought you'd be, I dunno, meaner." The other girl said.

I AM NOT THE ENEMY OF LIFE, NOR ANY MORTAL'S, Said Death, the Grim Reaper, the Harvester of Mankind, the Ultimate Reality, the Kindness After Suffering, and, to one small community for a while, Bill Door. BUT I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT OTHER ASPECTS OF MYSELF DO NOT SHARE MY VIEWS.

"Aspects?" The old man said uncertainly.

NEVER YOU MIND. UNLESS YOU KNOW OF THE NATURE OF REALITY ITSELF, THE ULTIMATELY ARCHETYPAL FUNCTION OF THE BASELINES FORMS OF THE FORCES THAT RUN EXISTENCE AND THE CURRENT AND TROUBLESOME STATE OF THINGS?

"Um. No."

WELL THEN. ON THE HORSE NOW.

"What horse?" The grandpa asked as the girls squealed with joy. A huge, milk-white and alarmingly _real _horse nudged him from behind. "Oh. Nice horse."

'NICE HORSE'? Death said reproachfully. HE IS THE STEED THAT CARRIES ME ACROSS THE WORLDS, UNBOTHERED BY THINGS FLIMSY AS SPACIAL-CONSTRAINSTS. HE WAS ONCE CALLED SHADOWFAX OF THE MEARAS. IT IS WITH HIM THAT THOSE THAT WEAR MY DUTY RIDE. IT IS HE THAT I RIDE AGAINST THE END OF ALL THINGS WITH MY FELLOWS WAR, PESTILIENCE, FAMINE AND CHAOS.

"That's very nice and all. What's his name then?"

ERM. Death was aware that he had probably made too much lead-up. BINKY.

"I like it," The younger girl said encorougingly as her grandfather laughed uncontrollably.

IT APPEARS TO ME THAT IF YOU HAD A MORE APPROPIATE GRASP OF NARRATIVE CASUALITY, YOU WOULD NOT BE DEAD YET, Death told him. He wasn't angry, but he was mildly annoyed. Most people needed a lot longer to be informal with him around. He worried he was losing his touch.

The grandfather and his grandchildren got on his horse, riding pillon behind Death as he too got on. "I hope that wretched follow takes good care of my hat," He said. "I like that hat."

"Grandpa, you're _dead_. And he killed us. Don't you think that's a bit more important?"

"Hmph! You only die once, but a hat's a hat!"

THAT FELLOW KIMBLEE IS GOING TO GIVE ME MORE WORK TO DO, Death remarked. I AM SURE OF IT.

"Oh yeah?" The younger girl said. "How sure?" Death told her in precise percentages. "Oh. That's pretty sure." Her head exploded from the effort of comprehending it and reformed moments later. "That tickled!"


	9. Red Lotus: Raise The Choir

Well, sooner and shorter than expected is the next chapter! Here, we get to see these things! Zim's allies, old and new, irritating each other! The flaws of riding Sky Bison without prior experience! Unsubtle camoes and Kevin Eleven suffering more trauma! Wait, that last bit isn't nice. Oh well.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted properties.

...

Over the central part of the First District, a Sky Bison flew high over the buildings.

Sadly, the people below were not in a position to appreciate how mindbending cool this was; they knew nothing about the near-extinction of the Air Nomad's sacred animals, so their admiration and interest was limited to the simple novelty of seeing a six-legged bison-manatee hybrid fly overhead on bursts of wind. (It should also be considered that Traverse Town, diverse as it is, might well contain people that _do_, in fact, know about the world of the Avatar and therefore know exactly what Appa was, but if there were, they weren't telling anyone.)

Aang seemed more appreciative of the town than they were of his oldest friend's strangeness. He was certainly enjoing the refreshingly clean air of Traverse Town. "This is nice, isn't it?" He said, perched on Appa's head and holding a set of make-shift reins around Appa's horns and leaning with what he considered to be the breeze, which most sane people would consider a 'eye-stinging bitter blast that would knock you off a mountain side'.

Appa rumbled noncomittaly. He had been to many places in his life and not often enough to high mountaintops, which were the only places he really considered to be proper living places. He did not think this would be the last unfamiliar and alien place he would see and so he didn't take much interest in it.

Aang was the only one riding on Appa's head; he'd been born on mountains, lived most of his life on enormous temples where security measures to keep people from being blown off them had been irrelevent because any idiot who was supposed to be there could just bend the wind back up. As such, he was the sole person with the confidence to be there unanchored and unafraid. The other occupants of the litter - Zim, Ron, Sokka, Calvin, Morte and Abel - were in various means of being flattened against the litter except for Sokka and Zim, who were familiar enough with it to lay against the walls. "You know, I pictured this being a lot less terrifying," Ron said faintly.

"You knew you were going to ride on a giant monster with aerokinetic powers and fly in the sky," Morte said flatly. "At what point did you think caution was not going to be thrown out the door?"

"Uh...well, I feel like an idiot."

Calvin felt bored. "Are we there yet?" He asked.

"No," Said Ron.

"No," Sokka said.

"Are we there yet?"

"No!" Zim said.

"Are we there yet?"

"No!" Morte said.

"Are we there yet?" Asked Abel, who was childish.

"NO!" Everyone but Aang and Calvin yelled.

"Well, how are most of you guys supposed to know that?" Abel asked reasonably. "The only one of us that actually knows where we're going is Ron and me. And Ron's too scared to peek out of the bison-basket and I, frankly, couldn't find the back of my hand with a map." He rubbed his head; it was still sore from being shot and regenerated. "Couldn't that Mr. Lyle have made it a cleaner shot? Jerk."

"I think that Kim girl is leading the way," Zim said, gesturing vaugely at the ground below them where everyone else had gotten into the now cramped car. Except for Danny, Tucker, Sam and Scar. For reasons of the car not being big enough for ALL of them, they had to take the bus.

As if on cue (which it probably was), Ron's pocket made a annoying four-tone ring. "Hey-yo," He said, answering it. "Hold on, I'll put in on speaker, I don't wanna sit up in this altitude, I've recently contracted 'I-Die-If-I-Look-Down-From-Amazingly-Deadly-Heights' disease."

The squat communicator he held lit up and a flat holographic image appeared, Kim's face smiling dryly. "Funny," She said. "That's the same thing you said when we went sky-diving so we could get to Dr. Goldtooth's latest lair without having to go through the war-torn land around it. That was being fought against by four armies of warrior tribes with giant robots."

"Sky-diving into an _active volcano_," Ron said. "Which we later had to escape when the whole thing went boom, riding on the lava with broken but very tough airships and killer flying dinosaur-shark monsters with frickin' laser-beam shooting things wired to their heads. It was not a happy day for me."

"Didn't you get to ride a camel?"

"Oh, yeah! Then it WAS a good day for me after all!"

"Yes, I can certainly see that _this _world is going to make so much sense," Sokka said sarcastically.

"I'm sure it'll have less unfortunate implications than the world with sparkly vampires and psychic werewolves that weren't actually werewolves," Aang said.

"Anyway," Kim continued. "Us on the ground have noticed that you're not going the right way. In fact, I'm betting that none of you are paying attention to where you're supposed to be going."

"What makes you say that?"

"You're going the wrong way," Katara said, leaning over Kim's shoulder to get into the holo-screen. "In fact, right now you're going backwards."

"What?" Aang said, pulling the reins to get Appa turned around.

"Okay, _now _you're going the right way," Katara said. "...Maybe you should just follow behind us?"

"I see no reason why!" Zim said. "We do not have bad direction, we simply refuse to do anything as banal as obey the arbitary and corrupting laws of spacial configuration!"

"Well," Aang said. "The only person who actually knows where we're going refuses to look at the ground and tell me where to go, and neither me or Appa has the slightest idea where to go. Or Sokka."

"Right," Kim said. "Just follow me, okay?" Aang agreed in spite of Zim's protests and Appa dipped lower to follow the car below, still flying above building level, his massive bulk propelled by rippling gusts of wind. Various rooftop antannaes, sattilite dishes and plank-bridges going across buildings wavered but didn't break off, implying that in Traverse Town building codes were _very _robust and prepared to an extent verging on psychosis. They quickly made good time, mainly because Kim, while a good driver, had a driving method based primarily around treating every single other vehicle as an enemy bent on her destruction and simply going somewhere as a race for the very soul of the entire cosmos.

In short, it didn't matter if you were in the car or riding the Sky Bison; if you had a delicate constitution and a problem with panic, you were screwed.

"I'm begining to reconsider getting involved," Zuko said weakly after the sixth time Kim swung around another breakneck racer by sliding around them and moving up a convient ramp to launch them into the air and bounce onto a rooftop and start racing along them, jumping from roof to roof with concealing springs built into the car.

"Aw, come on, don't be a baby!" Kim chided him. "That is _nothing!_" She hit a button on the console-controller shaped steering interface, springing them right over the roof, throwing almost everyone back with the distinct feeling that their stomachs had dislocated, repeated again to nasuating effect when she hit another button; a unwieldly set of attachments on the car's side unfolded into a pair of large and crude-looking wings, flexible metal spread over a batlike skeleton. Little propellers extended from the back of the car and it actually _flew _for a short distance before Kim retracted one wing, sharply forcing it around a corner before it dipped near to the ground. She retracted the other wing, and they hit the ground and kept going. It should be noted that the whole time, they were going at a insanely reckless pace and the only reason that they, the car, the bystanders and other drivers weren't hurt was simply because Kim was both a really good driver in spite of her antics and the streets seemed expressively designed for this sort of thing.

"Oh good," Zuko said. "I was worried for a moment. I thought we might be getting excessive!"

"I love this town!" Toph screamed. "C'mon, you guys _gotta _teach me how to drive! Or learn to drive so you can teach me. It'll be awesome, promise!"

Katara paled and looked over the back seat at Zuko, who had a similar expression of utter horror. "No! No no no! For the love of Tui and La, you are _never _going to learn to drive, espicially not like this!"

Kim seemed wounded. "What's wrong with the way I drive?"

"The continued and rapidly escalated threats to all life-forms in your way?" Hobbes suggested timidly. While normally a Zen survivor kind of guy, Kim's reckless driving style had quickly frayed his nerves into what you got if you took spaghetti, shoved them in a meat grinder followed by a trip through a wood chipper and savaged what was left with a molecular-edged buzzsaw.

"You got something against blind people learning to drive?" Toph snapped at Katara.

"No, I have a problem with your lust for violence getting another outlet!"

Kim glanced back at Toph. "You're blind!"

"Shouldn't _you _be looking at the road?" Zuko yelled.

"Huh? Waugh!" Kim swerved to avoid a totem pole that, against all probability, was being carried across the street; she slid under it, damaging nothing except everyone's nerves. "Weird," She muttered as she pointed her car in the right direction. "Usually it's a pane of glass."

"I hope that someone is having an easier time of it than we are," Katara said in an equally quiet mutter.

...

_In a small tatooist's place in the First District..._

"Now then," Kimblee said to the woman studying the design he'd requested. "You are _certain _you know what I need?"

"Sure thing," The woman, a moderately tall and stocky young lady covered nearly head to foot in all manner of beautifully intricate and artistic tattoos and wearing scruffy overalls and a white sleeveless shirt, said. "An alchemical restructuring matrix, yes? I get requests like these all the time. Mostly newcomers to the Crossguard and Peace Mains that don't know about the selective disciplines they teach there. Very delicate work, requires a steady hand. The circles are generally made of _very _small lettering, right? And the actual geometric forms have to be _perfect_ or the whole thing is just an interesting reinterpretation of old man Hoscow's Theory of Symmetrical Function and Beautific Resonance. I wrote a paper on it, I should know."

"Ah," Kimblee said. He was sitting in a straightback chair with moulded padding to accomodate any medium-sized being of appropiate form, and was very comfortable besides. It wasn't surprising, given the length of time even a small tattoo generally required; uncomfortable people don't handle being stabbed in the skin with ink over and over again very well. The tattoo parlor itself was a small and rather pretty one; there were similar chairs arranged in rows, all in different sizes according to body shape, size and physiology, with small books on little counters that served as a directory of popular tattoos. And because it was Traverse Town, the books talked, often criticizing a casual observer's taste in artistry, chiding the men for looking overlong at the pictures of female models (and vise versa) and offering advice on getting a nice girl or guy. Many a happy couple in Traverse Town has been made thanks to the advice of a tattooing directory.

"Now then," Said the woman, whose name was Inque. It wasn't the most creative name for a tattoo artist, and she'd said so herself, smiling like someone who knew a very lame joke but didn't mind being the butt of it. "You want them on your palms, correct?"

"Of course," Kimblee said. "Not too tricky for you, is it?"

"Course not! I'm not much good at anything _but _tattoos, and I can assure you that I know how to make _any _tattoo work!"

"Even the impossible ones?"

"_Espicially _the impossible ones! Whenever someone from the Peerage or the Crossguard needs to get a set of Ishbalan Transmutation Matrices, they come to me for a reason!"

Kimblee blinked in surprise. "Wait. You mean the practice of Ishbalan alchemy is _common _now?"

"You know about them?"

"Certainly. I was _very _involved in a military program to confront the issues of our Ishbalan civilians," Kimblee said modestly. "I got a bit of a record with them and I know a man of Ishbal quite well. Him and his family, in fact."

_That's a roundabout way of saying that you murdered more Ishbalans than anyone else in the Ishbal Extermination Campaign, shredded one guy's face, murdered his family and heavily contributing to his decision to avenge his people by killing every living State Alchemist in a self-destructive cycle of vengeance and probably death by really good State Alchemist, _Kevin pointed out. _On the other hand...technically you didn't lie. I gotta give you points on that one._

"Oh, then maybe you know Mr. Scar," Inque said hopefully. "Big man? Very nice tattoos? X-shaped scar on his face? Gets really emotional about little kids that've lost their families to war and depredation?"

Kimblee stared. For a moment, he felt like the God of Increasingly Unlikely Coincidence had handpicked him to be his herald. "..._He's alive_?"

"Oh yes!" Inque said, misterpreting Kimblee's shock and glee as simple surprise. "He's a very good man, you know. He helps people rebuild their homes whenever there's some sort of fight, he's good at talking down bad people, he likes little kitties like all inherently good people..."

Kimblee listened attentively as she babbled on about Scar, smirking to himself. _Well,_ he thought. _Someone's certainly turned himself around_.

_And will likely kill us if he's sees us, _Ghostfreak pointed out. _And we're going to get a lot of attention with this stunt you're planning on_.

_And if your memories about him are accurate, he'll hunt us down and put us down like a rabid dog_, Kevin said cheerfully. _I'll die too, but what the hell._

_...You look forward to the prospect of death? _Ghostfreak asked.

_Hell no. But it's better than having my body stolen by a sociopathic war criminal while an alien warlord is mutating my body to do stupid shit, and in the meantime not only am I helpless to do anything while MY body is moved like a puppet but I'm constantly being barraged by both your guy's memories,_ Kevin said. _It's. Not. Pleasant. Besides, if I go down? I'm taking you with me._ Being a psychic presence, he couldn't smirk, but a wave of smug hatefulness was good enough.

_You make me said_, Ghostfreak said. _Ah well, ignore the meatcub, my loyal patsy!_

_...What did you just call me? _Kimblee asked, utterly bewildered. He was starting to think that having voices in your head was overrated.

"Hey, are you okay?" Inque asked.

Kimblee looked at her. "Hm?"

"You drifted out of it. You doin' okay?"

"...No one's ever asked me that before," Kimblee said, a little touched.

Inque smiled. "Really? Aw, you look like the kind of guy that the girls would practically throw themselves over."

"Well, I'm afraid so, but I've never been clear why. And they insist on me wearing leather pants. And I _hate _leather pants."

"Shame. All right, please hold up your hand..."

Kimblee did, presenting his palm to her. Instead of approaching his hand with ink and needles or a machine, she simply touched a finger to his palm, her brow furrowed in concentration. Kimblee's palm tingled, itching furiously, but Kimblee had the force of will to stop himself. She put another finger on his palm, and the itching intensified, a zig-zagging route of complaints from his skin. "It's not too bad, is it?" Inque asked. "I'm taking it slow so it doesn't bug you-"

"I can handle it," Kimblee reassured her. "Pain and discomfort does not bother me."

"Oh...okay..." She put her hand on Kimblee's palm, covering it, and there was a single bizarre instant when his skin felt like it had been dunked inside something cool and hot at the same time. Inque lifted her hand, and the sensation gave way to a more familiar itching that abated immediately. As she turned her attention to his other hand, doing it again, Kimblee dared to look at his hand and was amazed to see the first half of his signature restructuring array reborn; a triangle within a circle, surronded by letterings and with a crescent moon inside.

"This is very interesting," Kimblee said as she got to work on the other hand. "How are you doing this?"

"I'm a mutant," She said off-handedly. "A human born with the active potential for superhuman abilities? Most don't get to pass for baseline-human like me, though; I know a guy who looks like a beast and covered in blue fur. Or this guy who's made of living ice. And you hear about mutants that died because their powers ended up being something _deadly_, like generating a viral infection that made organic life wither into ash, including themselves. Or a regenerator."

"That sounds more helpful than deadly."

"Regeneration that _never stops?_ Suppose you have a tumor that just regenerates through out your entire body?"

"Ah."

"Me, I'm on the lowest end of powers. I can alter the base structure of the outer layer of skin."

"Ah. So you're mutating the pigmention of a person's skin color to create patterns and designs. Natural tattoos."

"That's pretty much it," Inque said cheerfully. "Painless tattoos that fade away if I want them to. Unfortunately, they're so easy to do that I can't charge very much compared to someone that uses a machine for it or more old-fashioned techniques."

"That's a shame," Kimblee said, admiring the designs laid out on canvases around the parlor. "You're quite the artist."

"Aw, you're too nice. Right, that's your other hand done. Tell me when the tingling stops...okay, you're done!"

Kimblee looked at his other hand; this design was similar to the first, but with two key differences; the triangle on _this _hand was upside-down, forming one half of a hexagram, and instead of a moon, there was a circle-in-a-circle that symbolized the sun. He clapped his hands together, sun and moon coming together to direct light and darkness into an unstable and ultimately explosive whole, the two triangles forming a hexagram suitable for restructuring just about any complex system, from earth and stone to a human being without qualifying as human transmutation. He did not permit the energy to flow, but simply clapped a few times, and because the new tattoos were not ink, there was no trouble of them staining. He applauded Inque. "Excellent work, young lady."

She giggled. "Thank you, Mr. Kimblee."

Kimblee prepared to leave; he'd already paid her for the tattooing (with money he'd stolen from a donation box with a clever scheme involving a duck, a large biscuit and a very small werewolf, but there was no need to tell her that) and prepared to leave. He paused. "Pardon me. You mentioned that you...admired this 'Mr. Scar'?"

"Ah, yes! No one knows anything about him from his past in his old world or what he did there, and none of his friends will say anything-"

"He's a murderer," Kimblee said.

This stunned her as effectively as a brick to the head, only with less mess and far more entertaining. "What."

"More accurately, he's a serial killer. His hands have been stained with Amestrian blood many times." Kimblee cocked his head. "I presume you know of the Ishbalan Civil War? When the Ishbalan's religious opposition to Amestris culminated in a bloody series of ever escalating reprisals and terrorist actions after the accidental shooting of an Ishbalan child?" From the horrified look on her face, it appeared that she did not. "Ah. Than allow me to educate you. I was a State Alchemist sent to quell the rebellion, you see. I was there. And I do not deny the Ishbalans their right to take revenge for the years of oppression and the genocide Fuhrer Bradley ordered for the good of our country."

"...You have a leader called the Fuhrer and he ordered _genocide_?" She said, horrified. "What...what are you, some sort of counterpart culture Nazi?"

"You now, I get that a lot." Kimblee glanced at himself. "Though I will admit this outfit isn't helping that impression. But regardless. I do not deny the heaps of Ishbalan corpses dumped into mass graves, or that even after the war the surviving Ishbalans crowded into slums, still seething for the loss of their holy land and their people. But they fought like _monsters_, just between you and me. A single trained Ishbalan warrior-monk was equal to ten of the finest soldiers the world had to offer. A pity they renounced alchemy, but...it does make me give some credit to the power they put in this concept of their 'Ishvala' god." Kimblee paused. "And this Scar you hold so high was there. He was there to see his holy land torn apart piece by piece, his kin shot to death in their own streets, with their sacred crown transformed into walls to cage them in while soldiers rounded them up and shot them like animals or the very soldiers sworn to protect them only years ago dragged their half-dead children to the laboratories to commit such horrible atrocities to them in the name of science. It was all very efficient."

"Stop." Her eyes were wide, a thin film of sweat coating her face. Kimblee thought he saw some trace of past horror. Perhaps what he said hit too close to home for her. "Please. For the love of God. _Stop_."

"I apologize. I think you should know this, because it _does _offer a clear view on our scarred friend's character. You see, there was a lovely married pair of doctors in the Kanda region of Ishbal. The Rockbells, I believe. Lovely daughter of theirs, I met her once. They were treating soldiers and Ishbalans alike, risking their lives for what they believed in. Treating the enemy of both sides is not a popular decision in a war zone, but they did it regardless. I admire such conviction." Kimblee paused, savoring the memory of those doctors, who he never had the pleasure of meeting personally. "And they died for it."

"...Winry?" Inque said. "You can't. No. No no no, you can't mean Winry Rockbell."

"Yes! That is her name! Talented mechanic girl, automail engineer, and as full of conviction as her parents. She survived to this town?"

"...Yes," Inque said in a small pitiful voice. "She and the Elric brothers and Mr. Mustang and Mr. Yao and Ms. Armstrong and Mrs. Izumi and...and..." She looked like she was on the verge of crying, like she _knew _what was coming. "She's my friend."

"Ah, talent does attract talent, does it not? I was assigned to protect the Rockbells," Kimblee said, not seeing how his commanding officer's point that it would be such a shame if an 'accident' happened to people harboring the enemy mattered in this conversation. "But when I got there, they had already been killed. By a Ishbalan warrior-monk with a tatooed right arm and a bandaged face. He took a knife and...well, he was apparently very good, though I supposed precision was not a factor in his method. Right after they saved his life. I assume he killed them because he saw Amestrian blonde hair and Amestrian blue eyes and...reacted. His home city had just been destroyed the other day, you see. His family blown to bits, his face torn apart by shrapnel and his own brother died saving his life. Scar's right arm had been torn away, you see, and his brother used pioneering and unique skills to graft his own right arm to Scar's shoulder. And died shortly afterwards. From bloodless and a rather painful wound to his lower abdomen, I recall." Kimblee knew this, given that he was the one who had murdered Scar's family in the first place. And destroyed Kanda in the first place.

"How...how do you-"

"And, here's the interesting part. Scar's dear brother was an alchemist! Something unheard of in Ishbal, accepted and urged on because his theories differed from the supposed heretical practices of Amestris. Taking the form of elaborate tattoos on his arms. So Scar recieved half a transmutation circle with his brother's sacrifice, and with it, the ability to deconstruct. And he used it well." Kimblee grinned. "By going on the most savage and extensive serial killing spree I have ever known. He used it to tear people apart from the inside-out, literally deconstructing their internal organs. It was revenge. Vengeance in the name of Ishvala. For every one of his people lying dead in the desert, he promised innumberable State Alchemists death. Even those who had nothing to do with the Ishbalan Civil War. When I was sent to deal with him, he had already killed over a dozen across Amestris. Even Brigidier General Grand, who'd been humane enough to allow the Ishbalan leader Low Logue an audience with the Fuhrer. And if you count all the soldiers that got in his way...well. _Into the dozens _doesn't quite cover it."

"You can't...you're lying. _You're lying!_"

"He murdered a little girl and her father, the Sewing-Life Alchemist," Kimblee went on. "Her name was...Nina Tucker, I believe. That one was a mercy killing. Her own father had done terrible experiments on her, you see. Forcibly transmuted her into a beast just to see if he could. If Scar hadn't come along and released her, she would have been doomed to such an awful life. Being experimented on by inhumane scientists that don't consider you a person isn't the right life for a little girl, don't you agree?" Kimblee paused. "Also. He kidnapped your friend Winry to hold her as a hostage? And when I was trying to proect her as per my orders from the Fuhrer himself. A bit of a stain on my record."

"Who _are _you?" Inque whispered.

Kimblee tipped his hat to her. "I am Solf J. Kimblee, as I told you before."

"No," She said fiercely. "You can't tell me these things, these lies and expect me to accept that you act like a human being! _What kind of monster are you?_"

"A human one," Kimblee said, unapologetically. "Though perhaps...if you are familiar with Amestrian history, you might know me better as the Red Lotus Alchemist. They called me a 'mad bomber' before. But I must applaud your handiwork. I offer you this information only as a tribute to your work. To your art, I offer the history that is a direct result of _my _art. Everything that Scar is, whatever he has done, is directly because I was involved. I shaped the nature of the man he became and..." Kimblee took a deep satisfied breath. "I am _so proud _of my handiwork."

He left the mutant girl to shake there by the parlor chair. He wondered why she shook and shivered. Perhaps she just needed time to think about the true magnificent of his artwork, the marvel of shaping a warrior-monk into an obsessed serial killer that she apparently looked up to...Kimblee hoped so. He hated not getting proper credit.

_Wow,_ Kevin said sardonically. _You don't know why she's freaking out? You're a real jerkass._

"I get that a lot," Kimblee said as he left the little tattoo parlor, a handcarved sign reading _Rebus Inqued,_ and went on his way. "But regardless. Business await!" In the tatoo parlor, Kimblee heard loud sobbing, a lovely sound with a ragged, wet edge to it. "Aahh...such a beautiful noise. A fitting solo to my symphony. Shall we make more?"

_Do I have a choice?_ Kevin said sourly.

_Of course not, _Ghostfreak said dismissively.

...

Roughly about fifteen minutes later, they eventually got to where they were going, and Ron was the first one to point this out. It helped that Appa had slowed down enough that he was capable of standing up without being blown down.

"Gentlemen..." Ron said, gesturing grandly. "_BEHOLD!_"

"Behold what?" Zim said, looking in the completely wrong direction. "Ooh. That cloud looks like a duck. And that one looks like a taco. And that one looks like a bee! _I hate bees._"

"Actually, those clouds are quite impressive," Ron admitted. "But I was referring to the mall over there."

He indicated a large building that, in brief, looked like what you would get if you took a large stadium of the ancient world, built it on top of an even bigger apartment complex of a Soutwestern Native American pueblo and filled up all the gaps with very weird looking engines and stuff, the whole thing sitting in a small parking lot that was half-full and surronded by some sort of moat that was the epicenter for a series of canals that ran through the streets.

"Ooh!" Sokka said. "That looks awesome!" He frowned. "A little, uh, over the top though. Why the heck do you need a single mall to be that big!"

"...I don't know," Zuko said quietly over the communicator, like someone with serious post-traumatic stress disorder. "I don't know I don't know..."

"Uh. You guys...doing all right?"

"I'm not sure," Kim said, sounding puzzled. "They've been acting weird."

"Eh, they're just big babies," Toph said dismissively.

"Happy place," Hobbes whimpered. "Happy place, I'm in my happy place...no cars in my happy place. No scary breakneck wacky racing in my happy place..."

"...O-kay," Ron said slowly.

"I think I can see you guys," Aang said. "You're parking, right? Yeah, I think I see your car and...hey! Tell Toph to stop making those gestures, that's rude! Who showed her how to do that?"

"How'd she figure out where we are?" Calvin wondered. Zim shrugged; Toph was a mystery to him that he was unwilling to explore least the answers turn out to revolve around hurting Zim.

"Yeah, you guys just come down," Kim said. "And...maybe see to your friends. I think something's wrong with them. Except, erm, Toff, right?"

"Toph," Zuko corrected from off-screen.

"Yeah, me," Toph said.

"Okay, okay, just hold on a sec'," Aang said, gently tugging at the reins. Appa took the hint and rumbled as he turned ponderously, slowly circling down to the ground.

People scattered and ran as Appa landed upon a raised sidewalk made of some sort of molded ceramic-plate, Kim's group walking over to them from her parked car. A few of them needed some assistance to get over there.

"So," Morte said slyly. "How was your car ride?"

"It was badass," Toph said. "I wanna drive."

"_NO!_" Zuko and Katara yelled. Toph sulked.

"So. Not happy with it?" Zim said. It wasn't like this was the first time any of them had ever been in a car.

"One day," Zuko said dramatically. "One day I'm going to come home. To a world where the only things on wheels are carts and carriages. Powered by good old fashioned animal-power. There will be no demon vehicles bent on killing you. And the only thing there to get on will be komodo-rhinos and eel-hounds and ostrich-horses and giant beetles and _I will never ever leave again, ever_."

"I'm starting to think that my driving had a negative effect on them," Kim commented.

"I'm starting to think you're a little slow on the uptake," Morte said.

"Hey!"

"You have weird animals," Ron said. "...I wanna see them! Are they all as awesome as Aang's bison-manatee...thing?"

"The Fire Nation has dragons," Zuko said proudly, neglecting to point out that his great-grandfather Fire Lord Sozin had them exterminated, possibly to stamp out other forms of Firebending or some paranoia with _anything _related to the Avatar, and the only two he knew of were in hiding, and if any others were left, they were well-hidden indeed. "Who do you think the original Firebenders were and taught my people?"

"_DUDE!_"

Aang hopped down from Appa's head. "Katara, are you okay?" He asked her, concerned.

"I'll be fine," She assured him, still looking a little uneasy; she dealt with it a bit better than the others. Growing up in the South Pole tended to form people who didn't have a problem with sudden acceleration, what with shelves of ice cracking without apparent warning. "The guys with you okay?"

"Hmn? Oh, they're fine," Aang said. He paused and looked back, noticing that Ron was a bit unsteady and was now affectionately kissing the ground out of gratitude. Toph was doing the same, but more because she wanted to see what it tasted like. "...On second thought, maybe I should stop randomly volunteering Appa to every other person we meet." He shrugged. "Well, we got here in one piece and no one threw up-"

"And you're damn lucky of that," Zuko said grimly.

"-And now all we have to do is find Danny and his friends."

"And Scar," Abel said.

"Yeah, big scary guy with awesome tattoos. They left after us, so I think I should take to the air and look for any buses and-"

"Yo," Danny said from behind Aang.

When it is said that 'he jumped ten feet into the air', it is generally a metaphor for extreme surprise. Being an Airbender, Aang did not suffer such limitations. "Eek!" Zuko, Sokka, Hobbe and the other guys stared at him. Realizing that 'eek' is not the most mainly exclaimations of surprise, Aang said, "Er, I mean, 'urrgh', or something like that. Ahem. How'd you get over there so fast?"

"We took the bus," Sam reminded him. Scar, standing behind her like the most low-key Person of Unexpected Gut-Punching Terror ever, managed to make a simple stare convey both a sense of exasperation and dismay for the state of his fellow sentient life-forms.

"Well, yeah," Aang said. "That's the thing, isn't it? You took the bus! We flew here! And drove!"

"Only in the most technical sense," Katara said. Kim sulked.

"So how could you guys get here before we did?" Aang said.

"Probably because we took the bus, and therefore took the most direct route to here," Tucker said. "Whereas you guys...well, sounds like you did what you usually do and somehow turned simply going somewhere into the stuff of stress disorders."

"Well, at least they made an adventure out of it," Aang said.

"Did not!" Hobbes said.

Aang turned to Danny. "So...you guys didn't have any problems?"

Danny appeared to consider that question, looking askance at a few things the others hadn't noticed because they were so far out of the way: the corpse of some malformed tentacled _thing _hastily being carved up and carted away by some local sheepish-looking science nerds; a small group of confused looking giant robots formed from the remains of a single bus, all of them carrying the dazedness characteristic of those new to sentience; unusual cloud formations heralding a gap in the fabric of the universe that had been so recently shut, an innocent-looking blender sitting on a fence and serving as the base of a ridiculously complex device with all manner of bizarre things cobbled onto it, and sitting atop that blender-monstrosity, was Traverse Town's second most demonic and sinister-looking duck, Dr. Swandlish Horowitz McEeval. He was wearing a hat that said in very clear neon letters _I Am Evil_. "Erm," Danny said. "Now that you mention it-"

"Nothing happened," Scar said flatly.

"But...the duck! What about all that-" Tucker started to say.

"Nothing. Happened," Scar said with a horrible sort of finality. It was a very simple statement that effectively said _Speak of that utter nonsense that most certainly DID NOT HAPPEN and I shall visit such terrors upon you that would make devils cry. Or at least take envious notes._

"...What he said?" Sam said meekly.

"That's my old buddy!" Abel said loudly, seemingly materializing directly behind Scar and throwing an arm over his shoulder like the most obnoxious frat boy ever. "Implying horrible violence for no apparent reason inbetween moments of randomly behaving like a father towards random orphans and perpetuating horrific acts of head-splodey violence against evil-doers!"

"Remove your arm from my shoulder or I will remove it from _your_ shoulder," Scar said.

"Aw, not Slappy, I love that guy! Or is that arm Mr. Gunstabber? I can never get them straight." Rather than debate the logistics of how a man who was technically older than the religion he followed could still not tell his left arm from his right, Scar pushed him away. Xiao-Meng appeared out of a pocket, growling like a maddened chainsaw-spirit before retreating.

"Was that a savage midget panda hiding in your pocket?" Toph asked him. Scar nodded, remembered she was blind, and told her she was right. "Ah, okay, just checking."

"Well," Kim said after a moment. "I guess since we're all together now we can figure out what we're all going to do today..."

"What?" Calvin said, bored that he hadn't said anything for a while. "No way. I say we get something to eat first! A proper breakfast and somesuch."

"Didn't you already eat your share of meat pies?" Zim asked him.

"Yes. What's your point?"

"I can't help but wonder how you guys intend to pay for any of this," Zuko said, correctly concluding that it was left to him to be a voice of reason.

He was met with a silence that, were it a physical form, would have been a great big anvil that would have hit everyone. Only it wouldn't, because anvils don't get up that high. And it wouldn't be a funny anvil, because there would have been very serious injuries. Possibly someone could have died. So it wasn't very much like an anvil at all.

"I don't believe this," He said. "We come all this way and none of you, _none of you _even thought about the fact that any profit-based economy is rooted in the fact that to exchange goods for money, you have to have money! What is this, I don't even...I don't expect any of us has much money on us to exchange for local currency, even assuming that we _can _exchange it or that the resulting amount will be worth much!"

"Erm...ah, actually, I was expecting that we could just guilt people into giving us money," Zim said. "Or I could show off the Keyblade. I am some sort of destined hero or some other nonsense, there must be a fringe benefit somewhere."

"You have a what-now?"

"I don't know, some kind of mystical do-stuff weapon that's a bit like a key and a bit like a sword only it's not really either but it's still badass because I think it lets me shoot fire now."

"I...see," Zuko said flatly.

"Makes sense to me," Aang said, referring to Zim's 'plan'. "People back home used to throw stuff at me just because I was the Avatar. Unless they didn't. Or resented me for not being there a hundred years ago when I should have. Or wanted me tried in a unjust trial for the actions of my past incarnations. Or if they were Fire Nation and were brainwashed into thinking that I was a sociopathic monster that wanted to kill them all or was a incarnation of pure fury that still wanted to kill them all because they killed my people and under Fire Nation law that basically meant I was obligated to kill them right back. Only I'm an Air Nomad, so...no."

"And besides, we made a huge bunch of money when we sold admission to that random kickass fight Calvin and Zim had for some reason," Sokka pointed out. "I think it should cover breakfast for all of us and whatever stuff Zim needs if he's willing to stay on the cheap side."

"...Damn it, I completely forgot about that!" Zuko said, facepalming.

"Epic fail," Abel said sternly.

"As though _you're _one to talk," Kim said snidely. "Remember what happened last week when you tried to make tea for my dad?"

"They rebuilt those city blocks eventually," Abel said evasively. "And I found homes for all the giant kittens..."

"There are people who want to have giant cats for pets?" Zim asked.

"Yep. In fact, my faction kept one as a mascot. We're suckers for incredibly dangerous yet adorable creatures."

"Well, since that entire pointless bit of filler is dealt with, how bout we get something to eat?" Morte said.

And then they did. Yes, even Appa. The mall was very big. And catered to many things.

...

_Somewhere inbetween Foster's and the outer edges of the First District..._

The closer you get to the center of Traverse Town, the messier things get.

The buildings become more erratic and unconventional. Any semblence of street plans go amok. Entire city blocks are converted into parks by replacing the streets with grass and replacing buildings with treehouse wonders for no apparent reason.

But, as you get closer to the walls of Traverse Town, to the great seige-proof walls that form the outer circle of what anyone that flies high enough recognizes as the basis of an immense magical spell array, a strange order becomes apparent.

Here, there is a strange reluctance among people to convert the buildings into residences or places of business with either demolished rubble fashioned into architecture or exotic machinery hand-cobbled into wonders of mad science. Elsewhere in the town, from the floating buildings of the Beach District or the high-rise palatial residences of the Upper District or even the manufactory warrens of the Underdistrict, people take an attitude towards architecture best compared to a child with a extensive collection of connecting block toys from an amazingly large collection of sets but forced to mix them to see what he got. But on the outer edges of town, there is no such eccentricity in design. The few remaining intact buildings share the strangely organic look of the town's original architecure, all smooth curves with a tendency for spirals of all shapes and forms; helix-shaped doors, spiral staircases, drill-shaped additions...

And no one dares to change these remainders of whatever old culture that shaped the town when they regard the rest of the place as spare parts. Mostly, it's a case of being reluctant to do irrepairable damage to the intact parts of the town's original form. No one, not even the most enthusiastic archeologists and scholars of lost cultures, had more than a few clues and half-baked theories on what that culture was, what they were like or even what they were. Even the numerous cultures around the planet didn't know what their ancient ancestors were like. The only real clues were on isolated islands and hidden ruins across the planet, secreted away in the territories of vicious pirates and enclaves of savage wilderness, often inhabited by squatters who didn't take kindly to trespassers, regardless of their intentions.

That was the excuse, anyway. Like when people said that they didn't notice that spirals seemed _very _important to whatever culture had once existed here, from the heavily predominance of that shape in the architecture and the very design of the the town's streets, gently curving only to meet in the very middle. They were _afraid_. And they didn't know what they were afraid of.

Deidara was one of the people that suspected much and worried about more. In particular, he was a student of the arts, and due to the success of his art gallery, had been hired to oversee most of the public-works art projects that his faction, the Peerage of Transcendant Study and Wonderworkers, liked to engage in from time to time in addition to researching things that no one dared to. In preparing areas for urban beautification, mapping them out for computer analysis, directing people on the proper methods for the desired result and generally being a helpful jerkass in artsy ways, he'd noticed a large number of things with his trained artist's eyes, and he'd helpfully made a few papers on it. Some of them made a difference to the people who mattered, some of them were ignored, some of them became the root of the ramblings of conspiracy theorists and the housewives that secretly ran everything...Deidara didn't care. It was the process that mattered to him, not the outcome.

He lived in what some people called a 'Progenitor Hold', or a structure almost completely intact from whatever disaster had hit Traverse Town. It was a modest dwelling, a two-structure made of the exotic shimmering substance that characterized the Progenitor's work, like light dancing on water worked into solid form. It was also built like the head of a giant robot with a big smiley face and a drill for a nose. (Deidara was sure there was some sort of reason for that.) It also extended underground, into a private and extensive series of chambers suitable for his more..._unorthodox _experiments. (And in Traverse Town, where mad scientists comprised the majority of the science circuit, that was saying something.)

It was also not far from Foster's Home, making it a simple matter for Kimblee to take a bus over there after he got his tattooing done. He found their bus system interesting; they didn't appear to operate on any sort of timetable, but appeared _exactly _five minutes after Kimblee had arrived at the bus-stop, and Kimblee had no idea how it had known to come, for the bus had no driver if you didn't count the amusingly snarky autopilot. Apparently the buses themselves were alive, and it refused to tell him how it had known he would be there. It had also abruptly kicked him out about five minutes into the trip before it ran away with all it's passengers, screaming like a lunatic in binary noises. Kimblee had been utterly confused.

(A quick check of the Hitchhiker's Guide would have revealed to Kimblee that the buses had a form of temporally-unfocused sensors, adapted from those of a type of elevator with similar technology in order to peer dimly into the future to see when a passenger would be waiting; therefore, the buses simply knew when someone would be there. Unfortunately, the founders of the Sirius Transport company neglected to realize that the artificial intelligences of the buses were smarter than anticipated and used their ability to play the stock market to enormous profits, thus allowing them to seize control of the company and take over. Fortunately, the buses were kind to their creators and permitted to stay on, mostly as glorified tax accountants and to satisfy certain laws about keeping at least a few token minorities on board, namely organics. But Kimblee didn't have a Hitchhiker's Guide, which was good for the bus in question, because then Kimblee would have realized the implications of it fleeing in utter terror of him.)

After Kimblee had found the door after several confused minutes, finally deducing that a flower-shaped seal near the ground seemed suitable, he was faced with another problem; he had no idea how to open it, or even knock on it. He could have simply tore it open with alchemy or blown it apart, but there was the consideration that he didn't know what it was made off, rendering alchemy useless. And then, there was such a thing as courtesy after all. The problem resolved itself when the floor-door irised open and the vaugely adrogynous face of Deidara popped out, one eye covered with a complicated scope and long blonde hair held back in a high ponytail. "Eh, you're here already? You already do the thing?"

"No, I'm afraid not," Kimblee said, not entirely sure if he was speaking to a man or woman. Deidara was ambiguous that way. "But I do have a plan for it."

"That so? Come in, huh, you're letting bugs in."

Kimblee pushed aside a large fly-like creature that was trying to shove some real estate brochures at Deidara. "I most certainly am not!" Deidara disappeared down the door and Kimblee followed, the door shutting behind him. The fly buzzed furiously and flew away, foiled once more.

Kimblee followed Deidara, a slim and somewhat effiminate man wearing a sleeveless netted-shirt, a smock and black cargo pants through a looping entryway, the floor ribbed like a stairway; once they were into the house proper, the two of them popped out of a door like a hatch and into a large underground room, as big as the entire house on the surface; it was clearly an artist's workroom, with odd little half-finished sculptures and artbooks laying around the room, mostly on a variety of tables notably berefit of sculping tools: Deidara had his own methods for his art. There was a looping staircase in the middle of the room, leading to another floor-door in the ceiling.

Kimblee glanced at a nearby book that Deidara had apparently been reading. It was an artbook of course, a collection of sketches and special art designs to accompany the author's explanations of the evolution of his artwork and commentary on the more specific parts of his work. "_The Tale of the Gallant Naruto_," He read. "I didn't know they adapted that book into a manga..."

"Yeah, there was a huge broken base over it," Deidara commented. "You had the fans of the book who didn't want to see an adaptation ruin old Jiraiya's _magnum opus_; then the fans who don't like the new artist's style, though I'll admit that Ms. Relm has a touch of difficulty with eye design; and then came the fans of literature who hate everything manga related because they're elitest jerkasses; and finally you had the people who hate everything associated with Jiraiya because of his pornographic literature. I myself was in the waiting to see crowd. No point in condemning something to come until you get a first-hand look, yeah? Espicially an adaptation. Might have to be pragmatic, but that's no reason to dismiss it. Even if things look different then what you think they should be, yeah?"

"People always make such a fuss," Kimblee murmured.

"Yeah, tell me about it. You don't even want to know about the flack I've caught over my reintrepretation of superflat pre-surrealistic hyper-romantic post-modernism."

Kimblee stared at Deidara. "...I'm sorry. I'm quite foriegn to art outside of music and I don't mean to be rude but...what the hell does any of that mean?"

Deidara shrugged. His hands were covered by very thick leather gloves, stained with clay. Tellingly, a lump of clay drippled down his wrist. From the _inside _of the glove, along with a fleck of drool. "It's art, no one knows!"

Kimblee accepted that and noticed _another _manga based on a book by Jiraiya. This one was not so respected or well-reviewed as _The Tale of The Gallant Naruto_, though you could certainly saw it was...adventurous. "_Make-Out Paradise, _hrm?" Kimblee said, a little amused. "Well well. That's certainly unexpected of you. Though it does put paid to the notion that you're an asexual person, doesn't it?"

Deidara shrugged, a little embarrased. "I like good artwork?" He tried to grin sheepishly, but because of too much practice, it came out looking like the grin of a type of shark that savages random beach-goers, and when it's killed generally requires a large boat for some reason.

_What's Make-Out Paradise_? Kevin wondered.

_Well, _Ghostfreak said, after scanning Kimblee's memories quickly. _It's-_

_Don't! _Kimblee thought warningly. _It's quite bad enough he was tortured to the brink of madness and crammed into my head after having you living in _his _head, do you really need to expose him to softcore pornographic literature and manga?_

There was a pause between the torrent of consciousnesses. _You realize I'm fifteen or somethin', right?_ Kevin asked dubiously. _That's, like, NORMAL for a kid my age. Probably._

_Oh, fine, break his brain, I don't care,_ Kmblee thought in distaste. _You'll have little luck with my memories, anyway. Hardly any in-depth information there, I don't approve of such infantile nonsense._

_I bet you're gay,_ Kevin said sneakily.

_Am not, _Kimblee thought back.

"Uh, you okay?" Deidara said, snapping Kimblee out of it. "You drifted out a bit, you know?"

"Nothing to worry about, just some bickering voice in my head."

"Oh, okay," Deidara said, finding that perfectly acceptable. Given the people he knew, that was probably not the most outlandish thing he heard. "I assume you're not here to unwind, yeah?"

"No, unfortunately. I do have a valid reason for being here. I assume you're familiar with Jack Crowley, the Silver Bullet Alchemist?"

"The self-made homunculus? What about him?"

"I heard his research had been confiscated by the Peace Mains some time ago after they found what was _really _under his basement, but that what they found was incomplete. Like certain important volumes had up and disappeared. And Crowley's one of us." Kimblee raised an eyebrow. "And you do have a certain reputation..."

"Maybe I am holding on to a few of Crowley's books while he's working with the guys that like making trouble," Deidara said evasively.

"Perhaps you could see to allowing me a reference to a volume that _might _have some very important understandings to what he did in Laboratory Five before he left and escaped the fate of the other researchers in Amestris?"

Deidara blinked. Understanding dawned; he wasn't a stupid person by any means, if impulsive and short-sighted, and he could certainly put two and two together. "_Ah._ That's what you're doing, eh?"

"Cleaning up unneccesary problems is part of my work," Kimblee said. "I'd best put the oppertunity to good use."

"Hold on a sec', I'll go grab it." Deidara walked to the wall and removed a stone from the wall, revealed a small and narrow opening surronding by what look like toothmarks. His back to Kimblee, Deidara removed a glove and put a hand on the wall, with a disgustingly _wet _sound, like a mouth biting down and enthusiastically slurping. Some sort of security system deactivated itself and a door appeared in the wall with a sound like a muffled scream. It wasn't a sound effect. "Hmn, Lara Noddikins is getting weary," Deidara said. "She's approaching the culmantion of my project for her..."

"Turn up the voltage, record the screams and sell it as a novelty doorbell ring to morbid people," Kimblee suggested. "No one will realize how authentic it is."

"Nah, Sabretooth tried that one before they caught on to him, you know?" Deidara disappeared down the stairs. Judging by the echoes, he went down fairly deep before he came back a few minutes later with a thick handwritten book. "Here you go."

"_Secrets of the Blackest Arts_ by _Jack Crowley_," Kimblee mused while Deidara sealed the door again and replaced the stone that hid the interaction slot. "Crowley never was the most subtle. Encoding alchemic text in a book of black magic aimed at impressionable teenagers who think controversy makes them interesting? You're practically pandering to sterotypes now..."

"Sure you got time for it?" Deidara asked. "I heard even the Fullmetal runt took weeks to figure out the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone in the Crystal Alchemist's coded text, and he had access to the best books in decoding, cipher breaking and alchemy references in the world. And this place is no library. A shrine to specialized art, maybe, but not a library." Deidara sighed. "I ought to expand this place."

"You'd probably have more room if you got rid of that torture chamber," Kimblee said, opening the book and flipping to a suitable page.

"High risk performance art!" Deidara corrected.

"You should have stuck to freelance terrorism. You'd have proper job satisfaction like I do." Kimblee stopped at what would have looked like a violation of at least four laws of nature to a layman and to a practicing black magician as a inordinately sexual but hilarious misunderstanding of offering yourself to the Prime Evils via their corporeal forms of a confused goat, a snake and someone's very surprised cousin (and to an Lawful Good angel that erred on the side of Law, it would have been a reasonable argument towards incinerating humans that were creative in all the horribly _horribly _wrong ways; angels are a lot more badass than popular culture lends people to believe and this infuriates them greatly), but to Kimblee, after the initial moment of wanting to vomit he turned the book sideways (thanks to some advice from small arrows pointing that way along the page) and saw that the horrible picture now resembled an equation rendered in graphic form. Very graphic. Kimblee decided that Crowley was going to suffer for this. "And Deidara? I suppose you remember that we are required to submit our..._important _discoveries to our esteemed commander?"

"The great leader? Sure, but usually we have to get it thrown over to Hojo or Shou Tucker. Tch, I hate those guys! Creepy."

Kimblee chose not to acknowledge the hypocrisy in that statement. "Then you know that when we're sent on missions, pernitent information is given to us or made available should we choose to ask for it."

"Yes. What's your point?"

"Crowley had his research funded, not just by embezzling funds from various organizations he weaseled into, borrowing grant money from some of the lazier local organizations and offering his services to the highest bidder, but he also got the lion-turtle's share of his money from Research, Develoupment and Ill-Advised Exploitation."

"'Lion-turtle's share'?"

"I've spent too much time around Azula, it rubs off."

_It wasn't even an hour!_ Kevin said.

"Yes," Kimblee said. "And that was quite enough for a very..._very _long time."

"Who are you talking to?" Deidara asked.

"Voices in my head!"

"Right, sorry. Yeah. So what's your point?"

"I already _have _the relevant information for understanding this," Kimblee said plainly. "I've been planning something similar to what I intend to do for a while, but the oppertunity never came up. Now, though, I'd be a fool to waste this oppertunity."

"And what _are _you going to do?" Deidara asked. Kimblee told him. "...Wow. If I wasn't impressed by your audacity, I'd almost be offended. And even then it'd be tempered by the thought of the art of such an undertaking."

"I may have to dedicate this symphony to you and Crowley," Kimblee remarked. "You have been so helpful. Er, not in the sense of implicating you two. Do try to stay out of the damage zone, will you?"

Deidara looked disappointed that he wouldn't be able to join in. "Hmn, yeah, might be better than spoiling our great leader's plans, yeah?"

"Indeed." Kimblee frowned as he pursued the book, applying Crowley's reports of how his book had been coded and the proper way to look at it, along with sincere apologies for the nature of the book's coarseness. "Oh my."

"Yeah?"

"Two things. One...when next Crowley and I meet, we are going to have _serious _words on appropiate ways to encode alchemic research. This is just..._grotesque_. Two, may I be lended some paper and such? I may need an on-the-spot reference when I get to Fosters."

"Sure thing, yeah." Deidara brought him some paper and a pencil, and Kimblee quickly got to work breaking the code relating to a very specific form of biological transmutation. It was a shame Wuya didn't know about his precise plans, because she would have gloated to Azula about paying more attention to her ramblings, because she'd been right to mention the ultimate alchemic amplifier and the means of it's creation. Occasionally, Kimblee jotted something down on the paper.

"I don't suppose you know anything about somebody named Jarod, do you?" Kimblee asked eventually.

"I've heard rumors," Deidara said darkly. "Nasty ones. Some kind of vigilante that haunts the First and Underdistricts. Our kind of people do stuff? He shows up and makes them suffer in ironic tortures. You hear of Delores Umbridge? She was running some kind of a racket kidnapping nonhuman kids to sell to morally ambiguous mad scientists for experiments. And then he found her. No one's heard from her since, though I've heard rumors that she escaped from the Vault a few weeks ago and wound up bossing around the remnants of the last big Mech War halfway around the continent."

"Ah." Kimblee let the subject drop and went back to work decoding Crowley's text. It was slow work, mainly due to Kimblee reluctance to acknowledge the horrific subject matter of the book itself, but it was going _much _faster than if he had to decode it without the ciper Crowley had given.

In the meantime, Ghostfreak was shielding Kevin's mind from comprehending anything Kimblee was looking at or thinking of. _What are you getting so worked over? _Kevin complained. _Weren't you telling me what this Make-Out Paradise thing is? What's so bad about what Kimblee's reading?_

_Believe me, some things are not meant to be known_, Ghostfreak said flatly. _And this is several of them. I must shield your mind! YOU DO NOT WANT IT OTHERWISE! Or do you dislike sleeping without nightmares?_

_...My body's been stolen from me, I'm sharing headspace with a sociopathic complete monster with no comprehension of human emotion and you-_

_You wound me, _Ghostfreak said blandly.

_-A body that's been transformed into a horrific monster for way too long and tortured into biological insanity and I'm probably going to be the vehicle of mass-murder on a scale that sickens even me_, Kevin finished._ My life IS a nightmare_.

_...Even so, there are some things that can make it even worse._ To make his point, Ghostfreak mentally allowed some of the emotional resonance of the horrors Kimblee was looking at to leek into Kevin's consciousness. The resulting scream was going to give _Kimblee _nightmares. Though he was sick and twisted and would probably find them quite pleasurable. _You see_? Ghostfreak said brightly.

_I want my mommy...I want my mommy..._ Kevin whisperd, mind shrinking to a vauge scrap of consciousness edging that fine line between not-quite-sanity and true madness, getting ever closer to dropping straight down.

_You can't, on account of her being dead._ Kevin didn't say anything. _Hmn, I appear to have broken him. Ah, well._

Kimblee ignored this, decoding the whole time and putting down something on the piece of paper. A ordinary person would think of it as a lot of circles on it. An alchemist would have noticed that it was an circle with an octogram, circles where both met.

An alchemist who knew exactly what that precise circle did would have a good reason to run away and never, ever look back.

...

And that's my shortest chapter ever in recent years! I have thus develouped the idea to make shorter chapters by writing big ones normally, cutting them in half and posting them as seperate chapters. Should I continue to do this so you guys get more frequent updates, or do you prefer the big chunks of chapters?

Anyway...just what will our heroes and associated company do? What's Kimblee up to? And _will _all the vaugely mentioned villains, past events and references ever get some proper explaination!

Well, next chapters gonna be chock-full of exposition, so I figure..yeah. You'll get some explanations and stuff.


	10. Red Lotus: Exposition and Firebending

Here I am again, probably sooner than you expected. Again. Surprise!

Once more, we have a posted half-chapter. Which was supposed to be the second half of another chapter, but it was getting too long and had some bad pacing, so I cut it in half again and worked on the first half until we got this. I hope I don't keep doing that, or commentary like this will get very complex indeed. I don't think my wrists could take it.

Writing these short chapters is rather fun. And that makes it easier to do it, yes?

On a personal note, I recently saw _The Last Airbender_? I was following it ever since I saw the first trailer on _Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen_. I was excited then, and I stayed excited throughout. I followed every update on the Airbender Wiki and Youtube, collecting internet pictures with fervor and sqeeing like a girl on every released trailer and news release.

I dismissed all the concerns about M. Night Shyamalan directing it, in spite of his recent issues with direction; I cited Mike and Brian being the executive producers. I honestly got _extemely _sick of all the naysaying, and even a little depressed. (It at times spawned some brooding about the nature of the human condition and wondering if hatred is so deeply ingrained in the human brain that we just _need _something to pour the bile on, but I do stuff like that all the time, no big deal.) I was exhiliarated with all the stuff I was seeing, with only a little fear now and then, but that was to be expected.

And then, I finally saw it, by going with my step-brother because my dad didn't want to risk the bad reviews.

And you know what?

I liked it. Seriously.

(Fooled ya, didn't I? You were expecting some sort of outraged rant about how M. Night RUINED AVATAR FOREVER or some other whiny nonsense. Got ya!)

Seriously, I liked it a lot. True, there were a lot of things that could have been done better, were executed strangely or shouldn't have been altered too much (where's Koizilla, man? Though I firmly believed that the Ocean Spirit acted through Aang regardless, given the Dragon Spirit's remarks of 'use the ocean'), but the Blue Spirit scene was plain BADASS. I hope the DVD will have an extended scene thing or deleted scenes, but it was still excellent. Not something I'd spend a whole day building up for an epic watch-a-thon, but it was still good. And let's face it; no live-action can match the brilliance and majesty of the animated series. So let's just pack up on the hating and look forward to Avatar: Legend of Korra? New Avatar series! It'll be cool.

Enough about me ranting. But then, there's a fair bit of Avatar stuff here, so be prepared, yes?

But first, mysterious spookiness. And then some exposition and a game of Spot The Fandom! _Ooh! _But then Avatar stuff. Only without the Avatar and...aw, you'll see.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted characters, setting, ideas or properties.

...

A lot of people take it on faith that things are connected.

It's pretty obvious, really. The quantum butterfly proves that a tiny, seemingly irrelevant event can cause a cascading avalanche of unexpected results until a hurricane is born is probably the best known one. And there are less obvious connections within all things: thousands of universes dance alongside each other, unseen and unsuspected and reflecting each other in almost-there ways until they are almost nothing alike but for the people within them.

Some know of the truth of these connections. They know how to pull on them or how to flow into them and make things happen. More often, usually because they haven't a choice, they use them to see.

In the glowing room of light, the lion-man, the machine-being and the hooded one were still watching recent events unfolding through the device between them. They were silent; they knew what Kimblee would do. They knew everything about him, everything he had done; time, for time, was not something they had to experience linearally, so they had felt the shocks of exploding buildings as his alchemy tore the earth apart, seen those marked for death by a monstrous government crushed under the dying ruptures of their own homeland, and the hooded one had at least been there in person; old dried blood appeared on his gauntlets as he watched, thinking of old wars and the sobbing of dying children, and he was again troubled by the miserable incomprehending horror the people of Ishbal felt as they died. It had driven him a little mad back then, and now it gave him a dawning sense of horror at what was to come.

They all knew what Kimblee would do. And even with all their power, they could not act directly. Not now. Not yet.

"So, that's it?" The lion-man said, knowing the same thoughts were running through their heads. They were not limited to such primitive forms of communication like speech or body language, even though they employed them often enough. "We just watch."

"Yes," The machine-being said, and in that one world was both a heartbreaking regret, black and deep and wound across his soul like the patches of rust that spread across him without explanation, and also a rage greater than the nuclear fire of a star, righteous fury hissing out of every seam and vent as white-hot holy fire with a half-mind of it's own, furious and hungry.

"Watch people _die_."

"...Yes." The machine-being became obscured as flakes of sad-rust and fury-fire streamed around him like a black-white cloud.

"I've never liked rules very much," The hooded one said flatly. "...Damn them. Damn the devil-puppets. They're going to _fry _for this."

"The rules that prevent our personal touch are not of our own design," The machine-being said wearily. "We _mustn't _act directly, or those we oppose will retaliate with all the means at their disposal." Rust overcame fire for a moment. "And _worlds will die _if we give them the slightest leverage."

"We'll still hold them down and send them back to the pit they crawled out of!" The lion-man said fiercely.

"But people will still die. We cannot allow a single mortal to die because of a lapse in judgement on our behalf. You know the terms! If we act, it must be subtle!" Fire blazed through rust, the machine-being's wrath overwhelming his torment. "We cannot afford to wield our strength like a hammer, even though I wish it otherwise! We must be scalpels: quick and precise!"

"Even if there's only so much that we _can _do that way," The hooded one said. "If the devils and their kin act through agents innocent and knowing alike, mortal champions, the games of the gods, the schemes of the spirits, and the forces of Destiny and Fate, we must also do the same."

"And let's not forget that Traverse Town is in a...delicate state," The machine-being said. "The land around it mustn't be disturbed by powerful forces of our level, whether they be good, neutral _or _evil, or..._that._..may awaken. We cannot afford that. Not with those refugees dwelling there."

"Nor can the universe," The hooded one said.

"Imagine if by some dirty miracle the Heartless overcame _him_," The lion-man agreed. "Assuming that whatever monster came out of that thing's heart wasn't trapped on the other side of the Door to Darkness, if Wuya got her claws on it...well, the new Keyblade Bearer would have to be a fast learner, yeah?"

"He will be. They all are, sooner or later. Good thing too, you remember the mess an inexperienced one can make."

"I can still remember when I accidentally broke through the universes adjacent to my own," The machine-being said wistfully, rust and fire dying down in the face of his memories. "And they were brought together in a federation of peace, brotherhood and interspecies goodwill. Those were the days!"

"Getting off-track again," The hooded one reminded him. "On the other hand...the Keyblade Bearer had got good allies. I always say, 'you can't reach for the top without people pushing you up from below'."

"It is a little weird, though," The lion-man said. "Two of his friends just _happen _to be the Avatar and the Half-Spirit? Imagine if they teamed up! The collateral damage would be so damn awesome!" The other two gave him looks. "And so very destructive and unwanted and not good. But awesome!"

"You're forgetting Mr. Lyle," The hooded one said mildly. "You know what he's done in dealing with the devils, and more importantly, what he has become. And is evolving into."

"He's done what now?" The machine-being said. They stared at him. "What? I don't know about Mr. Lyle." They told him. "Oh. Hrm, I should have remembered that. Mind like a sieve sometimes."

"You sure your mind isn't a sieve?" The hooded one joked.

The lion-man laughed. The machine-being literally steamed up, fire and rust gone entirely. "I hate you all."

"No you don't, you're almost incapable of the emotion of hatred."

"...Shut up."

"In any event, it's only a matter of time before Mr. Lyle's..._alterations _take the better of him," The hooded one said. "He won't be human anymore! Or if, say, he dies again. That'll leave a hole in the fabric of reality. Something that we are _expected _to exploit. That's a useful loophole, that is. We could play a little Chaotic, maybe; they get demons running around all the time, and I'm sick of playing catch-up with the devils. Time we did something crazy."

"A defining element of Chaotic is that we don't follow the rules," The lion-man agreed.

"Particularily Chaotic Good, what with the whole 'heirarchies are inherently unjust' and 'the best way to do good is just for the sake of it' and stuff like that," The hooded man said. He appeared to grow serious. "And now...it's time we immersed ourselves."

The strange machine at their feet appeared to brighten in response. Like a gun eager to be wielded, a tank waiting to be piloted or any tool that wanted nothing more than to be used, to be important, to fulfill the function it was made for. (After all, if they don't do their job, how do they go to Machine Heaven with all the good toasters?)

"Does this mean interfering?" The lion-man said hopefully.

"Obviously," The machine-being said.

"Finally!"

They prepared themselves.

Then the machine-being said, "Wait. Is there any chance we could infiltrate the lair of the fiends themselves?"

"What?" The lion-man said.

"We could take the fight to the devils themselves! None of this half-assed business with hanging around and tugging a few strings to be subtle! Harking back to the good old days of extremely obvious divine intervention! That style of thing."

"...Yes," The hooded one said sarcastically. "Oh, let's go and throw ourselves into the Nine Hells of Baator, the place where our eternal enemies are most powerful! The place that is _literally a semi-sentient self-contained set of universes literally made from Lawful Evil_. Which is corrosive to us because we are made of Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic Good! It'd be like taking a dive in acid, only except that jumping into corrosive fluid that dissolves you would be downright pleasant compared to what total dissolution in the Nine Hells does to _any soul_."

"...So, that's a no, I'm guessing?"

"No. Just...no."

"Aw, come on! I had a totally awesome plan! There were trained gerbil-commandos, a transforming alien cargo plane filled with tacky merchandise, the multiverse's second biggest ball of twine and a absolutely freakin' huge wooden alpaca filled with potato salad!"

There was a long, long awkward pause. "...That was pretty random for a Lawful Good guy like you," The lion-man said dubiously.

"Does being Chaotic Good imply that you spend all your time jumping off bridges on dares, screaming at rats with your shirt off and taunting god-killing abominations?"

"Hey, I told you not to bring that up! It'd been a long day and I needed to unwind! And the god-killing abomination stopped crying after a few hours." There was a pause. "My point is, 'Chaotic' does not mean I'm totally off-the-wall, stab-you-in-the-face-with-a-spork stupid-crazy!"

"Therefore, me being Lawful does not mean I have to be one hundred percent predicatable, logical and stuck-up."

"Can we please put this behind us, never speak of it again and just get to work already?" The hooded one said. It felt very awkward for him to be the one bugging other people to do their work for a change. He hoped that the heroes in Traverse Town would prove to be a bit more competent than his own allies.

...

About an hour and a half after Zim's large extended group of allies, friends and acquantices had found the mall and set off for lunch, one of the large and somewhat neurotic buses that patroled through Traverse Town with all the driving grace and obedience to the regulations of driving safety of Kim Possible came charging to a stop in the central plaza of the downtown First District; stopping a few feet of a lamppost before it's doors flew open and Calvin, Toph, Abel Nightroad and Tucker Foley stumbled out, barely hitting the ground before the bus ran off again to harass some other hapless schmuck in need of transport.

Toph and Abel were the only ones to stay on their feet; Abel because he was used to it and Toph because she was too awesome to be bothered by something as banal as crazy driving skills. "Oh come on, it wasn't that bad," Abel told them. "It's not like we crashed or anything."

"We came close," Calvin mumbled into the grated metal sidewalk they were on, too glad of stable ground to want to move. "...Gathering information about this town cannot be remotely worth taking the buses here."

"How did that bus not run anyone over?" Tucker asked. "It was driving like a lunatic! Driving itself like a lunatic. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of being transported inside something that can think."

"You complain too much," Toph said, lightly shifting her position; this was enough for her to Metalbend the catwalk-style sidewalk under them up and push Calvin and Tucker onto their feet and keep them standing before she slammed it back into it's usual place. She even fixed it up a little bit, tightening some bolts, fastening a few loose bits and evening out a few gaps; Toph was cool like that.

"Well," Calvin said, brightening up a bit due to Toph's influence. "You can't say it hasn't been an interesting morning."

"You can only imagine the enthusism in my heart," Tucker said flatly.

In spite of what Calvin had said, they hadn't had that much exciting of a day, at least not after they found the mall earlier and then stopped at a restraunt that Ron had absolutely insisted on, and all of them gleefully took the oppertunity for a little time without life-threatening chaos, recent errors in judgement coming back to bite them in the butt or anything remotely approaching stress. It was a welcome break for everyone except Calvin and Toph and possibly Zim; they liked having interesting stuff happen, but they at the very least liked having a chance to unwind and get a proper meal along with a good deal of somewhat mixed explanations with how the town worked. (Considering that it was Abel who had said so, it had been a bit garbled; Calvin understood that the town was a very informal sort of ordered anarchy guided by a Council of some kind with members chosen from the various factions that divided the various community duties of the town between themselves, but Abel had refused to give a detailed report, claiming that his position in the faction known as the Crossguard made him too biased.)

After the initial wariness between the new guys and the locals (mostly on the former's behalf), everyone hit it off quite well, even alarmingly so. Calvin still thought it was weird. Kim and Katara had hit it off really well as two girls that had to be the sane ones (like Zim had predicted) with Sam Manson and Hobbes finding a genial friendship out of nowhere. Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton and Aang had pulled Zuko and Scar out of their usual moody self-absorbtion, convincing them to referee an eating contest Ron and Sokka on a spur-of-the-moment whim, involving the naco, a tortilla shell filled with chips, meat, nacho cheese and other stuff; a eating contest ensued between Tucker, Sokka and Ron, and it ended in a tie because the contestant's horrendous eating habits had made Zuko and Scar sick. (Katara and Kim gave them a stern reprimand while Aang apologized to the spirits of the naco's meaty contents for his friend's karmically imbalanced diets.)

Even Morte, the one guy nobody remembered, found some common ground in being the guy that explained stuff along with Scar and Aang and they spent some time swapping notes. Calvin and Toph, of all people, had found kindred reverse-gender spirits in each other and hit it off amazingly well; they shared a impatience with stupid people, short tempers and an affinity for big flashy stuff that went 'boom'.

After their lunch, they were forced to admit that there was indeed stuff to be done and they couldn't just goof around all day; Zim's team needed supplies, Teams Avatar and Phantom desperately wanted to know what sort of place they were in and it would have been mean to just leave Team Possible and the two warrior-priests all alone. Then everyone realized that _everyone'd _had an absolute nightmare of a night, whether they'd lost their world (Zim and Team Phantom), had completely failed to stop horrible monsters from destroying a world and killing nearly everyone on it (everyone on Team Avatar), had been horribly lost in a seemingly endless chain of catacombs for days without food or water (Abel), had been subjected with the possibility that an evil guy was watching their every move (Kim and Ron) or had been forced in a long and twisted series of chaotic adventures (Calvin and Hobbes). Oh, and there was Scar, but he refused to talk about what his night had been like aside from a brief mention of possesed gardon gnomes packing rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

Consequently, Aang raised the point _"Why can't we do stuff and not have fun doing it?"_ and they decided to split up and do just that. Hobbes, Kim, Sokka and Sam decided to go shopping for the adventuring supplies Zim's team might need and incidentally have fun shopping. Zim wanted to do something involving creating land-roving death machines for transport on his mission, but Zuko had disagreed, insisting that Zim needed at least one good lesson in Firebending basics if he didn't want to blow himself up. Zim had agreed, mostly because he thought it was too cool an idea to pass up: Zuko had been quiet during the meal, at least for him, and he seemed to have something else on his mind. Scar had agreed to take Danny, Aang and Morte sightseeing so they could understand the town they had found themselves in, and perhaps learn something about their new world. Calvin and Toph thought that was boring and resolved to do something fun by themselves; poor Abel had been forced into keeping a rein on them, and Tucker had been similarily co-opted into being his back-up. Neither of them were happy about it, and Calvin and Toph's irrepresible delight in making trouble and keeping things 'interesting' hadn't helped much.

As a consequence, in the past fifteen minutes alone, their various antics had resulted in the outbreak of a riot, a war between two feuding neighborhoods, an entire platoon of pilots with giant robots attacking each other over an incredible misunderstanding instigated by Calvin, at least five public statues defaced in Toph's image (it was pretty good, given that she wasn't entirely sure what she looked like; fortunately, Abel said that because they were _public _statues, people could do whatever they wanted to them. Nobody did, because permission takes away the thrill), and a short but very horrible incident involving an incredibly sick mad sociologist who had a dozen people locked into a simulation world where he tortured them in every way possible, forced them into unspeakable depravities for his amusement and generally crossed the moral horizon for kicks. (Calvin and Toph had handily solved the problem of his continued existence by wrapping him inside a metal shell and shooting him into a sky at a specific angle that Abel assured them would lead to a nest of vigilantes that took a very dim view of monsters like him) and several other small incidents that nobody in town seemed to care about except as something to watch, but their resident authority figure, Abel, seemed to regard the whole thing with a bemused apathy that was starting to rub off on Tucker.

After the last incident (involving the evil duck that had caused some sort of trouble with Tucker earlier, and it was following them for some reason), they had cooled off a bit as Calvin and Toph started enjoying each other's company more (something Abel found adorable, even though Calvin and Toph hit him very hard when he said so) and independantly decided that they didn't want to rub each other the wrong way through brashness.

This, of course, had engendered a distinct lack of focus in what they were actually doing, and Abel had happily filled the void by taking them on a bus ride to some friends of his that he promised would give good information on how Traverse Town actually worked. He hadn't specified where or why, and everytime they asked he either chided them for being too hasty or changed the subject to a completely random and bizarre topic, like what colors tasted like (and therefore what the hypothetical eighth color of magic tasted like), making it a futile prospect to ask him for information.

This had ultimately resulted in them coming to the outskirts of the inner part of the First District, between the places where pre-refugee buildings dominated and newer buildings had been built up. And finding out how terrifying the bus system was; being passed around by sentient prescient triple-decker buses with all the driving skill of Kim Possible and none of the restraint is less fun than it sounds.

Tucker shuddered, reacting to Calvin's remarks about the 'interesting' bits Calvin mentioned. "Please don't talk about that."

Calvin didn't seem to notice what he had said; something in his weight seemed different, and a quick pat-down had confirmed that one of his pockets had become unexpectantly lightened. "...Hang on. Where's my cool thing?"

"Your what?" Abel said, not looking at him but instead staring at a distant cloud that appeared to be flipping him off. Abel didn't mind; people had treated him like dirt his entire life, he had gotten used to it.

"It''s...a thing. It's mine, this thing. It's cool. A cool thing." Calvin seemed aware that he wasn't making a lot of sense. "I think I made it in my sleep, because it was there when I woke up and it's not the first time I kitbashed unconscious!"

"...'Kitbashed'?" Tucker said uncertainly. He had grown wary of what Calvin meant when he used words from his own private lexicon without much in th way of explainations.

"Jury-rigged. Take apart and put together. Making mad science-y stuff from what you have lying around, you know?" Calvin didn't appear to notice Toph quietly reach into her pocket, grinning like a loony. "Man, I hope I didn't make something stupidly-destructive without thinking about it. Like a electricity degenerator that eats electromagnetic power, or some sort of handheld laboratory for incubating and releasing incredibly annoying patch-and-stitch viruses. The last one of those I made turned everyone in my hometown into mutated freaks for five days before I put them back to normal. And then they tried to kill me. I mean, they'd tried to kill me before, but this time they were serious about it. It was a real milestone for me!"

"You're a weird little kid," Tucker observed.

"You say that like a bad thing," Calvin said while Toph pulled out a small round and rough-looking device, covered in little wires, blinking diodes, a single red button with a glass shield on it and the general appearance of something that had smashed down into a little size. "Seriously. Has anyone seen my cool thing!"

"Is it small, round and make a cool noise when you shake it?" Toph asked.

"Sure, yeah, that'd be all the interior components-" Calvin froze. He slowly turned around. "...How long have you had that?"

"Since it fell out of your belt-pouch on the bus and you never noticed," She said, lightly tossing it back to him. "Keep a better eye on it, will ya? If you don't at least pay attention to your stuff, you're going to be completely blindsided the first time Zim runs off to blow up vending machines or something."

"Sure, whatever."

"Ooh!" Tucker said, eying the Cool Thing. "It's all hi-tech looking and crudely fashioned and mysterious at the same time...so cool. Let me see it!"

"No way!" Calvin said. "No mad scientist looks at another mad scientist's wonders without dismantling them, you know! I don't even know what this thing does!"

"Then let me show you! Just lemme push the button!"

"Push off, you scavenger!"

"Ahem," Abel said before Calvin and Tucker could start arguing. "Pay a little attention to our surrondings, please?"

"Pay attention to what now? Something to do with the guys you said were going to talk to-" Calvin stopped, taking noice of where they actually were; it was a far cry from the crazy opulance of the mall, the weird uniformity of the uptown where Calvin had met Zim or the Victorian-Funk of Foster's.

"Huh," Toph said. "I like it."

"Well, I like it," Abel said. "I lived around here once. Before everyone kicked me out of the neighborhood for attracting their stabby things and firearms."

"...It's a dump," Tucker said, ignoring Abel's latest non sequiter. "Only not, y'know?"

They were standing in the central plaza of a large open market of some kind, what Abel had called the Big Robot Plaza of the First District Downtown; not far from them on a place of honor in the center of the place and surronded by streets was a large and friendly looking house made from bits of a carrier plane and a few trucks, along with a broken-down giant robot behind it for some reason. Unlike the cobblestone and sidewalk look of the rest of the First District, this area looked like it was made entirely from a scrapheap; the streets were sheets of metal bolted down, the sidewalks were modified catwalks, and everything around them from the small buildings crowded together like metal coral reefs to the giant robot in the middle of the plaza like a statue were made from...well, junk. Most of the buildings looked like they had been made by taking apart aircraft, trailers and things of that nature and smashing them together, and that wasn't even included how many of them had simply been built on top of each other, leaning into each other for support. It was surprisingly well-built; apparently, the people that lived here appreciated this kind of look but didn't skimp on doing it good. In keeping with the 'bad neighborhood look', there was a lot of graffiti, but it was surprisingly well-done grafitti, tasteful and skilled in a blocky and artful way.

"...Well, I like it," Calvin said reflectively. "Reminds me of where I grew up! Only without the crushing pressure of dozens of layers of mess above you. Or the legions of the desperate and vicious. Or the teeming masses of filth and garbage. Or the guys trying to kill you for being related to the wrong people, or guys hunting for spare parts for crazy mad science experiments...okay, tihs place isn't anything like my childhood hometown but it does have a nice look."

"You didn't have a normal childhood, did you?" Toph said rhetorically. Calvin snickered, finding the very thought of a childhood where everyone _wasn't _trying to kill you or do far worse to be amusingly surreal.

"What the heck is this place?" Tucker asked Abel. "It's...like I said, a dump. Why would the people you're taking us to hang around here?"

"Uh...good point," Abel said. He gave the place a honest look. "There's more to this place than it looks. It's a bit complicated, too...a little long, I should say."

"We've got time," Calvin reminded him.

"We do?" Tucker asked.

"Sure, why not?" Toph said.

"Well, okay." Abel tapped his fingers, trying to think of where to begin. "Well...this wasn't always the downtown of the First District. It used to be...well, a dump. A real one. Everyone just dumped their garbage here. Then ol' Jumba Jookiba came back from a trip to one of the worlds of the Precursors and studied in a place called Haven City; he came back with samples of this neat stuff called Eco; it comes in several different colors, and he'd discovered how to use Blue Eco as a safe and cheap fuel, and ways to recreate it by processing organic garbage and...er, waste. Sewer water, you can say. Suffice to say, the garbage got carried away quick (not to mention an overhaul of the sewer systems); now all our dumping is put at special processing plants around the town, but I'm getting off-track. This place ended up as a free-for-all scrapheap where everyone dumped their more metal-themed junk, at least until the Amestrian alchemists showed up and started teaching people transmutation alchemy; then the scrap got carried away, not by bored gadget geniuses but by people who knew enough about alchemy to patch up their houses or _make _houses with big ruined bits of junk in such a way that they were actually safe to live in and met building codes! Take a lot of mercantile people from around the worlds moving in here to take advantage of Traverse Town's reputation as a center of trade, a few roaming gangs of ruthless thugs, and you had a recipe for disaster."

"I'm guessing this place used to be where all the jerks used to do stuff that's pretty low," Tucker said.

"You got it. And to understand this better, you have to understand that Traverse Town wasn't always the unified place it is today. Not that it _is _unified today; mostly everyone just does their own thing and the people sort-of nearly in charge organize all of it a bit. But then, things were a _lot _dicier. We were practically on the verge of war with ourselves, what with the factions not being established-"

"The what?"

"Factions. Sort of like the organizations that keep the town going, the people you're gonna meet can explain it better, but listen. At the time, the rest of our little world here didn't like us very much; thought we were intruders, or aliens come to invade or just didn't belong here, so when it came to the bad guys among us, we were on our own. The best we could do was fight them when they got really out of hand, but otherwise...it was a uphill battle. Not that we didn't give them far more than their share of losses, but since we hadn't quite settled into our current cohesion, no one was focused enough to make our victories meaningful. For a while. You see that giant robot behind that house?"

They looked at it. It was a wreck of a machine, missing it's entire lower half, but it was a terrifying-looking machine; what intact little of it was left was enough to tell them that it had been designed to be strong and resilient, and while most of it's armor was scorched, broken off or worse, there was enough of it left to show that it had once been covered with massive serrated plates of jet-black armor, shaped so that light would shift off it in the form of agonized faces. The very head of the mechanical colossus looked nasty, with it's low-set visual sensors like mean little eyes and the remnants of a massive faceplate shaped like monster's teeth. "Yeah," Toph said. "In a manner of speaking."

"Well," Abel said, missing the joke. "_That _thing was built by Captain Razorbeard, who was at the time the leader of the villains here through dint of being nastier and tougher than anyone else. Nasty robot guy, last I heard he raids the islands but we give him a tough time. Anyway, he had that giant robot over there built so he could lead his most powerful men into battle against our own and assert his dominance. Called it the Juggernaut Armor, and a nasty thing it was; in it's heyday it could smash through a Guard Armor Heartless with little trouble. In fact, that's why the people back then delayed taking them down; the Heartless were attracted to this place because of all the evil, I guess, and our enemies fought them for us." He grimaced. "Lazy is what I call it, but I wasn't in a position to complain back then. Well, one day, two members in good standing of the faction that would become the Peace Maines said 'Enough is enough', and marched on this place. Singlehandedly, it was just the two of them. And it worked."

"Wow, that must have been so one-sided," Calvin said. "I bet this robot got put here as a memorial to them."

"What? No, they're alive. It was one-sided, as in they kicked Razorbeard's butt backwards and forwards. What you see there is all that's left after they were done trashing his robot and salvaging the good stuff on it."

Calvin stared at it. The robot was in _horrible _condition; swathes of it had been melted right through by some enormous heat, most clearly the right side of it's head, now only soot-black clumps of blackened machinery. Most of the armor around it's upper left arm had been torn clear off and the machinery scavanged, leaving only a sad skeletal framework, and the lower arm was missing completely. It's other arm had fared a bit better, with scattered bits of it's original armor, albeit scarred with the signs of some incredibly heavy concentrated firepower. It's torso was the worst; the plates of armor had been completely shredded, burned and torn away, like it's entire chest had been blasted right through. (Someone had shoved a trailer into it to make a bar.) "Two guys did all this?"

"That is so incredibly badass," Tucker said. "Who were they?"

"Roy Mustang from Amestris and Jethro Gibbs from...I'm not entirely sure where. I understand that he traveled across a few worlds before settling down here but he doesn't liking talking about it much," Abel said. "_Very _tough guys, those two, and they really don't like guys like Razorbeard. Just the two of them kicked Razorbeard's pirates out and made the start of us making this town our own. A lot of our success can be attributed to what they did that day. In fact, some people got together and made them and the rest of the Council a place for them to hang out, namely that house over there that they've turned into a clubhouse-slash-meeting-place for them and the Council, and they used the remains of Razorbeard's Juggernaut Armor as the literal backbone of it! A good way of rubbing it in people's faces of how awesome they are, don't you think?"

"Okay, you've lost me," Toph said. "What's the Council?"

"The guys in charge," Abel said. "Remember you guys asked me earlier about how the town is run and I wouldn't tell you everything? Well, I figured the best way to show you...was to bring you to the guys that would know. Namely, their hangout."

"...Wait, this is why you brought us here?" Tucker said. "You wanted us to meet up with the big guns that run this town!"

"Not all of them, they like to get out and do stuff. And I wouldn't say 'run'. Like I said, you don't run Traverse Town, you sort of steer it so no one gets hit."

"My point is, isn't that kind of stupid? Getting a bunch of important people to talk to us new guys about the secrets of the town? Why would they possibly do that!"

"To make you like them and want to join their factions?" Abel suggested. "They're not exactly what you would call people that put on airs. Explaining how this town works to new guys is just good PR. Besides, if we had people coming in by the hundreds or even the dozens, it wouldn't be sensible. But that's not the case. It's perfectly fine for us to this with every person or group of people that shows up, even if it's usually a bit more low-key than going to their hang out place."

Toph's casuall facade cracked a little. "Wait. You don't mean-"

"That it's extremely rare for big groups like you guys to survive?" Abel said. "I'm afraid so. To be frank, I've never heard of such a large number of people surviving a Heartless invasion and surviving at all, let alone with your pieces."

"...Oh," Tucker said quietly. "...Then, even so, there's still plenty of people in this town. If less then ten people from each world even survive long enough to come here..." His face went horribly blank. "Oh man. Oh man. Oh _man_. What _are _dealing with in those Heartless?"

"The Heartless have spread very wide," Abel said quietly.

The bleak tension was broken, this time not by Calvin pulling some crazy stunt, but by somebody else doing it for him. There was a screech from the clubhouse, a man yelled "FIRE OUT OF THE HOLE!" and a flaming pool ball crashed through a wall and right over Tucker's head, burning a hole in his hat; Tucker barely had anytime to acknowledge his hat's sad fate before the poolball exploded.

"Damn," Someone said. "Still can't get the friction-to-impact ratio right!"

"That's the least your problems, Roy," Someone said. There was much irritating giggling. Somebody grumbled, and it sounded like they were marching somewhere. There was a flash of blue light, and the broken flashed brightly before it repaired itself; a bit stretched out in places but good enough.

"Hey!" Tucker said angrily, forgetting his reservations in his indignation and charging into the clubhouse, his hat still smoking. "Who did that! You killed my hat!"

"...We should stop him," Toph said after he went. She didn't move.

"Yes," Calvin said. He didn't move either.

They both stayed put. Abel gave them such a disappointed look that Toph could feel it; it was even worse than the one she could feel Aang giving her in situations like these. (It was because Abel was older than Aang and had more experience at it.) "Oh, fine," She said, and charged into the clubhouse after him, dragging Calvin behind her for some reason. Abel shrugged and followed them, letting the door shut behind him. It would have been rude to slam it.

The inside of the place was the second unexpected thing, mostly because the mid-sized room they were in looked a lot like an old-fashioned diner with a light green tile-floor and tasteful tan wallpaper; it had a counter, but it was manned by a green-skinned fanged orc with a nice hat, which rather spoiled the normalcy. And the rest of the place didn't look like a diner at all; there were a few tables, sure, but only a few, all four of them set up near the door with neat little booth-seats, and they all looked a bit beated up from some fight and hastily transmuted back together. The dimly lit diner-room, in fact, had a surplus of unexpected things; there weren't very many people in there, most of them were wearing uniforms and none of them seemed to be doing things figures of authority were supposed to be doing. Three of them were gathered around a TV and playing video games, there was a man was eating his lunch at the table while a imposing woman tried to read _The Art of Personalized Gambits by Bruce Wayne_ while two women were watching their favorite comedy-horror-drama opera _Doctor Acula_ and constantly yelling advice at the characters.

The first unexpected thing was that Tucker was sitting near a table and talking fairly amiably with a dark haired Asian man wearing a dark blue longcoat worn over a strapped-up white vest and black pants with matching boots; Tucker's hat was inexplicably repaired, and he certainly did not have the attitude of someone who had just charged into the private place of the most powerful people in the town.

"Uh," Toph said. It was the only thing she could think of. "Uh...hi?"

A few people looked at her, Calvin and Abel, intruders in their doman. A few of them said, "Hey," and went back to what they were doing. Other than that, there wasn't much of a reaction. One of the two fighters went flying across the room and crashed into the wall, going 'Wheee!'.

"...Wasn't expecting this," Calvin muttered to Toph.

"Psh, like you'd tick off the Council by coming in here," Abel told them. "They like visitors."

"We do?" Said one of the dueling people, a rather wiry teenager with brown hair and a spider-themed look. The woman he was fighting ran over and poked him in the eye. "Not my eye! I'm not supposed to get people in it!"

"What's with you guys?" Tucker asked them, waving them over. "You're freaking out over something, but I don't know what."

"_You're the one who was freaking out!" _Calvin yelled.

"Geez, calm down," The larger of the two women watching TV said; she was a dark-skinned woman twice as tall and wide as a man while being mainly normal-shaped at the Amazonian side of the build spectrum; she took up her entire sofa by herself, and the poor sofa seemed quite stressed with her considerable weight; in spite of her intimidating size, she looked quite friendly and seemed to have tailored her looks to seem more approachable, tomboyishly short white hair framing her rounded face. She was wearing a priest's uniforms not dissmilar to Abel's, except that her longcoat was green instead of black and was even more awesome. "This is a happy place. We don't like yelling in our happy _YES YES YES! CONFESS YOUR LOVE TO DR. ACULA, MAD SCIENTIST LADY!_" She screamed this last part at the TV, stomping on the ground and shaking the floor a bit.

"But she won't, that's the episode on next," Said her friend, a strongly built and buxom woman that seemed much older than her apparent early thirties, her long blond hair tied back in twin ponytails and a diamond-shaped seal on her forehead. She had a definite style, and that style was defined by 'awesomeness'; she was wearing a outfit that was all black; a armored utility vest with all manner of pockets on it worn over a net-shirt, baggy pants with bits of armor and pockets here and there, a pair of sandals and armored gloves up to her elbows with spiked armor on it, an espicially large set on her knuckles. Worn a bit lazily around her waist like a belt was a leaf-green cloth with a metal plate on it, marked with a stylized leaf. Her outfit had a lot of crazy stuff on it just to look cool; chain-belts, normal belts wrapped around her arms, a few bandage-wrapping on her upper arms...Calvin felt vaugely inspired by it.

"I know! It's the wait that hurts!"

"...These are your leaders?" Toph said, bemused. They certainly weren't like the leaders from _her _world. Well, unless you discounted King Bumi; when Aang called him a 'mad genius', he wasn't exaggerating. Well, or Zuko's Uncle Iroh, once in line for the throne of the Fire Lord and known as the legendary general and Dragon of the West; Toph still wasn't sure if the upbeat and hedonistic attitude he had was a front for his ultimate stores of badassery or authentic. And Sokka and Katara's dad Chief Hakoda was _nothing _like the old stories about the cold and ruthless Water Tribe chiefs; he preferred non-lethal warfare when at least one of his precedessors had made a point of scalping his dead enemies because it was expected of him for some reason. Or Earth King Kuei, who's pet bear Bosco was still the _strangest _thing Toph could think of and that was ignoring his childlike enthusiasm for everything, or...Toph reconsidered, and decided that these people were pretty much like all the good leaders she'd ever met or heard of.

"We don't lead, we steer," The man at the counter said. "You been in this town long? Then you don't say people rule it."

"I know," Abel said. "I already told them."

"Abel!" The giant woman on the couch with the green coat said, bouncing off and slamming into him with a kiss on his cheek. Given that she was quite a lot bigger than him, he was nearly flattened. "Where've you been! I thought you were deader, or had gone abroad _forever_ or had a case of public flatulence so bad you were never ever going to come back, _ever!_" She waited and started echoing herself. "Ever! Ever...ever...ever...ever!"

"Ever...ever...ever..." Abel echoed. He blinked. "What, no. I got lost in Foster's after a little freebie work. Really lost. Like, they sent Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable to save me. And got saved a second time by him and _his _friends," He said, pointing at Calvin. "And then I got into a huge fight with a creepy guy I don't know who knows _waaay _too much. It was awesome. Except for the bits I still don't understand."

"Wow, really?" The woman asked Calvin, having to get down on knees just to see him better; he was barely taller than her knee.

"You could say that, yeah," Calvin said, utterly confused with what was going on. The woman's size didn't surprise him that much; he'd met plenty of people her size and bigger. "Just...who the heck are all you people?"

"Hrm? What, you don't know? We're the Council, duh! The representatives of the factions of Traverse Town, bound together to protect the interests of this town, it's people and do awesome stuff. We also have an awesome frycook named Odd Thomas. You know he's awesome with a name like that. YOU'RE AWESOME, ODD!"

"Yay!" Odd Thomas said from the diner's kitchens. "I'm appreciated!"

"...Factions? I still don't know what those are," Calvin said. "Or who any of you are."

"Ah, new guy! Wait. Are you a tourist...or a _resident_?" This was delivered with a edge of concern.

"I'm a resident!" Tucker said. "I think."

"Me too," Toph said. "I guess."

"Eh, I don't know," Calvin said. "I kind of have a mission going on. Nice place though. The King should open up diplomatic relations with this place. Hm, maybe I can get something like that going..."

"Ooh, a foreign diplomat from someone outside this world," The giant woman said. "Haven't had one of those for a while. Had to send him to a mental institution, poor thing...well, I suppose you could say that the factions are like like philosophical clubs or organizations that a ton of people have gravitated toward because they have ideals in common, because they liked the faction and wanted to do some good, or they used to be bad but were rehabilitated and joined out of remorse."

"The factions split the running of the town between them," The guy with Tucker said. "We organize certain things, and while we keep an eye on each other, we don't interfere. We keep things going with a spirit of mutual fellowship and no small amount of neccesary rivalry."

"I get the feeling this is going to be a long talk," Toph said. "Just...who are you all?"

"Me?" The giant woman said. "I'm Angilaka, from the Crossguard."

"Just like me!" Abel said. "You know all the good churches and groups of organized religion around the worlds, the ones that don't care about the divisions between man, woman and others, choosing to do good and kill evil in the face? We're the ones that out-awesome them all!"

"...I don't follow," Calvin said.

"Ah. In-depth information is required. Luckily, the Crossguard are something I'm prepared to be informative about! You see, the Crossguard is a faction formed of soldier-monks, research-priests, scientist-shamans and all that sort of thing! We're organized religion that doesn't care for too much organization, if you follow me."

"...Not really."

"Oh, right. We're a bit hard to explain, I guess. Er...basically, a lot of very spiritual people with a keen interest in their fellow sentients gravitate towards us. Skilled men, women and assorted others. Fighters, scientists, warriors, researchers, soldiers, battle-clerics, martial-artist types...but mostly people that kick ass and are really _really _good at it. We believe that order is important; it takes an exceptional person not to go mad without some form of self-imposed fetters. But by the same token, we believe that enforced restrictions and needless law choke the soul and stagnate the people and must be destroyed where it is found."

"We've all sort of congealed together into what is called the Crossguard," Angilaka said. "We're a pretty varied group; mostly we keep the new refugees into homes that suit their particular temperments and needs, as well as pursuing the studies of the lost ancient civilization of this world, discovering the secrets of the multiverse to unveil parts of the Truth behind truth that allows us to do all kinds of crazy stuff-"

"Oh! We have something like that in my world," Calvin said. "It's called 'theurgy'. Sort of a metaphysical science-themed school of philosophy."

"Really? Sounds familiar; With us, it's more about self-englightenment and doing stuff by flowing with the will of All...but I shouldn't tell you more unless you're initated. Not that it's a secrecy thing, really, because if I told you secrets you weren't prepared for, they'd make your head explode. Seriously." Angilaka went on, not noticing how freaked out Calvin looked. "And...hey, we actually do a bit of everything, really. We're the official 'odd job' guys. Science...public works...art sponsoring...helping out neighboring worlds or countries with small bands of elite fighters to fend off aggressive invaders. We like to get stuff done."

"There are reasons each of us are born," Abel said. "We justify those reasons with our lives. Don't focus on the whys, hows or could-bes; we do our mightiest to make the worlds we leave better for our being there. And other stuff."

"If by that you mean you embrace the weirdness that follows you around, love messing with people's minds and doing over-the-top flashy stuff because you like the aesthetics, that would be an appropiate statement," The man at the counter said. "...On the other hand, you are the nicest people I know. Annoying enough to make the Devil insane, but nice."

"True," The woman said. "You just hear Mr. Grumpy-Because-I-Need-A-Girlfriend over there? That's Max Eisenhardt. Or is it Erik Lensherr? Or Magnus? He keeps using so many names...anyway, he does stick to Magneto when he wants to be cool, so...yeah."

The man in question sighed in defeat, put down his book and acknowledged Calvin and company, the metal on the table twitching in his direction when he moved, a faint pulse that tasted like electricity, and where his fingers touched the countermetal, there was a small but violent spark. He was a tall and sour-looking Eastern European man in his late thirties (but it was hard to tell), his silver-white hair very distinctive looking and starting to grow out to a length not normally associated with modern masculinity but nowhere near as crazy-long as Abel's. His eyes were fiercely sharp, an electric-blue color not unlike the spark his touch had produced on the metal, and there was a terrible look in those eyes; it was the same look Scar had, stained by some long ago horror that had driven him straight off the edge of darkness and straight back the other side. This man was as sharp as a katana, and far more dangerous; even his clothing looked the part: he wore a long sleeveless red-purple coat over a matching vest, black pants and short boots. "Call me whichever you like," He said evenly. "If you care to know, I am affiliated with the Free League."

"The what?" Tucker said.

"The ones that say 'Governments should be afraid of their people' and _make _them afraid. The unjust ones anyway." Magneto's lip curled. "Though all governments tend to become unjust, I have noticed."

"Don't like authority much, do you?" Toph said. "Cool, me neither."

"Authority breeds power. Power breeds poor perspective. And _that_, in turn, breeds horrors." Magneto grimaced, but didn't elaborate on that point. "The Free League are...equalizers, I suppose. I suppose you've heard that we hold no organized system of government in town? That we in the Council, the closest thing to it in town, simply take part in keeping the various organizations we're tied to in a state of competition at the very worst? Educational structures, the explorers, the many adventuring teams, the Shinobi Guild that organizes the ninjas and gives them something to serve, the trader's guild and the other force in town?"

"Yeah," Toph said. "Something to that effect."

"That is the point of the Council. We are people of power and authority, certainly, but we are _not _the most powerful people in town. We are people that care, however, and we keep the balance of the powers in our town. The Free League does something similar on a larger scale. You might call us 'social engineers', if you like. We maintain peace among the various forces that keep the town supplied and alive, particularily our allies around our world, but you can be certain that we do _not _rule, control or force anyone to do anything through the lesser means of false government. We only see to it that they are kept intact and do not attempt to control anything. We keep them safe, sane and most importantly do _not _let them overreach themselves."

"They're also pretty wild guys," Abel remarked. "They believe in benevolent anarchy, that the best form of order is a voluntary one. The best state is governed the least, or something to that effect."

Magneto nodded. "As we say, 'laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater man.' We try to put this into practice on a personal level."

"Which means arranging incidents to happen," The guy in the blue uniform said dryly. "I'm serious; the guys based in anarchy actually have the bones of a bereaucracy that keeps random monster attacks, alien invasions, mad scientist-related issues and extradimensional annoyances occuring."

"It is nothing like that!"

"To be fair," The woman on the couch said. "They _do _keep it happening for a reason. They keep the people on their toes and prepared for tons of crazy shit, and all the weird 'incidents' give everyone a wide range of experiences so they don't panic when something bad happens. And nobody usually gets hurt, aside from the perpetuators."

"...That doesn't sound quite right," Tucker said. Magneto frowned. Abel looked like he agreed with Tucker but didn't want to offend anyone with his opinions.

"You're not nearly chaotic enough," Calvin said firmly. "You want to keep things nice? You _smash _your semblence of order, take the pieces and forge them into something that works better!"

"...Do you now?" Toph asked.

"Worked where I come from."

"Actually, that's _exactly _what we do," Magneto said. "But in a long-term manner. Though, admittedly, it's hard to see how some of what we do makes a lot of sense. Lin Yao assures me that it works, though frankly I'm not sure how his idea to bio-engineer the Traversian Inappropiate Comedy Thistle (a more annoying cousin of the Traversian Carnivorus Thistle) does much to help that."

"Oh, okay then." Calvin glanced at the blond woman in black. "What about you? Who do you work for?"

The woman in question raised an eyebrow. "Name's Tsunade; I'm with The Justice Maines. And incidentally, I'm also a grandmaster in the Shinobi Guild." She shrugged.

"Which are what?"

"The Shinobi Guild employs and trains ninjas. We send them out on missions, keep the peace when it suits our specific talents and we do our part to help out our allies when we have to."

"They have a ninja guild!" Tucker said. "An actual guild of ninjas! This place is awesome."

"What about that first part? The Justice...something?"

"Justice Maines," Tsunade corrected Calvin. "We're a group dedicated to justice and avenging those that have fallen. We hunt the Heartless and search for a means to bring them peace permanently or better yet, restore them, but we do not yet have the means to do so." Calvin remembered what he heard about Hohenheim's report, but didn't say anything, assuming that this Tsunade already knew about that. "And we also form the closest thing to a legitimate law enforcement division, and even so, that merely amounts to investigating serious crimes and bringing the perpetuators to justice. We're also a bit like internal affairs for the big people in town; if the Free League keeps an eye on the _external _side of them, we watch how they work internally; we study who's been shipping what, who the big people are working with, what alliances and feuds are going on...and by a weird coincidence, we've also become something like the big guns and armaments people for the fighters. Go figure."

"Huh." Calvin looked at Toph.

She seemed to pick up his intention. "Alright..." She turned to the guy talking with Tucker. "What about you?"

"Huh? Oh, fine..." He stood up and walked over to Calvin and Toph. "I'm Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang, of the Peace Maines. More importantly..._I'm the Flame Alchemist_."

There was a beat. "...And?" Calvin said.

Roy almost fell flat from his face in exasperation. "_Why don't I get any respect around here?_" He raged.

"You fixed my hat!" Tucker said. "Even though your experiment with that pool ball wrecked it in the first place, but all you had to do was clap your hands and touch it and it was as good as new. Awesomeness."

"Flame Alchemist?" Toph said.

Roy brighted a bit at this. "Yes! Through intensive study, experience and talent, I'm the only alchemist around with the ability to manipulate flames with enough pin-point control to create controlled explosions or walls of flame that can burn a city block to ashes. I'm basically a human seige weapon."

"Really?" Calvin said. "I can make fire with alchemy too."

"Oh?" Roy was, surprisingly enough, not put out by this. "What sort of methods do you use?" He and Calvin quickly began comparing notes, ranging from the remarkable similarity of their transmutation circles to the specific differences in their styles (Roy Mustang messed around with splitting oxygen into hydrogen to create flammable gasses, while Calvin directly used the heat and the air).

"Nerd," The blonde woman reading her book said. She turned imperiously to Toph and stood up; she was an dangerously beautiful statuesque woman with long blonde hair, serious blue eyes and a uniform similar to Roy's. "_I _am Commander-Admiral Olivier Armstrong, and I'm more of the Peace Maines than _that _fire-starting circus freak is."

"Circus freak..." Roy muttered mutinously.

"_What was that, you spark-flicking womanizer?_" Olivier Armstrong said, drawing an long and deadly sword from it's sheath on her belt. "_Speak up or I'll beat the words right out of you!_"

"...Uh, maybe later," Roy said, backing away a bit.

"What, again? Coward."

"So...Peace Maines?" Toph said. "That like the Justice Maines?"

"In a way. We were once the same faction, the Sea Maines, but we split after we realized that we were arguing too much instead of doing things. While the Justice Maines help keep order in the town, we have done our part to assist our allies in other parts of the world. Where the Justice Maines have focused inwards, we are concentrated _outwards_. Do you understand?"

"Yep." Toph raised an eyebrow. "So...reading between the lines, you guys are some kind of military, right? Going around the world, hunting down the jerkasses and beating them down?"

"Good girl; you'd make a smart soldier." Olivier clearly approved of her. "We are certainly the closest thing Traverse Town has to a standing military; we spend much of our time hunting down criminals around the world. We search the mountains and the seas, scour deserts and dead cities, roam the entire world hunting down the traitors to Traverse Town...and sooner or later, we _always _find them."

"Badass."

"Yes. We are."

"Hey, I feel left out," Complained a pretty and rather curvy woman with long red-blonde hair, large glasses and an outfit that screamed 'mad scientist': she had a long white coat on over a brown vest with all kind of pockets bulging with odd gadgets, gear and what looked like a little pocket watch robot; a pair of heavy duty pants over a pair of big boots. She had been the one playing video games earlier, and seemed to have wandered over after finally noticing that something was happening.

Calvin brightened at the approach of a kindred spirit. "And you are?"

"Agatha Heterodyne," The new girl said. "I'm from the Peerage."

"Huh?"

"The Peerage of Transcendent Study and Wondermakers. We got voted as 'best name than the other factions'. Basically, we're a collection of mad scientists, mad doctors, mad artists, mad social scientists, mad retrophrenologists (though it's just the one guy)...we're only a faction made of the greatest and slightly unhinged thinkers in town!"

"Your faction creates impossible monsters every other week that nearly kills us or gives invading idiots something to kill us all _with_!" Roy yelled.

"And yet we keep reverse-engineering alien and native technology that keeps us ahead of our enemies and lets us live comfortable lives," Agatha said smugly. "And we do clean up our own messes. Most of the time. When someone doesn't do it for us, anyway."

"Do you have any openings?" Calvin asked.

"Wait, what do you guys actually _do_?" Tucker asked. "Besides be mad scientists."

Agatha blinked. "...We help the Justice Maines with the educational stuff, of course. It'd be a shame for study to go out because more people don't bother. We also organize a lot of public artwork projects, both to keep us busy and because we like the town to look pretty."

"They get the mad artists and scientists to engineer the statues and stuff?" Toph said. "That explains a lot of the stuff I've 'seen'."

"I have no idea how they even get most of this stuff approved," Olivier said, mildly amused.

"We also look into researching the ancient culture that once inhabited this world," Agatha said. "Kind of like the Crossguard, but we're better at it then them."

"Everyone's better at everything than we are," Abel said miserably. "We multitask so much we have no outstanding specialties..."

"Aw, come on," Angilaka said soothingly, putting a hand on his shoulder and pushing him down a bit. "No one reconciliates disparate feuding religions, classes and species like we do! Wait a minute..._WE'RE THE DIPLOMATS!_"

"WE ARE!" Abel yelled. "Finally! Something to be genuinely proud of!"

"Even more than the time we busted that slaving ring up north with a laser the size of a truck, giant robots, fifteen surprisingly moody kittens and a tub of glue? Or when me, you and Scar singlehandedly took down a corrupt theocracy that used it's belief structure to wage holy war for the business sense? Or when we settled a six-hundred-year long war of murder, retribution, vegeance and absent-minded pettiness between the shark-tribes and the dolphin-clans of the Hook Sea?"

"...Well, two things to be proud of. We do stuff like that all the time, it's hard to keep track."

"Would it kill you to act like sane people for once!" Roy yelled at them.

"What culture is this that you research?" Calvin asked, ignoring the idiots.

"No one knows!" Agatha said. "This town has been mostly abandoned for centuries, either the natives that are friendly with us don't know anything outside of legends or don't want us to know, and the only clues we have are in the ruins scattered around the world. It's an intriguing mystery." Calvin looked thoughtful; the Comic Kingdom had it's own share of long-gone civilizations, often due to the Kingdom's dark past, most significantly the desperately xenocidal Imperium of Man. Also xenophobic. And terrifyingly zealous. And constantly on the verge of dying forever. Frankly, the peace between the warring factions of the time to the modern day was a little surprising if you knew your history, but Calvin had problems conceiving of humans and Tau being at each other's throats or Orks that were even more violent than they were today.

"And that's everyone," Magneto said. "Any questions?"

"Yes, actually," Calvin said. "Why is it that you claim to represent Traverse Town and yet have a membership exclusively consisting of humans when the town is largely _not _human?"

There was a very uncomfortable pause. "...Damn," Angilaka said. "I never thought of that before. We need to start writing petitions to stop this speciesism! Row row, fight the powah!"

"What?" Olivier said. "Angilika, we _are _the Council, we can just admit non-human species in later. Oh, I can't believe I never noticed before...I have become a racist...I HAVE BECOME EVERYTHING I HATE! Except for a coward."

"We must fight the evil authority!" Abel said dramatically. "Down with tyranny! Down with the unfortunate implications of our membership roster! ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWAH!"

"Abel, you just pointed out that it's _our membership!_" Agatha said. "It's ours to add on to. And besides, we're just a bunch of allies that banded together to get stuff done, there's not some kind of evil human supremicist group going on."

"That's what they want you to think," Toph said to Angilaka and Abel wickedly.

"Don't encourage them!" Magneto said. "And we are not entirely human in our ranks."

"We're not?" Tsunade said.

"Obviously! I am not human!"

Tucker stared at him. "...Yes you are. I can see you being all human right here."

"I can't," Toph said.

"My point is that I am a mutant!"

"Defined as a _human _born with the potential for active super powers without any outside stimulus," Agatha reminded him.

"...If anyone ever brings that up again, I shall have no choice but to hit them in the face with a building."

"But-"

"_With a building._"

"Isn't Angilaka some kind of giant?" Tsunade asked. "Obviously not the _really big _sort that can lift battleships, but she's clearly much larger than a normal human. I'm sure she came from some sort of northern tribe native to this world..."

"I did what-now in the hey-huh?" Angilaka said. "...Because I was bored, don't you get inappropiate ideas."

"...O-kaaay," Calvin said, increasingly disturbed. He thought Abel had been annoying enough, and the idea of a more level-headed guy like Scar had given him a bit of hope for Abel's group being a bit sane, but from Angilaka's behavior, _Scar _was the odd one out and Abel's entire group, this Crossguard, was as weird and unfocused as Abel was.

"Well, this was fun and weird," Toph said. "But I bet we have other places to go. Things to see. People to irritate."

"You've already done a good job here," Roy said.

"And we have a ship to pick up later, so...let's go, okay? Talking to you, Abel."

"Oh...okay..." Abel took a bow. "Sadly, I must take my leave, friends."

"I hardly know you!" Tsunade told him. "I don't think any of us do, actually. Except Angilaka, she's with you. And you dated her for a while."

"But I won't get lost this time!" Abel promised, ignoring this. "I still have a task to do. Showing these guys around!"

"Leave me out of your drama!" Tucker said.

"And being annoyed by them," Abel said. "Slowly slipping down the slope of strangeness. My mind going increasingly strange as my sanity dies, driven closer to the end of the mortal coil by their constant belligerance and refusal to acknowledge that they one day must date!"

"We will not!" Toph and Calvin said.

"My only ally in the madness content to watch me suffer!" Abel continued, pointing at Tucker. "And mad I shall go...but it shall not be the first time I fall. And I shall rise again! With lovely gift baskets and such. So...see you later, hope I'm not crazy, bye!" He ran away.

Everyone on the Council stared at Calvin, Toph and Tucker.

"Wonder how long it'll take before he realizes he forgot us," Tucker said.

"GET BACK HERE, YOU DITZ!" Calvin yelled.

Abel did, and was properly embarrased. "Er...yes. Um...where to now?"

"That place those guys took my ship to be fixed, I guess. You guys okay with that?"

"Sure," Toph said.

"I'm just along for the ride," Tucker said.

"TO ALL PURPOSE TECH SUPPORT WE GO!" Abel shouted. "Which is the name of Cyborg's place."

"We don't care," Magneto said.

"STOP BEING DRAMATIC!" Calvin yelled at Abel.

...

_On the rooftop of the First District's Central Bazzar Mall..._

The unusual architecutral style of Traverse Town lends itself to many things, not the least snide remarks from snobs that the newer parts of the town look like it was made by a ragged bunch of wasteland dwellers from an After The End scenario. (Like the place built on the old scrapheap, for example.) The fact that they often _do _look slapped-together, patched-up and more than a little scrappy does not help. But it does work; the buildings are surprisingly well designed and very rarely fall apart, and when they do, it's usually become they've become sentient and then suicidal for some reason and choose to end it all without much thought for collateral damage. And the idiosyncratic building style leans towards making it easier for alternative forms of travel; it's a part of Traverse Town building code to always add ladders, all manner of features capable of being used as handholds, big windows and rooftops that can very easily traversed to make it that much easier for, in example, _le parkour_, or the art of urban building-hopping. Consequently, wherever you go in the districts of Traverse Town, you're probably going to find unused rooftops being used for something that wouldn't happen normally: ziplines being hooked to friend's houses to make it easier for people to get to them, very large and elaborate gardens arranged on large baskets hanging from the side of the buildings in such a way that they are natural sundials (and, for some reason, are specially bred to make wireless Internet signals much stronger; it's not known what the plants get out of it) and sometimes stranger things, like scavenged parts of broken giant robots removed and made into crudge balconies or rooftops.

And sometimes, as in the case of a unoccupied area of the First District mall's rooftop, littered with air conditioners and reminders for adventuerers to clean up the destruction they made, they were used for training people in training people in supernatural martial arts with elements of full body magic.

"Don't focus on the sun," Zuko said, sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. "Don't _think _about what you're doing. Let it happen. Relax your _chi_, let it flow and adapt to the sun's energy and breathe that energy in...Zim, are you listening to me?"

"Hah hah!" Zim said, pointing at Ron, who was mimicking Zuko behind his back. "It's funny because it's suicidal."

Zuko opened his eyes and glared ferociously enough to make Ron meekly sit down. Zim didn't even notice, but that was to be expected. "Would it kill you to stay still for five minutes?"

"Probably," Zim said.

For reasons that were obvious to anyone who knew anything about the emotion-driven aspect of Firebending and the very, very horrible consequences of Zim running around without any idea of what he was doing, Zuko had taken it upon him to take Zim to a isolated part of the mall's rooftop and instruct him in Firebending basics as well as he could; Ron had come along, supposedly to keep an eye on them but more likely because he seemed to be steadily becoming a fanboy. The idea did not please Zuko.

Despite that, Zuko was too stubborn to give up now. He had climbed up mountains with his bare hands. He had coiled lightning within his body and blasted it back. He'd faced the _Spirit of the Ocean _and not cowered, and he was going to hammer Firebending into his mildly deranged Irken friend's head if he needed a mallet to do it. "Listen, this is important! Most Firebenders are trained just like this after they first start sparking; you have no idea how abnormal it is to be teaching a Firebender that can already make large flame and doesn't know a single bit about _controlling _it. If you were a novice Firebender, it would be weeks before any sane teacher would let you even near a fire."

"I defy your logic and replace it with toads!" Zim said. "Toads made of doom...I love that word. Doom. Doom doom doom doom!"

"_ZIM!_" Zuko stood up, embers flickering off his skin.

"What?"

"Try to be serious for five minutes! You need to understand this if you want to grasp heat manipulation and external Firebending! Or do you not want to be able to move fire around?"

"Not really. I can shoot blasts of fire, what more do I need?"

Zuko stared at him for a long, long time, and he had enough time to wonder if the sun spirit Agni, patron spirit of the Fire Nation, had ever blessed someone as..._dense _as Zim with the gift of Firebending. He had to admit, given the various men he'd had in his crew during his banishment, it would be quite close.

"_You might be able to stop burning yourself,_" Razael's voice said quietly.

Zim hushed him away, not wanting to admit that the figment of his imagination had a good point. "I'm pretty sure I got some practice in on that last night, anyway," Zim said. "Bet I could do it when I need to. So why bother? Teach me to shoot lightning."

"No," Zuko said curtly; Zim had been trying to get Zuko to tell him how to generate lightning, and Zuko had flatly refused for obvious reasons. A _normal _Firebender lacked the clarity of heart or the raw power to seperate yin from yang and summon lightning without literally exploding. _Zim _using it was just asking for his untimely death. "Zim, I'll be blunt."

"Are you ever anything else?"

"Cute. You are, without a doubt, the most abnormal Firebender I have ever encountered. Even _Aang _learned to Firebend the sane way!"

"By supplicating big scary dragons that could have killed you and him if they felt like it?" Zim pointed out.

"Bad example; I was referring to when he learned from Master Jeong-Jeong. Or from what I heard about that from Jeong-Jeong when I met him before the day of Sozin's Comet. He was entirely too good at it; Jeong-Jeong spent all the time training him how to control fire, not create it. Internal Firebending, the generation of fire, without training on _controlling _it?" Zuko remembered Zhao, his rival in chasing Aang until the damn fool had fulfilled his life's ambition of _killing the moon _and gotten himself killed for it; Zhao'd had power, but absolutely no control or restraint. He decided to mention Zhao's untimely demise later to Zim as an object lesson. "That's dangerous. I'm surprised you haven't burned yourself!"

"Er...yes...funny that, I certainly haven't caught myself on fire at all...hah hah..."

"Of course you haven't. Zim..." Zuko appeared to be wrestling with something. "If you don't learn how to control your own fire, _people will die_. You're going to kill someone if you don't think straight!" He considered this. "Kill someone you don't want to kill."

"Oh," Zim said. He frowned a bit. "Well...in that case, it _would _be a step backwards for me at this point."

"They really know how to take the fun out of training montages," Ron complained to Rufus while Zuko and Zim argued, the little mole-rat sitting near him.

"If I threw you off this building, wouldn't anyone complain?" Zuko asked Ron.

"Probably not."

"That's depressing."

"Eh, I'm used to it. Also, you're way too tense. You need a girlfriend."

"I have a girlfriend!" Zuko said angrily. Zim remembered Zuko talking about a girl named Mai that everyone else generally said was 'gloomy', 'emotionally repressed', and 'a terrifyingly good shot with big sharp stabby things'. "She's...just back home and...I haven't seen her in a really long time...shut up."

Ron and Rufus snickered. Zuko contemplated whether it would be proper behavior to light Ron's tail on fire and decided otherwise. "Alright. Now...obviously, I can't train you the usual way, because it simply doesn't apply in this case; you can already create fire, you've shown me that you can make some very impressive flames, which takes a _lot _of time off your training. Normally, Firebenders are given considerable effort towards learning how to amplify their inner fire...my sister was the exception to that, mind you; she was making sparks when she was four."

"When'd you do it?" Ron asked abruptly.

Zuko didn't say anything for a moment. "...That's irrelevant." He didn't tell them that he was struggling with fire even when he was eleven, back when his sister was making fire so hot it was blue. Or that he had always found it so much easier to bend existing fire than create it, something shameful in the line of Sozin and damning in his father's eyes. Or that even with his uncle's tutelage, he had struggled with the most basic concepts for years until they'd been pounded into his head. He learned it, though, like he learned everything he ever had in his life: the hard way.

He tried not to think about that. Focusing on himself was _not _something he needed to do right now, with all the people on Earth he'd fought or saved or met or even been vaugely aware of dead (no, worse than dead, screaming and torn from their bloodied corpses and mutilated into things torn from the blackest night imaginable); with all those dead on his conscience, daring to brood on the absolutely pointless problems of his childhood was childish. "Zim. I'm not quite sure how to go through with this, is what I'm saying. The basics, though, are something you ought to have hammered through your head. _Then _maybe, and only maybe, you might be able to learn the more advanced techniques."

"Will these 'advanced techniques' involve me learning to shoot lightning?" Zim asked hopefully.

"Agni, I hope not." Zuko said. In some ways, he reflected, this might actually be easier than teaching Aang; that was a bit of an odd point, given that Aang was, after all, the Avatar, the savior of their world. (And, as events had transpired, quite a few other ones.) He had been _born _with the knack for the other elements, and once he cleared whatever psychological barriers stopped him from bonding with the appropiate element, he was scores beyond any other Bender; a bit humiliating to Zuko, seeing Aang breeze his way through forms that had taken him months to hammer his way through. Zim, on the hand, didn't have the problem of having to edge through an Airbender's thinking; Firebending was rooted in aggression and passion, while Airbending was firmly based in evasive thought and harmonious will; it ran counter to the essentially ferocious nature of Firebending, and instilling a killer instinct in Aang, had been like pulling teeth.

Zim already had entirely too much of that, and Zuko'd always thought that Zim would make a natural Fire Nation citizen; always a degreely insanely loyal towards them for some reason Zuko didn't understand and deeply passionate about anything he cared about. That insight now proved a degree prophetic, now that Zim was apparently a Firebender. Zuko wondered to himself what his uncle Iroh would do at a time like this and could think only of a koan he made up: _If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and hits a squirrel destined to destroy the world, does the squirrel have the right to complain, or is it what makes the squirrel turn to the side of darkness?_ It helped nothing. "Zim," Zuko said, getting an idea nonetheless. "When you Firebend or make flame or whatever you want to call it...what does it feel like?"

Zim frowned in thought, remembering Zuko mentioned something about a 'fire inside' earlier that morning, and Zim had agreed with the idea then. Zim held his hand out and concentrated, fire swelling out from around his hand, like the determination and floods of passionate will that had always driven him right through the impossible had escaped through his body and burned. "It's like a fire within me, just like you said earlier today," Zim said, having difficulty putting into words what was happening regardless of his intellectual comprehension. "Emotion...energy...everything that's ever been the drill that I've spun through limitations and obstacles mixing together and flowing through me and becoming fire."

Zuko nodded approvingly. "At least you understand that much on Firebending." Zim looked at him, so surprised he forgot to keep his flame burning and it disappeared.

"Sounds like hot-bloodedness given physical form," Ron remarked.

"Row row, fight power!" Rufus said, punching at the air

"Don't be such a-" Zuko stopped, whatever harsh thing he was saying dying. He looked at Ron, surprised. "...What makes you say that?" He asked, a little sharply but not without interest.

"Just how it seems to me?" Ron said, looking uncertain now that he was actually being paid attention to.

"Well, you're right on," Zuko said, looking impressed. "You're smarter than you act."

"Uh...I'd have to be?" Ron said, looking both smug and confused. Rufus patted his knee, as if saying that Ron didn't give himself enough credit.

Zuko turned back to Zim. "That's basically the heart of Firebending. Drive and the higher passions - compassion, righteous fury and determination among them - blend together into your inner fire, which according to the Fire Sages may not be a _literal _spiritual fire but a form of spiritual connection that we _feel _as fire. Like the dragons, we breath in, taking in energy from outside, mix in with our internal heat and it creates fire outside the body. The same principle applies to external Firebending: not creating fire but manipulating existing flame, reducing and amplifying it as needed."

"I don't really grasp it, but eh, works for me," Zim said. Ron nodded; he was a fan of martial arts and fantasy movies, and this stuff fit right in.

"Good enough. Before you start trying to do something stupid like I _know _you will, you should have a better grasp of actually controlling fire and minimizing the damage you can make. _That_ is external Firebending, which is likely to be the earliest form of human Firebending, develouped by the Sun Warriors, the original human Firebenders. It may not be as seemingly handy as internal Firebending, which creates fire, but it's not to be underestimated. Bending operates on principles you'll probably think are alien, and you need to destroy mental barriers like them if you want to learn."

"Alien how?"

"Well...take Toph, for instance. Her Metalbending."

"Right. She uses her vibration-sight to reach out to the impurities in the metal and budge the rest of it." Zim looked vaugely wistful. "I wish I could do that. That would be AWESOME! Also very useful in a mundane sense. Doors would get out of my way for me. I'd settle for just Metalbending period, and never mind proper Earthbending. Wait, don't tell Toph, she'll hurt me."

Zuko pretended not to hear anything after the first part of Zim's statement. "Good analysis. All nice and scientifically accurate. She also bends the metal itself, or so I believe."

"Wait, what?"

Rufus blinked. This whole thing was going over his head. He looked up at his human. "Hrk, getting this?"

Ron shook his head. "Nope. Wish the Hitchhiker's Guide had articles on this Bending stuff. Maybe I can get Aang to do something like that, he seems like he'd be into it..."

Zuko continued explaining to Zim. "Look at it like this. Fundamentally speaking, the seperation of the elements are an illusion. Toph can bend metal, not just because she's an extremely powerful Eathbender, but because metal is, in the spiritual sense, refined earth. It's still Earthbending, you see? Once you let go of the illusion of division...your bending follows." Zuko smirked. "You follow?"

"I...I believe so," Zim said, a little shaken by the implications. He couldn't stop the appropiate thoughts from lining up and explaining themselves, one by one: if metal was refined earth, then perhaps the only reason most Earthbenders couldn't budge it was because they hadn't done it the right way, or else move their chi the right way through it or however it was supposed to be done. And...in that case, it would explain how Aang could bend so easily; perhaps the Avatar intuitively understood that the elements were one, and had the raw power to bend their individual manifastions as the spirits embodied them and the nations of his world understood them. Air for freedom, fire for power, earth for strength, water for adaptability...all those were great traits in any person, and the Avatar held them all in equal measure. It...it made sense. It sounded _right_. But Zim didn't understand how it could be: for instance, why was _fire _an element? It was a reaction, a function of energy, not a true element...but Aang had said that the original benders had controlled _energy_. Perhaps the Firebenders were the spiritual inheritors of those Energybenders, manipulating internal energies to create fire, graced by the Sun spirit? And then, there was their secret technique of Lightningbending? Perhaps a truely flexible Firebender could make more subtle means of Lightningbending, such as controlling magnatism or other such techniques...and incidentally, where were these thoughts coming from? They didn't sound like anything Zim would come up with on his own.

Before he could keep going with those thoughts and hit on a eiphiny that would have remade the theories of Elementbending forever and open up Zim's own eyes to the other potential abilities unlocked in him, waiting to be explored, Zuko said, "Now, for a better example..." He breathed in deeply.

The air around him shimmered in a heat flash and Rufus hid behind Ron after Ron hid behind a suitably large air conditioner, both of them alarmed by it. Zuko tilted his head up and exhaled a massive burst of fire roaring out from his nostrils and mouth, arcing over his head in a swirling fire-cloud flickering white at the edges. Zuko raised his arms in a stance more suited to an Airbender's and the fire dissipated, a fearsome waver of heat still above him like a dragon's aura of power. Zuko spun his arms out, gathering force and thrusting it away, and the heat moved with him, and with that heat, so did the air itself; flickers of fire danced in the burning wind as it surged to the ground, ashes streaking across the ground as it burned.

There was an appropiate stunned silence. Ron peeked out and broke it first. "Okay. I'm not a Bending know-stuff-guy, but I'm pretty sure that Firebenders aren't supposed to do that."

"That _was _Firebending," Zim said. "But...you moved the air? With heat?"

"Dude," Sammael said. "Airbending, but with Firebending. The implications, and applications, are endless."

"Tell me about it!" Razael said. "The possibilities are awesome! And...wait, where are all these intuitive but not quite _Zim-ish_ ideas coming from? I feel like a lock being picked. Alien thoughts and ideas...flowing in. Like a light that's _alive_...and _thinks..._and does a bit of thinking for you to give you a head start and let the rest get done..."

Samael's jaw dropped off his head and reattached on it's own. "Something seriously weird is going on in Zimhead Land...moreso than usual, of course..."

"Precisely," Zuko said, pleased that Zim had understood the concept so quickly and fortunately not privy to the objections of Zim's shoulder angels, otherwise he would have been very paranoid. "Creative applications of Bending have a lot bigger impact than even the great research-masters from my world think. I don't even think the great library of Wan Shi Tong has information about stuff like that. Multi-cultural Bending practices haven't been used or develouped except by the Avatars in more than several hundred years after the Nations started becoming more insular. Since about...a thousand years ago, when factual history was destroyed in some kind of horrible world-wide disaster." Zuko shrugged. "Now the closest we get are legends about spirt-touched Benders who could bend _two _elements and were two nations at the same time." He grimaced. "I'd _hate _to have that happen to me."

"Some kind of disaster?" Zim asked, intrigued. He'd never heard anything like that. "What was it?"

Zuko shook his head. "No one knows and half the spirits known to us today don't knowl and the others won't tell. Probably some of them weren't even paying attention to whatever it was. Or engineered it. Spirits don't have the same sense of morality we do. The great Nation spirits excluded, of course, but even they're not quite..like us." Zuko thought about it. "What happened then...mass earthquakes in the Earth Kingdom, hurricanes all over the Fire Nation, tidal waves at the poles and island domains, and the Air Nomads ended up caught in of it, this being before they had Air Temples and roamed around like proper nomads. And all tof this happened at the same time, too. The survivors reformed what they could of their cultures, lending itself to my world's international political climate, and one of the worst long-term after-effects was a breakdown in cultural comprehension of the other nations, flanderization of the Bending styles and people generally finding reasons to be bigger jerkasses than usual."

"You're using internet terms for fiction tropes," Ron said, impressed. "Not only are you made of badass, you're one of us!"

"_Nerd!_" Rufus squeaked, climbing onto Ron's shoulder. Ron gave him an indignant look. "Hnk. Sorry."

"One of us, one of us!" Zim chanted. "Wait, in what way?"

"Er...in the sense that he's into trope classification?"

"It's a hobby," Zuko said. "It's more of Sokka's thing, but Aang thought I should study this sort of thing more to...avoid the unfortunate instance in the not-so-abandoned ruins that I shall not speak of. Apparently, Air Nomad stories about raiding the treasures of the ancients are more applicable to real life than I thought..."

"Is this something about when you saw the dragons?" Zim said. "Because you don't explain much about that in detail."

"Wait, when did you see dragons!" Ron said. "You gotta tell me, dragons are the badass of badass!"

"That would explain a lot, actually," Zim said. "Aang tells me that pre-Fire Lord stories about the Fire Nation say that dragons interbred with humans to birth the original Firebenders, and supposedly feature heavily in Zuko's genealogy."

Ron blinked. "What." He looked at Zuko thoughtfully. "...I hope in your family's case the dragon was a matriarch. Or a shapeshifter. Otherwise...well, the biology is freakingly iffy either way, but it's a little more acceptable when it's the girl that's outrageously big."

"Those stories always have the dragons as shapeshifters," Zim said. "...Not that I pay a lot of attention to when they tell me them...of course..."

"Oh, okay then."

"Will you stop talking about that!" Zuko said, looking tremendously embarrased. "Those are Fire Nation spirit tales you're spreading around! My mom loved those stories, stop making fun of them!"

"She did, eh?" Ron said, scratching his cheek and grinning evilly.

"Indeed," Zim said knowingly. "Hmn...that makes me wonder..."

"Wonder what?" Zuko said.

"Oh, nothing much," Zim said quietly. "...Just that dragon blood is supposed to run in your family, that's all. The question being, how recently does it run?"

"I don't like where you're going with this. Stop going with this."

"But you gotta wonder!" Ron said. "I mean, you seem like you don't tihnk much of your Firebending, but you're really good at it! I'm guessing you were a bit of a slow bloomer, maybe. Like, real natural talent? _From the very source?_"

"Dragons get kissy?" Rufus said.

"_What are you talking about!_" Zuko yelled. "And how the hell are you talking?" He asked Rufus. Rufus shrugged, not knowing himself.

"Ah, I think I see now why your mother might have loved stories about dragon-wives," Zim said, grinning like a maniac. "It hit close to home, yes? And she _did _disappear completely after she was banished, or so you've said. Perhaps she couldn't be found was because they were looking for someone human-shaped?"

Zuko's jaw dropped in slack-jawed horror. "...You can't be serious."

"Hey, look at the bright side!" Ron said cheerfully. "When people call your mom a dragon lady, it wouldn't be a technicality!"

"Also, we think your mom is a dragon," Zim said. "Maybe she was one of the ones that taught you and Aang Firebending! That'd be nice. Though she probably would have said something nice to you. Like, 'hey, son, how's it been?' Something to that effect. Or a gift basket. Do mother's give gift baskets?"

A deep inner struggle appeared to take place in Zuk for a moment. "You have ten seconds to get off this subject before I push you both off the rooftop with great big blasts of fire. And lightning, if I can find a power source around here."

"One joke?" Rufus asked. Zuko growled, rather dragonishly, and they took the hint. (Zuko appeared not to understand the problem of behaving like a dragon when he was trying to make them stop joking that he was part dragon.)

"You're no fun!" Ron whined.

"I'd say you are a killbuzz or whatever they call it, but I'd expect it from a half-dragon," Zim said.

"STOP SAYING THAT!" Zuko said. "Zim! Show me your form! We're training here, not discussing my lineage!"

Grumbling ungrateful things about chainsaw hotdogs (because Zim is not like normal people), Zim did just there, going off a short distance and standing at attention while he tried to remember what a Firebender's stance was supposed to look like and settled on a bad imitation of Zuko's usual long distance form; foot rooted with the legs apart, one arm tucked to the side and the other ready to lash out like a snake, palms facing out. Feeling a little stupid, Zim drew an arm back, the air around his arm shining with energy before bursting into flame and expanding around his arm without doing him harm; he thrust his arm out, fire spinning out in a thick but unfocused stream, it fell apart after less than ten feet and dissipated, leaving a thin trail of smoke and singed rooftop. Compared to the Firebending Zim had seen from Aang and Zuko, it was...lacking.

"Eh," Rufus said, waving his little claws. "So-so."

"Was that supposed to happen?" Ron asked Zuko.

"What was _that?_" Zuko demanded. "Ugh...your fire is a _lot _stronger than any normal novice should be, but you have some of the worst self-control I've ever seen. Focus on your breath control! Firebending control comes from the _breath!_ You breath in! The motions of your Firebending form turn that breath into energy and that energy leaves your body as fire! Poor breath-control makes you weaker in a fight and a danger to yourself and those around you!" _Wow,_ Zuko thought. _I paraphrase my uncle better than I thought._

"You're not a very nice kung-fu teacher guy," Ron observed.

"No," Zuko agreed.

"That's almost..._draconic _of you."

'Yes." Zuko blinked. "I TOLD YOU TO STOP THAT!"

"My Firebending doesn't have anything to do with breath!" Zim protested. "I think. And breach control sounds stupid!"

"Breath control ineptitude leads to wild fires," Zuko said. "Do you how many have died in dry seasons because some idiot wouldn't control his breath? How many child Firebenders ended up left without families because they lost control aroud non-Bending parents _just once_? Just do it. Breath in, mix your fire with the energy of your breath and release it as fire!"

"But-"

"Do it!" Zuko loomed over Zim ominously. His eyes almost seemed to glow with the heat of the fire inside. "_Or I'll make you heat up toast and eat the slices you burn_."

"I don't know how to do that. That energy-mixing thing."

Zuko blinked. He appeared to rethink the whole thing. "Don't think about it," Ron suggested. "Just let it flow through you and let it go where it needs to!"

While Zuko gave Ron a confused look, Zim decided that the teen with a monkey's tail wasn't a bad advice-guy and, mostly to shut Zuko up and prove he was wrong, Zim inhaled and clumsily let that new fire inside spread out, having absolutely no idea what he was doing. His timing was off. The energies mixed clumsily. The fire that roared out from his palm was smaller than the flames Zuko had made earlier, a twisted mass of heat and not a flowing stream, but it went further than the fire he had released before, whirling away and leaving a less odious trail of smoke.

"Hey, it worked," Ron said while Zim gaped, astonished that Zuko had been right. "Once again, dumb skills in the form of sage wisdom I made up based on my own experiences with my own inconsistant powers of awesome worked! For the first time. Man, that made no sense."

"Told you," Zuko said smugly. "Wasn't expecting Ron's advice to actually work, though. Good work."

"Thanks, Dragon Son!"

"STOP THAT!" Zuko retreated, grumbling under his breath about annoying mutant man-children who didn't know to leave well enough alone and dealt with it by instructing Zim through constructive harrasement. "Your stance needs work. For one thing, that's a mid-range form, the Solar Snake Style. Quick to move, easy to manuver and deadly to those that get too close. You want to tuck your left leg in for a less constricting stance; you're a Firebender, not an Earthbender, and a lack of mobility is a hindrance. Don't flatten your hands, cup them a bit, like you have dragon's claws; you want to _guide _the fire, give it a channel to flow through, not force it around. Keep your lower body firm, your upper body loose..."

This went on for a bit, Zim constantly adjusting his stance by Zuko's nitpicking on very minute issues with Zim's stances. Zuko went on to show Zim a number of other forms: Crashing Star Suite, a form meant for someone fighting on higher ground and emphasizing short-range bursts of fire; Righteous Spirit Style, a long-range form based in creating fire and amplifying it for shaping into various forms like fire-whips or pinwheels; and because Zim seemed so used to moving stiff, Zuko showed him the basics of the Raging Volcano Style, an Eathbender-derived style based in holding one's ground and bending existing flame, blasting fire to ward attacks away and building up nearby fires until a moment presented itself to direct all that fire in a single massive blast. And, most importantly, the primal style of Firebending, the original form practiced by the Sun Warrior tribe that was now extinct (or so Zuko claimed) and a far cry from the corrupted and brutal styles Zuko's forefathers had instituted, the Dancing Dragon. (Ron had quite some fun mocking this after all the build-up.)

This went on for a good while. It was kind of a fun, in a way, and certainly instructional. (Not only was Zim being taught real Firebending, he was also getting a crash-course in various forms of martial arts, mostly in aspects of Northern Shaolin Style or whatever Earth martial arts Firebending had an eerie similarity to.) Zuko was aware of this secondary benefit and made a point of focusing on it for a short while, since unarmed self-defense is always helpful; he told Zim that because of height, using his legs to keep his enemies at a distance was a good idea, particularily with his superior mobility, and he was certainly strong enough to take a much larger person close up; in fact, his size was probably an advantage against some people. This wasn't the first time his bending-friends had tried to teach him the more practical aspects of the Bending Arts, though it was the first time Zim had paid enough attention to actually get more than a few scattered moves and principles, and he'd already used most of them in his fighting recently.

Eventually, Zim ended up explaining to Zuko that his agility, while always somewhat impressive given the conditioning of Irken Invaders, had gone through a massive upswing owing to a chance contact with a magical artifact after Zuko expressed a considerable amount of disbelief at Zim's ease with the muscle-stretching stresses the fighting forms induced, not to mention his vastly improved acrobatic and dodging skills. To prove this after Zuko complained about how contrived that sounded, Zim produced the Monkey Staff itself, Ron glaring at it mistrustfully. "...So I hit this thing, summoned it's powers and my own magical artifact interacted with it somehow, adding it's powers to my own and giving the agility and speed of...well, a monkey."

"I'd like to express aribtary skepticism, but that's as good an explaination," Zuko said, handling it before giving it back. It felt...odd to him. Not bad, exactly; where his fingers touched it, a slow and ponderous power reached out towards him, as though curious in a totally non-sentient way. Not alive, certainly, but it was _powerful_, like the chosen weapon of a hero in a spirit tale. It wasn't like something that had been imbued with magic, either; the very wood of the artifact was like something that had been thrust into the world by the very force of it's reality, like the smallest soul of some massive entity that simply existed without begining or end. This thing was _of _magic, that much Zuko could tell. "I'm not sure you should be carrying this thing around. It's...it doesn't feel safe, exactly."

"The elemental monks that safeguard stuff like this thought it would be fine for me to have it," Zim said reproachfully.

"Hmn." Zuko looked at at for a good long moment. "And you just found it there? No explaination for what it was doing there or why you, who just got a magical Macguffin earlier, ran into it without foreshadowing or any suggestion at all?"

"Pretty much."

"That's suspicious."

"What, you think someone wanted Zim to find it?" Ron asked.

"Possibly," Zuko said. "On the other hand, Zim said that the Heartless were swarming from around that place, and he said he fought a giant Heartless there too. I've..._met _things like that, things without name or purpose or sense that are attracted to artifacts and magic. Someone could have been using it to lure them there! And Zim just happened to pick it up."

"Mr. Lyle!" Zim said. "That evil guy that surprised us! He could have planted it there! Someone did say that the Heartless I fought _had _been haunting the place, and all kinds of people have been talking about someone with the Keyblade coming there! Maybe this staff thing was a beacon, and that's how Mr. Lyle found me...or maybe it's both!"

"Hold on, hold on!" Ron said. "I hate and fear the evil that is monkey as much as the next guy-"

"Not me!" Rufus said.

"You are made of sterner stuff than me, little buddy. What I'm getting at is that Mr. Lyle doesn't seem like the kind of guy to carry out crazy-elaborate plans that always end with him winning no matter what, and your idea of this staff being for something like that sounds like it'd fit in those kinds of plans. In case you forgot, you got super-acrobatics powers and Mr. Lyle got beaten up. And that giant Heartless got killed. Bad guys didn't win that one at all. And these Shen Gong Wu magical artifact things are pretty hot on the black markets; nobody around here that has it in for the good guys would use it as a trap when there's so much other stuff they could use it for!"

"'Shen Gong Wu'?" Zuko said. "Huh...I think of heard of stuff like that before. Not on my world, but during my travels, of course..."

"You and everyone else, it seems some days. Half the evil guys that bug us use scavenged Shen Gong Wu to power themselves up, ya know? Usually powering one of their kill-you machines, or as part of their personal weaponry. The Xiaolin Dragons spend a ton of time tracking those jerks down and securing the Shen Gong Wu when they aren't loaning them out to the good guys like us, of course. Good thing Traverse Town sees a lot of 'weird stuff' trading; the more popular Shen Gong Wu trickle down here sometimes."

"You're getting off-subject. What's your point?"

"We-ell, the Xaiolin Dragons obviously didn't know about it, but the Monkey Staff is, and I heisitate to say good things about the evil monkey things against all that is good and pure, a pretty popular Shen Gong Wu. Used to see a lot of it now and then until it disappeared. Last I heard, it was with the Crossguard; they were due to hand it over to the Xiaolin Dragons but then it disappeared. Crossguard said that they had a deal going with forces that they weren't allowed to talk about and no one got a word out of them. The Xiaolin Dragons weren't talking, incidentally."

"...What does that mean?" Zim asked.

"Could be someone planted that thing for Zim to find," Ron said. "Someone that wanted Zim to find it and give him an advantage."

"I don't buy it," Zuko said. "But then I'm recklessly paranoid."

"Also half-dragon," Zim said.

"STOP THAT!" Zuko looked at the Monkey Staff. "How the heck do you use this thing anyway? Can't see how anyone could summon whatever powers it has on accident."

"You do it with _WILLPOWER!_" Zim shouted. "Proclaiming the name of the Monkey Staff in a resolute voice, summoning it's powers to you!"

"What, you just say 'Monkey Staff'?" Zuko said. The Monkey Staff overflowed with golden light that wrapped around Zuko in contrails and swirls, resembling a sawrm of light that for a moment looked like all that was Monkey; it flared into a brilliant aura that was so awesome it cracked the ground and levitated Zuko into the air; Zuko was too distracted by this to notice the black fur growing all over his body, his hands swelling up and nails extending into claws, thick military-issue Fire Nation sideburns growing over his normally smooth cheeks, his hair growing out into a shoulder-length mess, the long black-furred tail rolling out from his pants or any of the numerous other changes happening to him.

The light faded and Zuko dropped to the ground, a thick coil of light still flowing from the Monkey Staff and up his arm. He blinked. "I feel different," He said, voice a bit different because of the teeth grown to sharp points. "Do I look different?"

Zim and Ron looked at each other; a freak-out was not in the rulebook for this. Zim didn't have the weirdness censor most people had that would be offended at this sort of thing, and Ron was sensitized to craziness like this. Rufus tried not to giggle at the sight of Zuko. "Let me put it this way," Ron said diplomatically. "No one's going to be making jokes about you maybe being part dragon. Now, part _monkey,_ that's another story."

"What?" Zuko said. "Random question. Why am I suddenly incredibly itchy along with an urge to abandon all upper-body clothing along with my shoes. And my feet _hurt_." Well, his feet had changed, it seemed. "And what's this pain in my back!"

"Well, I could make a joke about the 'monkey on your back', but it seems in poor taste."

"You aren't making any sense."

"Lookit!" Rufus suggested. "Hands?"

"What?" Zuko glanced at his hands. He stared. For what seemed like a full minute, he just stared at the fur covering the back of his hands before he gently touched the furry sideburns on his face. A full examination of himself commenced, ending with him looking at his tail with a look of quite horror.

He didn't rant, rave or scream his revulsion to the heavens. Because Zuko was a young Firebender, and his emotions ran hot and overt. But for some people, there comes a time when their anger becoems so white-hot that it comes back the other side, quiet and calm. "I am a monkey," He said. "I. Am. A. Monkey." He stared at Zim. "Why. Am. I. A. Monkey?"

"I do not know!" Zim said proudly; it's not like _he _devolved last night, but then he hadn't held it for long. "What about you, Ron? Ron?" Ron had disappeared, along with Rufus. "...Lousy human, using their common sense." Zuko was still staring at him. One of his eyes twitched. Zim sensed burning doom was approaching. "Er...have you considered dropping the Monkey Staff?"

Zuko let it go; as soon as it hit the ground and the sun-bright curlices around him vanished, Zuko's body lit up from within with a dull light that shone in the image of a simian form for a moment before flying apart in a brief shower of motes, and with them went the magic the Monkey Staff had worked on Zuko, the fur, tail and other monkeylike adaptations reversing themselves and leaving Zuko normal again. Zuko looked himself over and sighed in relief. (He also quietly checked to see if there was still a tail. There wasn't.) "Well, that's another traumatic transformation I won't be forgetting in a hurry," He muttered, referring to any number of horrible incidents that had happened during his time traveling the worlds. It had not been pleasant.

"That had to be unpleasant," Ron said, popping up besides Zim.

"Where did you go!" Zim said.

"Exactly where no one would notice me so no one woud shoot fire at me."

"What?"

"Also, I was hanging from the ledge."

"Oh."

Zuko kicked the Monkey Staff back to Zim, making sure that he was in contact with it as briefly as possible. "It is my professional opinion that no one, and I mean no one, is to get themselves anywhere near that thing. Honestly, what's the point of a magic artifiact that turns you into a monkey!"

"One that gives you superhuman agility and speed?" Zim said, flipping up and catching himself on the ground, holding himself up with a one-handed handstand just because he could do it now. "And balance too, apparently. Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking at me, Zuko?"

"...No."

"Aw, come on, don't be such a hardcase!"

"Is that how _you _mutated?" Zuko asked Ron, ignoring Zim's childishness. "You used the Monkey Staff and you grew a tail?"

"What? No, a Shen Gong Wu's powers are temporary if they change you. No, my case is a bit...different," Ron said, looking awkward. "Long story, not very interesting, full of unpleasantness and mad science and crazy-awesome magic powers that never work the way I want them to."

"...Well okay then," Zuko said, not really understanding but knowing enough to let it go. He resolved to find some brain acid and erase the memory of this incident forever. "We are never going to mention, talk about, think about or remember the last five minutes again for the rest of our lives."

"But it was funny!" Zim complained.

"I mean it."

"But-"

_"For the rest of our lives_."

"Okay, okay. Geez. Hot head."

"Incredibly lame punster," Ron said.

Zuko looked like he wanted to change the subject quite desperately and found an appropiate topic. "Zim?"

"Yo," Zim said. "Gah, I can't believe I said that! I feel so dirty. Like I spent half an hour listening to pop idols remixing classic rock. Must ask Abel if that is some sort of sin."

Zuko bit his lip. "...This mission of your's is to go into space so you can find your robot, your friend and any survivors of your world, right?"

"Pretty much, yeah." Zim shrugged. "Gir likes people around; I expect he's with Gaz, wherever she is, so I _guess _he's safe enough for the moment, but I _must _find him. It is a matter of duty, you understand. And Dib is perhaps the first person I could have ever truly called a friend, even if he was simply my most worthy foe. That alone would be enough to chase him down if he wasn't in...some sort of trouble. When the...unpleasantness happened last night, it affected him. Badly. I simply have to smack some sense into him, yes?"

"If you think that's what you have to do, you should. But how, exactly, do you intend to do that?"

Zim shrugged again. He hadn't thought too much about and he didn't care to; he didn't care too much about forethought. He just _did _things. "I don't know. Go from planet to planet until I find them? I still have a transponder in my Pak linked to Gir's SIR signal; I tried it earlier to connect to him, but the signal's too weak. It _does, _however, exist." Zim grinned, a minor triumph still enough to push him that much close towards a premature victory in his eyes. "I bet I could fashion some sort of radar out of it, though, and I _do _have this magic key thing that does stuff. Probably it finds things."

Zuko didn't look pleased. "That's not good enough. You're talking about going to every planet you see and searching the whole thing until you find _three _people. Two of them are children and the third is a childlike robot." He pointed up, as if for emphasis. "Every. Single. Planet."

"Probably even in coterminous galaxies and dimensions based on your resonance imprint," Ron said casually.

"Places you go? Places could be, you!" Rufus said, with some difficulty.

"Dib's no younger than Aang was when he fought your evil dad," Zim pointed out, ignoring Ron and Rufus' contributions.

Zuko, for a moment, looked like he wanted to make some sort of big point but decided against it. "...But, doesn't that seem a little inefficient to you?"

"I believe I could wire the transponder to direct me towards the general location of Gir's location. If I can find the materials, I can make better ones to finetune his location. Simple enough. So what are you getting at?"

"...You're not a tracker, Zim. You're a fighter. And more importantly, you're blasting off into space with two complete strangers. Just...why?"

"Eh, they said something about their King making them help me."

"You could just offer to borrow their ship and consider that to be help enough. Then you could have _other _people help you. People more qualified for the task at hand. People who know how to _find _things that are extremely hard to find. Perhaps someone that knows how to hunt down the impossible."

Rufus shook his head in disgust. "Subtle, not work!"

"You missed a perfectly good oppertunity for a 'hint hint'," Ron scolded Zuko.

Zim didn't understand what Ron meant. "Well, yeah, but why weasel my way out of good minons like Colin and Handlesack? They're good fighters, if complete idiots; I'd be a fool to waste this oppertunity!"

"Their names are Calvin and Hobbes," Ron said. "And you forgot Morte."

"Who? Never mind, it must not be important if I can't consistently remember it or keep track of whoever."

"Zim, you just told me this is a search and retrive mission," Zuko reminded him. "What does fighting have to do with anything?"

"Heartless," Zim said flatly. To his twisted amusement, Zuko flinched a little. "Apparently they're attracted to me now, what with the Keyblade and stuff. 'They'll never stop hunting you', someone told me. Or something to that effect. Even though I haven't seen any around today. Then again, it _is _daylight and they are creatures of darkness. So...yeah."

"Okay, good point, but again, what's stopping you from at least recruiting one of your _friends _to go into space with you? I'm sure _one _of _us _would be very happy to go along with you for adventures and rescuing and that stuff. Particularily someone who knows how to _find _very hard-to-find things?"

"Well, when you put it that way, it does make a bit of sense!" Zim said. "Hah, of course! That might be a good idea, if not for the fact that there are extenuating circumstances. But why would Sokka want to go with me? I annoy him greatly."

"Wait, what? Why Sokka?"

"He's a Water Tribe hunter. Good at finding stuff." Zim considered this and, in the interest of honesty, added, "Mostly. Sometimes. When it's vitally important for him to be capable of doing so."

"No, you idiot, I wasn't being extremely unsubtle about bringing _Sokka _with you," Zuko said. "I was talking about...uh, someone else. Look at this another way...uh, you need to learn Firebending too, right?"

"Why?"

"...So you can fight more effectively and not blow yourself up?"

"True. And so I can show up Copenhagenn! Hah, he thinks he can go around making ice slides and explosions and exploding spike things and doing mad science with things, I could show him, oh, how I could show him provided I had proper tutelage from a experienced Firebender! Too bad I don't."

"Cal-vin," Rufus corrected Zim.

"Look, another moment where he's just tempting you!" Ron told Zuko. "Take the oppertunity, will you!"

"What?" Zim worked out what Ron meant and laughed at the stupidity of it. "Psh, like Zuko would want to follow me." Zuko looked like he wanted to smack Zim really hard. "Besides, I couldn't take any of my old friends with me. I dunno how big this ship thing is, so I don't know if I could even take them with me, and even then...Danny's a nervous wreck, I'm not about to tear Aang away from his friends for my own mission, Toph would probably get bored too fast, Katara scares me, everyone would go to pieces without Sokka and I don't think it'd be a good idea to take Danny's friends with me. What would be the point? Snide commentary, occasional badassery from normal people and ghost-fighting knowhow? Also, Zuko! Wouldn't want to join me."

"Uh huh," Ron said, clearly not believing it.

"Zim, that's enough," Zuko said, with deceptive calm. "I'll not have anymore talk about this speculative talk when the obvious solution is right in front of us and absolutely damn nothing is going to change my mind about."

"Oh?" Zim said, not clear where this was going.

"I've been thinking about this ever since we ate. You going into space to find your friends, winding up with this 'Keyblade' thing, these two guys going with you and those Heartless _things _out after you...I was thinking about my friend's situation and how we're in the same boat you are, and I've come to a decision."

"Okay? Because I don't know why you bring this up now. What, are you going to go into space to find your world? Because that seems like a good idea, provided you find a big ship to take Danny and his friends too. It'd be cruel to leave them all alone."

"I'm aware of that, but that's unfeasible right now and anyway it's a moot point," Zuko said. "You see, I'm going with you."

"Oh, okay then." Zim stared out into space and hummed a bit. What Zuko had actually said entered his brain. He stopped. "What."

"Wow, you haven't even started and you already have another party member," Ron said, sounding impressed. "You're going to be picking up new ones all over at this rate!"

"Brigade!" Rufus said cheerfully. "Boom boom, badass it! Hoo-wah!"

"No, no, no no no!" Zim said to Zuko. "And no for good measure in case you're denser than this floor! You hear that!" He yelled at the floor. "You are less dense than he is! SO THERE!"

According to the fierce look on Zuko's face, Zim's refusal did not appear to make a great deal of difference in his decision.

"Uh, Zim, you may want to reconsider this," Ron said. "He's a pyrokinetic with martial arts! He's a freaking badass and he wants to teach you with inventively cruel methods! This is every martial arts geek's dream come true!"

"It is?" Zuko said. "Hrm, that would explain why I was excited to have my uncle teach me when I was a kid..."

"NO!" Zim yelled. "To you coming along, not the geek's dream thing, which it is. But you're not coming with me, Zuko!"

Zuko glared down at Zim, getting an equally harsh one in return. "And why not?" He asked, with surprising calmness, perhaps a leftover from his tranquil fury at being unexpectedly turned into a monkey briefly.

"Because going with me neccisitates that you _not _go with Aang and the others!" Zim snapped.

"Fine, we can get a really big ship like you suggested and we can all go have adventures in space or whatever. Bring Danny and his friends too, make a team effort out of it." Zuko appeared to be making an ironic joke, but it was hard to tell with him. "Leave this town behind and find our friends and find my world."

"Leave Traverse Town behind?" Ron said sadly. "Aw...but I like you guys. It's nice having you guys around, it's like havin' friends."

Zuko stared at him. "...You barely met us twelve hours ago."

"When people alternatively ostrisize and pity you, you take what you can get," Ron explained.

"That's rough, buddy." Zuko paused, remembering how..._comfortable _Kim and Ron were together and missed Mai so terribly it was like being punched in the stomach. By a gorilla-goat wearing fullbody armor.

"Focus!" Zim said to Zuko. "Even if I _did _have the resources to purchase ship big enough to transport all of us comfortably - which I don't, as you pointed out earlier - Danny is in no condition to venture off into space! And I seriously doubt Aang would abandon Danny here and leave him to fend for himself!"

A burst of light cued that Razael had appeared to throw his feelings on the matter in there. "You know, bringing your friend Zuko along would be helpful," He said. "What with the whole 'you not knowing what the hell you're doing with that fire thing' issue."

Sammael appeared in a burst of ink-dark smoke. "And he's a Firebender with an emphasis in stealth skills. He's like a ninja! A ninja with fire powers! Are you aware of how few ninjas with fire powers there are that _aren't _jumping down the slippery slope to complete insanity! Well, Zuko _wants _to go with you, so he's probably been touched by the darkness and it made him crazy. Eh, go for it, he might burn down an orphanage or something. Comedy value!"

Zim ignored them, refusing to acknowledge the fact that if two sem-autonomous aspects of himself were saying those things then he obviously felt the same way somewhere. "And you're supposed to be _loyal!_ Just running off with me hardly seems like loyal at all, and how'd you think they'd feel if you went into space with me and possibly die somewhere out there!"

"And how do you think _I'd _feel if you died out there and I wasn't there to help you!" Zuko yelled back. "You have no idea what to do, you barely survived those _things _that attacked your world and you don't even know what sort of insanity is out there!"

"It's space! I was an Invader! I've gone from planet to planet my entire life! _I do know!_"

"_No, you don't!_" Zuko yelled with surprised ferocity, flames bursting up around his feet for a moment. "You don't get it, do you! The worlds outside our own are _not _like the planets you've been to! You're not going to go to planets that are alien because they have unfamiliar enviroments and starfish-weird people, you're going to _worlds _that are fundamentally different from each other and not at the same time! It'll be like hopping from universe to universe, not going around a galaxy!"

"How do you know it would be like that?"

"Because I've been doing that ever since I lost my way from my world! I _know _what it's like out there! Hell, you might end up in places I've been!" Zuko calmed himself down with an effort. "Look...Zim, I don't know what this ship you're going to use is like, but if it's like the ones I've seen, you're going to be shifting through pararrel probabilities to get to places that _fit _with the types of universe and worlds we're meant to exist on. It won't be like the planets you used to go to. You'll be as new to this as you are to Firebending."

Zim didn't say anything for a moment. "...Even if that's true," He said with uncharacterisitic quiet. "Even if I'm going into something unprepared and without hope, I'm not changing my mind. _I'm going. _I will find Gir, Gaz and Dib. I will bring them here and that is that."

Zuko smirked. "I didn't say to abandon your journey. Not even for an instant would I tell you to betray a friend because it sounds smart. Just...think for a second. You're my friend. Maybe I haven't known you as long as I've known the rest of _my _team, but..." He shrugged. "Firebender. Loyalty. It applies to you too."

"And speaking of that..." Zim said. "If you go with me...what about Aang and the others? They're far more important than I am to you. They're your _family_." Zim grimaced, looking at the groiund. "I'm just the first Earth idiot you met."

"I already told you. You're my friend," Zuko said flatly. "That's all the reason I need to help you. And...they'll understand. They'll be angry." He snorted. "Oh yeah, they'll be angry. They'll want to drag me back and use me for a ping-pong ball in Bending Contests, but they won't actually disagree; Katara can keep everyone together without me to make things worse...Aang can talk the horrors out of Danny's head and help his friends move through what happened to their world...and besides, it's not like it'll take long." Zuko smirked again. "It's not like we're fighting an evil conspiracy or anything."

"Lyle guy," Rufus said.

"Yeah, he's right," Ron said. "Mr. Lyle may be proof otherwise. Don't let your guard down on that front, Zim."

Zuko frowned. "Yeah. There is that." He heisitated. "And...I do have a bit of an ulterior motive."

"Aha!" Zim said. "Base selfishness! I knew there was something in this I could understand. What is it? Sick of not being in the Fire Nation and missed having people to boss around?"

"No. But...it is about my home." Zuko looked uncomfortable. "Listen...we've been bounced around the worlds so many times...none of us though we had a chance of getting back home. We were resigned to drifting around the worlds forever, fixing problems here and there but never being able to come back. That's why...you know, we helped your friend Dib with that...machine."

Zim shivered. "That thing that let the Heartless in."

Zuko didn't nod. He didn't look at Zim directly, and his yellow eyes had been infused with a deep veil of guilt. "...We helped make _that _happen. At the very least, it's our fault your world is...gone." He swallowed. "And I can't stand around and let yourself go off into space because your friends are gone and your world is dust because of something I helped make happen! It'd be passive betrayal and damn it, you're a friend, I won't dishonor you like that!"

"Ah. This is a matter of honor, then."

"Yes."

Ron had been watching it with a curious mixture of growing discomfort and a cheerful detachment that was so very much like Abel. "...And Zim's got a ship that can go places. You don't, Zuko. So maybe Zim can help you find a way to get you and your friends back home."

Zim blinked. Zuko gaped. Rufus made a noise that indicated he thought it was overwhelmingly obvious. "Oh well, that makes sense then," Zim said.

"...Damn it, I didn't even think of that!" Zuko said. "Except that I have, and nothing either of you two can say will ever make me claim otherwise. Yeah. I've had that in mind the whole time and it will be like that forever."

"Hmn, you intend to use my resources to pursue your own goals while satisfying your personal honor, which you feel has been bruised owing to your probably incidental involvement in Dib's crazy dimensional-gate machine scheme," Zim said. "Okay. I can work with that."

Zuko seemed to accept that. "So. What do you say? Will you accept me as a teacher and an ally?"

Zim thought it over for a long, desperate moment and slumped in defeat. "I don't like it," He said bitterly. "This wasn't part of my plan, you're being the spanner in the works all over again! And they'll just _hate _me for it...but it'd be nice to have someone I can actually trust along for the ride." He shook his head guiltily. "I do not know right now. Give me some time to think about it."

Zuko's face went carefully blank. "All right."

"...I don't want to seperate you from your friends just because I need a tracker and someone to show me the ropes of fire-magic stuff." Zim didn't want to admit that Calvin could probably fill that role himself, even though it would a strike against Zuko coming along, mainly because he didn't like Calvin to _want _to learn from him.

"Those are _advantages _to having me around. You said it yourself; you want a friend around too."

Zim nodded glumly. "That I do." He reached down, picked up the Monkey Staff and put it in his Pak, probably to give himself something to do. "So!" He said with false cheerfulness. "How do you Lightningbend?"

"I'm not going to show you that," Zuko said flatly.

"Come on! I'll let you in on the team right now if you do."

"You're trying to get me to bribe you now?"

"...Maybe?"

"The answer is still no."

"Curse you!"

"You need to build on your Bending style," Zuko told Zim. "But that's something that takes practice and dedication, not instruction. I think that it would probably be better for you to get a firmer grasp on this two things: manipulating existing fire and _fighting _another Firebender."

"Ah, like using aggressive moves defensively or dispelling flames with your own body heat?" Ron said.

Zuko stared at him. "How'd you guess that!"

"Movies," Rufus said. He punched out in a surprisingly good imitation of Sozin-Style Firebending. "Waaaugh!"

"Supernatural martial arts are a big industry," Ron said confidingly. "I love 'em! Espicially when they do stuff that verges on cartoony...of course, I know a lot of people that actually _can _do stuff like that, but I dare not spoil the wonder of the film."

"I see," Zuko said, clearly not. He coughed. "Uh...yeah. Bascially, that's what I meant. First, I'm going to need to see if you can Firebend defensively and how to best improve your points in it."

"Okay," Zim said. It sounded like it could be fun.

He was immediately proven wrong. "DON'T DODGE!" Zuko roared, flames roaring out of superheated air all over his body like a superpower aura and a single punch sent a good deal of it rocketing straight at Zim, willing it not to burn or hurt.

"NOT FUN!" Zim yelled; in his panic he forgot all about what Zuko had painstakingly taught him about Firebending forms and clumsily fired off a bolt of flame with a thrusting palm a few seconds too slow; the fires connected and exploded violently. Zuko was only buffeted by the wind of it, and blinded by smoke. Zim got it worse.

The smoke faded. Zim was gone. "Where he go?" Rufus asked.

"I'm okay," Zim said, hanging from the nearby edge of the roof, having been nearly blown off the roof from the explosion. Dazed from the explosion, he lost his grip and dropped. Fortunately, it was not a straight fall to the ground because the First District Central Mall had more rooftops than a _le parkour-_friendly city has balconies (even though it had it's share of those; some shopkeepers like a healthy breeze) owing to the weird construction. Consequently, there was a crashing noise almost immediately, a slightly slick squishing noise, and an annoyed cat screetching it's displeasure. "...Still okay."

Zuko, Ron and Rufus looked over the edge of the rooftop; below them was a part of the mall open to the sky, a large balcony for some healthy wind and sunshine. (And optional shutters for rain.) Zim had landed in a safe landing spot, though it wasn't very hygenic.

"I can't believe he landed in a garbage can," Zuko said. "What are the odds of a solitary garbage can being in the _exact _place he was going to fall?"

Ron looked at Zuko with something like pity. "You're not very genre savvy, are you?"

Below them, the garbage can tipped over. "Ow," Zim said, covered with filthy garbage.

...

_In the First District, a healthy distance away from the mall, probably..._

"...And that is why it is pointless to invent noble reasons for murdering people beyond the simple desire to do so, how you will soon die along while your soul will simply merge with the energy-mass of this planet and also a few reasons why I would quite like to kill the universe," Kimblee said. "A life so twisted and bleak ought not to live. As you should well know."

The small child he had been talking to for the last five minutes stared at him, mouth open. "But...but-but..." He whimpered, tears drippling down his face. "No...that's wrong. It's not right, it's not right!"

"And why do you say that?" Kimblee said in a reasonable tone. "I have told you why _I _do what I do. I have explained my outlook on life and the conclusions I have reached during my years of service to various figures of authority, as well as numberous examples citing specific events throughout history that complement these conclusions. If you have something sensible to prove me wrong, I will be only too happy to hear it."

"Nuh-nuh-no," The child whispered. "It's wrong, it's all wrong!"

"Indeed," Kimblee said. "_Everything _is wrong. I realized that when I was your age, boy. When I crawled out from under the mutilated remains of my family's bodies stacked up in a pile so nice and neat un a burning caravan with the flames still burning bright and the whip-marks on my back stinging in the desert wind, the bandits running away in the distance. I looked up into the sky, blood dripping down my back and unable to stop crying while the carrion-beetles dove into my open wounds and laid their eggs there, and when I beheld that blissfully empty streak of blue and saw no God looking back at me. It came to me, forces bubbling under the surface and swelling together until a single spark set them off and blasted understanding into my mind." Kimble was, of course, lying. Nothing of the sort had happened to him, but people tended to react favorably to those stories.

The child stared at him, trembling on the sidewalk and afraid.

After his meeting with Deidara, translating Crowley's notes (and deciding that he was going to be very angry later about the content of the coding) and taking a brief tour of a nearby art gallery Deidara vouched for (it was a compeitor for his own gallery, naturally, but Deidara was too fine an artist to let a little thing like business interfere); it had the loveliest collection of bazooka-bagpipes, the signature weapons of the now extinguished Glauswigian Division of the Folk Music Army from the planet of Hat-Planet Two-And-Three-Thirds. (The planet was in very bad shape. Their music was _very _enviromentally damaging.) He had spent quite some time admiring their collection of death-masks from a number of famous warlords and city-state patriacians and wannabe empresses from around their little world; a few of them popped up every year or so, amassing great stores of lost technology by defeating their rivals and taking their's before marching on the rest of the continent; which unfortunately for the would-be conquerers were still rather better armed. Sometimes they made it all the way to Traverse Town and generally died quite horribly. (No one bothered to regulate those wonders of a lost people; if they tried to, they reasoned, it would only increase the demand and increasingly more horrific consequences. If they left them, prospective conquerers killed themselves fighting over the things.)

And then there had been the new exibit of a recent archeological find in a distant island; very large photographs and high-detail video feeds of a largely intact captial city in ruin that had done fairly good as apocalypse collateral damage goes. There had even been a few artifacts that had been sent to that gallery as a favor; a few damaged but quite operational weapons shaped somethin like revolvers as large as a man's forearm, a barrel-like front made of delicately carved and slightly transparent crystal, a cylindrical 'battery' inserted behind it on the stock; a display case full of shards of ancient serving bowls; an entire cabinet holding the smashed remnants of a boat-shaped vehicle that, judging from the shattered wings at the sides and the propulsion bulbs at the back, was a flying vehicle. More interesting to Kimblee had been the attendent notices claiming that these pieces had been uncovered and sent back by the Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward Elric, at his most recent discovery in the distant Ho'Kami islands in the South Hook sea. That was _very _interesting to Kimblee; Edward Elric had come a long way since Kimblee left him bleeding in the ground with a bar through his shoulder. He always though the boy wouldn't be very happy in a military program anyway.

Sadly, his mission had called and Kimblee went on his way, doing his best to either ignore or harass Kevin as the situation called for it. Ghostfreak was a bit of a puzzle to Kimblee; he wasn't quite sure what the nebulous sentience haunting Kevin actually was; but he was certain it didn't have his best interests at heart. If it had one. It was a bit slow actually getting to Foster's, though; after the last one kicked him out and ran away, all the other buses refused to come anywhere near him. (A few of them, unknown to Kimblee, had actually detoured for entire neighborhoods just to keep themselves from coming within two miles of Kimblee; this played havoc with the passenger's schedules, but it did them the favor of not getting anywhere close to Kimblee.) He'd considering hitching, but there weren't enough people on the roads to make it sensible and besides, you met very strange people that way. So he was taking the long road and walking; this gave him time to think about his plan, too. It was coming along nicely, even if the actual execution of it was still a bit unclear. Kimblee liked having room to be flexible, anyway.

And, of course, he took the time now and then to give foolish people a bit of his wisdom. He liked connecting with people, even if it didn't go over very well most of the time.

"There is _no _meaning to anything," Kimblee said, like a teacher to a smart but untutored student. "There is no grand scheme, no all-knowing entity judging the wicked and avenging the weak, no real reason for anyone to take up gun or sword and strike down another man. Life, you see, is war. A constant battle fought between the strong and those who wish to be strong, like waves smashing together and breaking into dozens of little dying droplets that stay alive just a little bet longer than those already smashed. Some are too weak to even fight back and are struck down. And that is war. Others survive dispite all the odds and keep fighting until all sense is lost. And that too, is war. And others fight with such ferocity and lack of forethought that they lay waste to everything. Their own people are slaughtered by their efforts, and the battleground becomes a wasteland home only to corpses and carrion-birds poisoned by the meat. And that is also war." Kimblee smiled wanly. "Life, you see, is a blank canvas. There is nothing there and only a fool claims otherwise. Blood, sweat and tears are our paints. And all we can do is either endure our service until we are relieved of duty, or else impose a pattern on it and _make _that pattern real, for however long it lasts."

"That's horrible!" The child cried. "It's horrible! You're horrible! Everything's horrible!"

"Espicially trashy vampire movies," Kimblee said.

"No, you-" The child blinked. "Wait, what?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your approaching mental breakdown, I simply hate films like that. Even clumsily executed live action adaptation of animated series are _much _better."

"...I'm gonna go far away and forget this ever happened," The child said, edging away from Kimblee.

"See you later!" Kimblee said cheerfully. There was an odd twitch, and his jaws, throat and tongue worked without his consent or inclination. "_In your dreams_."

Kimblee stared. _Do you even intend to be creepy,_ Kevin asked as the small child ran away sobbing in horror. _Or does it just wind up happening independantly of whatever thought processes are going on in this head of yours?_

"Technically, it's your head," Kimblee said, wondering just what had happened just now. _He _certainly hadn't said that last part, even if it had been his voice. "And I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

Ghostfreak radiated smugness. _And I gave you a bit of a help. Wouldn't want this child to forget our talk, would we?_

"That was you?" Kimblee was not given towards strong emotional displays, but he was quite annoyed at having his body usurped, however briefly. "Please do not do that without my say-so."

Kevin ignored this point. _Also, what's with you? First that girl in the tattoo place and then this random kid on the street? You can't go five minutes without giving someone a brain-breaking speech about how evil you are and how meaningless everything was. That kid just asked you what time it was!_

"And I thought it appropiate to point out that _everyone's _time is running out!" Kimblee blinked. He became aware that he was drawing a small crowd, what with attempting to psychologically destroy a child and talking to himself in the middle of a street. "...All of you heard my entire conversation with myself, didn't you."

"Yes," A elderly squid-woman said.

"Did you escape from a sanitarium?" A small person-shaed bush asked Kimblee.

"...I suppose that's a matter of debate. I was only having an inner monolouge, anyway. A very expressive one."

"Oh, okay then," The squid-woman said. The crowd started to drift away before they remembered that Kimblee had tried to psychologically break a small child for no reason. They immediately reconvened, intending to beat Kimblee to a pulp, only to find that he had disappeared.

They would have been better served looking at a higher elevation; in the few moments it took for them to want to made Kimblee hurt very badly, he had fled up a ladder onto the roofs, with no one the wiser, and now he looked down at them from the base of a wireless beacon. "Such sad fools we are," He quietly said to himself. "Pretending sanity and rationality, but bruise one of those precious invisible rules we impose on ourselves and we abandon it all. We don't even question that we do it."

_Now you're giving _yourself _a cruel lecture, _Kevin said. _You're gonna make me ill, man_.

Kimblee ignored them. The people down there looked like ants. A dense cluster of insects, clicking and crying their petty little complaints. It was just noise to him. Ugly. The Symphony of Destruction could sooth the pain of it away. They chittered with self-righteous anger disconcerting on such primitive things: the intruder to their hive had vanished, and they had nothing to vent their hate on. Perhaps they would let their irrational insistence on their invisible rules slip just enough to satisfy their lust for violence on one another.

Kimblee had been in this position many times. A lone figure overlooking the targets below him, insignificant until fate gave them their right to live through the fact of their survival. Sometime he had soldiers and warriors and monsters to back him up, but it was meaningless; even now, with the voices in his head to bicker and plead, cajole and encourage, he always stood alone. There was no company. There was no brotherhood. There was just him, and that was enough.

He felt then like he did now; the world seeming to crawl to a stop. The streets and buildings and all extraneous features of his surrondings fading out, leaving the Targets to stand out like fires on ice through an infrared visor. His own heart speeding up as he began his work and started his Symphony of Destruction. For a moment, then, there was a blissful _freedom_, a complete cessation of self. He was not a man, plauged with doubts and memories and a burdensome sense of awareness; nor was he human, so dreadfully like all the other gut-bags, screaming and sauntering and beating themselves to death for vauge stupid reasons that were like so much tiresome _noise _to him. No; in those few moments, he was a _weapon_, all his existence directed towards the fullfillment of his superior's will; he was the bombardier and the bombardier's scope, sniper rifle and bullet. And in that null void, when the explosions rocked him to his choir and his ears were filled with the rising perfection of his Symphony, he found his reason to live.

Kimblee considered embracing the bombardier's scope and starting his work right here and now; smash the little nothing people out of existence. Stain the earth with their blood and hate and desperation. It could be the start of something _wonderful_.

His hands were already coming together, restructuring matrices about to touch when he saw that the crowd had remained together and coerced the weeping child out of a garbage can it had sought refuge in; the squid-woman was dusting the child off like a fussy grandmother while the bush-thing and the other varied people said things that Kimblee heard as a gentle sussuration; Kimblee did not hear the words or care to understand them if he had (Does any weapon care for the protestations of a Target?), but he understood what was going on.

He tilted his head, a bit puzzled. His normal expression of faint amusement spread into a geuine but twisted smile. Laughing quietly, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Such fun this town was! The thought rang in his head like sweet little bells, chiming out copper tones that soothed the ache behind his eyes.

_Why do you leave them? _Ghostfreak asked imperiously. _I could feel your killing intent; why repress such fine talent? What posessed you to flee the battle?_

"I choose not to begin the battle here," Kimblee said, (_no battle, not a proper battle without suitable combatants to die under his hand)_ lightly running down a rope-and-plank bridge someone had made between two rooftops and silently congradulating whoever had been kind enough to put in rope-handrails too. Kimblee disliked it when people commited building code violations.

_You let them live_, Ghostfreak said. He sounded affronted. _Why?_

"Why not?" Kimblee walked across the head of a giant robot that had been converted into a house and onto a pipe that went into it's 'ear'; he deftly made use of several handholds and crawled up the wall, soon on the rooftop of a building made from two ships transmuted into a rather odd looking building. Perhaps the pipe was for power supply service. "I expected them to fight alongside each other and vent their anger at not having me to attack. Instead, they turned their attention to the child and comforted it."

_...And_?

"And nothing." Kimblee slid down a chute built into the outside of a wall and touched down on a good sidewalk. He had no idea what the chute was for. Perhaps it was just for fun. "Their sole motivation was the child, not petty rule-breaking. I enjoy it when I find real people among the social maggots. It will be interesting to see if they can survive me the next time we meet?"

_That means you're going to kill them,_ Kevin said vaugely, like it was only a point of vauge concern to him.

"I shall certainly give it my best. If they survive, then good for them. If not, they were not meant to live." Kimblee smiled. He imagined every person in the crowd lying in graves of honor, or what was left of them, with neat little photographs to commorate their struggles. It was a beautiful sight.

Kimblee never forgot the face of anybody he worked with. He made a note to revisit those people later. He would give their lives meaning, if fate decreed that they were not meant to live.

"'With a little crystal ball I see a naughty wizard scry," Kimblee sang. "'Mists and dust, fog and clouds, I see the little children cry. Their world cracks, and away they fly. Oh, watch the little angels rise up high...'"

_Your rhymes stink_, Kevin complained.

"Oh, hush." Kimblee started walking in Foster's general direction; he soon decided that was inefficient and decided to purchase a map.

About twenty minutes later, after a good deal of trouble getting people to give him directions to a place of map purchasing, a regrettable incident with a fruit-pie sorcerer and a angry argument with a blond midget wearing a dogsuit, he found a newstand; Kimblee considered it to be a poor one, since the perveyor of it's papers, postcards and other stuff was a transparent haze of green with a mouth and sixteen hands, but he didn't feel like being picky.

The haze (which was called Magic Mouth, after the spell that had created him; once it had been a normal spell, but it had been cast by a Crossguard research-priestess in an attempt to decipher a neophyte's extremely bad handwriting; when a Crossguard priest does _anything _it usually leads to weirdness, but owing to a chunk of psychically reactive psitanium that was being used as a paperweight and some funky resonance, the spell had acquired sentience. Normally, this would have been bad news for the poor spell, giving it life only for the duration of it's time effect, but the research-priestess had quickly discovered a way to affix the spell's existence into the fabric of reality so it wouldn't fade away into oblivion. Sometimes Magic Mouth and her played video games on the weekends; _Bash Fighters Vs. Immortal Conflict _was a favorite) stared at Kimblee. "Hey. Whatcha need?"

"...How can you see me if you don't have eyes?"

"With my spirit of youthful enthusiasm, that's how, and don't question the logic. Here to point out the nonsenseoleum or is it something else?"

Kimblee had conditioned himself to ignore the strange and pointless. Admittedly, it was hard. "Ah. I need to find my way to Foster's Home. Do you have a map that would serve that purpose?"

"Sure thing, boss." One of Magic Mouth's hands pulled out a folded-up map from a small vertical rack. "A reasonably detailed map of the First District, for a reasonably extravagent price."

Kimblee raised an eyebrow. "You certainly don't bother with white lies for the sake of business."

"Truth in advertising, kid. It's gonna be big. I can feel it! Not that I know what this 'feeling' thing you flesh-guys get so hung up about is, what with the lack of nerve endings, but you know, idioms. They're weird."

"And the prices?"

"Tourist season! Summer started not so long ago, we gotta milk them while we can! Of course, that doesn't apply to the new guys, but you are clearly a tourist, not a refugee."

"How do you know that?"

"Because your spirit's not broken," Magic Mouth said simply.

"Of course it's not." Kimblee paid for the map, started to leave, and paused. It would be imprudent to not use a potential source of information. "You run a newstand. I suppose you hear your share of rumors from customers?"

"Well, I don't _run _this thing per se, more like I sort-of rent it from Mr. Bloo, but yeah, I hear things. Like about the Monty Burns Casino! The whole thing was completely destroyed last night!"

"What?"

"Apparently, some idiot was flying a ship without any skill and crashed right into the Casino. Apparently it hit something big and...well, boom. Big boom. Whole Casino just exploded; the roof was shattered into pieces, the walls collapsed, one-armed bandits were disarmed, jukeboxes fired like popcorn kennels, the noise broke some windows and scared a few cats, but lucky no one was hurt."

"I'm sorry about that," Kimblee said sincerely. He wished he'd been there; it would have been such a _lovely _noise.

"...About the explosion or people not getting hurt?"

Kimblee frowned. "Is this a distinction or a difference?"

"Uh, never mind..." Magic Mouth floated up and down; a shrug. "Heard there was some kind of messiness at Foster's; heard some people heading down to Damage Control complaining about some new guy running amok. Heh, good thing for him that Mr. Herrimen's softer than he acts."

"...Is that so?" Kimblee asked. "Because _I _heard that there was another incident involving a recent refugee as well."

"You tourists, you get savvier all the time. Dunno too much about that, though one of the Foster's regulars that came my way said something about a ballroom getting totally wrecked in a fight. Thought it was the same guy that messed with them. Guy's not making a good impression, though I have to admire his _chutzpah_."

"What does that mean? That word you said."

"I don't know, and I'm a sentient spell designed to translate langauges, but it sounds cool."

"I'll take your word on that. Now tell me; have you ever heard of a man called Jarod?"

Magic Mouth burst out laughing, falling to the ground and chortling helplessly. Kimblee politely waited for him to finish. "Oh man, I don't get that question done seriously. I mean, _really_! A tourist, coming up and asking about Jarod? That's like someone going up to a New Yorker and asking about the sewer gators!"

"What's New York?"

"I don't know, but tourists mention it in mean jokes a lot."

"So this Jarod is an urban legend?"

The point that Magic Mouth got across, with a lot of hyperbole, friendly jabs and a fair degree of bemusement, was yes. Kimblee was not overly surprised or displeased to hear this; you expected complications in missions like this. According to Magic Mouth, the rumors were varied; some said Jarod was a mystical force of justice incarnate. Others said that he was the extension of a vast force beyond all understanding, brought into existence to right some unspeakable injustice. And, in an side, "I know this Stewie kid that insists that he's just a really smart and freakishly obsessive guy that lives in the Underdistrict and spends his time working odd-jobs when he isn't hunting down evil-doers to visit karmic justice on them, but hey, some people just can't tell a good tall tale."

Regardless, Kimblee waited patiently. He was good at getting people to talk. He just looked at people and created a sort of vacuum that people hurried to fill up with words to stop them from thinking about Kimblee looking at them.

"...But you hear things," Magic Mouth said, after getting suitably unnerved. And Kimblee listened attentively. Weird things, it seemed, happened in the Underdistrict, and there was so much for it to happen in. Warlords that exterminated entire native tribes and went into hiding from their enraged allies wound up arrested by the Justice Maines, begging for prison time because it was safer than being out in the open where _something _could find them.

Crime bosses from other worlds that hid too well for interplanetary police to find them were written about in the newspapers after being buried alive in the ashes of their blood money.

Mass murderers in hiding that came screaming to the Peace Maines to be arrested because someone was stalking them, calling them on the phone with the voices of people they killed, plastering every inch of their house with their pictures and getting little letters that stuff like '_You will never forget them' _and _'justice is coming for you' _and '_your nemesis comes'._

And there were more stories. Magic Mouth told them with a mixture of morbid fascination and quiet fear. He didn't believe in what they were talking about, and at the same time, he was afraid of it.

"Disturbing," Kimblee lied when Magic Mouth was done. He liked this man's style. If this newsvendor's rumors were true, this 'Jarod' was a man of convictions. Kimblee admired that.

"Not the sort of guy you want hanging around," Magic Mouth said. "Tell you the truth...I don't know if he's real or not, but I hear there's _something _in the Underdistrict calling itself the Pretender."

"Really? Why would it do that?"

"Got me on that, boss. My guess is that it's responsible for all the Jarod stories; scary thing. And the stories about the Pretender are even weirder. A few people think it's this insane vigilante named Rorschach come back from death after ripping the soul from a demon and taking it's body from it; doesn't work, because I _know _Rorschach and he denies it. Some people think it's an alien life-form that can take on any form and any mind; it can be anything it chooses to be, so it can know how _any _mind works and figure out how to break them, so _anyone _could be the Pretender. Even me. Even you." Magic Mouth stared at Kimblee. "Are you the Pretender? Tell me now!"

"No."

"Aww. Anyway, I know a few Transformers that reckon it's a reformed Decepticon that turns into a human shape that pulls this stuff, on account of that's what Decepticons that disguise themselves as humans call themselves."

"Fascinating," Kimblee said. He was taking everything Magic Mouth said dubiously, but he knew better than to discount it out of hand. This was _Traverse Town_, after all, where members of dozens of vastly different species and cultures existed in amiable apathy, evil mad scientists attacked every month, pirates attacked the coast border with giant sea monster-ships and all kinds of absurd oddities occured every three and a half hours just to make things interesting. A perfectly mundane explanation would have been stranger. "And how would I encounter this 'Pretender'?"

Magic Mouth stared. "You heard me, right? You heard me tell you about it? And you still want to meet it?"

"Yes."

"...Damn. You're crazy. I don't know if it comes up here, but I expect that it doesn't have much of a sense of jurisdictions. I suppose if you hang around someplace where something really bad went down, you might catch it. If the Pretender's real."

Myths, Kimblee reflected, were all the same. They grew in the retelling, like coral reefs acculumating from years of shed exoskeletons. What starts as the acts of a vigilante become distorted as each tale teller adds his own spin to things. The next tale teller takes those additions as part of the story and adds to them, and it goes on and on until the vigilante has become a god of the avenging dark, a terrible _thing _of justice and rage that burns the souls of the unjust. Kimblee, reading inbetween the lines of the rumors, suspected that 'the Pretender' was some sort of psuedonym Jarod had adopted for whatever reason, or perhaps a name he had picked up somewhere. He didn't put much stock in exaggerations. "I suspect that he might be. I have very convincing information."

"You do?" Magic Mouth sounded intrigued.

"Yes," Kimblee said, not explaining that it was because he had been asked to capture the man behind the myth and drag him back to the people that had tortured and coerced him into engineering staggeringly inventive plans, military strategies and weapons that had led to the deaths of hundreds of people. He considered that pretty reliable information. "So. If something...regrettable happened, he, or it, would show up to attack the perpetutor."

"Could be, but the Pretender would have to get in line. There's a lot of evil-fighters in town, you know? Half the factions are centered around fighting the people that show up to make things miserable, you know, and the other half just love getting their hands a bit dirty. And that's nothing to say about all the regular vigilantes, hero teams, heroic mad scientists, warrior-heroes and all the other kinds we have. The Pretender sounds like it goes after small guys that the factions don't notice most of the time. It'd have to be _really _big to get it mad. And even then, you'd have everyone screaming for your blood."

"But all one would have to do is make sure that no one knows you did it," Kimblee pointed out reasonably. "And then, this Pretender, or Jarod, would appear to bring his justice, if someone was to cause a big enough disaster to the town. Kill many people in a horrific or eye-catching way. A real _horrorshow_, you might say. Perhaps even blow up an important building, like the Deceased Memorial in the Upper District or...well, someplace else that's important." A thought struck him. "And if _multiple _incidents were to occur throughout even a single district...they would be spread thin. It could be a simple matter to isolate this Prenteder, if you knew the how of it."

"Uh...well, yeah, I should say so, him and anyone else who hears about it!"

"That's very interesting to know," Kimblee said. He tipped his hat to Magic Mouth. "Thank for your time. Have a good day. I recommend you treasure it, because you never know when a good day might become a very bad one indeed."

He left. Magic Mouth seemed puzzled. "I wonder what he meant by that?"

Half a street later, Kimblee was having his own share of questions. "Mr. Lyle seemed to think that this new body would enable me to find this Jarod," Kimblee said. "I wonder why he told me that?"

_This body is host to an infusion of the energized DNA of the Omnitrix,_ Ghostfreak said._ Kevin lacks the control to manipulate it, espicially after Dr. Hojo's experiments drove his body mad, but it is currently contained, with both your morphological resonance 'imprint' keeping it that way and, I suspect, my own influence. I have already shown you that I can...relax. you might say, my strangehold on the Omnitrix energy to create short transformations on you. I suspect doing it for long periods of time would be disastrous and carry a risk of imbalancing our present stability. but..._

"Your point?"

_I can give you the powers and forms of the aliens of the Omnitrix for short periods of time, obviously. There are scores of skillful trackers in the Omnitrix; Vulpimancers, Loboans, Xenomorphs, Yautja, Wookiees and more, and those are only those who can do so with heightened senses, natural instincts or programmed know-how! Such banal abilities, to be sure. There are _other _species with more...sophisticated potential. True power that do not rely on scent or tracks or residual heat or innate skill._

"You speak of psionic abilities."

_Precisely! And as it would happen, my own kind, the Ectonurite people, posess such power. And quite potent they are. I would be willing to, you might say lend them to you._

"Interesting. But at what price?"

_...Consider the cost to be a favor to be paid later on. Allowing _me _to control this body of ours, for my own purposes._

"Very well," Kimblee said, having no intention of allowing that to ever happen. Ghostfreak was a valuable tool, but he didn't like having him in his head. "I shall allow you to control this body at a later point, and those are the terms of our deal."

_I dislike your specific wording, but a bargain struck is a bargain I intend to have you hold._

_No one mind me_, Kevin said peevishly. _It's just MY body you're treating like the new car everyone wants to drive, but never mind me, it's not like I have anything important to say._

"It's true, you don't," Kimblee said.

_Shall I change you?_ Ghostfreak asked, a bit too eagerly. _We can find this Jarod much quicker!_

"...No, actually. Consider this transformation idea part of my plan but not the crux of it. I have something else in mind."

_Oh?_

"Simple. I need to draw this Jarod out, and I need to make trouble in Traverse Town for Wuya's various purposes. Mostly likely making people miserable, and some idea that is. But I always pay my debts, and Wuya did give me a perpetual source of employment." Kimblee smiled. "I intend to do both at once. It'll be a marvellous concert..."

_What kind of crazy sociopath says 'marvellous' with a straight face? _Kevin asked abruptly.

"...Shut up, Kevin. I don't feel like listening to an idiot child who can't even hold onto his body."

_At least I didn't buy stock in the studio that made the 'Kill Your Family' show._

"I like that show, even if it bombed."

_If that is your plan, _Ghostfreak said. _Why did you fetch that diagram...formula...transmutation thing or whatever it was from Deidara?_

"Firepower," Kimblee said simply. "I intend to make this act a full-production. I shall begin it at Foster's and expand it from there. Would it not be wonderful if this entire town could become part of my art? The music and fire spreading on every corner between the Seige Mountains and the Scyllian Sea. I've never done anything like that before. I've anhillated cities, but not a place of people of this magnitude."

_Might I see what your actual plan is?_ Ghostfreak asked hopefully.

"No no no, dear Ghostfreak. It would be a shame to spoil the surprise. Suffice to say, I shall need to find the skillful and the strong-hearted to make the msot of this. But I suspect that good...ingredients, you might say...will not be hard to find in the vicinty of Foster's."

_You know, I've noticed you kind of go all over the place with metaphors_, Kevin said. _Concerts, symphonies, ingredients...find a theme and stick with it. You jerk._

"No one was asking you," Kimblee said. He pulled out his map and inspected it closely. "Hrm, I believe I have an appropiate route traced out. Gentlemen! Now, we move!"

"Who are you talking to?" Someone asked from behind him.

Kimblee turned around; the speaker was a little girl. "...No one," He said.

"You're weird." The little girl frowned a bit. "Do you know what time it is?"

Kevin flinched. Ghostfreak was amused. "Ah, _time_," Kimblee said. "You speak of time. I shall tell you about _time_..."

And so another entirely pointless and sadistic speech about life being meaningless and a lot of justification for being a sociopathic nutball ensued, It was having a very adverse effect on Kevin's day. And on a whole string of traumatized people Kimblee had run into, for that matter.

It was only going to get worse from there, amazingly enough.

...

A/N: And that's another chapter down, and in record time once more! Ladies, gentlemen and asexuals, we have something of a consistent schedule! (Even though it's still basically 'it gets down when I finishing typing the damn thing'.) These shorter chapters make it work, but I'm not sure I like them too much, but it does help the pacing; the original second half of this chapter, which I'll begin work on soon, had a serious problem with pacing: I had Kimblee doing the Evil Thing He Will Be Doing right away, and it felt rushed. No build up, no drama, no suspense, nothing. And there was a LOT of exposition for one chapter; I felt it would be too much.

A few notes of interest.

Calvin, Toph and Tucker getting the town faction talk from important Faction members was originally just them on a giant mechanical submarine-shark-tank and talking to Roy Mustang along. (It was originally a One Piece-themed Gibbs from NCIS with a fanmade Devil Fruit power, but I like Roy. He's awesome.) The problem was, it was just...talking. Too much exposition to sink it, and it wasn't very interesting as scenes went. I thought that having them go to a fairly low-key place and get the faction members themselves to explain themselves would work a bit better, not to mention show what a few of their members are actually like. Note that I've experimented with OCs again here; namely Angilaka, who came about because I could not honestly think of any cool-crazy warrior-nuns or fighting-priestesses and I wanted to have a healthy number of girls then. (I want to avoid the Smurfette Principle.) I've taken a note out of Vathara's book; in her fanfic Embers, she advises that you create OCs by taking another character as their core and build around it. (Sort like homunculi and Philosopher Stones from Fullmetal.) In this case, Angilaka is basically a more boisterous Abby from NCIS. Only a lot taller.

The factions themselves are a more interesting idea I've had for a bit; it's a shame I hadn't thought of them before Chapter 8, otherwise I could have made things a bit more sensible, but oh well. It's not like I've contradictied myself, or I hope not; Continuity Snarl is my great enemy. The Dr. Insano to my Linkara, if you will. In some ways, the factions corrospond to 3d Edition Dungeons and Dragons Alignments on the Good and Neutral ends! Guess which ones. On an unrelated note, several of the Factions are based on Trope concepts; the Crossguard, for instance, are my version of a Saintly Church with shades of Church Militants with all the Crazy-Awesome, Cloudcuckoolander and Bunny Ears Layer dialed turned up to eleven. The factions themselves were inspired by the way Sigil, the City of Doors in Planescape works, but it's less vicious rivalry between the factions here.

Zuko and Zim's training lesson will have big ramifacations later. Is Zim a true Firebender? Well, he's close enough for it to work, right? However, as has been pointed out, he shouldn't be able to Firebend and certain intergral parts of it were foriegn. So is he imiating Firebending, blundering into it on accident or simply doing pyrokinesis with martial arts that happens to meld with Firebending? Time will tell. Several of the ideas here were inspired by Vathera's Embers (the details of which have entered into my personal canon), along with a few of my own theories and stuff. And Zuko humiliation. I don't think anyone ever expected to see Zuko-Monkey. On a more serious note, some of you may be wondering if I'm going to have Zuko join or not. The first thing to say is that one, I've already made up my mind on that one but I want to hear feedback on the idea. The second point is that I'm taking a slightly different approach to the party formation that the game did. No member swapping here, people! Because that...would be just stupid. Seriously.

You might be wondering what's with those mysterious three guys that from this chapter and Chapter 7. You might be thinking that they're up to something, and you'd be right, but it's good. And you might wonder just what they are. In which case...I'm spoiling nothing for you.

Zim will be going to see other worlds. But first, he's going to have to deal with a crazy-ass alchemist first. That'll be fun! Well, not really, but at least he got a bit of downtime before it.

Kimblee's Evil Plan is very bad. Really very bad indeed. And appropiate, given a certain scene from Chapter 7, AKA the Chapter of Evil-Doing! Guess which one! Also, Kimblee likes his Hannibal Lectures. Tropers will know what the appropiate heroic response is to this. Also, I find Kimblee's character as a Affably Evil sociopath to be a interesting character study; I tried to portray him as a completely sick but charming monster, and I found the 'bombardier's sight' and 'they look like bugs from up here' to be an appropiate metaphor.

With all that in mind, be posting again soon! Next chapter promises to see what Hobbes' and Morte's groups are up to and, probably, what Kimblee's actually doing.


	11. Red Lotus: Forging The Stone

Well, it's been due for a bit, but actual stuff happening!

Yeah, not just pacing. Real honest horroshow stuff goin' on.

And I MEAN horrorshow. 'Cause, that Kimblee, he's an ass.

Also, we get to see what Morte and Hobbes' groups have been up to! A bit of Traverse Town building and weirdness too! Also, this is a bit longer than recent chapters, sorry. It didn't feel right to split it up, y'know? Seriously.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that isn't mine.

...

If there was one thing Kimblee was able to state without a hint of being called incorrect, it was that the attitude Traverse Town gradually installed in it's inhabitants was a deeply frustrating one for outsiders. Espicially the _maps_.

It was not obvious at first glance. But complications abounded. There seemed to be some sort of conspiracy afoot to make them as useless as possible; even the latest printing were always a few years out of date, the layout were nearly as twisted and multidimensional as some of the slightly more impossible architecture (and never mind how that was possible with a _two-dimensional piece of paper_), what he had first thought would have been a straight route had failed to take into account the weird shorthand the map used in the form of alternative layout with little notes advising not to take it literally and in fact had led Kimblee through five neighborhoods, and the last one had been on fire for no apparent reason. People had been roasting marshmallows and complained about a volunteer fire brigade. Even the references and informative notes had little to do with subject matter and everything to do with random tangents on whatever interested the mapmaker, and even those tended to lead into nonsensical arguments with _itself_. (Kimblee did not know that this wasn't the intention of the mapmaker, but of the thinking engines that actually copied them out; afflicted by the quirks of artificial intelligence that Traversian machines are so prone to, they decided that it wasn't interesting enough and spiced it up a bit; some had argued on the way to do that and another had misinterpreted the argument as suggestion and printed the whole thing down. People found the whole thing hilarious. Needless to say, Traverse Town is an easy-going place aside from the chaos.)

_I think I hate this town a lot, _Ghostfreak said, contempt rolling off him like grease off a melted pot of butter the third time they wandered into a building hoping it would supply a vantage point only to discover that some idiot had put a gravitational polarity engine in it and reversed the gravity. (To make it fly in the event of the apocalypse, of course.) Kimblee himself was uncomfortable with the prospect of jumping over open doors and wondering what would happen if he fell out a window.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide has this to say about flying buildings in Traverse Town; _they have become common. Really common. Incredibly, face-slapping, kick-you-in-the-groin-with-a-stuffed-alligator common. Admittedly, that is not a very common occurance in itself, but it is in Traverse Town, where retribution is more creative. According to the people in the know, the 'flying building thing', as it is popularily and uncreatively known, is a recent fad; Traverse Town clothing fashions are pretty much set in the whole 'belts and zippers, straps and buckles, longcoats and layers of clothing, chainbelts and personalized outfits' fashion with a few minor crazes, so fads are pretty much aligned at more unusual things. In this case, modifying your buildings. Before the flying building thing, it was filling them with machines that could transform the building into giant fighting robots; this made moving around a breeze, but vehicle sales went down, and people literally refused to leave the home. Before that, a serious misunderstanding of the 'fur is murder' idea had led people to cover the outsides of their buildings with a specially designed formula that altered their exterior, eventually growing thick, silky and luxurious fur. And after hearing of a fantastic tale from another world about a man that converted his house to fly with a lot of balloons, a steering system and para-sails, many people decided that they liked the idea of flying houses and did it their own way. Some liked balloons and sails, other modded their's into inhabitable rockets, a few guys put graviational polarity engines that inverted their home's gravity so it could propel itself, and at least one young lady made her house the central nervous system of a flying tree monster with fire breath; she had spent too much time at the planet of Melchior-7 and it gave her ideas._)

"I am begining to wonder if perhaps my familiarity with Traverse Town should have been more extensive before I accepted this mission," Kimblee said. "Oh well. When I blow up this district they can rebuild it in a more sensible way."

"Why are you talking about blowing up the district?" Asked a large mushrooms-man, a low-set face under a broad cap and a body made of gnarled branches and lumps of fungoid matter.

"Because I was sent here by the leader of a neferious organization intend on galactic domination and destruction to wreak great destruction," Kimblee said honestly, knowing perfectly well that he wouldn't buy it.

The mushroom-man snickered; it sounded like mud bubbling. "Like you'd do it." He walked off into an open manhole. "Ow! WHY DO I ALWAYS DO THAT! AUUGH, THERE'S ALLIGATORS DOWN HERE!...And they want someone to referee their Skid-Ball tournament and maybe have some tea after. I'm in!" Reptillian bellows of jubilance ensued. They talked with Cajun accents.

"...I choose to be the better man and pretend that didn't happen," Kimblee said, and walked away.

_Hey, I forget,_ Kevin said after they had gone a fair distance, narrowly avoiding a folk dancing contest made more interesting by doing it on giant spinning plates on ten-foot-tall poles; politely turning down an eager young perky goth Crossguard medic-priestess that wanted to try out her handcranked acupuncturist twelve-barrel precision minigun on a volunteer; and having to listen to people complain about the buses going on strike and roaming around the neighborhood with picket signs that went _Your End Is Nigh, Probably! Repent, Maybe! Your Doom Is At Hand, I Guess!_ and other such sentiments.

"Forget what?"

_Why we're going to Foster's._

Ghostfreak said, _To commit all manner of as-yet unstated horrors to get people's attention, you silly bastard._

_Hey! My parents were married! I think._

_It's a figure of speech meant to communicate one's low opinion of the other._

_Oh...and what does THAT mean!_

"Never you mind."

_Asshat._ Kevin glowered internally and then said, _Well, are we there yet?_

Kimblee would have to be a psionic, several steps outside consesual reality or have _really _good eyesight to stare at Kevin, but a nearby mailbox sufficed until it became unnerved, sprouted rocket jets and flew away singing like a barbershop quartet. "...We are in the middle of a six-way intersection crowded with shops all seeming to cater to a single kind of soft drink in massive cups sizes, slushies or tooth-healing varieties. _Foster's Home _is a mansion bordered by a cul de sac and posessing a considerable amount of private property because it pleased the Council to let it do so. Do you _think _we're there?"

_Couldnt say_, Kevin said, and Kimblee did not misunderstand the wave of childish spite spiking from him. _I'm not in control of my own eyes anymore. At least the set is consistent, so who am I to complain? Oh, right! BECAUSE MY BODY IS POSESSED!_

_You complain, _Ghostfreak said. _At least he's making proper use of it. You wasted time being tortured when you could have done something with it. Like join the winning game and twist it to your advantage._

_Sounds boring. I hate politics. Also: are we there yet?_

Kimblee groaned as he crossed the street. "Please don't tell me you're going to do _that _tired old sequence."

_Can if I want to,_ Kevin said. _I have no control of my body, I can't fight you in any way, and you're probably going to play some stupid game with my body as a playing piece. Consider this a completely ineffectual mutiny! So! ARE WE THERE YET?_

"You can't do that forever."

_Watch me._

Kevin was honest to his word; Kimblee kept walking. He ignored passerbys when they said things to him. When people on giant robot legs played hopscotch and kicked the loser in the dignity (they had very good aim), Kimblee avoided them. When roving reporters were searching for someone interesting to heckle, Kimblee treated them like they were made of very annoying fog. He scaled houses and shops, moved from rooftop to rooftop, traversed with all the inventive means the townspeople had already been kind enough to install for him, and kept moving in what he hoped was the vauge direction of Foster's Home, and still Kevin kept saying it.

Kimblee began to dread it. It was worse than listening to someone grinding stone on concrete. Even Ghostfreak became _polite _when he asked Kevin to stop after the first twenty minutes of a continious stream of _Are we there yet?_

Those four words. Over and over and over and over and _over and OVER AND OVER AGAIN_. Kimblee feared that he might go mad; those words seemed burned into his brain, a noxious hissing behind his eyes like some nerve gas that did worse than kill you. Time kept passing and Kimblee didn't even notice, like he didn't notice the buildings gradually thinning out into residences, the structure becoming less creative and more practical from residents learning their lesson from too much collateral damage. Kimblee could focus on nothing else but Kevin's insistent, spiteful, hateful, malicious voice, echoing in his ears. It was worse than acid dripped into his ears; at least _that _would cease and the pain didn't psychologically scar you.

Kimblee thought it had been bad before. He thought it had been annoying in Ishbal, listening to the bleating of cowards who hadn't realized what their duty entailed and cried so about the dead whose blood was on their fingers; one random officer had always bothered him for some reason, the man had been so..._alien_. Maes Hughes, that was his name. Odd man, _always _flashing his pictures of his girlfriend to any man or woman that came within a fifteen mile radius, had a thing for throwing knives and a problem with the 'erasing families' thing. Then there had been all the countless Targets he had removed that _whined _about their rights to live. Kimblee had a little list of people that annoyed him, and until now, he hadn't imagined that anything could be worse than Targets complaining about fate not giving them their existence to them, but Kevin quickly made his way up that list.

_Are we there yet?_ Kevin asked what felt like hours later.

_No, _Ghostfreak said, his voice as tired and ragged as any refugee's.

_Are we there yet?_

"No," Kimblee said. His hands itched and he wondered if you could alchemically blast someone out of your brain. It seemed as possible as flying into the air with martial arts, but you needed hope.

_Are we there yet?_

"_No_," Ghostfreak and Kimblee said.

_Are we there yet?_

"_No_," They said again. Kimblee nearly tripped over a torn bit of a cloth cat's-ear; all that was left of Katnappe after her Heartless' defeat and unregarded by the unscrupulous scavengers.

_Are we there yet?_

_No! _Ghostfreak said.

_Are we there yet?_

"No-" Kimblee started to say. He ran into a sign and fell over. He looked up, intending to blast it into oblivion and saw that it said _Foster's Home _on it. Some idiot had added _For Any Poor Sucker._

_Are we there yet?_ Kevin said viciously.

"Actually, yes," Kimblee said.

Ghostfreak gasped. _Are we there yet?_ Kevin said. Sometimes when you're in a groove, it's hard to stop.

"Yes."

_Are we there yet?_

_He told you yes!_ Ghostfreak said.

_Are we there yet?_

"I already said yes, you idiot child," Kimblee said. "Must I start thinking about Crowley's code in graphic detail?" He wondered why he hadn't already done that to shut Kevin up and pinned it down to being distracted.

_Oh, I know, I just wanted to see how far I could go with it,_ Kevin said. _Now I'm bored._

"You have my deepest condolences." Kimblee regarded the iron gate of Foster's and pushed it open with some effort. He was surprisd they hadn't locked it; they were going to regret that.

He would have smiled at the thought of begining his plan after some initial surveying of the area and making up his mind on the exact implementation, but frankly, his brain felt a little broken.

Sometimes, karma works in some very odd ways indeed.

...

Inside the mall, Hobbes crushed a projectile made from a lot of compressed trash in his hand, frowning slightly.

He glared at the a five-man team of people that had decided to oppose him, Katara, Sokka and Sam, standing guard in front of him and looming over them in their massive (but scrappy) suits of powered armor clicking in place, steam whistling through vents all over their bodies, twin canisters of glowing yellow fluid on their backs and hooked up to large energy-casting cannons on their forearms while their multi-sectioned jetboots hummed gently, air intakes readying for take-off. Kim, Katara, Sam and Sokka just in front of him, glaring as well. Kim looked slightly eager for the fight, Katara a bit more wary and Sokka almost detached. Sam alone looked worried; she could handle herself in a fight, but she had already claimed a spot as 'the weak one', given her lack of outstanding physical abilities or powers.

The engraved, elegant pillars at either side of the ranks of their powered-armored equipped foes provided an entryway into a wide floor space that was a bit like a mixture of a bazzar and a flea market, only even more chaotic because of all the weird stuff being sold and the weirder salespeople; large tents, stalls and similar things were placed in a haphazard manner, mostly organized on who got a spot first with short walls to divide them, though there were a few more traditional stores built into the mall and occupied on a rent basis. Their next shopping destination was there, and standing between them and their mission (and fun) were these idiots in powered armor.

"Okay!" Hobbes said. "We already beat up the last bunch of you loonies in lousy powered armor to stop us shopping because none of you recognize any of us despite Kim being a local girl!" He gestured below, referring to the floor under them. "After we defeated him in three consecutive games of capture-motion boxing, two rounds of air hocky and five games of _Mosh Mosh Dance-Off!_ What more to we have to do to get into this big shopping area!"

"Fight us!" The opposing team challenged. "We, the proud fighters of the Mall Crawler Enforcers, Traverse Town Chapter One, will not allow unskilled or incompetent idiots to gain access to the great treasures, equipment and cool stuff of our beloved salesguys!" Their suits powered up, their various weapons charging, one set of energy shields turning on, a energy-katana extending itself, a pair of arm-swords unsheathing and a massive electric-sledgehammer being slung out.

"Oh, this is just excessive!" Sokka yelled furiously, waving his sword at them.

"Excessive!" Roared their leader apparent, a rather scrawny human in a heavily modified suit of powered armor with an mighty strength-enhancing exoskeleton covered by plates of beaten metal like tortoiseshell, conduit lines glowing and little vents sparking bursts of energy as he powered up, all the little arcs of yellow energy making a ever-shifting tapestry around him. His helmet was fashioned like a knight's, with a cyclopean visor over his eyes and glowing much as all the other stores of power on his armor was, presumably to fuel integral parts of it. Protected by a shell-like form on his back was what looked like a pair of scuba tanks modified into fuel tanks, filled to the brim with a not-quite-energy-or-liquid mass that glowed a pale golden yellow; Hobbes vaugely recognized as it a form of essence-matter called Yellow Eco. "_THIS! IS! __**TRAVERSE TOWN**__!_"

Another one raised his arm-blades. "Gentlemen and ladies! Prepare yourselves! _For the breaking of those who would dominate great Purchasing! Know that the enemies of bargains will FALL! By our hands, they will be BROKEN!_"

"Why do people always quote historical organizations out of context?" Hobbes wondered as the armored fighters flew at them and his own guys prepared to fight the heavily armed (if not very well maintained) people 'guarding' the mall's best wares from them, so they could finish their shopping and goof off. (The girl's statement had been a warped variation of a common sentiment from the dark days of the ancient Imperium of Man, and Hobbes wondered how _these _idiots knew about it.)

Their leader (who had a nameplate on his armor that read Tesla Man, probably chosen because of all the power glows and ranged energy weapons) made a hand signal; everyone in his group scattered, jetboots and back-thrusters roaring to life as they ran with surprising speed for their ponderous armors; they took off and flew straight at them, their various weapons powering up.

Katara sighed. "Here we go again..."

"Hah!" Said a fish-girl in a broader suit of powered armor that went out of it's way to have elongated serrated surfaces said, energy whiped streaming behind her in a spiral from cylindral emitters on her armor's oversized forearms. A nameplate on the curved breastplate of her armor read _Shredcord_. "Our brothers and sisters in arms regulating the lower levels are vastly inferior to _our _might! You've never fought people like us!"

"Eh, we've fought jerks in super-armor before," Sokka said dismissively. "You're nothing special. Matter of fact, your armor looks really...slapped together. Like you just went to a scrapyard, retrofitted all the big heavy stuff you could find, made weapons out of stuff you slapped together, added some mechanisms to move it for you, took some power sources and soldered it shut."

"Our armaments are sufficient for our task, and our will far supercedes them!" Tesla Man said proudly. A handmade cannon that was a mass of cables, wire and an oversized barrel spun to life, Yellow Eco loading into it before firing mechanisms launched it as an explosive blast right at Sokka, a low-rate concussive blast hitting him dead-on. "Do not mock them!"

Sokka skidded across the ground and bounced, landing on his feet and brandishing his meteorite-forged blade Space Sword (names were not his strong suit) in one hand, his trusted secondary weapon Boomerang Junior in the other. "Do you have to ask _why _no one gives you better stuff?" He asked. "And who talks like that!"

"We _know _of mighty warriors and space-knights from the ancient and noble Imperium of Man!" Tesla Man proclaimed. "In their honor, we emulate their mode of speech! Or at least what the novels we've read said they talked like."

Hobbes gaped. "...You're _purposefully _emulating the Imperium of Man. The specist xenophobic and cult-driven ancient precursor to the Comic Kingdom."

"The what?" Said Shredcord.

Hobbes sighed. "...We're also called the Brighthammer Federation when we want to look more respectable."

"Ah," Tesla Man said. "That makes more sense. You should call yourselves that more often."

"'Comic Kingdom'?" Sam asked.

"Our King has a weird sense of humor," Hobbes said.

"Ahem, I believe we were busy?" Tesla Man said.

Hobbes grimaced, though he had honestly been expecting someone like these idiots: this wasn't the first group of holier-than-thou armor-wearing teenaged warrior-knights the four of them had to fight to gain access to superior shopping spaces, though they were certainly a few steps beyond the previous guys they had to fight.

These idiot's presence had been unexpected; there had been no indication of anything like that; the mall's layout was weird, but it didn't exactly suggest that teenagers in armor with elitist notions of shopping rights were hanging around to beat up unfamiliar people. (And by that, they meant beating up anything they didn't personally know; apparently they'd only started doing this a few days ago, while Kim hadn't been to this mall in about a week. It was a case of very bad timing all around.) The inside of the mall had four levels in it; one of the stadium-style lower part, two levels spaced out through the upper pueblo part, and a final level that was just under the roof and open in part to the sky. (With retractable transparent shields in those parts in case it rained.) The layout was...eccentric. The ground level had absolutely nothing to do with shopping, instead hosting a large food court with a wide variety of food sellers (the very one where they had eaten, of course), a movie theatre, a indoor pool-themed amusment center and a huge arcade, and a number of other things of that general nature. The upper levels didn't have much organization either, with the most famous stores renting out specific spaces or areas in the mall while smaller or newer places had to compete for space, sometimes with quite public duels. (Non-lethal, of course, and they always got someone to referee on pain of breaking the ground with your face.)

They'd wanted to go around through the mall and buy their stuff, taking their time and not hurrying around. That had been the plan, anyway, and had been somewhat jolted by the teens in powered armor that guarded, respectively, the elevator-lift to Floor Two, had patrolled Floor Three and this latest bunch that had teamed together to stand guard at the Big Bazaar, the place with the most unusual, specific and adventurer-heavy equipment; lower levels had provided them with stores where they had purchased, among other thing, a few codexes on interworld travel (Calvin and Hobbes were fairly new to it, after all), a good supply of dried food they could ration out when they couldn't buy any or hunt prey or otherwise procure something to eat, gadgetry for Calvin to make nice weapons out of, a number of other outfits for them to change into for certain extreme environments or just needed a change of clothes (Sokka had insisted on buying an outfit similar to what Spike had been wearing and using a weird machine to alter it to Zim's height and build, not to mention altering the color to something like the Irken Invader uniform; he reasoned that 'any good adventurer needs an awesome outfit, you know?') and a number of other things, though the bulk of their shopping needs were in the Big Bazaar.

They'd also bought a fair bit for themselves; Sokka decided that since they had come all this way it'd be a shame not to buy themselves some cool stuff. Sokka had already bought a few video-discs of a few series that looked cool to him (among them, the hit anime series of drills and giant robots _Heavenly Crimson Spiraling Stone,_ the often dark and tearjerking but still outreageously awesome_ All Steel Chemist: Nakama _and the much beloved pirate anime _Romance Dawn_); Katara wasn't much for shopping, but she did find herself a few interesting books to read, and for her part, so did Sam; Sokka bought her a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide, when she found a very good read rather quickly, but more significantly she bought some gifts for the rest of their team. Sokka also saw fit to buy a few gifts for his new friends Kim and Hobbes, as he, his sister and Sam were getting along very nicely with the 'new guys', and Sam now had her own copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide, and Hobbes had been gifted with a totally awesome flat-crowned wide-brimmed that had been fitted for his head. Hobbes dearly hoped not to lose it, because he thought it looked really cool.

_Oh well,_ Hobbes said, resigning himself to another fight. Just another obstacle.

He braced himself as Tesla Man came flying at him, a twelve-foot tall mass of metal and machinery; armored gauntlets open wide and small lenses in his palms glowing, vast stores of the weird power source he had recalibrating itself before releasing as sprays of little beam-discs; Hobbes didn't jump back, retreat or get out of the way but instead _dodged into the attack_, avoiding the little blasts of energy with dozens of small quick movements, hops, duckings and feats of acrobatics, easily dodging them with only a few singed hairs as casualties. Tesla Man was so surprised by this he almost stepped back; in that brief moment of heisitation, Hobbes lunged forward, snarling like his distant feral ancestors as he slammed a open palm into Tesla Man's chest and his other hand, crackling with a stream of cutting power, chopped at a forearm cannon; the force of his palm strike smashing up a powerful gust, cracking the floor around them and knocking Tesla Man across the floor and into the pillar, cracking it a bit.

Tesla Man got up with a syntheziser-distorted groan, a sizeable dent in his chestplate. "...Hrm," He said, standing up and keeping steady dispite his obvious dizziness. His armor made a few noises so people knew that computer stuff was happening. "Interal systems are uncompromised...left arm cannon inoperational..." He shook himself, metal sliding and grating agaisnt each other.

Hobbes winced. "I hate shoddy armors! Can't you be a little considerate for people with proper sensory capabilities and muffle your armor a bit!"

"My apologies," Tesla Man said as the others battled. "You are...more capable than a tourist, and have none of the hollow spirit of a refugee. An interesting fellow; I was wrong to brand you a heretic to the cause of shopping!"

"Does that mean you'll stop fighting us?"

"No. We stand as the bulwark against the endless storm of the rude, the self-important and the window-shoppers, using our physical might to weed out the inglorious and selfish from those who understand the intent of supply and demand, and who share the ideals of us Mall Crawlers! _Until you are proven, we shall not let you pass...AND YOU WILL NOT!_" He gestured disdainfully at the large cracks in the ground where his metal armor had bounced off. "This is nothing. The contest...is...not yet...OVER!"

"Well, _someone _took good advantage of 'Hamming It Up' speech classes," Hobbes said glibly.

"I take pride in my dramatic skills! Now, suffer the wrath of my _DUAL-WIELDED PUNISHMENT CANNONS!_" He raised his arms.

Hobbes brought his right hand up; supported from a dense network of severed cables, wires and conduits was Tesla Man's left arm cannon. "I can cut with my bare hands. I imagine it's a bit hard to dual-wield when you just have the one weapon!"

Tesla Man appeared to take this into consideration. "Indeed. In that case, taste the power of my _OMEGA CHEST BLASTER!"_ He gripped the inner sides of his pectoral-shaped torsoplates and pulled, sliding them out to reveal a whirring machine-mass over his chest and underlying machinery, a glowing disc visbile in it's depths. The energy grew so bright it was almost blinding, and abruptly fired a ridiculously huge laser-type blast bigger than Tesla Man (and he had a pretty big suit of armor).

Hobbes' eyes widened. "What." The laser came roaring at him, the floor shattering in huge pieces of stone work and virtually disintegrating in the massive power blast, and he was too stunned to move in time; it hit him with a thunderous noise, an explosion and a blinding burst of light. When it faded, Hobbes was at the other end of the chamber and half-imbedded in the wall, having narrowly missed falling into the gap of the elevator-lift. "...Ow." He fell out of the wall and landed safely on the floor, right on his face. "Again. Ow."

Tesla Man laughed. "Is that the power you can muster, knave!" Hobbes threw the severed arm cannon, which he had improbably held on to dispite being thrown over twenty feet by being hit in the face with a big laser-caused explosion and smashing into a stone wall hard enough to effective displace some of it; it hit Tesla Man in the head hard enough to damage his neck-movement regulating servos and knock him over. "Ow! What the wicker basket! How can anybody throw that well or that hard!" He got back up as Hobbes wearily did the same. "That's it, now you will hurt! Like a thing that hurts really badly!" He fired up his repulsor-pack and jetboots again, flying at Hobbes for a ramming charge. Hobbes only straightened the spacial-physics defying dufflebag he was storing all their stuff and purchases in; it'd be a shame to get anything broken.

In the meantime, Sam was being faced down by two armored Mall Crawlers. "I don't know," Said a girl in a nearly human-sized suit of armor, her nameplate reading _Deadshot_, probably because she specialized in long-range weaponry if all the arm cannons, palm-blasters, disc-shooters and the debris-launcher on her shoulder were any suggestion. To compensate for this crippling overspecialization, her guantlets had serrated edges and massive claws for fingers. "Ought we to fight this one? She seems a bit...non-superhuman and such. Would it be honorable?"

"What?" Sam said crossly. "Just because _I _can't throw water around or take a giant laser to the face, I'm not as good as the others?"

"You surmise the idea well, m'lady," Deadshot's friend, a guy in a fifteen-foot-tall suit of armor patterned after a prehistoric reptilian monster with only a pair of shoulder cannons for ranged combat; it was geared almost entirely for melee, with crackling power-fists armed with massive retractable knuckle-blades, long sidearm-blades made from flattened girders riveted together, huge jet-fired boots with retracted sickle-claws and a dinosaurian helmet and faceplate built over his actual helmet, designed to bite with devastating force. This guy's nameplate read _Behemoth_. "I apologize for the twhacking to come, but we simply _must_."

Not pausing to complain about why _two _powered armor nutjobs had ganged up on her instead of the more capable others, Sam said, "But _why! _Why attack us? Your friends downstairs wouldn't tell us anything, but you guys are clearly in charge! You even said so!"

"...True," Behemoth acknowledged.

"So why? What's the point in attacking people that shop at your malls and stores?"

"It's just this mall," Deadshot clarified. "This place is important."

"Huh?"

"This mall is the first stop for all the traders that come from the rest of our world _and _from the stars! Well, not the stars, they'd burn. Unless they wre Pyronites...my point is that many unique and treasured wares are sold here! That means that many rapscallions appear here to take them unlawfully!"

"Lawfully taking them usually requires a visually appealing duel in the public," Behemoth said.

"Our founders, the original Mall Crawlers from an ancient galaxy-spanning civilization of money mechanics, merchants, and makers of marvelous merchandise, discovered that this mall secretly hosted a vile group of criiminals from other worlds that were secretly controlling the most successful businesses for their own base desires, perverting the intention of any place of salesship; to provide a consumer with valuable products!"

A fair distance away, Sokka was having a similar conversation with Shredcord; the difference was that since he could clearly fight, Shredcord was happy to do battle-bantar in the process. "So you guys drove them out!" He asked, expertly flicking his sword out to deflect her energy whips, sparks flying from the ground where her whips tore up the ground in neat little lines. One might wonder why his sword could even compete with her whips, which were burning through the ground with ease. The answer was simple: Space Sword was just that damn cool.

"Correct!" Shredcord said, the small cannons on her shoulders powering up and spinning, firing a volley of concussive blasts; Sokka spun his sword around, deflecting a few of them back for some reason before ducking and then slamming his sword into the ground, digging out a chunk of stone from the ground and hurling it at a cannon as the volley ended, badly denting it. "Back then...our chapter was only a scattered bunch of teenagers who cared about this mall! We had nothing! We did poorly in schools, our families were long gone, our species were extinct but for us-"

"Wait, extinct? You're not human?" Sokka yelped; Shredcord's energy whips had coiled around his sword. Extending a modified telekinetic field over themselves, they reeled back, taking his sword with them and dragging it right to Shredcord's open hand.

"Certainly not. I am, in fact, an amphibious coelacanth girl; my people were known as the Edge-Treaders, owing to our homelands near islands. Many fish cultures, you see, think of land as 'Unsea', or a part of the world that is not the familiar and welcome water-based life." To prove it, her helmet unlocked, with a hissing of air forcing it's way into an unsealed vessel. Her faceplate flipped open, and Sokka blincked. Her big black eyes, low-sloped and finned forehead, and her broad mouth made her look kind of cute, in a weirdly ugly sort of way.

"...Huh," Sokka said.

Her faceplate flipped down and sealed shut. "Anyway, the mall was liberated when an advance scout from the Mall Crawlers discovered one of those rogues harrasing a tardy merchant after hours! They began a holy war to scour away the pestilence and restore peace to the mall! And among the natives here that they recruited so they could serve the town better...was us!"

"Cool," Sokka said. He readied his boomerang, made a few calculations regarding trajectory and allowing for her reflexes, and threw; the small sharpened pieces of metal spun through the air, sliced through the dented shoulder cannon, looped around and cut through the other shoulder cannon and kept going, hitting a vital cable on her arm. Power failure ensued, to her surpirse, and when her arm dropped down lifelessly, her muscular power unable to so much as budge it without her suit's strength amplification, Sokka dashed forward and caught Space Sword in one hand, and the returning Boomerang Junior in the other.

Continuing in this general thread of 'talking things out while still trying to beat the crap out of each other' was Katara, Kim and the last of the armored fighters, a fellow named Adeptus-Indefintus, who'd gone to the efforts of actually introducing himself to the two girls before formally engaging them in combat. He'd also explained to them that he was an artificial intelligence that operated by plugging itself into sophistacated electro-mechanic devices like his hulking powered armor, which was the most austure and plain of the armors in spite of being the largest; it was basically just a combat-oriented mechanism with a pair of arm-mounted energy swords that could transform into plasma cannons, a pair of massive arms bigger than she was, equally large jetboots armed with katana-blades mounted on the legs and a cyclopean helmet that doubled as a laser-blaster. "We struggled mightily against our foes, and with the assistance of the true Mall Crawlers, we proved victorious!" Adeptus-Infinitus said, keeping a good distance between himself and Katara while he repeated palm-striked at her, the repulsor-blasters in his hands firing volleys of concussive blasts at the two girls.

"That still doesn't explain all this!" Katara said, warding away the blasts with a fist-sized sphere of water she had Waterbent from the air; it was rare that she could make much with that technique, but she still wielded that tiny amount with devatstating efficiency; the energy blasts scattered the water only for Katara to pull it back together in enough time to block the next one while Kim simply dodged them with inerringly perfect agility, again and again until Adeptus-Indefinitus' paused a brief moment to evaluate his strategy; it was a few seconds too long, even for his machine intellect, and Katara spun her water out into a incredibly thin whip, launching it at Adeptus-Indefinitum's side at the same time a twist of her hand set a coldness into it that froze the strike side of the water whip into a layer of jagged ice. Her aim was near-perfect; it hit at a precise angle on a weak spot in his side that Katara had noticed he kept guarded and struck deep, not doing any injury but surprising him as her water whip splashed all over his side, some of it going through his armor. (It didn't short anything out; his electronic systems were more robust than to succumb to that.)

That changed when Katara drew her arms back and out again with incredible speed; the water that had seeped into the armor and outside it collected into a small ball inside his armor, expanding into an incredibly sharp thin icicle. Adeptus-Indefinitum shouted in surprise as a tiny spear of ice inside pierced right through his side and into a delicate servo-motor in his shoulder, normally protected by his armor but certainly not from the inside. There was a horrible mechanical screech, metal grinding against itself as ice sliced through it, unfroze, refroze in dozens of small sharp spikes only to liquify again and repeat until worn mechanisms shuddered and finally gave up, and Adeptus-Indefinitum's arm hung lifelessly at his side.

He glanced in surprise, a moment of distraction that was ill-advised; Kim ran straight at him, hopping off his knee and swung a well-muscled leg directly into his wounded shoulder with such force that the entirely mechanical appendage broke off; Kim caught it in mid-air and swung it like a club at his head before she even touched the ground. Adeptus-Indefinitum stumbled back and Kim pressed the attack, straightening her improvised weapon like a club and brutally striking out with it, focusing on the wound on his side to draw his attention and hit him in his other joints when he tried to protect it with a powerful swipe of his other arm. "We were the foot soliders of that great fight," Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "Our alien friends equipped us with mighty powered armors that amplified our abilities to vast levels, and we were only semi-competent fighters simply because our world's toughness demands it! The armaments they graced us with made all of us into war machines! Even I, who already AM a war machine in my unattached state."

"Are...are you sure you're okay?" Katara asked carefully. "Your arm's off!"

"Hmn? Oh, a mere flesh wound. Truly. This body is merely a shell for me to control! I have already insisted that you do not hold back; it will ruin the point of this exercise!"

"Right, but I'm still not all that comfortable with this," Kim said, hitting him in the leg with the robot arm and vaulting up with it, flying up twice his height and slamming his arm right down on his head, flipping in the air so that she could spin the arm around and hit the back of his legs, nearly knocking him off his feet. He would have kicked at her, except that he and everyone else on his side were avoiding lethal force and his leg-swords certainly were lethal. (One might claim that Tesla Man's giant laster to Hobbes' face defied this, but Traverse Town had a higher standard for toughness that, fortunately, the Comic Kingdom/Brighthammer Federation was even stricter on. One might also consider Kim's brutal treatment of Adeptus-Indefinitum to be a case of anti-robot prejudice, but this was not the case; his 'body' was one of several suits he could be plugged into and no damage to it would actually hurt him. He had explained this to them so they wouldn't be obliged to hold back. Kim, for her part, had no problem with robots.) "I heard all about it! They had to retrofit the mall to defend itself for times like that. So what does this have to do with you guys?"

"Our alien allies left, and in time, without a cause to motivate us, a goal to compell us, a _reason _to _STRIVE_, we were lost! Saddened and gloomy, we took to trying to enact ways to prevent a criminal group from doing that again! We saw the corruption being scoured away from our town, and we were powerless to help! Powerless to defend outselves! We are WEAK, mi' lady! We are MEANINGLESS! Without strength, without purpose, without CONVICTION, you cannot protect anything you hold dear, not even YOURSELF! We endured, nonetheless. We survived! We did what little pointless trifles we could! And then...we _remembered _what the Mall Crawlers had done for us, in the name of our eclectic socieity, fragile and small though it is! They came with technology and girded themselves with it, took up arms they crafted themselves, and fought evil!" Adeptus-Indefinitum paused. If his faceplate could express itself, it would have looked almost...rapturous. "We...were..._inspired_."

All around the chamber, along the two balconies bordering the elevator lift and the walkways that connected them, the fighting slowed down as the armored fighters explained themselves. For Hobbes and Tesla Man, though, it only intensified. "We had _NOTHING _before we remembered what we had been a _PART _of for so little time!" Tesla Man roared, his gauntlets crackling as he powered up secondary muscle-amplifiation modulators and punched, the energy shaping itself into the air and setting it on fire, twisting the burning wind into a drill-like shape and spinning wildly as more energy ignited Tesla Man like a thunderstorm, his power source consumed so rapidly that it couldn't be properly harnessed and was instead expelled through vents in his back with such force that he was propelled forward. "_DRILL! ARM! PAWNCH!"_

"Eek!" Hobbes said as he side-stepped out of the way of the 'Drill Arm Punch'; not nearly far enough, it turned out. The drill kept spinning, the floor cracking around them in bursts and blasts. The energy-drill expanded without cease, soon collapsing into a ominous mass as the floor around them completely shattered from the sheer force Tesla Coil was using, and then the energy-mass exploded again in a controlled blast right at Hobbes. "NOT AGAAAIN!" He yelled as he went flying across the room, his fur singed and his clothes starting to get a bit sooty but otherwise unharmed (not being of normal construction); not one to let this fight end here and now, he tied his new hat down under his chin by the drawstrings and aimed himself at one of the thin decorate poles at the edge of the elevator-lift, his claws tearing off chunks of rock as he turned his momentum to his advantage and spun around the pole, picking his moment and letting go after building enough speed to launch himself like a rocket at Tesla Man.

"Excellent form!" Tesla Man said.

"I'M BACK! HURRICANE! CHAIN! _SMASH!_" Hobbes yelled, spinning in mid-air and building up speed, turning it into a flip mere feet from Tesla Man and hitting him right in the dented chestplate with a singularily brutal mid-air roundhouse kick that hit with such force that it cut the air, sending a number of razor-shaped gusts of wind that sliced the ground in another spiral-shape; chunks of the floor went flying, blown off by the razor-winds and the entire floor for twelve feet rippled like water struck with a brick. Hobbes, bouncing back, flipped over a chunk of airbourne stone and kicked it at Tesla Man in such a way that it launched himself at another piece of stone. He kicked that at Tesla Man too, propelling himself against at a cluster of pieces that had almost hit the floor and sent _them _flying with a palm strike, a spinning kick and a final double-handed punch.

Hobbes landed neatly on all fours on a chunk of the floor that had been knocked up in their battle rages, tilting a little bit from his weight; he timed it so that he landed _exactly _as all the pieces of stone he fired slammed around Tesla Man. Not into him, that would have been a bit excessive; the first one landed right to his side, slamming his arm down. The next did the same to his other side, and the next two rocks trapped him from the back and front, effectively pinning him before the final rocks slammed onto the top, trapping him there and leaving him unable to move enough to use his armors strength.

Hobbes almost fell down, and he still breathed heavy. "Had enough?" He asked, trembling a bit from over-exertion and straightening his hat with a hand.. "Stop fighting now and let us go?"

"...Never," Tesla Man said calmly. "You don't understand! I don't CARE HOW STACKED THE ODDS ARE AGAINST ME! _None of us gave up when we fought the criminals that took over our mall! None of us gave up no matter how hard it was to find meaning after the joy of being soldiers in the cause of mercantile protection! And NONE of us gave up when we decided to protect this mall again in honor of the Mall Crawlers and took their name, and no one would give us weapons or armaments because we didn't have anyone's backing!_ _For four days we have guarded this mall agaisnt people who would use it! For four days we have weeded out untrustworthy tourists who would destroy our economy by engaging them in battle, proving their valor and virtue through the cleansing purity of combat! FOR FOUR DAYS, WE HAVE ACTUALLY ORGANIZED THE MALL A LITTLE BIT! WE HAVE NOT FALTERED, WE HAVE NOT FALLEN, WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN AND WE WILL NOT __**FAIL!**__"_

Hobbes blinked. "...You've only been doing this for four days?"

"Yes. What's your point?"

"...Well, if you go around attacking people you don't know because they've come to shop, how is anyone supposed to get any shopping done?"

"We don't keep people away, we clear away the weak and craven-hearted who don't understand our town! The ones who flee at our perceived strangless are NOT worthy of our town! The ones who do not fight us because they see it as beneath them to listen to our reasons are NOT worthy to enjoy the fruits of shopping! The ones who fight like devils are NOT permitted within this mall once we discover them! And those who are proven to be like the ones who would despoil our shopping will FALL! FALL! FALL AND BE BANISHED FROM THIS MALL FOREVERMORE!"

"Huh. So what happens to everyone else? Or those who can't fight because they have crippling disabilities or are just kids with their families?"

"Hmn? Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear enough. Those who pass our tests, by fighting with valor and whateer skill they have may go with our blessings. Those who we KNOW to be of our town, whether they reside in it or not, may be harrased by others ARE UNDER OUR PROTECTION! And those who CANNOT fight physically are fought in the manners of combat subtle! DEBATING!"

"Oh, okay...this still seems like a bit much for _shopping_."

"We take our mall very seriously." Tesla Man paused. "Care to surrender?"

"Uh...you're the one pinned there."

"An interesting point, my friend. But, my rebuttal! Did you, at any point in our fight, ever see me activing my weapons manually? Would you believe that our systems are activated through a neural INTERFACE!" Hobbes' ears pricked; he heard a grinding sounds, metal sliding over metal as mechanisms spun around, energy crackling and devices humming loudly, and a bright light illuminated the stone cell from within. "Prison! Erasing! AURA!" A single white-hot laser pierced the stone and burned a small hole in the ceiling above. Another stabbed through, followed by another and another, more appeared by the instant, the stone prison vibrating as more lasers cut through it. A small stone, cut away from a larger piece, tumbled down. It was swiftly followed by another as more lasers appeared, the light of all the lasers starting to hurt Hobbes' eyes, and the lasers abruptly faded away, though a threateningly bright light remained. His finely tuned senses detecting something very bad going on, Hobbes flipped back, clinging to a pillar and hauling himself behind it as a small but powerful explosion tore the stones apart in a flash of light; he narrowly missed the sharpnel flying everywhere, cutting gouges in the pillar he was hiding behind and a blinding wave of dust.

"Huh?" Kim said, noticing it. "Whoah, get out of the way!" She flipped behind Adeptus-Indefinitum and tried to pull him back.

"Hrm?" Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "What is-" Katara Waterbent a freezing spray onto his optical sensors and followed Kim's example, running behind him. Moments later, the dust hit, missing the girls, but their 'shield' wasn't so lucky; the dust and grit didn't do well with his somewhat sensitive mechanisms and he soon found considerable difficulty moving.

"Eh?" Shredcord said, as the dust cloud hit her, blinding her own optical sensors. "Gah! I'm blinded! Wait, let me just remove my helmet-"

Sokka sliced through the power conduits going from the tankers of yellow liquid-energy-stuff on the back of her suit. "You know, it seems a little stupid to be carrying your fuel on your _back_. Without _any _armor at all." He pushed her over.

"Bollocks," Shredcord said, not strong enough to move her suit with her own strength; her weapons, vents and auxillary systems blinked weakly and died in moments. "Wonderful thing I can breathe air or I'd be dying now."

Sokka's eyes bugged out. "Damn it! I gotta remember that the next time I fight a fish-guy; I can't go around _killing _people!"

"Eh, no harm done," Shredcord said amiably. "Um. Help?"

"Oh, sure, weird girl that beat me up for no real reason_WHAT DO YOU THINK I'M GOING TO DO!_"

"Unchivalrous dog!"

"YOU ATTACKED ME WITH LASER WHIPS AND TRIED TO STEAL SPACE SWORD! DO YOU HAVE _ANY _IDEA HOW HARD IT WAS TO FIND IT AFTER I DROPPED IT OFF AN AIRSHIP AND BROKE MY ARM!"

"Hrm, Shredcord has fallen," Adeptus-Indefinitum said, having witnessed that after breaking the ice off his face with some difficulty. "I mustn't give up now, not with her at stake! I will not fail to avenge her defeat-"

"Sorry, that's a negative," Kim said as Katara drew a little more water out of the air and pressurized as much as she could, lashing out once again, cutting through one of Adeptus-Indefinitum's own power conduits; the power demands on his body caused a unpleasant feedback loop, and he was forced to conserve the little power left to him by deactivating all but the most rudimentary of his motor systems, auxillary cognitive functions and AI-to-body interface processes.

"Bugger," Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "Oh, my apologies my ladies! No need for crude language."

"I've heard worse," Kim said.

"I am defeated then." The A.I. did not sound very upset. "I congratulate you on your victory, ladies! And I thank you for being kind enough to do so in a way that merely disables me rather than completely destroying this body and forcing me to be relocated to another one."

Katara smiled faintly. "Well, I wouldn't want to actually _cripple _you or anything..."

"Let's go find Sam!" Kim said. "She's not a fighter; I don't know if she can last long against these-"

"Geez, calm down," Sam said, walking up to them, Behemoth behind her, his armor utterly destroyed by an insane amount of firepower. For some reason, she was somehow wearing Deadshot's armor only without the helmet, and from the looks of the two Mall Crawler's condition, had done so quite well. "Thanks for endorsing me."

"...Oh," Kim said, abashed. "Um...why are you wearing that girl's armor?"

"This thing? I convinced them that it was unfair for a non-fighter like me to have to go against TWO of them, and they weren't confident in beating me in a debate about the foundations of 'Dark Is Not Evil' trends, so I got Deadshot to let me borrow her armor so I could fight the Behemoth guy on equal terms. Short story, I won. Hard."

"May I have my armor back now?" Deadshot asked imperiously behind Sam; she was a reptillain elf-like alien known as a Kineceleren, with a thin green-eyed face, light blue skin, a body shape something like a _velociraptor_ (raising the queston of how Sam had bit on her suit, but perhaps it adapted to the body shape of whoever wore it), a long thick black-striped tail and dagger-like claws; she was wearing a gray tanktop and matching shorts, neccesary clothing for the hot work of wearing powered armor all day. Sam shrugged and deactivated the armor (Deadshot had given her a crash-course in the neurally-operated armor's operation to make the fight as fair as possible; it would up being entirely too fair in Sam's favor) and the front of the armor slid open in rotating layeres of metal, the shoulders revolving away, the legs splitting open and the helmet sliding away from her head and a lot of stuff in this vein until the armor fell off. Sam stepped away, clearly disliking the armor, while Deadshot walked over to put it back on.

Tesla Man observed all this, pausing in the middle of a fistfight with Hobbes. "Hmn, you are indeed not the craven tourists or clueless fools we mistook you for! You have the strength of mighty convictions, and the will to adapt to unusual circumstances!"

"Do you always have this much trouble with tourists?" Hobbes asked, backing away and hoping the fight was done.

"Often enough. We respect the strong, you see; we know from our friends in the Crossguard that the multiverse seems to be patterend that in the end, it is those with the strongest convictions that win where it truly counts!"

"Really? Huh...and convictions aren't neccesarily good. Guess that explains why the Time of The Warped Immateriam was such a long, nasty period of time," Hobbes mused.

Tesla Man nodded. "Indeed! That is how we have determined that the quickest way to evaluate a man or woman's worthiness to come here is through the cleansing of combat. It doesn't matter if we win or lose, it is our enemy's actions and methods that matter! Brutality and fairness aside, those are not indicators of what we look for; we have learned to examine a foe's character through physical telegraphy and in-combat body language!"

"I know guys that can do that! Mostly Orks, like the guy in my theurgist-knight training bootcamp. They like that sort of thing. Hard to believe they used to be even _more _rough in the past...so have you made a decision about us, or do I have to punch you so hard it breaks physics?" Hobbes exaggerated, of course. He wasn't _that _good, but it paid to sound awesome.

Tesla Man lowered his head respectfully at Hobbes. "Men and women of the Mall Crawlers, listen to me!" His teammates looked at him attentively. "I have made my conclusion about the strength of these fighters! What have you to say?"

"They are adaptable and intelligent!" Deadshot said.

"The Goth girl posseses the strength of will to master our Self-Forged Armaments with capability, if not skill!" Behemoth said.

"They have the strength of character to carry on conversation while in the midst of intense combat!" Shredcord said.

"They hold great power...and it is tempered with greatness! Compassion and consideration even unto their foes!" Adeptus-Indefinitum said.

"_THEY ARE WORTHY!_" They shouted at Tesla Man.

"_MY FELLOWS HAVE SPOKEN THEIR HEARTS! WITH ONE VOICE, WE HAVE COME TOGETHER! WITH ONE HEART, WE OBEY THE MANDATES OF THOSE WHO INSPIRED US! WITH ONE UNERRING FOCUS, WE FIND THE TRUTH! AND WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY CERTAINLY THAT YOU FIVE ARE WORTHY TO BENEFIT FROM THE FRUITS OF OUR TOWN'S LABORS! GO FORTH, SHOP TO YOUR HEART'S CONTENT, __**AND BE BLESSED IN THE NAME OF THE MALL CRAWLERS!**_"

"...Yay?" Sokka said uncertainly.

Since they seemed to be allowed to go and finish their errand, Hobbes, Katara, Kim, Sokka and Sam walked back to each other in front of the pillars. They glanced back; the Mall Crawlers, having rejoined each other, were looking expectantly at them. "I can't believe we had to go through all that just to do a bit of shopping," Katara said.

"Just be happy it's not in the holiday season," Kim said evenly. "Martial arts duels with chained swords taller than I am are the accepted means of settling disputes over the hot new fad around then. And we should be lucky that these guys are new! Imagine how much of a menace they could be when they get _good _at this!"

Hobbes gaped. "Wait. You think they were inept!"

"Sort of. For the town's standards, a bit, yeah. Probably why they were the foot soldiers. They had some decent skill, but it needs polish." Noticing the incredulous looks from the 'toursts', she laughed. "You gotta be tough to make it in Traverse Town! There's something about the place that makes badasses out of _everyone_, and I mean everyone. Probably because of all the random weirdness. And the guys that hate us. And the supervillain idiots. And the smart supervillains. And would-be conquerers. And...you know what, I'm going stop now before I turn this into an overly long gag."

"Too late," Sam said.

Hobbes sighed. "...It's not like _you _guys thought they were tough, right?"

"More like persistent," Sokka said thoughtfully. "Their gear stunk and they aren't the fighters we are, but they were crazy-determined. They just wouldn't stay down! It's like a whole team of Zukos, but without the bad hair." (On the rooftop, Zuko instantly felt that he needed to get back at Sokka for something.)

"We've fought much bigger threats, but I guess they put up a good fight," Katara said. "And if we _wanted _to hurt them bad...there's not much they could have down about it."

"We can hear every word you say," Tesla Man said flatly. "Every single disparaging comment is perfectly audible to us."

"...And?"

"Bah, have it your way! Men!" Deadshot and Shredcord coughed. "Men and women! Let us move onward! TO THE SCRAPYARD FOR REPAIRS!"

"Yay," The others said, unenthusiastically.

"Buck up! Show some spirit!"

"Your dialect is slipping," Hobbes told him.

"Silence!"

Hobbes shook his head and finally went into the Big Bazaar with his team, ready to finally buy the essential equipment for adventuring.

...

Kimblee was in a better mood now; checking out Foster's and determining the best course for his plan had taken less time than he'd thought.

It was a fairly large property by Traverse Town standards; the main house and a few additions that included a dining hall, stables for sentient animals and a few other things, but apart from that it was smaller than Kimblee had expected. The entire property was fenced all the way around, a neat little dividing line in a near-perfect rectangle shape, cutting neat lines in the ground sharp enough to alter the flows of power just a little...and he could pattern the transmutation circle around it.

No one had paid much attention to him. He was just one man, a tourist, low-key and not interested in small talk or having anything to sell. He had been ignored.

He smiled. No ignoring him for much longer.

He had left, of course, after scoping out the house a fair bit and determining that the idea place to put the inner transmutation circle - the reception one, as it were, and the larger the output circle - was atop the highest point of the rooftop. When the time came, he would be within that circle, safe and unharmed. He had been hoping that he could have made the inner circle within the ballroom (the symmetry would have been pleasing, one scene of destruction engineering a much larger one) but it would have been impractical in this case, given that the ballroom wasn't near the center of the house. Unfortunate, that.

He whistled cheerfully as he dragged a janitor that had stumbled onto what he was doing. Kimblee lacked strength, but he was faster than he looked, and a point-blank explosion threw the errant janitor into a wall hard enough to knock him unconcscious. And to think that he had been thinking of capturing more people; it had been annoying charming people into coming into isolated buildings and old houses, transmuting little rooms to hide them in so they could play their parts. On the other hand, most of the places he'd picked for their particular positions relative to Foster's on the map he'd acquired, confusing as it was, had been inhabited. Not by much; three of them had been either shared with roommmates, a married couple and an old woman and the last had been a small family. _That _had been a pain; charming his way into their home, incapacitating them and dragging them into their basement. That one child had screamed like the dickens and his mother had rushed in with a _chainsword_ and...well, if Ghostfreak hadn't given him the armored skin of a Arburian Pelarota, he might have lost bits of himself there. Still, while he had been tying them up, he'd entertained them with stories of his job in Ishbal. He didn't understand why they cursed and swore and hated him for it. Sometimes people were so...inexplicable.

Luckily, _this _building, a stout and boxlike affair, was a news station that was currently in disuse owing to the operators having moved to a peaceful island home to a easy-going culture of sentient penguins with a thing for surfing. It still had to be regularily maintained for whoever wanted it next and thus the hard-working representative of the Guild of Maintanence Technicians had found himself as an unwitting resource for Kimblee to exploit.

Kimblee didn't _need _to transmute a hole in the floor, where the exact center of the house and dump him into it before tying him up with bonds of stone molded from the floor, but he didn't want screaming to get in the way. This was a delicate operation.

The janitor woke up before Kimblee had gotten out, however, and immediately made a fuss. "Wha' the hell's goin' on..." He blinked, realizing that he was in a pit with rings of stone wrapped around him. Kimblee was looking down on him in more ways then one, smiling oddly. "Ah crap damnit."

"Poor choice of words," Kimblee said. "Everyone should be a professional, Mr. Janitor."

"I'm a professional maintenence technician!" The maintenence technician, whose name was Dusty (he liked to assure people that it was not an ironic name), snapped. "And what do you think you're doing! You're not supposed to be here!"

"What if I was scoping the place out to see if I wanted it for my own?" Kimblee asked.

"That'd be different then, but you were making a big hole in the ground." He frowned, looking around him. "This hole, as a matter of fact. And you didn't even explain yourself!"

"You didn't give me much of a chance."

"Yeah well...you were being suspicious and stuff, I thought you were planting bombs!"

Kimblee laughed softly. "Funny you should say that." He clapped his hands and touching the ground; the ladder he'd made from the stone broke apart, a tiny explosion cracking the stone enough to shatter them. No one could have heard it.

Dusty frowned. "...What _are _you doing?"

"Only my duty to the world that is to come," Kimblee said softly. "I want to see how this will all turn out you know...the war that's going to come. The flood of the deepest darkness. The worlds of the Light drowning and burning to the last as every awful blackest thing arises from the depths of the multiverse's worst nightmares..."

Dusty blinked. "What?"

Kimblee ignored him. "They will come, heroes and soft villains alike to oppose us but they will fail, our foot soldiers will tear the light from their husks and make it one of theirs and they will grow like the most wonderful army ever, stamped with our crest after we tamed the wild ones and gave the newborns a shape to take, and they will never stop swarming in our name..."

"Did you take something?" Dusty asked. "Because this sort of thing can't be healthy."

...The Lower Planes themselves will be opened, and all the demons and devils and those other fun fiends will be free to kill each other and enslave the weak and teach the willing of the perfection of freedom from the lies of moral strictures and everything will _burn burn burn burn_. So many screams and so much crying...it will be so beautiful."

Dusty stared at Kimblee. "If you aren't on something," He said evenly after a moment. "You should probably get on something. You need medication bad."

Kimblee shrugged. "I'd rather not pollute myself like that." He smiled at the circle Dusty was in, that perfect little circle. A eye in the earth, fit for the flow of the earth's essence to flow into, pool over and spill back out.

He loved it when things came together like this.

"So, what now?" Dusty asked sarcastically. "Hold me in this pit until the Council of Insert Nomenclature throws money at you? Because they don't _have _money. They work with the town, not the other way around. And the Guild would sooner march down here and feed you to the shark-cats then waste it on you...wait, you're not even listening to me."

Kimblee was looking at a piece of paper he'd pulled from his pocket. "Yes, I'm sure the weather is lovely in the autumn but the seagulls are a bother."

"Great." Dusty grimaced. "I get the psycho that can't even pay attention to what he's doing."

"You know, I may be a combat specialist," Kimblee said. "But I'm not amatuer at medical alchemy. I have to know a fair bit to alter the makeup of a human body, you know. It's not easy; biological bodies are _much _more intricate and difficult than inanimate objects or natural phenomenon. So many little ways to fail, so much interconnected physical systems you have to sift through without damaging if you want to get your goal just right...and that's without isolating specific chemicals and elements within the human body like I do."

"Oh joy, a rant. At least you're none complaining about how your Daddy never loved you."

"Hmn? Oh, I had a good homelife. A bit out of focus, and I imagine my mother was a bit disappointed in me for not looking Amestrian enough, but enough of that." He looked at the paper a bit more. "Hmn...eight is what Crowley recommended, but I worked out how to alter the diagram enough to keep it balanced without destablizing the condensation process...from eight to five. The circles...doing this _eight _times would have been difficult. Figuring out how to translate the map into dimensions that make sense wasted enough time, I don't need to have to pull everyone I saw into this mess."

"What." Dusty stared. "You mean you're doing this to other people!"

"With great enthusiasm."

"You son of a...a...lady of questionable decorum!"

Kimblee raised an eyebrow.

"My ma raised me to be good to women," Dusty said. "No man ought to said rude things about a lady, you know."

"Ah, respect is something that no one seems to care about anymore," Kimblee said sadly.

"Too right. I mean, I love cats. Used to raise kittens until they made me charge rent because they felt bad about freeloading. And all my friends thought it was unmanly, said I should raise dogs. Why is that, huh? Why are cats unmanly, and why should it have anything to do with me being a good guy?"

"Useless stereotypes. People simply _must _apply them to everything, espicially when it makes no sense."

"You got a point there. Cats, at their worst, are savage little sociopaths that kill because they're born for it, not because they're hungry. A cat's nature's most efficient killing machine; claws to catch and slash, teeth to sever and tear. They're not feminine anymore than dogs are masculine; they just are and it's stupid to distinct them on that."

"I agree with you completely."

Dusty blinked. "Why am I being friendly with you? You knocked me unconscious, threw me in this hole, tied me up somehow and already did it to other people."

Kimblee shrugged. "Stockholm Syndrome works very fast these days."

"Psh, you say so." Dusty frowned. He felt...weird. A little dizzy, somewhat sluggish and it hurt to move. And he felt pale. "I don't feel right."

"Oh, that's because I alchemically fused the sulfer in your body and the iron in your blood with the carbon elements present in your physical structure into a gunpower substance that even now are absorbing oxygen through your blood with your every breath for about, oh, ten minutes. It was a bit difficult, but fortunately you eat the right foods so it wasn't hard."

"Oh, that'd explain it." Dusty froze. "Wait. What."

"I doubt you'd like a further explanation. Good bye." Kimblee clapped his hands together and put his hands on the ground. "...I can't have you making noise. If people come to rescue you, it'll be a nice big mess when the time comes, but I can't risk you being moved. The circle must be made or I'll be very annoyed indeed."

"What!"

"That particular mixture inside is very volatile. It'll make a nice big..._mess_. And plenty of destruction. When it all happens, I'll try not to be distracted by the sound of it."

"I don't understand."

"Oh, you will, don't worry. And I'm not telling you anymore. It'll be a _surprise_."

There was a flash of blue light from Kimblee's hands, and the hole over Dusty's head sealed itself, cutting off anything else he had to say.

Kimblee tapped a hand on the resealed floor; it wasn't going to interrupt the circle, as long as the circle itself stayed intact. It produced a hollow sound, and he could hear Dusty's faint but noticable yells. "Good enough," He said, and stood up.

_Time to move on, I think,_ Ghostfreak said; shortly since his promise of help (which Kimblee didn't entirely trust; the Ectonurite was being entirely _too _helpful for the leader of a terrifying hive mind), he'd adopted a slightly paternal approach to things, even if Kimblee hadn't explained anything about it yet.

"That _would _be the fifth one," Kimblee said. "And that's it. Now I simply need to get back to my spot, and wait. I will activate the circle at the appropiate time."

"Hello?" Dusty yelled. "The hell did you do that for!"

_Not that I'm interested in whatever you're doing,_ Kevin said. _But I got a point I need to make. What I know about alchemy is about the same that my old enemy Ben knows about anything outside of the Sumo Slammers series, but don't you need an actual CIRCLE for transmutation circles? You're just doing weird stuff to people that live in houses on your map._

"Oh, there will be a circle," Kimblee said. "If the dust clouds don't make one just long enough to activate the transmutation, the collateral damage certainly will."

"Let me out of here!" Dusty yelled. "I don't afraid of anything but enclosed spaces! Which doesn't make sense, given my occupation as a maintenence technician. Or grammatical sense. 'Don't afraid of anything'...what was I thinking!"

_What dust clouds?_ Ghostfreak and Keven both asked, ignoring Dusty.

Kimblee smirked and started to speak. "You can enclose me in the earth, but you can't silence my song of protest! In the form of _yodeling!_" Dusty interrupted. "Yoh-de leh, yoh-de leh, yoh-de lah _hee HOO! Yoh-de leh, yoh-de leh, yoh-de lah hee HOO!_"

Kimblee stamped on the ground. "Be quiet or I'll come in there and talk nihilism at you!"

"That doesn't sound very threatening."

"Neither does the combination of a pressure cooker and a steam gauge assembly, but tell that to the Railway Rifle! Although it's fairly inaccurate, I will admit...shut up...anyway, my plan. That I am most certainly NOT telling to you, Mr. Maintenence Technician."

"Then who are you telling it to?"

"The voices in my head."

"Oh, okay then." In Traverse Town, this was considered an acceptable excuse for talking to yourself in public.

"Bye," Kimblee told him. He didn't feel like getting a resource in his business. (Granted, he was realistically beyond the point where he was capable of complaining about that, but it was the principle of the thing.)

Dusty muttered and sat down on the floor, not feeling terribly put out. "Eh, whatever." He started doodling in the dust, to his contentment.

Unaware of this, Kimblee left the building and stepped out onto a street that, even nearing noon, was fairly uncrowded except by a few lazy drivers (a few of which had flying cars) and some other people. _Where were we before that obnoxious man interrupted you? _Ghostfreak asked.

"I was asked about the dust clouds."

_Ah._

"And I already told you, I'm not spoiling the surprise."

_Curses!_

Kimblee glanced around the abandoned studio. "...I suppose there's plenty of raw material around here I could repurpose for insurance purposes." He smiled and got back to work.

...

Morte was, by nature, a suspicious person. He didn't want to be; he tried, day after day and moment after moment, to be better than that. In the depths of his sarcastic, jaded and traumatized heart, he _cared _about people and wanted to see theme do good because they _wanted _to, not because some nebulous authority told them to or they believed it was the only way to escape the horrors their own psychological and karmic baggage would hoist on them after death.

In this respect, his present company of Aang, Danny and even Scar satisfied his wishes for genuinely good people. Admittedly, he was surprised by how fast Aang and Danny had acclimated to the essential weirdness of Traverse Town. He suspected that the boys were suppressing the horrors they'd seen just to function; Danny certainly was, if his slightly distant act was any indication.

Aang, in spite of being a self-confessed genocide survivor-by-accident, was...more nebulous. "Hi!" He said cheerfully while they were stopped at a convienience store, addressing a horrible vaugely humanoid twice the size of a man with barklike skin, the stature of an ape, a mouthful of fangs to complement the huge tusks and horns growing like fearsome branches and a head that looked flipped upside-down. It was also pushing a sales stall on wheels.

"Hey," Danny said, not batting an eye.

Appa, happily eating his fill from a feeding trough put in place for vegetarian animal companions like him and filled to the brim with straw from an adjoining dispenser, glanced up at the stranger, took his measure of it and concluded that it was no threat to him, Aang or their companions and lowed a response. Momo, perched on a horn and eating an apple that'd come from a refrigerated dispensor, paid no attention at all.

The plant-beast rumble-burped-coughed a reply in a language incomprehensible to them. (Even Morte, who'd spent a fair share of time in a sub-dimension occupied by plants, four planets of sentient trees, a plane of goodness where the forest primeval lived and loved it's inhabitants and a lot of other places of that sort, only understood a little bit of what it said.) Fortunately, the rather intricate and gaudily colored tunic-and-robe it was wearing had a small translator badge pinned to it's concave chest; it beeped and said, "And hello to you too!"

Morte, not knowing much about Traverse Town, had been all too pleased to run around a bit with Aang, Danny and Scar; they seemed the least annoying of the group (though he was coming to reconsider that for Aang), none of them had shown any interest in making trouble that'd give Morte problems and since Danny and Aang seemed interested in their new environment and Scar was willing to exposit when asked, it had been a good oppertunity for him. Morte had, like he usually was in matters of this sort, been proven right. They had left the mall and explored the First District, not hurrying, rushing around or generally being too hasty. This suited their temperments; Danny still acted like he wasn't all there most of the time, Scar seemed to dislike impulsiveness and Aang...well, Morte had been around Aang for a very short time but he'd seen how excitable he could be in the right conditions, but theat that earlier enthusiasm had cooled down into an inquistitive attitude; he seemed to be taking this as a guided tour. Morte concluded that Aang was sufficiently in tune with the element of air that he had become like it, changing here and there to sudden extremes without warning.

The thought disturbed him. The idea that the incarnation of a planet in human form, with all the power and weaknesses that implied, being prone to sudden extreme mood swings was not a pleasant one. And given the negative attitudes that the elements of water, earth and _fire _might have on him, those extremes could be very bad indeed. (Morte, clearly, did not know Aang very well.)

The others were just as worrying in their own ways. Morte had seen people like Danny before, splintering-glass people trying not to scream at the horror in their heads, and it was not a pretty sight. It was a good thing he had good people around him, because when people broke, you never knew if you could get the pieces put back together right. Appa and Momo ignored Morte completely, and he returned the favor (aside from some musing about how dangerous a ten-ton manatee-bison hybrid with the power of aerokinesis could actually be). _Scar, _on the other hand...well, he was incredibly terrifying in a quiet way. He reminded Morte a little of the old Chief when he'd been in his moments of quietly hating the universe because of it's injustice.

Thinking about the Chief hurt these days. It made the loneliness hurt worse. Almost as bad as how much that Jarod guy reminded him of the Chief, but he preferred not to think about that.

Scar looked like someone who honestly believed that for him and his kind, the entire world he was born had been his enemy. People like that were often accurate and rarely disappointed in their expectations. In spite of that, he was a pretty cool guy; among the Crossguard, his seriousness apparently made him the odd man out, or so Morte guessed from what Scar had said about his fellows in his faction. Aang, who seemed to make up his mind pretty quick about people when he had enough first-hand experience with them, clearly liked him dispite Scar's tactiturn and grouchy demeanor, probably because Scar had paid for Momo and Appa's food and refused to let them even _consider _indebting themeselves to salesmen (in Traverse Town, it was the done thing for new people to pay for stuff with favors or bartering, depending on what would be more valuable), while Danny was a little more distant, but then he seemed to be a few phases out of conjunction with reality as it was.

Scar, in spite of Morte's misgivings, was a pretty good tour guide. So far, he'd taken the prospective new residents towards, among other things, a mechanic-engineer that specialized in small personal vehicles that could fly, drive fast or operate underwater; a musuem of the town that collected and preserved artifacts of the factions, which was a good oppertunity for Scar to enlighten his group about the factions and his role in the Crossguard as a hunter of fugitives from justice when he wasn't working with Abel on missions; a statue dedicated to the man who had helped design most of Traverse Town's law system and their form of 'Lazy Justice' (if they're okay people, aren't doing anything heinous, don't ask for help and aren't monsters that need to be put down, let them solve their own problems) and was the unofficial leader of the 'sixth faction', the group collectively known as the Orphans because they weren't part of any faction at all, Bruce Wayne, more popularily known as the fearsome vigilante called the Batman; the world's largest ball of razor floss (once used as the favored means of execution in a distant country on their world by cat-people with a sick sense of humor); and a truly magnificent library with books, reference volumes, holy texts, biographies, spotter's guides, knowledge databases and other forms of information collected from dozens of worlds, all in honor of a great man named Charles Xavier that Scar, and other people, evidentally held in high esteem. Their most recent stop was this convienience store, which had apparently been where a number of high-profile adventurers liked to shop. No one tried to rob it ever, in the basis that anyone stupid enough to rob a place that is frequented by professional adventurers is too stupid to deserve to live anymore. Scar had gone in, reducing the total amount of evil intent around the neighborhood by sixty percent with his presence alone, all to fetch them refreshments out of hospitality. (Except Morte, who hadn't wanted anything.)

The whole time, Scar seemed to have a goal in mind. Wherever he was leading them, he was in no hurry, instead herding them towards whatever seemed interesting or informative. While his precise definition of this was a bit strange, it had gone over quite well with Danny and Aang. Even Morte had relaxed a little and was enjoying the day before something bad happened to ruin it like it always did. And the three of them were learning a lot; about the way the town worked, the amiably anarchic nature of the town, the bare-bones political structure, the near-constant attacks by exiled megalomaniacs, madmen who commited horrible crimes and would-be conquerers from across the world, the differences between the districts, the many strange and interesting native anthropomorphic animals and naturalized alien races that shared the world with them, the remnants of a bygone culture dead a thousand years ago but with such frighteningly advanced technology designed for warfare and national infrastructure that even today scavenged artifacts were commonly used and reverse-engineered all over the world...

Scar had taken them to many places; noble places that showed the hard-won peace the town had made with the world's other inhabitants, like the gallerys of art that proudly displayed souviners bought from the other nations of the world that Traverse Town honored by guarding them from dispoilers, like _Rain Maker_, the suit of powered armor once owned by the guerrila warrior Asosaki of the Ajaba hyena-people in the Sunland desert until he had been crippled killing the mass-murdering lion warlord Black Tooth. On the more sombre side, Scar had shown them the Necropolis, a building made entire from ink-black metal polished until it shone like a beacon in the sunlight, a small complex extending underground with names carved into every available surface of the walls with a short biography and dates of birth and death when they could be confirmed, and so very many pictures of people, lost friends and sundered family members on little alters surronded by dozens of little candles lit, little flames against the darkness. Sometimes, instead of alters, there were coffins and biers, still memorized with the pictures of the dead; according to Scar, the Necropolis was a memorial and buriel place for the few that didn't die under the Heartless' claws or dark sorcery, but either as victims or in the line of duty: repulsing the few truly serious assaults on Traverse Town, the most recent being a full-fledged alien attack by the warlike Lowardians that had left more than a third of the town ruined and almost the entirety of the former Factory District in ruins, dozens of people dead. There weren't many bodies left to honor, usually, even when the dead didn't come back as shadow-monsters corrupted and insane.

Morte thought it was...nice.

The plant-beast moved on, and Scar soon emerged from the convienience store, bearing drinks for everyone. "Oy, room service, we're over here," Morte said.

Scar gave him the kind of look that can kill with overexposure. "Okay, bad joke, sorry," Morte said.

Scar inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement and gave everyone their big fountain drinks. "You shouldn't be going to this much trouble over us," Danny said.

"That is a view you are free to express," Scar said. "Nevertheless. I must insist on it."

"This some kind of hospitality thing?" Morte asked. "You're from some kind of desert place? Hospality's the done thing in places like that, am I right?"

"True. Hospatality is an honored tradition of Ishbal, and only a madman would dare to impugn it. However, I am acting in a manner more consistent with something known as 'common human decency'."

"And that translates to giving us stuff for no reason how?"

"Because I feel like it is how."

"Skull-guy, stop being such a complainer!" Aang chided him. "We're having a nice day, don't go and make our tour guide mad by casting asperations on his goodwill."

"You're just siding with him because you're both tattooed monks," Danny said.

Aang and Scar looked at each other, glancing at each other's rather obvious (and cool) markings. "Am not," Aang decided.

Danny shrugged. "Mm, yeah, that." He took a long drink. When he had to stop to take a breath, his exhalation was clouded with frost. He frowned. "...There are ghosts around here."

"Yes," Scar said, not looking very surprised that Danny had seen so. "If you do not bother them or violate their laws, they will leave you alone. The problem is, they are very touchy, so I would advise you to be wary. Few of them care to be dangerous but they tend to make thing very irritating for everyone concerned."

Danny blinked and stared into space, perhaps looking for bursts of coldness or brief shimmers in the air or metal rattling so hard and fast it sounded like someone crying or any of the other ways ghost changed the world. Aang asked, "...I have had a weird feeling ever since I came to this place last night. Not a bad feeling, just this weird sort of...unfocused wonkiness, and not mind, it's coming from...somewhere else. It's kind of like when you're really tired after you just woke up." Noticing Scar's surprised look, he added, "I'm the incarnation of my planet's spirit, and the bridge between our plane of existence and their's. One foot in this world, another foot in their's; I can _sense _spirits when they're close, I know things about them. It's part of what I am."

"...I would reccomend you speak to my fellows in the Dimensional Sciences if you find the time," Scar said. "They know of this sort of thing. Communing with spirits, sharing their strengths, making peace with them...they're always trying to find ways to pacify the spirits of our land and determine why they act the way they do."

"What's weird about the way they act?" Morte asked shrewdly.

Scar thought about it; to buy some time, he dispensed more hay for Appa and gave Momo another apple in an absent sort of way. "Strange," he finally said. "Confused, from what I hear. Most are half-mad, though not unkind, but they all follow an alien logic that is very difficult to comprehend, let alone reason with. They are part of the chaos that makes the town unique. More often then not they contribute to it, setting into motion events to punish people who transgress on obscure metaphysical laws or posesses the unwary for their own means, though that is comparatively rare. Sometimes greater spirits appear, but not often. They do not seem to concern themselves too much with us, provided that we do not desecrate the remains of this town's original civilization. The problem is, we have not ascertained what they define as 'desecration'. They certainly do not care if we renovate, move into or use what the original culture left behind."

Aang frowned. "Spirits _normally _act like that. They're not like us exactly; their sense of morality isn't anything we would emphasize with. I get the feeling there's something else about them you're not telling me."

"...You are more perceptive than you let on," Scar said, after a brief pause.

Morte didn't like where this sounded like it was going.

"The spirits of this town...are largely quiet to us. For a long time, they were utterly silent; until the first shamans, spirit-speakers and dimensional-technicians appeared here, they normally only awoke to viciously punish those who angered them." Scar paused. "I have seen many horrible things in my life. What the spirits do to those than enrage them is a difficult one to top." He shook his head. "You recall that one exihibit in the museum I showed you? The one that detailed the town's period of lawlessness and rule by strength alone?" They nodded, though Morte privately noted that it was still pretty lawless. "The spirits were at their very worst then; the shaman-priests have theorized that the emotions of anger, despair and hatred, combined with the violence and brutality of Razorbeard and Panda Bubba and the other thugs inflamed their darker natures and influenced them into despising us."

Aang nodded. "Spirits are sensitive to currents in human behavior. I remember, after the big war back home, I spent a long time back in this big city called Ba Sing Se pacifying the spirits; the war back home turned the city into a dytopian nightmare, and the spirits of Ba Sing Se didn't like that at all. Everyone was constantly watched...they could be taken away by the secret Dai Li agents at anytime, just disappear into the earth and maybe not be seen again. And if they were...it wasn't them anymore. _Mindbending_." He shook his head. "The spirits of the city, dwellers of the hearth, guardian spirits of families and the very spirits of the Earth King's rule itself at the behest of an ancient Avatar...when the Dai Li didn't pacify them or take them down when they turned into monsters from all the spiritual contimanation, they did...things. _Bad _things." He shivered. "You _really _don't want to know..."

"No," Scar said. "I believe I don't. And I might have an idea of what you mean. We had a similar situation here. Am I correct in believing that over time, the spirit's desposition improved?" Aang nodded earnestly. "It was the same here. After Roy Mustang and Gibbs rooted out the corruption in what is now the First District Downtown, they rallied the other decent people living here and together we defeated the other thugs that controlled our lives, exiled them, forced them into hiding or scared them into scattering across the world or even leaving the planet. Without their toxic influence, the spirit's calmed down. There were no more incidents of flayed bodies lying in the streets after whistling the wrong song over the wrong canal, no giant robots awakening and running amok, no more apartment complexes disappearing and reappearing inside a volcano somewhere. Now...they tend to do annoying things, such as instigate small incidents for their own reasons, but they do not seem to intend any casualities." Scar grimaced at that. "And even then, those are the awakened ones. The ones that still stir, dreaming their long memories of whatever was past, tend to effect things on a rather broader scale."

"'Dreaming'?" Danny said.

"You mean some of your spirits are...asleep? In a coma? Hurt?" Aang said.

"In a manner, all three. While many spirits of places have woken up overtime, often confused and angry at _everything _for no reason we understand, and other spirits have been born of our presence and actions, the vast number of spirits that should normally exist, such as an embodiment of the town, have yet to reveal themselves. My brothers and sisters in the Crossguard who know of such things tell me that those spirits sleep; the few they have found evidence of have their essence scattered in the very metal of our homeland. There is evidence that the ancient civilization that once inhabited this world and gave us the vast numbers of technology we and our native allies use were kind to some of the spirits, and...less kind to others."

"This the same one you told us about in the museum?" Morte asked. "Not that we got much out of it. Not a whole lot of information, there."

Scar shook his head. "No, I suppose not. I think that we will need another stop." He looked at the area around them, as if comparing them to an internal map. "Hmn...I didn't think we would look at that thing just _yet_, but this is as good a time as any..."

"To do what?"

"To see one of the fragments we have of our past." Scar looked up at the sky. He was probably thinking about some crazy philosophical weirdness like how thousands of years ago aliens once roamed Traverse Town just like they did, wielding technology so stupidly advanced that it took insane geniuses to reverse engineer the simple bits, but now no one knew what those people really did, what they looked or acted like, what they even were or why they had utterly vanished from the face of the planet. (As a matter of fact, this was exactly what he was thinking about.) "...Would you like to see it? It may answer a few questions about the shape of our world."

Morte wondered what he meant by that. Glancing at Danny (who looked largely indifferent) and Aang (who looked enthusastic), he said, "Awright, show us this thing you're talking about."

Scar nodded and looked back. "...Will your Sky Bison carry us again? It will take a shorter time to ride with him."

"Also be much more terrifying," Morte said. Appa had carried them around since they left the mall, but it hadn't been any easier for Morte; he just wasn't used to the wind.

Appa, seeming to conclude the inevitable, rumbled something benign. "He can do it," Aang said. He glanced at Scar. "You know, I think he likes you."

Appa lumbered over and licked Scar's head, tousling his hair. "...I have no idea why," Scar said, absently scratching a side of Appa's face.

"Maybe you just radiate 'monk' and the bison-thing likes it," Morte said. "Or, you know, the whole giving him food repeatedly thing."

"He's a _Sky Bison_," Scar and Aang corrected Morte; Scar had learned the proper term already, seeming to be one of those nitpicky people when it came to names.

Morte muttered about people that never stopped picking nits but he didn't stress the point. Danny helped him up into Appa's litter, and after securing their drinks and snacks safely, Appa took off into the air again, knocking a few hapless bystanders over. One swore revenge agaisnt the heavens for the indignity.

They followed Scar's directions, and it was a fairly short and uneventful flight, suggesting that he had been vaugely circling around this thing he wanted to show them for a while; the only thing of interest was a number of Flying Pokemon like the graceful Pidgeot or dangerous Starraptor that flew up to see what this newcomer to the air was. In less then ten minutes, Appa's horns and the sides of the litter had become the new perches for a flock of various flying creatures; Aang didn't mind, but the way they stared at Danny made him think that they were plotting against him. (They weren't.)

Scar knew the district well; without getting lost or anything, they eventually flew into a large plaza of some kind; a number of small specialized shops offering services such as firearm-equipped weapon maintenance and a mechanical prosthetics engineering shop, as well as a few homes in the shapes of their owner's heads. No one asked why, because in the middle of the square was a highly elaborate sculpture that held a massive piece of ancient wall with an unusual mural on it.

Aang shivered a bit for some reason, looking slightly uneasy as he brought Appa into the square proper and landed him in front of the odd thing, Appa coming to a gentle stop on the ground in front of the spiral-shaped sculpture that wall fragment had been affixed to, keeping it displayed proudly to the world, some transparent material on the front of the fragment to protect it from damage. "...It's a giant rock?"

"Uh, that's nice," Danny said a bit warily. "Very nice, good rock and stuff." He looked at it. "...Why would you guys put up a giant rock?"

"Maybe because all the _other _rivals from across the worlds stole all the other giant rocks!" Morte said sarcastically. "The scoundrels!"

"It is a key to the past of this world," Scar said, hopping off Appa's litter to the ground below; Danny and Aang followed his example after leaving their drinks behind, Aang grabbing Morte on the way down. Morte was grateful for the help. The three of them followed Scar as he led them to the steps of the sculpture and wall fragment, impressed and disturbed by it, Aang more than any of them; he looked slightly dazed.

To begin with, the sculpture itself had been carved out of a single piece of rock fused with the ground, shaped like a reverse waterfall made of jagged loops and whorls, growing more rough and strange right around the necks of a pair of ferocious dragon's-heads at the top of the sculpture gripping the top of the wall fragment in their teeth, every inch of the sculpture polished bright and gleaming. In fact, once you noticed the dragon's-heads, the whole sculpture looked increasingly like a pair of dragons: a large fold of the stone that at first just looked like craggy shapes suddenly looked like folded wings, the parts of the sculpture holding the wall fragment in place looked like tightly gripping claws, folds and crags in the lower part of the sculpture looked like two massive bodies with their tails forming the steps. The strange roughness appeared intentional, as though both dragons had been injured but were supporting one another: the overall effect was of two dragons holding up the fragment, their bodies close together in friendship and holding each other up.

The dragon-sculpture was strange, but beautiful. The wall fragment, though...it was cracked and faded, in spite of the obvious attempts at restoration made by the artist, but it was pretty obviously a sectioned view of the world, and was very realistically done to, down to the cartographic undersea valleys, the large ridges of mountains on the land, flat expanses of land that were alternatives plains and deserts. Because of this, Aang, Danny and Morte could easily see that the planet shown on the wall had two medium-sized continents on opposite sides of the world, both of them slightly _broken_; they were ragged and cracked, dozens of inland seas and huge rivers running through them, and they saw that there were dozens of islands across the world, archepelagoes of very diverse sizes, ranging from scattered clumps of fingernail-sized islands (which appeared no bigger than a deserted island realistically) and large chains of tropical islands, about four nearly as large as Austrialia. There were even islands in the continential inland seas; the overall effect was that someone broke the planet and had put the pieces back in a hurry but had just said 'screw it' to getting them right and had just done what worked.

That alone would have been pretty weird, but then there was the..._thing_. Engraved in the face of the upper continent was a massive malformed thing, every inch of it ragged and shaped so that whoever had etched this into the wall had been shaking when he did it. They saw spikes like organic spear blades, each one made of a thousand tiny scales that proved to be distorted faces on closer inspection, looping together and branching out and extending in a nightmarish fractal design. Huge tendrils were intertwined into the ground like massive roots, looping in and out of the continent itself, spikes growing out at random angles, and those tendrils seemed made of thousands of tiny shapes and forms, wounds so deeply together they had become part of each other, and a lot of them still had limbs and faces. And last, by some twisted work of genius, the artist had not given any indication of the form under those spines, but only a suggestion of shapeless horror, a warped thing that was nearly humanoid and bestial at once, and then again neither; it was surreal and defiant, a grossly beautiful horror that was too complex to grasp properly. Aang, who had a good eye for detail, thought that the many, many slits and gaps were supposed to be eyes. He hoped they were eyes, because he didn't want to think about what else they could be. And somehow, the thing seemed to be burning, every one of it's spines surronded with a slightly blurred shimmer engraved on the mural through unknown means. Perhaps they had been done with powered crystals or some stranger method, but they glowed harshly bright in the sunlight.

Aang stared at it, utterly horrified. He didn't say anything, he just stared at it like it was the most horrible thing ever made.

Danny was the first to speak at the..._wrongness _of the thing on the mural. "Okay. _What the hell is this!_"

Scar tapped a nearby sign. Aang went over to it and read, "'_Wall fragment found in the deserted Kageko island of the Ho'Kami Island chain by the famed researcher Edward Elric in what is believed to be the remains of an ancient library. This was the only intact piece of artwork recovered and is believed to depict a legend passed down by native cultures acorss the world, commonly known as The Coming of The Uncreator; this tells of the arrival of an evil god from beyond the stars that destroyed nearly all life on the planet before it joined with the earth in eternal rest. Other cultures alternatively refer to it as The Great Fire, The Dark Zeal and That Which Devours Time. Research on this legend is ongoing._' I...don't get it." He looked back at the giant rock and shuddered; he couldn't stand to look at it for more than a moment.

"No one does, I bet," Morte said. "That's what crazy architecture like this is for. Confusing people."

"As the exibits regarding the ancient artifacts may have led you to conclude, the ancient past of our world is a complete mystery," Scar said, ignoring the stupid comments. "There are _no _surviving civilizations from a period of history going back roughly twenty thousand years ago. If the natives are the remaining descendants of whoever they were, they either don't know what happened to the original inhabitants or they refuse to speak of it. We dont know who these people were, what they looked like and we espicially do not know what happened to them. It is clear that they were a very advanced culture though; their construction material is unknown to us but it is still largely intact on much of the world, proving that it has withstood the wear and tear of the ages. It somehow stores and amplifies solar power, creating clean energy we use in conjunction with Blue Eco to power our town, and we've found remaining bit of their technology that we've only just scratched the surface of. Much of our town's infrastructure was made by reverse-engineering what we've found." The quirk of his mouth might have been an ironic smirk. "And this is the greatest fruit of our research. A direct link to whatever these people believed in. An appaling thing...but it is strange, isn't it? It is virtually untouchable by modern tools, acid or paint cannot mar it, it's surface weathers all nature can attack it with and endure unscarred."

"So you guys brought this thing back to figure out why they went to the trouble of keeping it preserved in that ruined library you found it in?" Aang asked. Scar nodded. "Huh! No wonder you think it's important. Could be some kind of thing they built a legend around."

"Or maybe it's some kind of evil thing from a local religion," Danny guessed.

"I believe it is a allegorical depiction of an ancient disaster that seriously damaged this world," Scar said.

"Or maybe it's exactly what it looks like and those civilizations were wiped out by a incomprehensibly powerful eldritch abomination that reshaped the world and either left, was defeated after it was done killing people or was sealed away in to the planet itself, and this was some poor sap's describing just what happened after the fact." Morte said. "Seen it a million times."

Everyone looked at him for a moment, considered it, and passed it off. Except for one. "I hope not," Aang said, but he looked like he half-believed Morte.

"It'd never happen," Danny said, dismissively.

"What made you guess _that?_" Scar asked Morte.

Morte appeared to grimace. It was a good question how he did it. "I'll end up right, I just know I'll be. And I'll tell you all 'told you so' and you'll shut up and take your lumps."

"Doubtful," Scar said cooly. "Now, I've brought you here for another reason. Aside from the...artistic license..."

"By which you mean the ungodly abomination on it," Danny said. He looked at Aang, who was starting to look a little sick. "Hey. You okay?"

Aang nodded. "Uh, yeah, yeah, fine, just fine." He shuddered. "Yeah, nothing's wrong here..."

"Yes, that. Aside from it, this is a perfect cartographic representation of this world. _This _is the world you have come to. Aside from the monster-thing."

"Unless it's still here," Morte interrupted.

"No it's not. As you can see, our world is an island-themed one, and we are right here," Scar said, pointing to a spot off the coast of the southern continent, right between a mountain range girding the area like crossed arms and a inland sea that resembled a reverse peninsula; instead of a spot of land extending into the sea, it was a stretch of sea bordered by pincer-like sections of land. "Because we have mountains on one side and a narrow expanse of sea on the other, we have the advantage in any homeland attack situation." He then pointed to the rest of the continent. "The rest of this is occupied by a large number of native cultures consisting of varying species of anthropomorphic animals that exist in a federation called the Fire-Born; it originates with a legend not dissimilar to the one about the thing on the wall fragment, concerning how their ancestors died in fire and they have been reborn as who they are now."

"That doesn't make much sense," Danny said.

"Translation issues are always hard to get through."

"...If there's something I've learned, it's that where there's a relatively small group of people, there's people trying to kill them," Aang said. "Is there anyone like that on this world?"

"Unfortunately. There's a fair number of foes to test us; the ever-present criminals and outcasts that arrange, lead and cause innumerable incidents on a nearly weekly basis, the not-infrequent Heartless raid, various native cultures that attack our traders, roaming explorers or even the town directly for bragging rights, religious reasons or because they require our resources...but they are the most dangerous." Scar pointed to the northern continent. "The Automechanic Empire. A group of machine-based lifeforms that we believe to have survived the time of our precedessors, though we're not certain if they actually recall that time; none of the ones we've made peace with have told us anything, though the ones we know may simply not know anything of use. They have largely feuded with the other native cultures for their own reasons, according to our allies, but they particularily resent our presence; they regard it as an insult to their makers, the original inhabitants of Traverse Town. As I understand it, they were intensely loyal to their makers, and now serve the memory of them."

"That's a bit better than the usual evil machines that conquer to take out inferior organic life," Morte said. "They have a 'you're not my real Daddy' complex. Least they're more honest about it than most kids."

Aang hit the ground heavily, accidentally Earthbending a sizable dent in the ground. Scar and Morte looked around but Danny was already there, helping his friend back up. "Hey man! I knew something was wrong!"

"Not me," Aang muttered. "That thing, the giant rock, it's wrong, it's all wrong..."

"The hell's he saying?" Morte asked.

Appa lowed, nudging Scar and Morte aside as he made a beeline directly for Aang; he nuzzled him, clearly worried. "We need to go somewhere else," Danny said firmly. "Something's wrong with Aang."

"Already told you, it's the rock," Aang said.

"Yeah, yeah, the killer rock and stuff, hear that's a real problem in these parts..."

"Actually, they are," Scar said. "And a mountain that ate people before we blew it up."

"Not helping!"

"Hrm." Scar helped support Aang as Appa laid down so they coud get Aang in the litter more easily. Morte was able to join them with some effort and they left quickly; as soon as they were out of the way, Aang started recovering immediately, as confused as everyone else was, but after Danny made him drink some of his fountain drink on the ground that 'sugar makes everything better', he improvd immensely.

"What the heck was that?" Morte asked him. "You have a problem with fainting spells?"

"No, but I've seen a few. Never well-performed." This earned a round of stupified looks. "Right, bad joke, sorry."

"Are you all right?" Scar asked Aang. He sounded concerned. It was hard to tell; he had the same basic vauge scowl he always did.

"Yeah, fine." Aang shuddered again. "Something wasn't right with that giant rock."

"In what way?"

"Hey, don't be so pushy," Danny said, annoyed. "Something weird just happened and he almost fainted, you don't have to-"

"Really, I'm fine!" Aang seemed genuinely irritated. "Danny, seriously. You know me! If I can channel the spirits of all the Avatars before me and the vast potential of those to come, I can handle...whatever just happened." Danny didn't look convinced. "_Really_."

"...If you say so." Danny leaned back against the litter. He glanced at Scar, the tattooed warrior-monk looking at Aang with a strange detached interest. He looked thoughtful, but again, with his expression it was hard to tell. "Hey. I don't think anyone's told us. What's the name of this world? It's not going to be named after this town or something stupid like that, is it? Because that would be incredibly parochial."

"...No." Scar looked at him; Danny was a little unnerved. Scar had a alarmingly forthright look that was only a few degrees away from being a stone-cold glare. It was..._sharp_. Sharp like a katana, some hard metal beaten and broken and put back together over and over again until it had become something deadly and focused, a thing that would never bend until it was shattered completely.

"Do you mean 'no', you're not going to tell us, 'no' that's not it or 'no', screw us you dont give a crap?" Morte asked.

"...This world has a name, and not one that we have the town have guessed at." Scar tapped a finger on the litter-floor. "We have not been so presumptious to take that right away from the true inhabitants of this world."

"Huh?" Danny said.

"I think he means the natives," Aang said. "Whoever they are."

Scar inclined his head agreeably. "They gave this world a name long before any of us came here. Long before Ishbal was settled by my most ancient ancestors, I am certain. Perhaps before you became...whatever you are." This last bit was directed at Morte.

"Hey!"

Scar ignored him. "This world does have a name. One derived from the non-stop warfare and harsh conditions engendered by it's standing magical field. And that name is Crucible."

Aang rolled the word around in his mind for a bit. "That sounds nice," He offered. Danny frowned vaugely, not looking very pleased.

"Sounds fine to me," Morte said.

"Your inclinations flatter me," Scar said, and it was probably sarcasm. "Now...I believe there's an interesting museum near the inner part of the district that offers an amazing cross-section of artifacts from across the world you may find interesting." He raised an eyebrow laconically. "Ones that will not induce strange spiritual illnesses."

"Hah hah," Aang said sourly.

...

"...So if hadn't been for the donkey exploding, I never would have spent that year in college," Captain Razor said to Bloo, finishing a long-winded anecdote. "And that's how I got my degrees in engineering, computer science and other stuff."

They were still on the grounds of Foster's; it was a nice day, and it wasn't like they had anything better to do. Bloo, tied to a tree so he couldn't run away, groaned. "Okay, geez, fine, I get it, you can't get anywhere in life by using people to your own ends! Is that the moral already!"

"Huh?" Razor blinked. "No, I was just telling stories about my young adulthood before I joined the Enforcers. Jeez, you gotta lighten up, Bloo."

"Says the guy who tied him to a tree," Mac remarked, without any vitrol; Mac was teaching Eduardo how to play a children's trading card game while Wilt talked to Minimoose and Coco to puzzle out their sudden relationship (and figure out why Minimoose was hanging around them at all) and the guards Acting-Lieutenant Stature, Second-Lieutinent Freya, Warrent Officer Andre and a pair of lower-ranked guards Razor liked just hung around, taking it easy and being generally relaxed. Razor chuckled, taking Mac's remark with good humor. After Mr. Herrimen had sent him to catch Bloo without any instructions on what to do after, he had fallen back on Madame Foster's default means of dealing with troublemakers that did things beyond a certain extreme level (generally defined as trying to attack someone for no reason when it wasn't awesome, trying to awaken demonic spirits to ravage the world of Men or publically trolling), and in this case he had chosen to annoy Bloo until he gave up and cut a deal to behave for a while. It wasn't the most productive plan, but it was fun. Until Mr. Herrimen sent orders to do something, he needed something to occupy himself.

(Most people would point out that the leader of the private security team of a high-profile team would have better things to do with his time than harrass a mischief-maker. The proper point is that the people in this town had a more relaxed outlook on 'proper business protocol'.)

"We can do this all day, Bloo," Razor said.

"He might," Andre said. "Dis iz da Keptain sp'heaking, he _like _messin' vith hyu head!"

"Perhaps you could attend to repairing the defense systems?" Freya said loftily. "Certainly it would be a better use of your time than annoying this reprobate!"

"Hey!" Bloo said. "Who are you calling a reprobate? Why are you calling me a reprobate? What's a reprobate! Mac, help me out here!"

"Maybe we can get our own oliphant-bodyguard later," Mac said, not really listening. "Now, Eduardo, you _can't _summon more than one monster in one turn except if you use special cards."

"But the people in the show, they are always summoning _lots _of monsters in one turn!" Eduardo said.

"Sorry, but the show's not very good at depicting this game. I'm not honestly sure if they even know the rules of the game! I mean, they usually win duels through blind luck, contriviance and the writers blatantly pulling cards out of nowhere JUST when it helps them the most. Not to mention resorting to card games for absolutely EVERYTHING. Why would a bad guy that wants to kill everything need cards for that, anyway?"

Minimoose squeaked something. "'I like the abridged Internet show better'," Wilt translated.

"Oh yeah," Said a random guard, a teenaged girl named Nidah said; she was wearing her uniform as conservatively as she could, and had the dark skin, red eyes and white hair characterisitic of an Ishbalan. More particularily, she had a terrible scar going across the lower side of her jaw, like it had been nearly removed by high-impact sharpnel. "Never liked the real show, to be honest; the abridged series is way funnier! Espicially when they get cameos from guys like the Cartoon Guy, infamous Internet reviewer of animated series and films!"

"I like that guy's show," Wilt said. "He's kind of snarky, but he's still nice about it, except when they REALLY need him to say mean stuff about it! Even if a lot of stuff he says doesn't make sense or he likes to go on about continuity to put stuff into context."

"He's actually Ron Stoppable," Stature remarked, grinning widely. The others stared at her. "It's true! He hides his tail and wears a pretty hat, glasses and a wig for the reviews, but you can tell it's him! Just listen when he starts going off on a rant about something or starts rambling, and you can tell."

"Hey, does this mean that the Film Lady, the amusingly abrasive and scathing reviewer of popular movies of all sorts, is his girlfriend?" Bloo asked. "I mean, I don't know them personally, but I've seen them a few times. She looks a lot like the Film Lady!"

"Huh," Razor said. "If she did up her hair in braids, put on a nice hat, got really big glasses and dressed like a punk...yeah, looks like!"

"Maybe would 'splain vy she go and start dating him in de skits dey do sometimez for charity schtuff," Andre said. He stared into space. "...I mizz her..."

"Miss who?" Wilt asked.

"...My true luff. The von dearest to my heart, the voman I szhall luff forever! I shtill haff de scar from her darling hands, de voman who ist more dangerous than a bag full of knives! _VON PINN!_" He started to sob theatrically and pulled out a terrifying huge bloodstained knife. "Look at dis darlink utensil of stabbiness! Admire it's sheen, it's deadly efficiency, it's wonderful curves and sharp lines! Designed for the purpose of killing and serrated so that the pain tears, though it is built not to kill but protect! So like Von Pinn! Hy named it in her honor, but it iz no replacement for _HER!_" He started to cry until he was distracted by the clouds over the mansion. "Hee hee, lookit zat! Dat von lookz like a taco! And zat von looks like a muffin! Un zat von looks like a bear! Hy luff bears! Und zat von looks like a bear-shark! Even better! And zat von looks like a man in white 'cept for his hat climbing up the house wall! Wait, zat's not a cloud."

The others had tuned out his babble, so they missed this last crucial point. This is a good reason to never entirely ignore the guy who spits in word salads.

"So I heard you guys met some new refugees last night," Another low-ranking guard said to Bloo; he was a small squat humanoid bat-person named Hertz,. his uniform modified for the leathery membranes stretching from his wing-fingers to his body, a pair of goggles for his light-sensitive eyes and a hat shaped so that his elongated ears wouldn't knock it off. Unlike many others in town, this grey-furred fellow wasn't a refugee, but had been born to a clan of the great mountain-dwelling bat people of the mountain range outside Traverse Town; he had once met a traveling salesman from Traverse Town who had been called in to fix some TVs from Traverse Town that had neglected to include repair instructions. (They otherwise had little problems with machinery, being a bit adept with them and powering them with geothermal energy from heatvents under the mountains.) Impressed by him, he had returned to Traverse Town to see what all the fuss was about and had many adventures, most recently a stint as a navigator on an airship and now a guard at Foster's, though he was primarily on the mechanic's crew and was expected to help repair the security system. "Think they have good life stories to sell to someone? Cartoons and movies have gotten a bit stale lately!"

"...If they do, the usual exaggerations and 'creative changes' are going to be _less impressive _than the real stuff," Bloo said. He had a thought; suppose those guys hadn't been told that it was the usual thing for newcomers to approach one of the entertainment guys that ran the studios in town and sell their life stories to them for a good amount of money if they were good enough. It was a good deal; the new guys could get around for a few months with that money while they figured out their niche, and the entertainment business got more fodder to spin into shows for the ever-hungry production mills, comic books, movies and novels. It was extremely rare for someone to be refused; _everyone _had a unusual story to tell. "The refugee I know is freaking nuts, and anybody that would actually be _friends _with would have to be almost as bad." In spite of that, Bloo had a plan for his next big scheme; get Zim and the other newbies to sell him their stories! He could picture it now; cartoons and tie-in comic books! Movies! _Endorsement deals from the big fast-food places!_

"Hey, you're dozing off," Razor said, poking him with a stick. "Pay attention, I have more pointless stories to bore you into submission!"

"Seriously, dere iz a guy up dere," Andre said. "...How de hell iz he climbin' like dat?"

Wilt's eye swiveled around and blinked. "...Huh, there _is _someone up there!"

"Don't humor Andre, Mr. Wilt," Stature said. "It'll only encourage him. The last time we listening to his crazy ramblings, we had to fight off an alien invasion in another dimension where sombreros are the symbol of kingship and the dominant lifeform were British cuckoo bird-people!"

"Dat was jest one time!" Andre said hotly. "Don't hyu mock me, leetle gurl!"

Stature narrowed her eyes and suddenly grew to the size of a small giant, reaching a daunting twelve and a half feet of height and a considerable increase in muscle mass (which, for some reason, tended for an increase along the arms, shoulders, legs and espicially the hips. It was just one of those things). "Who are you calling a 'little girl'!" She said, stomping on the ground and making a small crater, the impact knocking Andre (and everyone else) off their feet.

"My cards!" Eduardo wailed, scrambling in vain to pick them all up, but the game had already been ruined.

"Oh no! I'm sorry, Eduardo!" Stature said. She glared at Andre. "This is all YOUR FAULT!"

Most people would have been cautious when dealing with an angry woman so large that they were at face-level with her knee. Andre, being a Jagermonster (a supersoldier created by the Heterodyne family), was not one of those people. "Hyu, not-so-leetle-gurl!" He yelled, completely forgetting about the guy climbing, excited by the prospect of a good fight; Stature was a one-woman tank when she was in the mood. "But how is you messing up da cardz my fault, eh?"

Stature frowned. "I don't need to be taught logic by you!" She drew back, tensing for some tremendous act of enormous physical power that would probably involve Andre doing a remarkable imitation of a football or some other projectile.

Fortunately, there were clearer heads around. "Come on, calm down!" Mac said, running between the excitable Andre and the extra-extra-sizd Stature. "Can't you ever resolve arguments without trying to punt each other into the stratosphere or going crazy with a missle launcher?"

"Dere iz anudder vay?" Andre asked, puzzled.

Stature had a temper, but she was always eager to see reason. Inclining her head, she shrank down to her usual height and body shape, almost losing her footing; her center of gravity got a little wonky when she changed size quickly. Once she had her footing back, she knelt down to help Eduardo gather up his cards.

Minimoose peered up while Eduardo forlornly gathered up his cards. His eyes shifted to a setting similar to binoculars; he wasn't a very emotional robot by design, and he was generally focused on whatever goal he had at hand, but even he found himself unnerved by what he was looking at. He squeaked at Coco, inviting her to look at something. She squawked for clarification, and he squeaked an explanation of his capability of being used as a scope, adding exactly how that was done. Coco stared at him and then strutted behind him, looking awkward at staring into the screen that had appeared on his backside. It had certain connitions. These feeling passed when she clearly saw what Minimoose was looking at, the screen showing the world through his eyes.

"COCO! Coco cococo coco co!"

"What are you getting worked up about?" Razor asked, now flicking small things at Bloo and being surprised when a red shield repelled them; he knew Pokemon, and he knew what a Counter technique looked like when he saw one. Coco gestured frantically.

"What's she want?" Hertz asked.

"...She wants someone to look at something through Minimooose's...posterior."

"What's this about?" Nidah asked, walking over. "...Why does Coco's friend have a screen on?" She looked into it, a little disturbed by what she was doing. "...Huh, there actually _is _a guy climbing the building!"

"Andre was _right_?" Freya said, sounding like this constituted a serious warp in the nature of reality. "This is not normal!"

"Hy know, Hy'm scared too!" Andre said.

"What's he doing?" Hertz asked.

"Hard to tell," Razor said, having squeezed around Nidah. "Guy really likes white and...something's wrong with his arms and EW! THAT IS NOT RIGHT! ARMS SHOULD NOT LOOK LIKE THAT!"

"Urgh, it's like some kind of twisted half-Arachnachimp mutant!" Nidah said. "...Not that there's anything wrong with that..." (In Traverse Town, you learned to keep negative remarks to yourself. Sooner or later you were _going _to offend someone, no matter how obscure or absurd the remark was.) "What's he doing up there anyway? Taking the scenic route?"

"Could be," Wilt said, a bit ashamed that it wasn't that helpful. In honesty, it was perfectly normal for the more athletic of townsfolk to scale buildings through handholds, convienient balconies and piping, and various tricks of architecture specifically designed to encourage this because it reduced street traffic and besides, it made walking awesome.

There was nothing abnormal about this per se. Even the freakish mutations. (And again, in this town they have a different standard for 'freakish', most due to individuals forcing themselves to do so after a 'freak' taking their opinions the wrong way.) And yet there was something that didn't seem quite right about the way this man was doing it. He was moving slow, purposefully and with a cheerful implacability. He didn't slow down for obstacles, he just clambered around them, treating everything between him and his goal like an inconvienient fog.

"Huh," Razor said, focusing on this because it was his duty as a guard to see if a visitor was a potential threat. "Looks like he's trying to head towards the highest rooftop point...wait, he just got here. And it looks like he got suprised by some people already there."

"Should we go have a look?" Freya asked, flexing her well-toned legs. "I could have two others and myself up there in moments."

"Could just be a random tourist, we don't want to jump the gun or anything," Razor said. "I think...wait, his arms are doing something...they just turned human. Looks like we got us a shapeshifter, boys and girls!"

"And now he's clapping his hands," Nidah said, wondering briefly why the sight of this looking at a man high above sent a cold shiver up her spine, half-forgotten memories from her childhood, vauge shadows of the long-gone holy land of Ishbal dancing just behind her thoughts and crying _Run! Run!_ "Hey, he just grabbed Mr. Loikitz from the kitchen duty roster-"

An explosion intterupted her from the rooftop high above them, a bright flash of light and force that didn't make a loud noise so much that it made a wall of sound that was felt rather than heard; bits of roof flew overhead and hit the ground like shrapnel, a iron-fence broke against a tree and a number of people screamed as they fell from the air.

For a lot of people, there's a brief moment between the shock and the instinct to act; that pause is fatal so very often. Razor was more skilled then that. "STATURE! FREYA!" He yelled, the affability sliding away. "CATCH THEM!"

Freya didn't hesitate for even a second to judge the situation. She saw, she decided and she acted all at once, a lifetime of fighting life-or-death battles honing her battle reflexes to an edge that was proverbially sharp. She crouched low, her powerful leg muscles tensing under her uniform and her thin furred tail curving upwards to avoid impact. For a moment, she was there, grim and focused; the next, she had suddenly gone, and behind her was a small round imprint in the ground from the force of a singularily powerful push, and it had been strong enough to tear the grass from the ground like a shower.

Above in the air above her, already nearly halfway to a painful death on the ground, was a elf-like person named Seralat, of the people known as the Eldar, an ancient and powerful race known for their incredible powers; the species as a whole made it's stronghold in the Comic Kingdom where they had warred with, among other things, the civilization that was the ancestor of the Comic Kingdom and known as the Imperium of Man, but during the cessation of war if not total peace that had followed the restoration of the vast intersteller subdimension known as the Immaterium or the Warp, they had spread beyond their galaxy and even into other universes; this man came from such stock and was as far removed from his psychically-inclined ancestors as Hobbes was to a true Siberian tiger; he had chosen not to study the powers of his people but instead focused on building a mercantile empire to help found an interdimensional federation of worlds. He was begining to suspect that not bothering to even master some basic telekinesis had been a bad move.

This was no longer a problem as he abruptly vanished from mid-air; a instant later, Freya smashed onto the side of the wall of Fosters, her impact making a circular dent in the sturdy walls that would otherwise have warped steel if not for her carefulness. In her arms was Seralat. "I apologize for the discomfort," She told him as she slided down the wall, digging the clawed toes extending from her specially-made boots to slow their descent.

"What is going on here?" Seralat asked politely; he came to Traverse Town often enough. While nearly getting killed wasn't a novel experience for him, this manner of him escaping it certainly was.

"That is a good question. Hold a moment." She jumped again, nearly breaking the wall she bounced off, and intercepted another falling person in midair; a small autonomous mechanical robotic lifeform half her size. This one was a resident of the house, a female Transformer classified as a Minicon named Dingbot for various unflattering reasons concerning her sanity and penchant towards ill-advised experiments; one such experiment with portal apertures had unexpected thrust her into Traverse Town, and unable to find a way back to the planet she had been at, she decided to make the best of it. This may not have been the best idea. "No need to worry. I have you as well."

"Then what about you!" Dingbot cried, waving her arms and desperately wishing that she had trans-scanned something flight-capable when she had the chance. "Who gets you!"

"ME!" Stature yelled, her voice distorting to a roar as she abruptly swelled up to the size of a more literal giant, expanding to the point where she was easily able to catch the last falling civiliian. a foriegner of some sort named Lu-Tze who had been working as a non-descript cleaning man that did sweeping; in fact, he had been sweeping the rooftop before the explosion. Improbably, he was falling through the air without any trace of concern, smiling gently with his arms and legs crossed. He landed quite neatly onto Stature's helpful palm in a sitting position, doing it so easily he practically floated onto it. (It was a definite possibility. You never knew with little smiling men.) He watched with a detached interest as Stature gently grabbed Freya out of midair and put Freya, her passengerss and Lu-Tze on the ground. She glared at the man standing on top of the room and staring down at them; Stature considered if it would be a good idea to flick him so hard that he flew into the sky and came back down on something quite hard, but she decided against it; she might damage the house if she tried to finish this like that. Instead, she shrank down to her usual size, giving herself a slightly dizzy feeling as a significant amount of space she had just been occupying was now absent of Stature-territory.

"Hot slag on a positron engine!" Dingbot said.

"Not a good idea, making a engine that do that," Lu-Tze said.

"Shuddit, you...you...who the heck are you?"

"I think he's the new sweeping guy," Bloo said while Mac snuck behind the tree he was tied to to free him; something bad was about to happen and he didn't want his friend caught up in it when it wasn't his fault. Presumably.

"Right," Razor said, not really listening. "You guys, get out of here." He gave Mac a ironic look and slashed through the rope with curiously metallic claws, grabbing Bloo before he could hit the ground and setting him upright. "Stature, your powers aren't very collateral damage-preventive. Go and get an evacuation ready in case this turns ugly!"

"Got it, sir," Stature said, running off immediately and the lesser guards following her.. She didn't have to ask how to tell when she should get people moving out. She was a guard in Foster's Security; she would _know_.

"Andre? You're with me."

"Goot to hear it, boss-kitty!" Andre said, stretching his claws and snarling enthusiastically.

"Freya? Get us up there!"

"Of course," She said, grabbing Andre and Razor by their sides while they hooked their arms around her neck. She crouched down again, the two men looking uncomfortable with being pushed off-kilter, and then she was gone again in another spray of wind-shredded grass.

"What going on!" Eduardo cried out, completely horrified by all this and trying to stuff his precious cards in his pockets. "Who that up there? Why this fight happening!"

"All the really very bad shit is going down, I can tell you that!" Dingbot cried. "You guys run!" She transformed, her body coming apart, individual parts swiveling and rotating and locking into place and forming new parts until she had become a miniture motorized scooter. With jet engines on.

"Excuse me," Seralat said as he hopped aboard her. "Don't you fools forget to flee!" Dingbot's engines roared to flaming life and she literally rocketed away. The Foster's bunch couged from all the smoke.

"...We should be up there," Wilt said after a moment, staring at the roof. "We shouldn't leave them alone."

Coco squawked. "They might be hardened professionals," Mac said to her. "But we can't just sit here!"

"We can run," Eduardo said, though he did not look terribly enthusiastic. Eduardo was a coward; afraid of nearly everything and easy to turn fearful at the smallest signs of trouble. But he was still an imaginary friend, created from the heart of a young child and born of a purpose. And at his own heart, there was something where fear was not a factor, but a white-hot fury that roared to life at indignity, suffering and people in danger. He was a protector, a _guardian_. He wasn't supposed to run away.

"But what can we do!" Bloo asked desperately. It didn't sound like he was making an argument to flee. "And, wait, what are you doing?" This was addressed to Lu-Tze, who was amiably strolling through their group.

Lu-Tze moved very slightly. In the physics of the world, it was barely a twitch. For certain rules that went much deeper into more significant realms, it was the equvilant of a megaton punch. Wilt, Mac, Coco and Minimoose dropped, unconscious (or inactive) and made vauge noises of dazed people.

Bloo and Eduardo gaped. "...ARE YOU CRAZY?" Bloo said.

Lu-Tze smiled and nodded.

"It a ret...rhetetty...rhinoadon...question that you not need to answer!" Eduardo said. "WHAT YOU DO TO OUR FRIENDS!"

Lu-Tze pointed to the top of the roof. He made a gesture that suggested that while their friends were ordinarily competent and useful people to have around, this was a situation where they were better off out of it.

Bloo extended and waved psuedopod arms in frustration. "Whatever! Deal with you later, ya smarmy little sweepy guy...Eduardo, think you can carry everyone?"

"_Si_!" Eduardo said, gently scooping everyone up over his arms. Wilt danged a little because of his extreme height, but Eduardo had everyone secured.

"Uh...get them out of here! Like hide them somewhere where the collateral damage won't hit them." Eduardo ran off, careful not to jog anyone, and Bloo started to hurry after him and heisitated. He had a brief moment of thought, mostly relating to self-preservation instinct and more noble impulses and finally rushed back at the house the same way Stature had gone.

Lu-Tze smiled again. He looked up at the sky for a moment, seeming to be staring at something no one else could see. Something a bit _higher _in the grand scheme of the cosmic scheme. "Good enough," He said, half to himself, and he left.

Going back a little bit, around the time where Lu-Tze had done whatever he did to the Foster's friends and Minimoose, Kimblee (who else?) had been feeling a bit of satisfaction with the way things were going. He raised an eyebrow at the giant girl's brief appearance; they had all sorts in this town. Like the talking catman. Or the kangaroo-rat...thing that jumped as high as dragons flew.

He was making his way towards the alchemic circles hidden at the very top of the mansion, positioned right through the center of the house, when he became aware of movement. He turned and was surprised to see that same kangaroo-rat person he had just been thinking about appear high over his head, distangling a inhuman greenskinned _thing _from her; while still rising in the air from the power of her jump, she transfered her grip on him to his wrist and spun around with a mighty swirl of wind and a loud blast precipated that same green thing hurtling at him, as straight and fast as a spear, howling absurdities in a bizarre vaugely Germanic accent while it flew straight towards him, a roaring purplish aura shaped like a fierce dragon rippling around him.

Kimblee had time to blink at the absurdity of it. He did not have time to dodge before Andre slammed into him like the spear Freya had used him as and suffered the novel experience of being hit by over a hundred and fifty pounds of human mutated by mad science and an insane inability to die.

After Kimblee got back up and reassured himself that his stomach was still inside him despite the pressing feeling it wasn't, he glanced up to see Andre the Jagermonster grinning at him while Freya smash-landed behind him with a dignity that must have been very hard to carry with that sort of move. "_Guten morgen_," Andre said; it was hard to make out with his lips rolled back over his sharklike array of improbably pointed daggerlike teeth, his every breath whistling across their serrated inner edges and sounding like the whispering voices of a thousand furies were talking behind his every word.

"Please explain why you just kiled Mr. Loikitz, and nearly killed three others," Freya asked politely. "Perhaps we may be inclined to be merciful if you had a good reason."

"Because they were in the way," Kimblee said. "Because the sun flashed at the wrong moment and they suddenly annoyed me. Perhaps their existence was intolerable to me. Perhaps I simply wished to. I don't need a reason."

"That is not acceptable." Freya's eyes narrowed. It was a sight, barely glimpsed behind the eye-slots of a Dragon Knight's helmet, that had been a prime signal of sudden death for many an unwary evil dragon. "_You miserable little buckstick of a man._"

"I've heard worse," Kimblee said. He glanced around. "Wasn't there another one with you?"

He felt a heavy impact behind him followed by a larger furred - and curiously heavy - attacker that pulled Kimblee's hands behind his back with one hand and grabbed him in a headlock with another. "Freya threw me upwards after she opened with Andre," Razor hissed into his ear. "Sneak attack."

"Hyu lose," Andre said cheerfully. "Can Hy take a bit of him as a trophy? Mebbe a finger? A ear? Just a tooth! Hy put it onna necklace, trade it for stuff from Orks."

"...No," Razor said blandly. "I don't think so."

"I always find such compelling people," Kimblee said dryly. "And _always _ones that think I'm beaten so easily."

"You're restrained and unarmed," Freya pointed out.

Kimblee chuckled. "True. But then..." He tapped his palms together, which was easy enough the way Razor had them. "'Unarmed' is such a relative term these days, is it not?" With one of his hands, he was just barely able to tap Razor on the wrist; it was a moment of fleeting nearness, but it was all he needed to let the blue sparks fly.

"Huh?" Razor said. His arm seized, the skin of his forearm swelling up into rounded tumor-like growths the size of melons, spreading down his hand and as his fingers thickened, his grip loosening enough for Kimblee to tear himself away. "WHAT THE FU-"

The swelling cut him off in mid-curse, unexpectedly exploding. Razor went flying into a nearby elevator wall, blackened by smoke and collapsing after hitting the wall.

Andre and Freya stared at Kimblee. "What?" He said. "I'll tell you what I told the officers about the orphanage; it was a clear case of self-defense!"

Razor stumbled back up. "Ow. Explosions make pain happen." He glanced down; much of his uniform had been burned away, mostly on his right side. "Hey, you torched my outfit! You suck."

Kimblee blinked. "...You're still alive? I transmuted the flesh of your arm into explosives!"

"Yeah, well, it's not like I had a lot of flesh there to begin with." What Kimblee had thought had been skin had peeled away when it hadn't been burned completely and destroyed, not skin at but a cunningly designed imitation of it; now revealed was a complex and well-crafted series of flawless prosthetics that replaced much of the left side of Razor's body: his arm, his sides, some of his face...Razor grinned, the burnt fur on the right side of his face cracking as more fake skin stretched too much and sloughed off him, revealing an articulated complex for a good part of his lower jaw and muzzle. Perhaps amused by Kimblee's surprise, he waved the arm Kimblee had tried to transmute, and alll that was left of it was a damaged but very much intact prosthetic arm, bolstered by mechanical muscles that were amazingly still functional, sensory relays to replicate sensation and a complicated array of mechanisms to perfectly simulate arm functions and generally behave like the limb it replaced. There were a few improvements, not the least a set of metal claws forming the ends of his fingers and ordinarily buffered by the fake flesh and fur he'd been wearing. "Not everyone gets away from the Heartless with all their bits. I barely survived! Still, this nice kid named Victor Stone - he's called Cyborg now - fixed me up good. Everything works like the real thing and I designed imitation flesh to cover it up! Doesn't really work for guys who spring for exoskeletal designs like my buddy Cyborg..." He shrugged.

"Ah," Kimblee said. "No wonder. I introduced an unstable reaction into your arm, but since I was trying to transmute organic matter, it only affected your superficial coverings." He raised his hands, showing off his palms. "I shall have to recalculate."

"Hyu're an alkemisty guy!" Andre said in surprise.

"What?"

"He said that you're an alchemist," Freya said.

"Ah. I hate excessively thick accents." Kimblee glanced up at the sky; owing to all the Airbending going on earlier (not that Kimblee knew about that), it had gotten pretty cloudy. At least enough for his purposes. "Well, if you insist on interfering, I'll have to make you disappear as well." He shrugged. "I've got time."

"Time!" Razor said, realizing that someone more serious was going on than the usual random fighting. Of course, random villains or misguided extremists starting outrageous plans with excessive violence was normal around here, but they were more serious on general principles. "You have some kind of scheme going on!"

"You're trying to guess what I'm doing. How cute. He thinks he's people."

"Oh, that does it!" Razor pulled his pantsleg up, mercifully while dispite the explosion and tore the fake skin off his leg, revealing a metal leg. He dug his claws into an unusual disc on the side of his knee, inserting his claws into the notches on the edges and twisting hard; the front of his leg parted slightly and a hidden blade slid out, nearly going from his knee to his shin.

Kimblee frowned as Andre, Razor and Freya rushed at him. "...I really hate fistfights," He grumbled, in spite of Ghostfreak channeling the energy of the Omnitrix into his body to give him a Tetramand's strength, associated with his body swelling up into a grotesque mass of red-brown muscle, another pair of eyes splitting his forehead and his arms growing wider than he was and long enough to scrape his knuckles _and _his elbows on the ground as a second withered pair grew under his arms. He wondered what the point of those was. He fell into the battle regardless, hurredly listening to Ghostfreak's whispered instructions, the wisdom learned from a thousand dead foes; Kimblee needed it, as he was _horrible _at personal combat.

...

"A madman blew a number of people off the roof of the house and Captain Clawson believes he has something worse in mind?" Mr. Herrimen said, neatly summmerizing everything Stature had to say about the matter at hand.

"Yes!" Stature said. "He wants an evacuation readied!"

She, in an attempt to find someone of higher authority to get people's attention and correctly concluding that Mr. Herrimen was the logical choice, had cornered him in his office where he had been giving Bonnie, Zaphod and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass (who were seated rather than caged) a long and boring lecture about the proper way to express your issues with someone, such as a legitamate duel of some sort. Spike had been there too, mostly because he enjoyed torture when it wasn't him being tormented. (Sometimes he did when it was him, though. Spike had a warped mind.) Owing to the loud explosion that Stature had explained had already killed someone, it was not a time to be skeptical.

"...Do we really need to make a total emergency evacuation?" Mr. Herrimen asked. It was a two-pronged question.

"Sir, I know the problems that causes, and the stupidity in panicking over every incident that happens, but this guy killed Mr. Loikitz and blew a tourst, a sweeper and a resident off the roof with that explosion! I don't know how or why, but come on, from the looks of it he didn't even have a valid reason for doing it!"

"Ah, but what about the cost of it? You know what a emergency evacuation does to this house!"

"Yes. I do." Stature reminded herself to stay calm; Mr. Herrimen considered emotionality to be a disgraceful weakness and non-conducive towards keeping anyone alive. "And regarding your question...you know that things have been escalating lately. All the incidents from last night all around the town and not to do with the newcomers we've met...the criminals getting more gutsy and violent...someone _hacking _into our security system and leaving us completely defenseless! Last night, someone seems to have come here just to harrass some new guys and-" She froze. "Oh no."

"What's 'oh no'?" Spike asked laconically. "Suppose that you've made one of those unlikely little connections that screws everything."

"Sir. Our security system is down. _We are helpless_." Stature dwindled a little bit, her fear shrinking her before she got control of it. "However it got brought down, that could be a pre-emptery action on whoever's doing this! And I just realized, we can't activate the automated evacuation system with the securty down!"

Mr. Herrimen's fist tightened. "...Start an evacuation, then. With all due haste! What of Master Blooregard and the others? Captain Clawson was dealing with him!"

"He set him loose and told them to run; you know what Bloo's like, though. He's probably still in the thick of it somehow."

"...What a troublesome creature." Mr. Herrimen shook his head, but it seemed a compliment. "Master William?"

"Me?" Spike said.

"I have a deal for you in light of this. Find Miss Frances and escort her out of here and anyone else you find on the way! Make your way outside and then help stop this madman, whatever's he doing; you and the other three should be able to detain him at the very least. Be sure to capture him; I want a talk with this man! Consider this your community service to the house; I will consider your debt paid!"

"No problems here," Spike said, grabbing his sword from the side of his table and sheathing it in an improbable fashion again. "Save the girl, kill the freak. Not getting those mixed up, promise." They stared at him, aghast. "That was a joke. Mostly."

"No!" Stature said. "Mr. Herrimen said capture him! No killing unless you absolutely have to put him down like a rabid dog."

"Yeah, yeah, heard the first time." Spike started to leave.

"Wait!" Bonnie said, following after Spike. "I want in on some of that community service action! I'm paying my debt off too! Except not for the fighting thing."

"Me too!" Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said loyally.

"Eh, so long as I don't die," Zaphod said amiably, the two men following Bonnie.

"Wait, I didn't authorize that!" Mr. Herrimen protested. They ignored him and left. He sighed. "Acting-Lieutenant Lang, join up with Master William and help him; a woman in uniform and rank of good standing will do much for his authority. And try to keep those ruffians in line. If they can help, all to the good and I'll gladly accept their terms. But I don't want anyone panicking, you understand?"

"Certainly," Stature said. She saluted smartly and left.

"What about us?" Nidah asked.

"Go spread out and help in the evacuation; find as many guards as you can to comb through the house and get people out. It is fortunate that we already have so many residents either out in the town today or centralized in the ground level due to that bit of amusement they found earlier. But we cannot afford to have anyone missed! See to it!"

"Understood!" Mogo said. "What about you? The usual overseering bit?"

"Indeed. I shall remain here until the last and direct the process over the intercom. Alert me through it when it is appropiate for me to leave myself."

"...Sir," Nidah said, incling her head slightly. "Let's go," She said to Mogo, and the two left.

Mr. Herrimen watched them go and closed the door behind them; it was rude to leave the door open. Without making a sound, he hopped back to his chair. He did not tremble; he was too used to things like this to be so easily frightened. In the days when he had been new to Traverse Town, he had. Oh, how he had; for months, he had been a bruised bundle of nerves. It had taken years for him to acclimate properly, and he suspected that he would always be half-expecting the chaos to never be even close to fatal like it had been before the Heartless.

He sat down and paused, looking at the keybeard under his desk. He disliked the contraption and the monitor designed to flip out from the desk's top; he believed in manpower and self-adminstered filing, not in letting machines do proper work. (Usual machines, of course, he wasn't an robot-hater.) He was not all at used to the machine, having only accepted this after the Madame had pressured him into modernizing just a little bit.

Therefore, he was more than a little bewildered to see that the glass-shielded button that started the Emergency Evacuation system was lighting up now and again, that way it did when the house detected an obvious threat and reading the Emergency evacuation system. It was wrong somehow -the lighting was inconsistent and faint, like a dying person's heartrate monitor - but Mr. Herrimen distinctly remembered that it hadn't been on at all. It normally had a faint glow to it, possibly because of all the chaos around, but Mr. Herrimen was reasonably sure that it wasn't supposed to be lit up at all with the security systems out.

Deciding not to risk anything bad happening, he resolved to only risk the Emergency Evacuation button if things got...worse than usual. He glanced back at the large portrait behind him, showing the Madame herself. It was comforting; whenever he turned his chair to leave his desk or when he entered the room, she was the first thing he saw. At the moment, he felt terribly glad that she was abroad on behalf of the Council's business. (She dealt with them more often then he did; Mr. Herrimen disliked the atmopshere of what he considered recklessness and a lack of attention span among them. Commander-Admiral Armstrong and Mister Eisenhardt or whatever his name was were the exceptions to their anarchic outlooks.)

Composing himself, he hit a different button that activated the intercom, and spoke into a pleasantly archaic microphone feeding into the intercom.

"Friends, residents, tourists and newcomers, this is not a joke, a lie or a exercise of any sort..."

...

_"...So please listen closely! This is President Herrimen of the Household speaking, and I have been informed that there is currenly a battle going on between a number of our guards and a invading madman that attempted to kill one of our own residents without provocation! As your President, I am hearby ordering each and every one of you to evacuate immediately. Kindly do not interfere in the fight, but leave the house at once! Leave your posessions behind and assist anyone you encounter in evacuating! The Household shall care for you, but only if you are alive for it!"_

Mr. Herrimen continued in this general vein; a plainly worded speech urging escape and mutual aid. The ubiquitous speakers placed in every room of the house carried his mesage, and there was no one who didn't hear it. (Mr. Herrimen had tried to have cameras installed as well so he could actually SEE the people he was speaking to. Madame Foster had put her foot down because 'it's too creepy' and gave him a number of downer books set in dystopian settings to discourage this sort of thought; he hadn't brought it up since.)

Of course, some didn't believe it. No matter where you go, whether the gas giants at the outer edge of solar systems or worlds of floating plate-continents traveling in layers bourne on aetheric winds or asteroid-lands where sentient scraps of silicon evolved from constant exposure to cosmic storms, there will _always _be an idiot who refuses to listen to anything because they're too stubborn to do anything else, so blindly rebellious they might take a _Do Not Swim In Case of Crocodiles _as a personal affront to their freedom, or just an average idiot.

For these people, who would sit through an Apocalypse and complain that no one warned them about it when the angels made fun of them for being stupid afterwards, there was still hope; namely, the guards, which after the Spike messiness earlier had returned to theirs ususal routine of hanging around in large bunches and annoying people who had excessively big offense files. This made it a fairly simple matter for Spike to alert them to the matter at hand and get them to work evacuating the stubborn idiots who hadn't got the message.

Normally, Bonnie Rockwaller and her bunch of idiots were among that unhappy number; she was surprisingly charismatic in spite of her personality being roughly the same as a badger with chronic toothache, and had garnered a bit of influence among people and that made things a bit difficult when she didn't want people to do something, usually for her own petty reasons. It was a bit odd to see it work in his favor, actually.

"Get moving!" She yelled at a small group of her usual sychopants after explaining the situation to them in extremely clipped tones. It got them moving.

"Let's see, we're not far from the foyer," Spike said. "You lot, meaning Rockwaller and her minions-"

"Hey!" Zaphod said. "I'm not a minion! I'm just the guy that does stuff."

"Right, what you said, rush off to the dining hall and see if anyone's there. Kitchen staff is usually still there anyway, and meet with me in the foyer room!"

"Whatever you say," Bonnie said, and hurried away.

"Wait for us!" Nidah yelled at her, Mogo and her chasing after the itinerants. Spike didn't envy them their job of keeping those three out of trouble, but at least they could use their rabblerousing skills for something beneficient for one.

Speaking of rabblerousers, Spike heard a familiar voice, insulting people. "Slam-dancing orangutang pirates with slighshots and small dogs to do their evil bidding, that's how low on the lameness meter you jerks are!"

"SHUT UP, BLOO!" A crowd roared.

Spike blinked. _...Seriously_? He thought to himself. What was Bloo doing making trouble _now _of all times? Curious dispite himself, he quickly made his way to where he heard the voice coming from and soon discovered Bloo swiftly running away from a very large mob of residents, tourists and a few low-ranked guardsman, all of them absolutely furious.

He had no choice but to stare as they left for the very clear direction of the foyer, and a direct exit from the house. He also noticed that it took over a minute of high speed infuriated running for the mob to thin out a little. "...That's a lotta blighters he got there. Takes a bit of steam off the rest of us." For a moment he wondered if Bloo was actually _trying _to get people outside, and grinned; jerks often had hearts of gold, slightly tarnished though it often was. He was living proof. "Heh. Not bad."

"RUN, YOU IDIOT!" Frankie yelled, falling behind the rest of the group because she had been pushing the remains of what Spike remembered to be a huge clanking monster of a wheeled machine that was a combination vaccum cleaner, mop machine, air freshener, odor neutralizer, disinfectant factory and all kinds of other things that made it into the worlds perfect cleaning machine, if perhaps the least elegant one ever. "Oh, hey Spike."

"Mornin'," Spike said. "What's up with that?" He gestured at the direction Bloo had gone.

"He told me that there's a lunatic on the roof killing people, or trying to. Got it into his head to get people out of here by ticking them off bad enough to follow him outside. As if Mr. Herrimen's message wasn't enough...still, there's plenty of idiots who thought it was a waste of time with all the incidents we normally get slammed with. Never mind that they don't know about the security problems..."

"And the, uh, thing?" He pointed at the busted machine Frankie had.

"His idea. He rigged it to blow up somehow and caused a hell of a mess. Right in the middle of a crowded hallway. Mess went everywhere! And this was after a few other stunts he pulled; I heard some people ranting about mutant pirahnas with lasers on their heads backing up the toilets again, but to be fair that might not be related to Bloo. At least he managed to get all those people after him." She nudged the busted machine. "I figured that if I pretended that I was mad about it for real, more people would chase him down on my behalf. Wait, I am mad he did that!"

"You can belt him later. Wanna got take a quick turn and rustle up the rest of the layabouts?"

"Sure." The two of them ran off, leaving the useless machine behind.

Spike liked to drop in from time to time. Frankie worked as the head of maintence on the household; as a consequence, they were fairly used to this sort of thing. In a short amount of time, thanks to the fair amount of chaos that had enticed people out of their rooms to see what was going on (and most people not leaving the ground floor until a good deal after breakfast), they got a good-sized number of people heading towards the exit. (Bloo seemed to have egged on most of the people in the area, which was quite good.)

On the way, they passed the room where all the devices, computers and machinery pertaining to the house's security was kept. Frankie paused. "Say, you don't think...?"

"That we jump in there, fix the machines and evacuate everyone?" Spike said flatly. "Don't think it'd go. I'm no mechanist, and you're...well, there's a reason we got guys like Razor to handle this style of thing or outsource. And incidentally...that sort of thing takes a while to do. The system's _fried_, or whatever the techie word for a computer coma is."

Frankie frowned. "Just a thought." The door to the room opened and a amiable generically Asian face appeared. "Oh, hello...uh, what's your name...Lu-Tze."

Lu-Tze smiled, nodded and left, giving no indication what he had been doing there for the last few minutes ever since he manipulated Bloo into chasing more people out.

"...Isn't he a sweeper?" Spike asked. "The hell was he doing in there for?"

Frankie opened the door. The bewildering array of machinery within was, dispite all expectation, on-line. Or perhaps, to use a medical term more proper for Spike's 'coma' analogy, on life support.

She closed the door. "...By any chance, do you know if we hired him to do basic computer maintence or anything like that?"

"Shouldn't you know?" Spike asked. "You're the one that hires people!"

"Well, I didn't do it! As far as I know, he just showed up a week ago!" Frankie frowned. "And I'm not sure if Mr. Herrimen even knows he exists, Madame Foster likes hiring everyone she talks to (which leads to much irritation for everyone like when she hired that wrestler to be the house therapist), but if it was here she would have given him something more weird to do, like surprise everyone with a chansaw and hockey mask before bed to keep them on their toes."

"So, what, he just showed up one day?"

Frankie nodded. "Pretty much."

"...For some reason, that hits me as a weirdness out there even for this down," Spike grumbled.

...

_I am begining to think that you lack experience at fistfighting,_ Ghostfreak said coldly the third time Andre head-butted Kimblee hard enough to break his nose.

"At least I make an effort!" Kimblee said as he flailed at the Jagermonster; Andre, a much more experienced combatant, slid under his oversized Tetranmand's arm and rammed his elbow into Kimblee's gut. Even with the alien muscles half-melded with his own, it hurt bad.

_I give you Tetramand strength. I channel Petrosapien crystal skin, Vulpimancer muscles and the flame powers of a Pyronite, and still you falter! A pity Kevin won't help, he is good at this sort of thing when he isn't being beaten about by a stronger foe that wants to show it's strength..._

_Shut up,_ Kevin grumbled.

"Who iz hyu talkin' to?" Andre asked as he threw a punch at Kimblee; Kimblee could hear Ghostfreak whispering intstructions and ducked, dust and bits of wood settling on his head as Andre's punch went into the wall of a small elevator lift.

"The voices in my head."

"Ah, Hy see, that iz how it iz bein'. Get your face off my boot."

"But I haven't got my face in your-"

Andre kicked him in the face, and Kimblee slammed into the fence. "Hyu do now," Andre said, grinning madly as Kimblee hit the floor.

Kimblee got back up and grunted. This was proving tougher than he thought. Guards weren't supposed to be tough, but then these were the strongest of them...he frowned as his body twisted out of the mangled configuation Ghostfreak had induced to enable him to fight. His human shape reasserted itself, and Kimblee wondered why he couldn't maintain any xenobiological alterations for more than a few minutes, and that was for minor ones; extrem transformations, such as producing the musculature structure of a brutish alien beast, could barely be maintained for a hundred and sixty seconds before his own body rebelled at it and rejected the transformation. Kevin seemed to find this amusing, for some reason. Kimblee wondered if he had a hand in it, somehow. The boy was an uncounted variable.

He took a moment to recount the situation. Razor, the most dangerous in the group due to his superior on-the-fly strategies and fighting ability: blasted off the roof by a lucky explosion and already climbing back up. Freya, whose leaping abilities and dragon-themed techniques made her extremely threatening to his plan, jumping to all the outer rooms to get the people in there out. Andre, who was basically insane and a berseker, was right in front of him. It annoyed Kimblee that Andre gave him trouble; he was smarter than Andre, he should have run circles around him. He'd been told about Jagermonsters in some lecture or another throughout his travels in the aftermath of Amestris' destruction, that they were made by a truly deranged mad scientist family's secret formula that turned those who drank into either dead men, mad men or the 'hunter monsters' that were the Jagerkin. Stronger than machines, so tough hanging would only give them a gentle swing and as insane as the Orks that now held alliegience to the distant Comic Kingdom (which was a lot more terrifying than it's mildly goofy name let on, perhaps why they sometimes called themselves the Brighthammer Federation owing to the fact that they were technically a federation united under the rulership of a king, making it a bit of an empire too); Kimblee hadn't cared and that was costing him.

Kimblee clapped his hands together. Collateral damage could _not _be permitted.

Freya found Razor climbing up the side of the wall with his bare claws. "May I lend a hand?" She asked, standing atop a nearby balcony.

"Shouldn't you be getting the people out?" He asked. The battle had not been kind to him; more of his mechanical parts had been exposed by Kimblee's pinpoint explosions, and the only thing keeping him from being dead a dozen times over was Kimblee keeping them curiously muted.

"I do move quite fast, you know. The stubborn and ill-timed have been set straight, or kicked off the balconies." She grabbed his mechanical hand, not brooking any argument. "Hold yourself ready, sir."

She pulled him up onto the balcony. An unready jump could tear him to shreds. "Kay, I can live with that..." Another explosion rocked the house, and a few of the tiles that covered the house's slanting rooftops fell over their heads. "Freya, something's not right!"

"Besides the madman that came out of nowhere?" She said dryly.

"Well, yeah! Haven't you noticed that he hasn't left the summit point at all? He holds his ground, he pushes us away, but he refuses to make bigger explosions that could kill us except when we're in different spots!"

"You suppose he's more than a usual maniac, then?"

"It just doesn't make any sense! Why would he just show up to kill us all and hold himself back? We've seen him make big explosions easily, so why is he holding back? A chip in his brain that won't let him? Some bigger plan that needs the house relatively undamaged? A healthy respect for architecture?"

"And he seems to rely on his alchemy too much for a person with those shapeshifting powers of his," Freya remarked. "Even if he has difficulty controlling them or even fighting with fisticuffs. Odd...they're not dissimilar to young Benjamin Tennyson's transformations, if much more _coarse _in form."

"If by that you mean rampant body horror, sure. I don't get this. Idiot keeps going crazy in the weirdest places." He frowned, and grinned, his mechanical side sliding back to help the gesture. "Freya, back to the rooftop!"

She nodded, grabbed him, and jumped.

In the meantime, Andre had scored a lucky hit; a good slice through Kimblee's shoulder. It seemed to hurt much more. "Damn you!" Kimblee hissed, grabbing his arm.

Kevin was laughing at him. Like an wounded animal, cackling and echoing in the skull that wasn't his, like so many other people that dared to question his skills and his worth. Kimblee couldn't kill Kevin, couldn't wipe him away, couldn't make his existence disappear, couldn't make the laughing stop and the giggling stop and the sounds of mocking hateful _noise _stop, Kevin couldn't die and it was making Kimblee _crazy_ and thinking in italics more than usual and he just wanted to wrap his hands around the stupid boy's neck and _squeeze _until the ugly noisemaking stopped-

"Heh, not so tough now, huh?" Andre said, licking his claws free of blood. "You not half-bad with the fighting even if you a newbie, but you shtink at it with someun like me."

Kimblee couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't take the meaningless nothing people's noisemaking anymore."Shut it."

"Vay I see it, you'z a new guy. Some tourist dat t'ink's he tough enough to take on de town, so he start vith the big 'un: Fuster's Home! Vell, ain't working so vell for ya, eh?"

"Don't you dare to comprehend the way I see things, you beast!" Kimblee screamed and grabbed his arm. "Damn, what did you do to my arm!"

"Wuss," Andre said unsympathetically. "Pipe down and lissen to da master. You listen to dis advice, which iz advice dat Hy am giving hyu gratis free for nothink. And yez, I know dat's redundant, don't say it. Hyu new guy. Don't go overboard on your first day. Don't blow up dis house iffen hyu ain't even going to do it right!"

"I told you to be quiet and stop guessing at my motivations, you freak! What has science down to make you!"

Andre ignored him. "Chill out and go home, I'm going to say. Mebbe we let this go, okay? Prob'bly not going to happen, but you get away, you train up some. Mebbe practice on some warlords or cult leaders or runavay mad science-guys in the mountains, get some practice in and do de town a favor. Have some fun! Den you come back, set it up with the Freedom League for a nice appointment for a good mess and make it memorable. You get it out of you system, nobody else gots to die, and you stop wasting our time. Okay? Because you no good."

Kimblee's eyes flashed. "Dont..._you dare...look down...ON ME!_" He clapped his hands together, not listening to the insane laughter in his head (Kevin was so happy and crazy and he felt too _real_ and Kimblee actually felt scared) and let the energy shock through his arms and traumatize the air, introducing currents of alchemical force, change and alteration and dynamism spiralling out from his palms and-

No. The big structure in the very middle of the summit rooftop like a crown was _right there_, the explosion could utterly destroy it-

Kimblee dropped his hands and almost got his leg snapped from a heavy kick; Andre was even stronger than he looked. But he couldn't risk making explosions, not right here and now. The circle _had _to stay intact, he couldn't risk it now and he couldn't let himself be compelled to breaking for a pitiful beastman and a whole lot of other things that lended themselves nicely to Kimblee's train of thought until Andre grabbed his wrist, pulled his arm out and bit him.

Once, Kimblee had fought a rogue State Alchemist who fought by transmuting metal into intricate machinery: the Gearspring Alchemist, from his attentive detail to his art. During the fight, a beartrap had snapped closed around his arm. This hurt worse.

Kimblee went down screaming, blood streaming out in thick spurts over his nice coat and Andre's green twisted face; Andre twisted hard to the right, and if Ghostfreak hadn't swelled his skin into Arburian Pelarota armorplates he would have lost his arm. Andre let go and backed away with a wince - he'd nearly cracked his teeth there - his face bloody and grinning as he kicked Kimblee in the side and knocked him off the ground. "Hyu're weak," Andre said, leering. "But taste fonny. Like...a thing dat pipple ain'ts s'posed ta taste like. Explain!"

""No," Kimblee said, deceptively calm as he tried to stem the bloodflow on his arm with pressure. Strange; the blood didn't seem to be flowing as fast as he thought. Or perhaps he had become a fast healer.

Razor slammed into Kimblee from behind, hopped off Razor's head with his not-metal foot and landed on top of the rooftop structure. "'Scuze me!"

"Oy, boss, what's de rush!" Andre complained. "Almost lost me hat!"

"Sorry."

"Damn, you're back," Kimblee said, standing up. He almost clapped his hands, but remembered where Razor was. At this angle...a blast would ruin _everything_. And he was so close to fruition. Just a few more minutes. Just a little more time...and they would all _disappear_.

"Yeah, real sorry about that." Razor's sarcasm was a brittle and mean thing.

Freya appeared next to Razor. "I hope not to impugn on your time, you nasty little man," She said to Kimblee. "But we are attracting a crowd." Sure enough, there was a truly enormous crowd around Foster's; from Kimblee's vantage point, he coud see the insect-swarm of so very many of the Foster's residents just outside the house. Watching them, too fascinated to move. A few were actively leaving, but most had succumbed to that Traverse Town instinct for entertainment and were too distracted by the fight with the invader to their home to follow.

Freya added, "And it would be such a shame to disappoint an audience," but Kimblee wasn't listening. He was calculating. Thinking. He needed a few more minutes. He had to stall them until then, but that wouldn't be difficult; just try not to get killed or let that structure on the roof get destroyed and it would all work out. But those people down below...

They couldn't run, that would spoil everything! No running, no fleeing, no escape, no one gets out alive, that sort of thing. But...Kimblee considered fast. If they kept watching...if he kept it _interesting_...they wouldn't want to leave. They would be too fascinated by their own self-indulgent obsession with amuesment to be sensible until it would be too late. They _were not going to leave if he made it good_.

He smiled. This was going to work out.

Down on the ground below, Spike and Frankie ran out on the front yard with a large crowd of evacuees, along with Bonnie and a ton of people she and her gang had gotten out through dramatic speeches, and stood back a ways to see what was going on. "Think we got everybody?" Spike asked.

Frankie looked around; she knew everybody. Spike didn't know how she had the patience or psychology to know so many people and _care_ about them, but she did it. "...Yeah, looks like! We got guards chasing the rest out, it'll only be a few minutes before we're in the clear!"

"Don't curse us..." Spike said ominously.

"Hey!" Bonnie said. "Wait for us! I don't-" She stopped. "Ooh. What's going on up there?"

"Looks like a stand-off," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said. He looked extremely uncomfortable in the sunlight, even with his protective gear on. Spike had less troubles with it, through that was perhaps less of comfort level and because Spike was really weird even for a vampire.

"Sounds cool," Zaphod said. "Picture it! The plucky guards standing against the psycho intruder. Noble nine-to-fivers and the crazy-ass bomber with an attitude problem. Guys with uniforms and guy...who can't decide if he's going for a Nazi vibe or what. I'm going for the film rights and you can't stop me. Try and see, yeah?"

"You can see what he's wearing from down here?" Frankie asked.

"Yep. Nanoscopic binocular lenses. Had them installed last week."

"What's going on?" Nidah and Mogo said.

"Shouldn't you guys evacute other guys?" Frankie said.

"The boss is having us keep an eye on the idiots," Mogo said.

"Oh."

"Stand-off up top with the big guards, not counting Stature, and whoever's picking a fight now. Zaphod says he has binoculars for lenses or something now."

"Yep," Zaphod confirmed. "Huh; he's doing something weird with his hands. He's got funny little circles on them, can't make them out-" A bright flash of light whitewashed the world, and then they could clearly see a cloud of smoke over the top of the mansion. It cleared away fast, showing that no one had been harmed and the explosion had been directed in midair for some reason, but they could easily make out that the smoke spelled out _I Am Not At All Suspicious _and a little arrow pointing at Kimblee. In no time, much of the crowd started talking about this and arguing whether it was a bit of honesty, an ironic confession of being a villain or a weird joke.

"Where'd the explosion come from!" Bonnie yelled.

"Guy made it with his bare hands. Nice."

Nidah stared blankly. For a moment, she looked like all the nice happy things that make people human had been torn out of here and left with the rest to make her quietly insane. "...Did you just say that they're fighting a man with wierd circles on his hands who made the _air explode_?"

"Yeah."

"...No. No, that's ridiculous. It couldn't be. That's just not..." Nidah shook her head. "...It can't be. There's just no way. Mogo?"

"Yo," Her bat friend said.

"Take me up! The guys up there could use some back-up, and I am absolutely not harboring suspicions about a mass-murderer from my world improbably showing up here."

"Okay." He fluttered up, grabbed her shoulders with his flexible feet and somewhat awkwardly lifted her into the air. He flew off, though weighed down somewhat by Nidah.

"Maybe we should run for it," Frankie said as another explosion rang over head, this one spelling out _And Now For Something Completely Different! _prompting a few people to exclaim 'Hey, I love that show!'.

"Nah," Spike said. "Your boss got me to get you out here and help out beating that guy up there. Couldn't run if I liked; bit more than my personal safety's at stake, yeah? Said I'd do it, didn't I?"

Frankie rolled her eyes. "Oh, fine, just try not to get killed, you lunatic." She lightly punched him on the shoulder.

"Only done it twice and I ain't aiming for a third." Spike jumped with supernatural strength and speed, jumping several dozen feet clear onto the wall of the house, the spikes on his boots and the metal claws on his gauntlets giving him improvised handholds. Mogo and Nidah still were much higher than him. "Oy, why don't I get a flying escort!" He raged.

Back on the rooftop, Kimblee was trying to avoid getting gored by Freya, who had made a rudimentary spear from a bit of railing. "You're a good little soldier, aren't you?" He asked.

"Please stop talking, your voice annoys me," She said.

Kimblee kept needling her. His temper of a few moments ago faded; he was happy at the oppertunity to talk again. "I expect you have done your duty in many wars." A sharp point came within inches of his neck and scored a good hit on his jaw. "Yes," He said after he clicked his jaw back into place. "You certainly have the reflexes that only honest battle experience can offer. Tell me...are you one of the honest few that took satisfaction in it?"

"Hy am!" Andre said.

"Andre, stop talking to the looney, you'll just encourage him," Razor said.

"Why do you call me abnormal when he agrees with me?" Kimblee asked, a little hurt. "He's the same as me."

"Am not," Andre said. "I haff a nicer hat."

"Well, Andre may be a cheerfully psychotic monster with a weird thing for incredibly terrifying women, but he's _our _monster!" Razor said. "You? Not so much."

"Aw, thanks!"

"At least he understands me, then," Kimblee said, much to Andre's indignation. ""Incidentally, do you have the time?"

"It's a little past noon, why?" Razor asked. "And why are you making small talk in the middle of a fight? Banter, yes, that's an accepted tradition and I would kill you right now if you tried to break it, but asking the _time_? That's stupid."

"Ah, thank you. I was a bit worried that I was losing track of things. Happily, things are progressing according to plan!"

"Plan!" Razor said. "What plan! I knew you were up to something! Well, beyond trying to kill people, I mean."

Kimblee smiled. "Oh, is that so? How nice. Just keep waiting...the show is nearly ready." He paused, turned, and smiled. "And yet more players have arrived."

He stood still and took the hit as Spike slammed his feet into his chest in a dynamic entry; it almost smashed his ribs. "You're a bit strange," Spike commented. "And it's me saying it, doesn't come up much."

"Of course," Kimblee said. "You are entitled to your opinion. The question is...can you fight for your convictions?"

"I fight for the hell of it!" Spike said, drawing his impressively large single-edged sword. "Conviction comes into it when I please!"

"Impressive words," Kimblee said, Omnitrix energy cracking around him. "Now die by them."

Spike frowned under his facemask at the green static. "What the hells are you doing?" Not one to take chances when it's not that fun, he focused and cut the air so hard it split, the vacuum exploding out into a cut-shaped blast that carried the cutting edge of the slash; Kimblee got in it's way and destroyed it with a blast of his own before it could damage the central building.

"Please don't do that," Kimblee said curtly, his hands smoking. "We cannot afford excessive collateral damage!"

_When you say 'we', do you mean you and the other fighters in a mock-friendly way or are you talking about us?_ Kevin asked. Kimblee didn't bother answering.

Razor was thinking hard. Kimblee was avoiding damage to that part of the house and was even putting himself in danger to stop it...he had mentioned some sort of plan...he was acting like someone who hadn't even begun to fight and he was generally not acting like a random lunatic...Razor put it all together. "GUARDS! SPIKE! THIS FREAK HAS A CRAZY PLAN GOING AND I BET IT INVOLVES THE CENTRAL PART OF THE ROOFTOP!"

"You're intelligent," Kimblee said snidely. "How will you wow me next? Conclude that the sun rises in the morning? Explain that grass grows? Discover that shooting yourself in the head is not conducive towards living?"

"You're a jackass." Razor grinned, his bifurcated face nearly as frightening as Kimblee's inhumanly calm expression. "But I can use that. Hey, Andre! Spike, I got a job for you guys! SMASH UP THE SUMMIT LIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOFTOP!"

Kimblee froze. "What."

"Hyu gotz it!" Andre said, running ahead and smashing right through a wall, coming out through another wall without losing any speed.

"NO!" Kimblee screamed. "NOT NOW! WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING YOUR OWN HOME?"

"We can always rebuild," Freya said.

"You won't have that problem," Spike said.

Kimblee's eyes narrowed. "_No_." He clapped his hands as the Omnitrix energies within him surged, Kineceleran DNA superimposing over his own and turning his skin a faded blue and black-striped, his face narrowing and his knees reversing direction.

He ran, and the powers of his alien form amplified that small bit of kinetic movement a thousand-fold; he became a blue-black blur and slammed into Spike, his hands slamming onto the blade before the force of his impact threw Spike over the rooftop and right through the holes Andre had made, slamming into Andre himself and the two skidding across the rooftop and hitting the rails lining the roof. "Ow!" They both said. Kimblee cursed his impetousness; they had almost stopped inside the elevator itself.

"Ow, dat hurt," Andre said, extracating himself from Spike. "...Er, hyu swod s'posed to be turning bleck like dat?"

"Eh?" Spike said. The metal of his sword had turned a deep cold iron-black and was hissing slightly. "I really hate alchemy," He said before the sword exploded, and he and Andre went flying off the rooftop. Scraps of bent and twisted metal was left behind, a few sad remnants of a weapon.

"You'll pay for that!" Razor roared, his mechanical claws telescoping into two-foot-long blades, larger ones sliding over his knuckles and a air compression cannon unfolding from his forearm. "No one lays a hand on the men and women under my command! _NO ONE_!"

"Then why send them to fight?" Kimblee asked reasonably. "You command them to fight. In fights, they will get hurt. It's fairly standard logic."

"Arrgh! You...just...shut up!"

"A stunning counterargument."

"STOP STEALING ALL THE GOOD LINES!" Spike yelled as he and Andre came flying from the direction they had fallen (only coming back instead of falling) and they both slammed into Kimblee. This time, Kimblee got a good amount of boot in the face and shoulder.

"Damn it, where did you come from this time?" Kimblee asked after he got back up.

"We gave them a head's up you sick genocidal person of questional parentage!" Nidah yelled as she and Mogo came flying up from where Spike and Andre had come from this time. "I kicked them right back as they were falling! Tricky, but I've done worse!"

"I'd say you're about due for a promotion," Razor said. "What took you so long to get here?"

"Lifting a teenage girl with her mass is not easy," Mogo said as he let Nidah down and fluttered down. "Humans are much heavier than they think."

Nidah seemed to ignore the remark, which really lent itself to a 'did you say I'm fat' moment. She glared at Kimblee. "You damned dog of Amestris. _You're alive_. What the hell are you doing been all alive and breathing and people-shaped!"

"The natural order of things," Kimblee said. "Who are you...ah." He smiled slightly. "I know you."

"You should," Nidah said. She did not tremble with rage. She did not scream with hate fit to burn the world. She did not curse Kimblee with all the foul names her people had seen fit to devise. She did not need to do any of those things: the look she fixed Kimblee was worse than anything she could have done or said. "And I _know _you."

"What is this?" Freya asked. "You know this man? Is he from your world?"

Nidah laughed hollowly. "Oh yeah. You could say that. You could, you can, it's so sick I could cry but you could say I know him." She looked like she did want to cry, with rage and misery alike. She smiled twistedly. "Did you tell the guys your name, you sick freak? Or did you lose that sense of courtesy?"

"Who iz he again?" Andre said. "Hy'm losing track of t'ings here!"

"Ah, since the situation calls for it," Kimblee said. He just needed a few more minutes more. He could humor this girl. "Permit me to introduce myself at last!" He swept his hat and bowed. "My name is Solf J. Kimblee. But I expect that this girl knows me as the Red Lotus Alchemist."

"And the Mad Bomber of Amestris," Nidah said.

"A State Alchemist? Like Edward Elric?" Freya said. "One of those people from that military dictatorship from your country Amestris?"

"We are from the same country," Nidah said. "...He is _not _my countryman."

"Is this about the Ishbal Civil War?" Kimblee asked. "Because you brought that upon yourself. It was a single child. Just one little girl that got herself shot. Why make such a fuss?"

"Ishbalan Civil War?" Razor said, confused. Recent history from their world was not something the Ishbalans or Amestrians among them cared to discuss, espicially with each other. "What's that?"

"It was a nasty war from Nidah's homeland of Ishbal and the country they were a part of, Amestris," Spike said. "Little girl was murdered by a Amestrian officer, and the Ishbalan people were pissed enough with the military intervention in their holy land, so they basically went crazy with rebelling. Went on for a few years until the Fuhrer got bored and sent in the military to execute everyone in a full-scale genocide campaign." Everyone stared at him. "What? I talk to Fullmetal all the time, he don't want this sort of thing to be forgotten. Stuff like that, _can't _be ignored or forgotten, you know? I been alive a long time, I remember stuff like that. Things that sicken even monsters, I've seen. Ishbal sounds like one of them."

"A nice little summery," Nidah said quietly. "I was there, you know."

"And so was I," Kimblee said fondly. "I got quite a reputation. Everyone knows me as the alchemist who killed more Ishbalans than any other one involved." He paused and smiled, remembering a few other pernitent details. "As was many other Amestrians living here that you hold in such high esteem. Roy Mustang...Alex Louis Armstrong, brother of Olivier Armstrong...Riza Hawkeye..." He continued. Razor blinked in horror at the list. "A shame; you hold these people in such high esteem without knowing what they did."

"Alex Louis Armstrong? That charming buffoon from the Justice Maines?" Freya asked. "Big, noble, is outrageously dramatic about everything and treats everybody like they were his closest family? Enjoys smashing things to transmute them into effies of himself for missles?"

"Wait. Roy Mustang? That guy from the Peace Maines? You can't seriously expect me to believe he was in a genocide campaign," Mogo said.

"Ask him yourself," Kimblee said. "Ask him about Ishbal and see if his eyes don't cloud with horror. See if perhaps he doesn't _choke _with the guilt of the dead he hoists on his shoulders like a damned martyr. Would you like to know of all the women and children he burned alive on his country's orders? The city blocks that burst into flame with the snap of a finger? The buildings that he made into crematoriums? Or I could tell you the story of how I once found Armstrong in the midst of making a wall to cordorn off Ishbalan runaways as they fled the firing squads. How they panicked to find a towering wall cutting off their escape! How the children cried before the gunshots silenced them. One of the men tried to shield a woman with his own body, you know, quite noble. And Armstrong made it there and listened to them die. I saw him punch a hole in the wall so a young woman and an old woman could escape. He said something about fleeing to them. Quite unprofessional of him; lucky for him I blew their heads off before they could get away or he could have been tried for treason."

"...Hyu got problems," Andre said. Coming from a Jagermonster, this was a very bad sign.

"In fact," Kimblee continued. "I expect that's what caused his mental breakdown. He had to be sent home, you know that? I heard that one day, he found the body of a child his alchemy killed and he just broke down there like a machine that snapped a gear or two. Bawled something about 'how can we be fighting this brutal war' or murdering civilians or some other nonsense. They had to drag him back to Central. I think it made him a little crazy; it would certainly explain his outlandish style."

"No," Nidah said. "He's always been that way. Told me so."

"...And you associate with a man that murdered your people?" Kimblee asked.

Nidah frowned. "I don't need to answer to a animal like you. They call you State Alchemists 'Dogs of the military', yeah? For people like the Flame Alchemist or the Strongarm Alchemist, they were _dragged _on those chains. Choked with them. I cannot forgive them for what they've done, not with my country a bitter memory...but I will not take revenge either. The people of Ishbal dare not disgrace Ishvala with more bloodshed! Whereas you...are a rabid animal. The leash is for your handler's protection as much as your control!"

"...Interesting remarks," Kimblee said. "That is the standard belief of the Ishvalan religious order. Enduring your hatred for vast indignities done to you. A pity your fellow Ishbalan warrior-monk does not share the same beliefs. Do you call him Scar as well?"

Nidah's eyes narrowed. "Watch your mouth with what you say about God-Hand Scar," She hissed. "You filth. You are undeserving of even speaking his alias, given in place of the name he had forsaken!"

"'_God-Hand Scar'_!" Kimblee said, laughing. "What manner of stupidity is this? Is that the name you have given him? The name the remnants of Ishbal have given their great hope, to the beast that slaughtered the despoilers of Ishbal?"

"Enough talk," Nidah said. She unsheathed her punch lasdaggers again. "I do not do this in the name of revenge...but I am _putting you down like a rabid dog_."

"How appropiate," Kimblee said. He glanced up at the sun's position, and grinned so broadly his face should've split. "But I'm afraid your revenge will have to wait!"

"I told you, it's not revenge, it's simple pragmatism and...wait, what do you mean?"

"The show," Kimblee said. "Is about to start."

"What's doing what-now?" Stature said as she popped out of seemingly nowhere. (In reality, she had shrunk to such a tiny size that she develouped porportional strength similar to a flea, but on a capacity relative to her usual size. This gave her the ability to jump to the top of the house in under a few minutes; she'd only just arrived, of course, after herding enough people out of the house.)

"...What, more of you!" Kimblee said. "Oh, never mind, I can work with this..." He clapped his hands and laid his hands on the ground; everybody who knew what he could do, espicially Nidah, recoiled, but all Kimblee did was use another ability of his transmutation circles to shove the ground under him upwards and launch him into the air at such an angle that he landed neatly atop the little building in the middle of the rooftop.

He clapped again, and once more laid his hands down, touching the roof of the building he was on, the highest point of all Foster's. A blue pulse flashed over it, the building under it and the entire rooftop around him.

The surface cracked. A slightly larger layer that he had transmuted earlier to protect something else crumbled, and revealed at the feet of his unwitting witnesses was a large eight-point restructuring matrix; a circle with a octagon drawn within it, small circles where " the two shapes met. The circle had been carved deep into the ground, at least three feet deep, and it looked like the material he had 'moved' out of the way with alchemy had been transmuted into the protective layer above them and reinforced with building materials from all around; no wonder the rooftop had looked a bit shoddier. It was still quite impressive for alchemy, which revolved around the concept of the conservation of mass.

"A transmutation circle!" Freya said. "Razor was right! You did have a plan!"

"Obviously," Kimblee said.

Andre glanced around. "Hy only see circle-shtuff on the ground by uz. Whyfor hyu protect that place hyu standing on so much? Hy don't see anything on it."

"I needed a dramatic place to make it happen," Kimblee said honestly.

This was so stupid, the sheer stupidness hit all of the fighters except Spike and Andre hard enough to make them fault on their faces. "True, gotta look important," Spike agreed.

"If hyu gotz to do sometink, HYU DOES IT VITH A PASSHION!" Andre roared. "...Even if it iz beink evil and schtuff."

"Why do only the morons ever agree with me?" Kimblee wondered.

_Because the multiverse is really unsubtle and pointing something out to you?_ Kevin said.

_Because you speak on such a high level that only the truly stupid are able to comprehend it because their stupidity goes so deep into negative-intellect that it comes out the other side as semi-genius?_ Ghostfreak suggested.

_...No, I'm going to bet on my guess._

"Anyway, go see what's going on below," Kimblee said, clapping his hands again and directing it at the people below him, grateful that they were packed together; he touched the ground and bits of the floor seperated and spun around them, wrapping them in little cocoons of stone and tile and whatever building material the house was made of and hardening. Kimblee transmuted again, this time turning the floor underneath each of them into little flippers that tossed them off the rooftop in a tight cluster. The transmutation circle was left intact.

Kimblee wasn't surprised when a few of the better jumpers or fliers - guards and experienced residents alike - intercepted the trapped fighters and ferried them to the ground. "They'll make good starts," He promised himself.

On the ground, Frankie had ran over to the first of the people-cocoons when she saw them falling, along with Bloo, his hate-club disbanding when they realized what was going on a while ago; Eduardo, who had returned after getting their friends somewhere safe, had broke it open and owing to the inverse statistics of someone close rather than some stranger in a time of drama, it was Spike. "Sonuvablitsnack!" He yelled as soon as his head was freed.

"Spike!" Frankie warned.

"What?" He looked at Eduardo meaningfully. "I didn't swear! Technically."

"Is true," Eduardo said helpfully, and broke the rest of the cocoon off.

"People keep doing that to me," Spike remarked, and shook himself off, checking his outfit for tears; even a little sunlight would burn holes in him. "Awright, the others alive?"

A good distance away, they could hear Razor scream, "KIMBLEE! I'M GONNA HIT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A LASER!"

"It's a fair bet," Bloo said.

"Where's Mac and the others?" Frankie asked.

"They're okay," Bloo said. "Uh, they are okay, right, Eduardo?"

Eduardo nodded fervently. "_Si!_ I put them in a nice alley right by Mr. Cyborg's shop! No one bother them there! Me hope."

"Not that encouraging," Spike said. "Better than I thought-" He froze. "...What's that?" He sniffed the air, his facemask shifting against his wrinkled nose. "Wuzzat smell? Like somethin chemical...getting worse." He looked around. "It's coming from...everywhere."

...

In the buildings bordering Foster's that Kimblee had broke into, alchemically mutilated people and trapped them in, bad things were happening.

In the family household at the top of his 'circle' outside Foster's property, a homemade bomb made from carbonated beverages and a lot of bottle caps was foaming over and rattling against the sides of the gas-fired generator the father of the household had kitbashed together just in case, and this generator was hooked up to every single appliance in the house Kimblee had found, and was sparking dangerously. This was not going to do well with the gas leaking out, or the family themselves, lying on their sides and comforting one another even as their insides twisted and fused and mutated into something else.

In a modest little home made from several trailers mashed with a gunship bridge that no one had quite been certain about, a husband and wife of a happy sixteen month's marriage were tied together in their bathroom, wired to a assortment of explosives that Kimblee had created from the weapons they had collected as a hobby; they went all over the house, and they were a little miffed that their house was probably going and explode soon. Oh, and kill them too. Still, they didn't mind too much; they'd had a good run of it, even after surviving the destruction of their worlds and having to deal with the stigma of interspecies marriages from some people, what with him being a halfling and her being a half-giant. At the moment, it was enough for the both of them to take strength from the other and go out together.

In a often-contested duplex, amid a whole assortment of chemicals easily transmuted into powerful explosives, a pair of older teenagers that had finished their schooling were tied together under a false floor Kimblee had transmuted, but he had made it from a unusual material he'd used various chemicals he found as a base; another homemade chemical he'd found was airbourne and highly acidic to this type of building material: as a result, the floor was giving through in patches and bursts, much to the surprise of the mutual friend that had come looking for them when they hadn't answered their phone in spite of the super-special awesome news about an update on a up-coming movie they were all into. He was understandably surprised to see that his friends were tied to a shallow pit in their own living room, their body's distorted, bloated and in some places the skin had worn so thing that he could see muscles and organs that had melted into a yellowish gel. He heisitated a few seconds, and rushed to save them. It would wind up being a bad idea, but the correct action must be undertaken regardless of the consequences.

In a small apartment building, an old woman had been tied up inside her own bedroom, surronded by all manner of ticking oil drums she had kept as a reminder of her old days as an oil baron back when she had roamed the desert lands of Crucible, an idea that had lately struck her as exqusitely stupid because nobody here used fossil fuels and more importantly oil was _very _flammable, and it hadn't taken that insane intruder very long to convert them into what looked very much like time bombs; he'd put a few here, in the basement and in her lookout room for some reason, muttering something about 'equally distubuted explosions' and 'it must work but it must also look correct'. She was trying her hardest to get loose, but that bastard had changed her own bed into a excrutiatingly tight cage that kept her from moving. She couldn't slip out. With the gag in her mouth, she couldn't scream. She did have time to think, and she considered that much of her life had been senseless, starting with her stubborn specisism and human superiority attitudes, driving away everyone who didn't share the same opinons she did. She had convinced herself that she alone was right, and the entire world was completely mad. Only now, she was forced to conclude that she had wasted her life and she had become an embittered wretch, but in spite of that it had still been...a happy one. Her body seemed to be expanding into a shapeless horror that was _moving _inside, but she was sufficiently distracted by this revelation to make this body horror seem minor.

Finally, in the abandoned news place, Dusty the maintence technician had been trying to sit up for the past few minutes but was finding it hard; his muscles were hardening and fusing with his bones, softening now and almost liquid. He could feel his skin rippling; he remembered movies when the unlucky guy who's just there to show how nasty the monster is gets an egg put inside him and is torn apart when it's born. He knew how that guy felt now. The ground above him was cracking - microscopic explosions taking it apart bit by bit - and it was begining to bother him that he couldn't feel it settle on him even while he saw it. He hadn't felt much for a few minutes now; probably his nerve endings had been melted by whatever monstrous thing was happening to him.

In spite of it, he laughed. The sound was tiny, foriegn and weak in the gloom, but he laughed regardless. He smiled honestly, blood trailing down his lips and making tiny blasts when they hit the air. It was tearing up his face pretty badly, not that he minded very much. "Heh," He said. He had thought about what Kimblee had said earlier, and he'd figured a few things out. "...At least I get to go out with a bang."

He grinned, closed his eyes and let all his troubles pass. He had reached the point were conjecture, hopes and fears were pointless and did not bother himself with them.

A moment later, his body, as well as that of all the other people Kimblee had transmuted in the buildings, absorbed enough oxygen to fuel their body's alchemical transformation into a potent combustive gel and they all exploded horribly in massive chain-blasts that on their own would have been powerful enough to shatter bedrock, but this also set off all the secondary explosives Kimblee had prepared in the buildings as well.

Kimblee _knew _explosions. He knew them like the Flame Alchemist knew the splitting of air to create precious flammable hydrogen gasses or the Iron-Blood Alchemist knew how to draw on the metal in his blood to augment the metal in a simple building and transform it into a mass of weapons. So it was no accident that every rigged drum of oil, every homemade canister of explosive chemicals, every jury-rigged on-the-spot thing that made a big mess that he'd put around the buildings with expert precision had been set up in just such a way that when the buildings erupted in noise and a showering rain of rubble, those very explosions cracked the ground in just such a way that they arced to the next building.

All it took was a few moments. That was all. Less then fifteen seconds for sixteen people to die so their bodies could fuel a massive explosion, at least half a dozen more people to be crushed or severely injured in the ensuing rain of debris or the explosions themselves. Fifteen seconds for the ground to be so badly torn up to make a perfect circle with each building as a 'point' on it seen from overhead, and for the tremors to collapse underground tunnels and basements, killing twenty people that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Some of them were evil and trying to smuggle other evil people for their own reasons, though, so it balanced out a bit.) It took even less than all of that for the entire neighborhood to screech to a sudden horrified halt. These people had seen destruction before. They had seen their homes torn asunder and their families massacred. They'd seen their worlds vanish into nothingness, and they'd seen countless random attacks and monsters attack them generally for no apparent reason or even on purpose by their town leaders, but those times, nobody ever _died_ or even generally got really hurt.

The common people of Traverse Town had not seen death since an entire distract had been anhillated in a vicious war not so long ago, and the horror of it simply made so many of them just..._watch_.

But in those few moments, things got worse for everyone inside Foster's. _Much _worse.

"Yes..." Kimblee whispered as he saw the smoke and dust and thick airbourne debris rise above them, so thick and dark and _perfect_.

"What the hell!" Spike yelled as the crowd at the base of Foster's broke into a chaos that was worse than usual. Panic. Screaming. Running for the exits and people fighting to get there first and trying to kill each other while the guards tried to stop them or even got in on the fighting themselves, their duties forgotten in their terror. Blood was raining on the ground, not only from that of the sacrifices from the buildings Kimblee had rigged to blow.

"_Yes..._" The echoes of the explosions roared through Kimblee, rocking him to his core; the five so loud to make lesser men deaf, vast existences here only for an instant, but so much greater than any single life, needing only moments to change the world. They had roared and now the screams followed, and Kimblee wanted to scream at the absolute _beauty _of it, the glorious _perfection _of the symphony of screams and devastation. His symphony. The Symphony of Destruction.

Inside the house, Mr. Herrimen had fallen on the floor, the explosions strong enough to knock his office astray, and he was currently trying to extracite himself from a large amount of filing cabinets. He was trying to _move_, to _reach_, to hit that damned button regardless of what might happen, the consequences could _not _be worse with explosions going on-

"_YES!_" Kimblee screamed, his veneer of humanity and affability and sanity tearing away, and left exposed to the world was the monster he knew himself to be. Spittle flew from his mouth. His lips were stretched in a huge horribly jubilant grin. His hands clutched tight around his chest, like he was afraid of his heart tearing away on wings of joy and he wanted to catch it just in case. "_YES! WHAT A GLORIOUS NOISE! INSECTS PERISH! MAYFLIES VANISH! BEASTS OF MEAT LACKING SENSE OR REASON DISAPPEAR, AND THE MUSIC BURNS THROUGH! IT! IS! __**GLORIOUS!**__"_

The people below him spoke. He did not listen to the noises of insects. They meant nothing, they were nothing. But he did have a appreciation for drama.

"BEHOLD, PEOPLE OF FOSTER'S! YOUR LIVES HAVE MEANING!" He screamed, ignoring Kevin and Ghostfreak's babbling; the first furious and a little underwhelmed, the latter exultant at the devastation and that which was left to come. "SETTLE DOWN AND EMBRACE YOUR CALLING! KNOW THE SOLE THING THAT YOUR LIVES COULD EVER HAVE MEANING IN! ENDURE IT AND JOIN TO MY CONVICTIONS!"

He slammed his hands down on the ground. Light streamed forth around him, in sparks and flashes and then flooding out from the circle in the rooftop around him, building up as the people below recoiled, feeling _pulled _and _hurt _and starting to scream so lovely even as the light then began to flow at the much greater circle created by the destruction of the explosions, pooling in the rubble of the buildings and swelling up like a chorus.

This was not the same blue light as normal alchemy. Normal alchemy was almost _always _yellow or blue; sometimes specialized forces of nature made it a different coloration, but this was not the green of bio-alchemy or the orange of heat modification or even the purple of the vastly experienced metal workers: this was a vibrant and brilliant and utterly exciting _red_.

Red, like the color of the Stone. Red, like the life's blood of humans. Red, like the eyes of the people of Ishbal that died under his hands. Red, the shade so close to touching the _Truth_...

Red bolts of alchemic energy thundered, roiling mass that fired straight up into the heavens, piercing the clouds and filtering the sun's light through a haze of crimson that turned the neighborhood the color of war. Distorted and warped, it was still the energy of the very world itself, harnessed with the laws of alchemy and directed by the alterations in the landscape Kimblee's explosions had made, it couldn't help but flow through the patterns of the circle now. It was a vast stroke of misfortune for Foster's that the fence - or rather, the pattern it made in the ground - was easy enough for Kimblee to adapt his circle around, and that same red light flowed through it, turning the fence into a glowing wall of light, the metal bars breaking and bending and tearing apart under the raw force Kimblee was modulating.

It was something that was seen all over the town. Atop the mall in the First District, Zim and Zuko's training exercise in Firebending styles halted completely when they saw the explosions, and now the red flashing into the sky. Hobbes' group heard the explosions, and a nearby TV on a salebooth was displaying the whole thing through a distant camera that could zoom on. (But not well enough to show Kimblee.) Calvin's group was right outside the neighborhood due to their proximy to Cyborg's place, and Cyborg himself saw the whole thing on a TV; they couldn't do a thing to stop it, none of them understanding just what was going on, not even Calvin, for this concerned alchemy he rightfully never breached. Morte, Aang, Scar and Danny, flying on Appa far away, saw it from too far away, and they were all enlightened at this not being normal when they say how Scar froze and stared in utter horror and recognition.

The First District was the first to become aware of this monstrosity.

Finally, Lu-Tze watched it happen from a rooftop right outside there, much like Calvin's group. He watched with a calm, slightly weary look. He did not inerfere, nor could he. There are those with great power who can interfere with the working of history. And then there are those who can, at best, nudge it a bit. Lu-Tze was not lucky enough to be among the former. He observed. It was his duty.

The red dancing under Kimblee's hand looked like a baleful aurora before it exploded out to the limits of the outer circle in a gigantic killing pulse.

The screaming was brief. That did not mean it wasn't loud enough to pierce the heavens.

It bore down on Spike, Frankie, Eduardo and Bloo, and Bloo flashed another shade of red: the aura-glow of a Counter technique.

...

Mr. Herrimen had only just gotten free of the cabinets and screamed when the world turned red, with indignation at the foul _wrenching _feeling, with rage at this latest violation of _his _household, with a sudden paralyzing fear for everyone's else's safety but that last was very slightly eclipsed by the mind-shattered pain.

_Hooks in the core of him and wrenching pulling and tearing, he feels himself dying, feels the life tearing away from him and screams, screams again and again, every single awful memory and every moment of regret and remorse and horror coming back and tearing in and out again and again and again-_

Blood dribbled down the corner of his mouth as he collapsed again, his office, _his _chamber tainted the red of dying innocents and pestilential churning like a damned wind, cracking the walls and rotting the brass and rotting wood, the names of people that cared blackening and fading in the rust on the plaques-

_It can't end like this._ The thought welled up through the screaming that seemed louder in his head, his own screams a fraction of it. For a moment, he was surprised to realize that he was capable of thinking rationally at all.

Then the pain surrendered to the white-hot rage simmering inside him for years, centered squarely at the sheer _injustice _of it all, of so many creators and friends dead and corrupted, at his house and those under his protection inflicted by too many indignities; he had seen too much, done too much. It could not be in vain-no, he _refused _to let it be in vain.

His eyes narrowed in spite of the blood streaming through the cuts that have opened on his head as his body tore itself apart on the inside, his very _soul _slowly peeling away from the awful force tearing at him. "I..." He rasps. "I...I..." The single syllable repeats itself. He wasn't not sure what he was trying to say.

His gloved hands, starting to turn damp and red, grabbed the edge of his desk.

"I...have come too far..."

He gripped as hard as he could with his muscles tearing themselves apart, his bones cracking and his body failing ever faster.

"I have not gone so far from home..."

His shoulder felt like it's going to break as it pulls all of his not-inconsiderable bodyweight up, over the desk. His front collapsed all over the keyboard, and he started to slip.

"..._To give up now_."

Mr. Herrimen's hand fell down hard on the keyboard and hit the big red _EVACUATION _button.

He was dimly aware of lights blaring, of hidden machinery in the walls coming to life and stranger things happening as the house itself rumbled, like a sleeping giant finally opening it's eyes. More pointly, the pain was fading. Everything was fading. He couldn't feel anything at all, not even that soul-stealing pain.

He hit the ground hard, flat on his back and his arms outstretched.

Mr. Herrimen sighed to himself. "Not good enough," He scolds himself even now. No matter what, everyone had to survive. His own life was of little consequence.

He is not alone. He can hear the sweeping of a cloak, a hint of black in the red, but he cannot look to see.

I EXPECT IT IS GOOD ENOUGH, a voice like two slabs of lead slamming together remarks. I SHALL BE SEEING YOU LATER.

Mr. Herrimen didn't appear to notice; his attention was centered exclusively on the portrait of Madame Foster, even as his eyes shut.

...

Frankie heard screaming after the world flashed red. It hadn't lasted very long.

Some of it had been her own. She hadn't imagined that she could make a shriek like that.

She was having trouble moving. Thinking. Doing anything. It was hard to focus, with the red still firing into the sky, turning the smoke and dust falling down into bloody-colored demonshapes.

People were on the ground and they weren't moving or breathing or doing anything so Frankie knew they weren't dead. So many people. So many women and men and kids of all shapes and sizes. So many friends. So many people dying dead or dying on the ground, whispering and sobbing and gone half-crazy and talking to people that died a long time ago...

She could hear her own mom and dad's voices, distorted and fading echoes of the dead. Hah. It was silly; they died when their city on Earth exploded in dust and dirt and darkness.

It was hard to hear the things that _were _there, unless (Maybe? Could be? Or if?) _this _was the illusion and she was waking up. She smiled loosely. The nightmare was over. Nobody died and imaginary friends weren't almost extinct and the people that had created them could do it again and her Earth wasn't just one of many.

Frankie heard Spike yelling. His voice sounded raw and ragged, like something had been torn out of him clawing and screaming. That wasn't good; Spike needed somebody. She needed to...needed to...she didn't know. Hard to think. Hard to remember what she was supposed to do.

She saw Razor crawl along the ground even while the world turned to screaming. Saw Freya claw at the ground screaming and yelling as the red tore something out of her. Saw Andre actually climb halfway up the mansion to get at Kimblee before he collapsed. Saw Stature grow three times her size before she collapsed, and Frankie didn't know if she was alive or dead.

The huge crowd had become the biggest pile-up of bodies Frankie had seen since the war with the Heartless on Earth, when the bodies that didn't fade into the darkness had been burnt in big holes in the ground so the monsters didn't posess them and make them kill people. So many of them. They died screaming and yelling as the red pulse ripped the life (or something else?) right out of them, flopping right over each other. It was like watching dominos fall.

Some people were still moving. They were crying and begging and whispering hate and sounding like they wished they were dead, but it was good enough.

She heard Bloo yell. She remembered the flash of red that had come from him (a Counter technique? Like what Wobbuffets used?) that had smashed into the red pulse and..._bounced _it away a little. Maybe that was why he wasn't dead or halfway there like the others, and maybe why Spike and Eduardo were still moving.

She was moving. Oh, right, Spike and Eduardo were trying to get her and Bloo out of there. She kept trying to tell them to leave her there, she didn't matter, to get the others out before Kimblee finished the job, but she couldn't make the words work.

_Hell of a time for the Evacuation system to not work_, She thought sourly before the ground rumbled. For a moment, she panicked: _He's gonna make it worse, he's going to kill us all-_

Then rationality prevailed. She remembered what that noise signaled. She grinned. "...Screw you..." She rasped, thinking of the invader that had made all this horror happened.

Spike stumbled after the thing causing the rumblings made him trip. "Damn it," He gasped. "What's wrong with me! Can't move like I'm s'posed to...don't feel normal...what did that bastard do to me!"

"Sorry, Scary Vampire Guy, but no arguing!" Eduardo said, scopping Spike, Frankie and Bloo off the ground and running. Curiously, he didn't hurt at all. He had seen the screaming. He didn't understand what had happened, he just needed to get them out of there, then he could save everyone else.

"Damn it, put me down," Spike said weakly. "Like hell I'm just going to sit this out like a punk..."

"We couldn't do it," Bloo said faintly, squished between Spike and Frankie but not seeming to notice. He wasn't paying attention to anything, really. "...I couldn't save anybody."

"Please focus, _Azul!_" Eduardo pleaded. "Don't go all crazy in the head!"

"Not making any promises," Bloo said, briefly lucid.

"Chill out Bloo," Frankie said faintly. "We're almost in the clear."

"Wilt not here, so I have say this: sorry, what make you say that?" Eduardo asked.

The rumbling under their feet reached a peak; deep under the surface, strange things had been happened. The stone catacombs running under Foster's (not actually part of the building but accidentally broken into during it's establishment) had been shaking, strange technology that was as much magical as it was scientific activating. It wasn't complete; with the security system mostly down (this specific function having been restored by Lu-Tze) not everyone could be saved like this system was meant to. But it was still good enough.

All around the house, floorboards were tearing up under the feet of the people standing on them. Bits of wall tore out and wrapped around unmoving guards and the people they had been trying to evacuate. Doors broke off their hinges and went around people. Outside, huge slabs of the walls tore right out of the house and slammed over dead or near-dead people, bits of the catacombs walls tearing right through the ground

As they did this, the bits of house flying around people changed, seamlesly transforming into another state of matter entirely. Wood, stone, metal and other stuff bulged out and stremlined themselves into seamless masses of silvery stuff that was too unyielding to be a liquid and too malleable to be truly solid, gently but speedily wrapping around people and sealing themselves up into compact spheres.

"What the hell!" Spike said as stone from the catacombs tore around around them and did this very thing, silvery stuff spinning out through the dirt, bits of stone still melting into something else and flowing right around them, moving right under their feet and closing itself before reforming into a ball-shape big enough to accomodate Eduardo and everyone.

"That's the Evacuation system," Frankie said quietly. "The house tears bits of itself off, reverts it to this protomatter stuff and then it seeks out anyone alive on the property classified as a resident or 'friend' and gets them out. Wrecks the place something bad."

"Hooray!" Eduardo said as the protomatter-ball shielding them stiffened on the outside, presenting a mighty defense while keeping the inside soft for the comfort of the passengers.

In spite of the intense concentration it took for Kimblee to mold the primal forces around him, he still noticed all of this. "That was...unexpected," He said, bits of vibrant red _stuff _floating in the middle of the circle, red flashes of energy meeting there as people had died and growing it bigger. It was taking form, one not dissmilar to the substance Kimblee's soul and personality had been personified in until recently.

_That was it? _Kevin said, unimpressed.

Ghostfreak raised the mental equivilant of an eyebrow as the spheres scooping out all the survivors from the ground abruptly spun around, generating incredible gyroscopic force, and without further ado fired themselves like bullets right over the Foster's property lines, going the alchemic energy flashes without harm and landing elsewhere with big crashes. _You seem remarkably composed about this. Your victory here has been stolen!_

"Hardly," Kimblee said, not paying much attention to the metal spheres now smashing right through the walls of the house from the inside, carrying away the unlucky few who hadn't made it out in time, not that it would have helped them much. "They were of little consequence...come on now...just a little bit more...condense, damn you, _condense!_"

The red bursts of alchemic energy flowing through the explosion-made circle outside the Foster's property and the smaller circle on the rooftop died away. The red stuff floating in the air in front of , and finally fused together, the bright red glow dimming a little as a new shape appeared; an uncet red crystal, still glowing slightly with crimson light. Kimblee stared, his mouth open in glee. He did not generally indulge in powerful emotions. But this was different. He held his hand up and let it fall into his hands, right on the outline of his transmutation circles, and gingerly picked it up between thumb and forefinger, staring at the jagged thumb-sized crystal.

_The hell is that thing_? Kevin asked.

Kimblee grinned so widely his face might've cracked. He imagined that his fingers might tremble under the power of the unassuming little object. "The great dream of Amestrian alchemy, ever since the original homunculus illumatinted our ancestors with real knowledge and _real power_. The power to create is also the power to destroy. You must break before you can build and those who know how to make know how to _un_make."

_...What?_

"It has many names, this little lovely made from living souls..." Kimblee said, twirling it in his fingers excitedly. "The Sage's Stone. The Red Tincture, the Crimson Elixter, the Fifth Element, the Heaven Stone, the Elixer of Immortality. But they are only titles. No name is as recognizable to the learned as it's original name, this most powerful artifact forged from human lives and will, the most powerful ingredients of all...

"The Philosopher's Stone."

Kimblee waited for a stunned internal silence.

_The what?_ Kevin said.

_I expected something a bit more...grand_, Ghostfreak said.

"Idiots. A thing need not be obvious to be impressive," Kevin said. "Just look at my handiwork!" He spread a hand at the ground; bodies littered the ground still, the spheres not bothering to take the dead.

_That IS a lot of deaders,_ Kevin said. _I've seen more. Made more but...you know. It's somethin'. I guess._

_Not as many as I expected_, Ghostfreak remarked. Kimblee frowned, but he had a point. There were a _lot _less dead bodies than he'd hoped for.

Well, not _quite _dead. He peered into the stone, looking deep past it's red glow. Past the reflection of it's own light on it's many facets, into the very core of it. He saw faces, screaming without sound, bound together and mashed all up. The faces, as a matter of fact, of the people lying dead below him.

Their souls, really.

"Not bad for my first time making a Stone," Kimblee remarked. It could have gone better; the raw flow of energy with such a large-scale transmutation had been agonizing to maintain and direct; he hadn't properly transmuted as many people as he would have liked, only seriously draining or half-killing a good deal of them. But enough had been used to make ideal fuel for his purposes.

Ah well. He looked at the stone, satisfied. The first one he'd wielded had been forged from the souls of Ishbalan officers discharged from the military; Ishbalan convictions made for powerful stones. The second had been made from the researchers that had worked on it except for the man in charge of the project, Dr. Marcoh; those men had violated the very principles they had vowed to uphold through the course of their experiments, all for 'the good of the country'. Finally, this stone, created from people who had survived the Heartless invasions and all the dangers of this world; what sort of wonders could he work with the power _they _could give?

He grinned, biting down on the Stone and touching his hand to the ground. It flashed red instead of the usual alchemic blue, and the entire front of the house angled out into a broad slide, facade and roof ledges and balconies and windows and walls surging together and flattening at an angle. "Let's make some explosions, he said, sliding down and clapping his hand, still holding the Stone in his teeth.

He slid down to the ground and neatly landed in a waiting piles of bodies. "Just like old times!" He said, laughing to himself and pulling himself out. There were so many hands waiting for him. He clapped his hands, glancing around for ideal explosive material.

He found none. But he did see the shadows moving. Kimblee remembered that bloodshed and death wore holes in the multiverse; it made the tears easier, making it simpler for the things beyond the light to chew their way in the worlds of light.

Yellow eyes blinked, wary of the sunlight, and seemed to peer at Kimblee in subservience. He laughed at this intriguing develoupment.

Strange; the bodies of those guards that had attacked him weren't anywhere around. A pity, it would have been delicious ironic. He shrugged, walked over to the dead bodies he had landed on, and put a hand on an outstretched hand. "Farewell," Kimblee said. "It was a pleasure to work with you." He then turned back to the house, held out his hands, and released a surge of alchemic energy vastly amplified by the power of the Philosopher's Stone.

The air crackled red, the Stone's power bleeding into it and draining the life of a soul or two within it, and with a blast that made Kimblee just _roar_, released.

The explosion, in professional terms, was really damn awesome.

...

"So think we should check whatever happened to Foster's?" Ron asked Zim and Zuko, the lot of them still on the rooftop of the mall.

"That red flash of light didn't look good," Zuko said darkly. "The explosions alone deserve our attention!"

"Get 'splosions alla time!" Rufus said dismissively. He hesitated. "...Mebbe not like 'dat..."

"It's probably an evil mad bomber doing some sort of unspeakable evil that deserved our burning retributon!" Zim said.

"I-" Zuko started to say.

The explosion that utterly anhillated Foster's Home, most of the property and a small chunk of the area behind it nearly blinded them; they shut their eyes instinctively and were almost deafened by the near-solid wall of _noise _that hit them like a car hits a stupified armadillo on a highway. It was so loud, it almost didn't register as sound, just a terrifyingly hard smashing of the hearing organs.

Zim, Zuko, Ron and Rufus dared to open their eyes.

They stared. Shock overcame emotion momentarily.

Finally, Ron carefully spoke. "Um. I may be a bit presumptious in saying this since we're pretty far away from the place...even though we got a pretty good eye-view from up here...but did Foster's just get wiped off the map by a crazy-big explosion?"

A set of alien binoculars unfolded from Zim's Pak and around his eyes. "...Yes," Zim said after a moment, uncharacteristically quiet. "Yes it did." The binoculars unfolded.

"...Oh." Ron was equally quiet and still. Like a sword about to be unsheathed to skewer someone.

"We're find the others," Zuko said, with a terrible note of finality. "_Now_."

There was no arguing.

...

A/N: Well, this is a bit of a WHAM Episode, is it? Someone tell me, I can't tell.

Kimblee just killed off most of Foster's, and then he blew it up. After killing a bunch of other people. But nobody we know. Probably. Don't go giving the guy ideas, mind.

But on to other matters!

The Mall Crawlers are loosely based on the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout 3. Very loosely. Also much more provincial. They were written in to give Team Hobbes something interesting to do other than some vauge description of shopping going on, and also a vauge idea of the sort of stuff that happens to Traverse Town: even the crazy dorks are, at the very least, Elite Mooks. It was also a ton of fun to write.

Alas, poor Dusty, nobody actually knew you. For the purposes of this story, I'm playing a bit loose with Kimblee's alchemy, but I figure that if Miss Arakawa did it in Fullmetal Alchemist (she stated in the first volume she wanted to go for a B-Movie feel), it fits the genre if I do it, right? Also, Kimblee a total sociopath. I hope I got that across; I did a bit of research into the typically solipsistic thought patterns of fictional sociopaths for this sort of thing.

So what's the deal with that spooky rock that makes Avatars collapse? I bet the more Genre Savvy will figure it out quickly enough. Also, I realized earlier that I was forgetting Morte, so aside from turning the _characters _doing the same thing into a Running Gag, I'm doing my part to make Morte a more integral part of the team, and certainly more of one than Jimmy was. Looking back on it, if I had thought the complexities out more when I was starting this, I wouldn't have included a 'chronicler' character at all, espicially since that version of it makes no sense for this story, but I decided to make the best of it and retcon Morte into a Mr. Exposition, just like he was in Planescape: Torment.

Of the four main guard leaders, I think I like Razor and Stature the most, though Andre is plain fun to write. (I actually patterned a bit of his dialogue after a Warhammer 40k Ork. Jagermonsters are basically Genre Savvy Orks with Nice Hats, really.) Also, the fight scenes may give a few potential clues to how this Red Lotus arc will play out. Any guesses? Anyone? Also, I adapted aspects of Freya's abilities from Final Fantasy IX for her fights, after Shonen-ing It Up a bit. (My little term for taking stuff and making them ridiculously awesome. My main inspiration was the One Piece anime.)

I'm taking steps to making Bloo more like his original personality in Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, but his troublemaking version is just so much inciteful fun!

Discworld fans will probably recognize Lu-Tze and Death's brief cameo in this chapter. Think hard about the implications of them being there!

Also, yes, most of Foster's is now dead. (Or had their souls transmuted into a Philosopher's Stone; unless that thing gets broken, it's the same thing.) Note that this means, of course, that not _everyone _is dead. Just very close to it. Among the survivors...well, you'll see next chapter, yeah?

Also also, Kimblee blew up Foster's. He's kind of an jerk that way.

Have a moment of silence for Nidah, Dusty, Mogo and the unnamed minor OCs that got ka-boomed. Okay, silence moment over!

Belive it or not, I originally had an extra scene with Bonnie, Zaphod and Tarquin Tiesenhausen Tickgrass, evacuating people from the dining hall with big dramatic Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann speeches. It was pretty damn awesome; in a similar vein, a deleted idea for Zim's Firebending montage with Zuko involved Zuko giving Zim a Kamina-esque peptalk. Complete with the phrase 'believe in me who believes in you!'. It was as intentionally ridiculous as it sounds.

Aaand...that's all I have to say.

Next chapter: people start a-looking, and Jarod gets pissed. This will be inadvisable. Also: stuff happening!

Don't worry; only a few more chapters to go until World Hopping Time, hoo-wah! Zim's crew will start getting bigger around then. Look forward to it!

...I really like the games Chrono Trigger and Dante's Inferno. Been eating up a lot of time, playing them.


	12. Red Lotus: Reactionary Measures

Disclaimer: This is a fanwork; I don't own anything.

...

In that mysterious place of light, the bizarre-looking trio of machine-being, hooded one and lion-man had gone utterly and terribly silent, threads of light that would have looked even weirder to someone with the appropiate mulidimensional sense required to properly perceive them splintering around them.

They stared at the complex device showing them what was going on around the multiverse, each individual event layered over each other in ways that would drive conentional intellects to insanity. Fortunately, these beings had greater minds than that.

"A pity that our efforts saved so few," The machine-being said, his bland words creaking on every syllable and close breaking. Rust spread over him, bits of him falling without him noticing; something still remained where he was falling apart, as though the _idea _of him was so deeply ingrained into reality that it surpassed the psychmorphic nature of his body.

This earned a solemn nod from the other two. They _knew _what had befallen those consumed by the Philosopher's Stone. They also knew that the threads, the lives of those same people, remaiend in conjunction with their respective level of reality, indicating that they weren't dead yet.

It would have been kinder if they'd died.

After a moment, the hooded one spoke, his voice tight and controlled. "...It is a good thing that we had Lu-Tze there to help."

"I didn't know he knew about machines," The lion-man said.

"He's been alive for a very long time. All immortals learn to fill up that space with knowledge sooner or later. What's the point of immortality if you don't do something useful with it?"

The lion-man grunted. The hooded one looked politely interested; he had only spiritually 'evolved' into his current state fairly recently, he wasn't very well-versed on the nature of what he had become. "It did end up better than the projections suggested in a sixty-nine percent outcome; Kimblee only ended up with a little over half of the population of Foster's in that monstrous construct-cage of his. The rest are safe...for the time being."

This was not said with a great deal of satisfaction. A single lost soul was a tragedy; these entites did not have the unique capability of most mortals to be unable to conceive of anything beyond a set number of people as being 'people' in a conceptual sense.

They could count the death toll of a million, _feel _each screaming dying scream, and rage against the darkness for every single one lost.

"...He intends to spread chaos," The machine-being said. The others didn't say anything; they were looking through the myriad possibilties evolving from this specific moment (relative to Kimblee, of course), displaying from the machine at their feet, fractal image-scenarios emerging from quantum time-analysis and presenting them with all the following events that could possibly happen.

Most of them were not espicially pleasant.

That was not the same as saying that they were invaribly bad endings. "...There is still a _chance_," The lion-man said. "We can still beat that jerkass!"

"Indeed," The machine-being said approvingly. He, having been what he was for far longer than the others, was able to process the multidimensional information far more efficiently than the others, and found the best future, in both a cosmic and personal sense. "Yes..._that _would work nicely."

The others soon sensed their way towards the future he referred to. Nonverbal communication was cool that way. "Oh yeah!" The hooded one said. "That'd work awesomely. Lot of collateral damage though."

"Would you rather people die?"

"No, I'm just making a point. Anyway...the Keyblade can really do _that_?"

"Yes!" The machine-being said earnestly. "In fact...I am not altogether certain that there is not _anything _the Keyblade cannot do, given sufficient skill, knowledge and imagination. And of course...skillful teachers to educate a young Keybearer."

"Zim is learning quick," Remarked the lion-man. "He just got the thing and he already makes fire. Probably won't be long before he starts applying it in more..._creative _ways and makes little steps to figuring out what he can really do." He paused, and grinned. "The Avatar is going to _flip _when he realizes the truth about this 'non-native Bender' thing he's been spreading without realizing it."

"Zim's just the first," The hooded one remarked. "He's getting close to becoming a true Firebender, if he earns Agni's acceptance. And the others Zim find could become Benders too, assuming they have the right spiritual inclinations. The spirit's little experiment is starting to expand a bit, isn't it?"

"All for the good," The machine-being said, his sorrow-rust flaking away a bit. "...I must confess, I am a bit worried about those children the Cat-King sent to assist Zim in his journey. Calvin and Hobbes. The descendant of Chaos Cultists on one hand and a pariah from a nearly extinct tribe of animal-people on the other. They are gifted, yes...but untested. You would think he'd send seasoned warriors."

"He did, in his own weird way," The lion-man said. "They're strong. Strong in mind, body and heart, and against the Heartless, that's way better than ordinary skill. People who believe in themselves are lights in the darkness, and they _burn _it."

"But they do not entirely believe in themselves," The hooded one stated. "They are riddled with doubts. They hide it well, but...despair and regret chokes their Kingdom still, and them with it. The days of the Imperium's atrocities mark their people still, and there is still something to be concerned about. They are both touched by the Warp."

"Oh?"

"Not the current one...as much as time applies in that chaos-place. I mean...Chaos is partially responsible for the very existence of Hobbes' kind, as well as the experiments of Fabius Bile; he has a trace of it's mark, no matter how long seperated by the generations. And Calvin is the descendant of _psykers_. Psykers in service to Chaos itself. It has been moderated by the times, channeled into other forms of power and reduced to dormancy...but the Heartless _knew _of these things. They might still be able to...affect it."

"Well, the boy _is _a Genius," The lion-man said. "...For his sake, and those of everyone around, I pray he holds to his humanity, or at least keeps his growing madness channeled in a positive direction. That boy comes from a long line of the Inspired...and we know what happens to a mad scientist consumed by the light of their own genius, let alone Warp taint that's in the blood making things worse."

"Or it could end up being a good thing," The machine-being said off-handedly. They stared at him. "What? It could be!"

"Good point," The hooded one said, after a moment of reflection.

Their talk seemed inane and distracting from their state purpose of being subtle with manipulating events in such, but they were, in truth, already doing so, even as they talked. Their immersion in reality was not such a simple thing to sever, the echoes of their mighty existence echoing (in countless realities, the very act of them doing this made happen small and seemingly unimportant coincidences that cascaded quick; evil empires were toppled, dictators were crippled, genocide campaigns were halted when intervening armies showed up due to a freak storm, and a sad kitten got a sandwich and made it happy).

Even so, the talk faded as they returned once more to the situation at hand; nudging things in the right direction, manipulating by means sly and surprising, casting a bit of light into even the greatest darkness and generally being mysterious benevolent benefactors. They seemed to fade somewhat, merging into the very fabric of their divine reality.

They had some good to do, after all.

...

_In Traverse Town._

Minimoose was, by Zim's design, far less emotional than his 'brother' Gir was. Zim had wanted a robotic sidekick that was capable of focusing on the mission at hand, not one that jumped from one distraction to another. A robot that didn't have a mind nearly as warped and bent as his own. A robot that could actually contribute to the cause instead of making things worse. A robot that was, in short, _useful_.

He did this admirably. Minimoose was not the unfettered spirit Gir was, was not eternally bounding from one distraction to the other as Gir was. By the same token, he was not as overemotional. He was far from the unfeeling machine of human legend (any sufficiently advanced race learns that cold logic and the slavery of eternal servitude do not go well together), but he was...calm. Fettered to Duty and The Proper Thing. Quietly determined.

Still, he was surprised and a little frightened now. It was for his own reasons, of course; he didn't have a particular interest in going overboard in preserving his own life if it put his Master (an unforseen side-effect of his personality growth, not any action of Zim's; he wouldn't have thought of it during his 'bad' era and it would be repugnant to him now), but he was sufficiently empathetic to be concerned about the fact that the earthshaking explosions and that terrible gale of blood-red light had been from Foster's.

He was very glad he had seen his Master leaving that place.

Amid keeping up with Mac, Coco and Wilt as they desperately ran back to their home, that last remnant of the memory of their lost world, and filtering through their panicked-frightened-babble cries for something he could formulate a response to and be helpful-

Minimoose felt afraid. It wasn't an emotion he was familiar with. Without the fear of death that plauged meat-people and so many mechanoid-forms, Minimoose understood fear as something less tangible. He wasn't afraid of his body being broken beyond repair, but he was afraid of other things; of his master being killed. Of the people he thought of as 'acceptables' being damaged beyond repair. Gir never coming back. Those Heartless monsters had inspired true fear in him, fear of a break-down that could not be restored by system-backups or any degree of repairs. Now, as his emotions were begining to register a new form of interpersonal connections in regards to his new friend, he found another form of fear: he could not stand the thought of Coco coming to harm, physical, emotional or otherwise.

"I'm sorry, Mac, but don't you think this is a little crazy?" Wilt said, somehow outdistanced by Mac.

"Are _you _crazy?" Mac yelled back at him as he ran around the corner and they followed him. "Explosions! Creepy red light! More explosions! _Bloo and Eduardo _could be there! People could be getting hurt, who knows what that crazy guy could be doing!"

Minimoose squeaked. Coco squawked, translating. It didn't help much for the random bystanders watching and occasionally getting knocked over. Anyway, Mac didn't hear her. "Minimoose says that if that's the case, it'd probably be a good to hang back and wait until it's safe!"

"Easy for you to say, you don't live there!" Mac snapped. Minimoose squeaked sourly: _I do now_.

Coco squawked reproachfully. "We don't have time for this!" Mac said. "We gotta...I don't know...do something! We _have to!_ I don't know how we got in that alley or what caused that explosion-"

"It was that guy that showed up!" Wilt said. "He made a small explosion that nearly killed those poor guys and _definitely _killed somebody!"

"All the more reason to get back there and...and..." Mac grimaced. "Doesn't matter, we just do something! Better than just letting it happen!"

As they neared the property, Minimoose scanned for life-forms. He squeaked, and it was the loudest and most bewildered noise Coco'd ever heard. "Coco coco co!"

"I'm sorry, _what?_" Wilt said. "I didn't catch-"

They turned the corner and saw Foster's.

"...That."

Or more accurately, they saw what was _left _of Foster's.

Minimoose, Mac, Coco and Wilt stared.

They went on staring.

There was a certain distance in their staring. Like they saw not just smoking and torn ruins (and there was nothing else to see), but they saw memories, swarming hordes of black monstrosities; people dying and more monsters rising and trailing darkness; a thousand-fold moments of despair and misery and spiralling ever closer into an abyss. Being pulled out of it, only to be broken down again and again and again-

Then, this new home. A new start in Traverse Town. Another Foster's Home, for them and for the people that washed up here on the tides of the blackest night. It was like a lighhouse on a razor-rimmed reef; a beacon of safety and hope in a living nightmare. Amid the chaos and the nonsenscial adventures and the crazy madmen and the semi-deranged factions and all the weirdness Traverse Town had to offer, there was Foster's. (True, it was just as weird as the rest of the town, but at least there, the chaos was _their's _alone to lay claim to.)

Before them was smoke and ashes rising into the sky. A neighborhood, so familiar to them as their own rooms, blasted and broken, chunks of building smashed through the ground and maimed bodies under them. People were swarming - bloodied and battered and bewildered - pulling bodies out from shattered ruins where buildings had once stood when they weren't running away. The streets - Mac could remember drag-racing with Bloo when they built go-karts for the fifth time for fun months ago - had been shattered. Dust over gore-speckled pieces bigger than trucks, blackened by fire and a huge massive crack rolling around the broken homes and shops and places like a white-hot giant's knife had sliced through the ground. The air was thick with dust, so bad that people kept sneezing and could blame the tears on it getting in their eyes.

Mac moved forward, stumbling and dazed, like someone had just hit him in the head. He said something, a small inchoherent noise without sense, and he went on staring. His hands shook, and his knees went numb.

The fence. The big iron fence with spikes on to look cool. Mr. Herrimen liked fences like that. He said looked good, but it had been blown right out of the ground, bits of metal half imbedded in wall or all twisted up in big rolls like weird metal anchovies. After about halfway on, the fence was just _gone_.

"No..." Wilt whispered. "Nuh...no way, man. No."

The ground was shattered. Big glassy bits were strewn everwhere, clumps of soil rip up and half-pressed into glass by some massive force. The handpaved road from the fence to the house was gone too, but Minimoose could see some bits of white pavement here and there. At least one big chunk had sliced right through a tree and cut it down. Peculiarly, there were a lot of perfect holes in the ground.

Coco squawked something. It held less meaning than usual; no translations were offered, needed or even reasonable; she had no words to make out, just a strangled noise of bewildered incomprehension.

There were bodies. So very many bodies. Humans, humanoids, beast-people, imaginary friends, aliens, fish-people, talking animals, wilted plants, sentient stone sapients...there were more. So very many more, in big piles with their arms and legs against each other, their faces (or equivilants) staring at something with horrible looks of agony. Blood (or something similar) was dribbing from their noses and their mouths (again, if they had any; Foster's residents were a pretty varied bunch). Many had fallen down, like death had just smashed them over. Others were lying down in large piles in positions that suggested they had run and gotten pretty far before they'd died. So many of them were gripping hands or holding to shoulders or had died with hands on arms, like they'd tried to pull each other out even as they were dying or had tried to shield one another. More than a few of them had fallen down holding each other, and none of the men, women and various others that had wandered into the site could pry them apart. (Realistically, they could, but it was disrespectful and it would probably involve damaging the evidence.) They saw _friends _lying dead there.

Minimoose didn't squeak at all. In all honesty, this was just as bad as he'd expected. It was strange; he had once help to engineer things like this. It was...uncomfortable looking at it from the other side of things.

(But the scanner...these people were dead? Something was not right.)

The mansion, the house, their _home_, was a ruin; the entire ground floor and most of the second and third floors had been obliterated in that final explosion, and the resulting shockwaves had shatted the internal structure of the house enough to send the rest of the house smashing down. There was pieces of red rooftops and broken glass amid the wooden supports poking out of the sad broken mess like bones in a decayed corpse, all shattered and smashed and utterly beyond any of their means. The dining hall had been flattened by the shockwaves, and a huge piece of a rooftop had smashed into it to finish the job; the once proud shape of the dining table, a massive piece of wood supposedly carved from the trunk of a legendary tree from the planet of Melchior-7 where the trees were three hundred feet tall and breathed fire, stuck out like a arm raised out in some final defiance. The stables, which lay directly behind Foster's, had been simply wiped away, a wide streak of shattered wood and metal where it was supposed to be, the dead within horribly mangled. Even the very neighborhood behind Foster's hadn't been spared; the massive streak of devastation that had tore the ground and unmade the hedge maze and the gardens and the stone statuary plaza had wiped the fence girding the property out of existence, and the streets and buildings beyond had suffered almost as badly, if only because they hadn't been close enough to the explosion, but that didn't make it any better for those half-dead in the rubble amid that nearly perfect circle of destruction off in the distance.

"...We were just here," Mac said, quaking with his disbelief and refusal to accept this in spite of it's unalterable reality.. "_We were just here!_"

Minimoose was tempted to point out that a lot of things can happen in a few moments, and decided that it wouldn't be in good taste. For similar reasons, he neglected to remark that at least they had a blast. At the very least, it would be amazingly tactless and an incredibly lame pun.

Wilt shook, like a scarecrow in a high wind. He fell down hard, his maimed eye rattling and sounding like a marble in a bag. "What _happened?_" He said. "What did that guy do?"

Coco's beak trembled a little, and then she just stared. She didn't blink. She didn't squawk. She didn't hide or cry or do anything at all. She just stared.

"...Bloo came back here," Mac said, almost too quietly to be heard. "He and Eduardo came back here, and Mr. Herrimen and Frankie and Spike and _everybody and they were ALL HERE!_"

Wilt's working eye swiveled at him. "...No," Wilt said, and with that rarely said word it was like he wanted to deny the truth. "No. Not _again_." This was not the first time they had returned to home only to find it gone, with everyone dead.

Minimoose squeaked. Coco blinked and squawked. "Yeah...okay," Wilt said in response, still shaking. "We gotta go and find-" Mac ran off. "Mac, whatta ya doing!"

"Gotta find Bloo!" Mac said desperately. "Gotta find Bloo, gotta find Eduardo, gotta find Frankie and Mr. Herrimen and Spike and everybody else and I don't care if that guy's just waiting for us because I am _not going to let everyone die on me again!_"

"Mac, stop!" Wilt said, running after him, his much longer strides allowing him to catch up easily.

Mac didn't seem to hear him. He just kept running. Straight at the bodies, as a matter of fact.

He turned over the first one he reached; Mr. Bobba that worked in accounting at some multi-world company, except he was dead now. "No." He ran to the next one, not noticing Wilt, Coco and Minimoose after him. It was Bladeleg, a nice girl with mechnical legs with swords built in and she was at the back of a kid Mac's age that he didn't know and it was like she'd died shielding him but it didn't work. "No." Again, he went to another body.

And then another. _Trey Roadblazer, a puma-kid a bit older than Mac that liked going into the world to explore. He looked like he'd tried crawling to safety even after his legs stopped working._

And after that, another one. _Madame Gachanoa, a weak but genuine psychic lady of the good ol' houndoun voodoo style that taught Mac how to make gumbo._

And again...(_Leah Owiks, a small dryad that was somehow in love with a rock statue of a kitten in the gardens; Mr. Olafssonsson, a rather eccentric old dwarf that built up a small fortune making novelty prank boxes) _and again (_Perry Cox, he was a grumpy but good guy that just showed up one day and said he was going to be the house doctor and no one said otherwise and he didn't have a mark on him but he was still dead; Douglas Ramsey, that mutant teenager with linguistic powers who was always ready to help with a computer problem with a nice smile and his alien friend Warlock was there on his body, melding to it in a last ditch attempt to save them both that failed, and it was still warping in death)_...and_ again_.

(_Alice Aetherhed, Bob Blunderbus, Ripnick the Shreddy-Guy, Mr. Ouldenshanks and so many many more, too many, this couldn't be happening, it was happening again, no no no no, and here was more people he know-)_

He recognized faces. People he knew, people he fought with, people he was friends with, people he just knew because he lived in the same place they did. And they were _dead_.

"No..." He whispered again. He was aware of a burning wetness on his cheeks and blinked, but that just made the tears come faster.

He'd wanted to help. But something had happened, he had been stopped, and now his friends were _dead-_

"_BLOO!"_ Mac screamed, another bit of his childhood shriveling away and crying as it died. "_EDUARDO! __**WHERE ARE YOU?**_"

No one answered.

His legs trembled; Mac fell to the ground on his knees, but he barely felt it. He suddenly had all the strength of a bowl of gelatin, and all the feeling too.

"Bloo..." Mac said again, in a whisper so quiet he himself could barely hear it. "_I'm sorry...please be alive...I'm sorry...please-be-alive-I'm-sorry..._"

The words were running together, like a mantra that glued his sanity together.

Mac was vaugely aware of people running onto the property; many of them in the longcoats that were favored by faction members of all sorts. He hardly noticed them taking appropiate note of the situation with well-timed curses and disbelieving shouts. He didn't react when one of them shook his shoulder and asked what was going on. Mac just kept mumbling that little almost-prayer under his breath, and he was shortly left alone when Wilt was more accomodating.

Mac was starting to cry again. Some of the factioneers were taking notice of this, but he barely noticed them trying to calm him down or comfort him.

In much the same way, no one paid attention to the man with the dirtied outfit and the nice hat and a mad grin and the glowing red stone still glowing with the power of over half of Foster's residents as he watched the proceedings. In the chaos, none of the panicking people on the streets had seen him leave, and no one paid attention to him now; he was just one man watching a disaster's aftermath.

The darkness of his shadow shifted, even though he was otherwise still. Kimblee grinned at it, and other things stirred in the shadows cast by the rubble and the broken buildings. There were no yellow eyes or solid bodies or silent monsters. Not yet.

Blood and hatred and loss were seeping into the ground, staining the planet with the negative flow, the Lifestream of this world twisted very slightly through it. It was like stamping into the ground lightly enough so that a river could flow; on the whole, it was a very small and nearly insignificant act, but it was enough to let the water through.

Like putting up a lightning rod in a storm, or perhaps like dropping an anvil on a stretched sheet of rubber. Atrocities, murders, mass death and all the other lovely shades of human darkness made things..._thinner_, or so he understood. Interdimensional physics and the sciences of realm interaction hadn't been his thing. But he knew that what he had done had other reprecussions than anyone knew. The people researching the Heartless in this town didn't know. But Hohenheim had known, had seen the twisted results of people dark enough to do what other men didn't have the courage to do, and now Wuya knew what he did, and by extension, so did her trusted agents.

Human evil made a hole in the mish-mash of magic, order, stability and associated weirdness. Like poking a hole in a bag of water. Except it didn't let things _out_.

It let the things outside _in_.

Kimblee looked up at a likely building, considering how to best climb up it so he would have a good eye view: self-styled heroes and avengers would be coming soon, and he needed to be ready.

Find Jarod, he decided, and everything would logically flow after that. He didn't have a _plan_, per se, except in the loosest sense, but he did enjoy the prospect of making something up on the fly. He was already considering what to do if Ghostfreak's scanning didn't work or went sour. In that case, he had a plan that would, if it didn't work, would certainly afford him some fun and allow him to make a big mess.

Technically, he had already accomplished his mission. He had killed more than half of Foster's and destroyed the building. Their precious little illusion of control and safety had been shattered as surely as the dead lying there on the ground in big beautiful bundles. But it wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.

Maybe it would be enough when they found him and killed him. Maybe it would be enough if he found a good place to stand tall and start wiping the First District off the planet. Maybe he could blast the town up in such a way that he could create a massive human transmutation circle and make a truly impressive stone and present it to Wuya as a token of his appreciation for being such a good boss-

Wait. She didn't want the town gone yet. Pity, it had seemed a lovely idea.

Still, it wasn't like _this_ district was needed for that.

Kevin was getting better at reading his thoughts. _You're an ambitious bastard, aren't you?_ He asked, a little disgusted and impressed at the same time. That seemed to be his base reaction to Kimblee's actions here.

Kimblee smiled. "To strive...is to live."

_I wonder where those ball things were going, anyway._ Kimblee didn't answer him; it wasn't his concern now, even if it meant his death. He had more important concerns.

He attended to them.

...

"I wonder where these things came from?" Tucker asked, tapping of of the three great big metal spheres that had nearly flattened them moments after the big explosion that scared them half to death and really freaked out a lot of people. There was, under them, a bullseye-pattern lined in red circles.

"Looks like a Foster's evacuation casing-sphere to me," Abel said. "They have a emergency evacuation system that makes bits of the house tear off bits of itself that revert to a proverbial state of protomatter that forms into a kinetically-absorbant material; they hunt down everyone in the house who registers as both alive and a friend or resident, captures them, and then blasts out of there to land in several designated landing spots throughout the First District. Hence the bullseye on the ground."

"What made you think it was a good idea to stop on one of those, anyway?" Toph asked.

"I thought they were just for decoration, like all the other crazy stuff we've seen!" Tucker said. "How was I supposed to know that there's actually something in this town that's for exactly what it looks like?"

"Common sense?" Calvin said dryly. It was a cutting insult coming from him, a self-confessed mad scientist.

The lot of them were currently standing in the middle of a small plaza (the precursors of Crucible had really liked plazas in their towns for some reason. Possibly they operated on the Rule of Cool) that was actually located a very short distance from Cyborg's shop, though this was a minor point for them. Their hero instincts were ringing. Something bad had happened. Indications from Abel and the other freaking out people suggested that this was _not _order as usual. Explosions, yes. (But not deadly ones, normally. Property damage was normal here. _Lethal _casualties were not.) Big red blasts of light and screaming, espicially not.

Some sort of properly heroic action seemed called for. Probably involving stomping someone, in Calvin's own weird lexicon. (He'd spent quite some time among Orks in his younger years and some things had rubbed off.)

Four big metal spheres had nearly smashed into them while they had paused for a moment to figure out where Foster's was relative to them, having done this on a big bullseye painted on the ground (this had been Tucker's idea; naturally, the others were wasted no time mocking him for it, except Abel, who'd done much worse feats in dumbass-ery.). This was cause for concern, given the word _evacuation _considering the horrible explosions and spooky red lightshow.

"How are these things supposed to open?" Calvin asked, referring to the metal balls. "I don't see a seam or seal anywhere on these-"

One of the sphere shimmered and did something best compared to a chunk of ice suddenly transforming into water and collapsing, except that in this case it was more like metal turning into a liquid-like state and falling apart as it reformed into chunks of wood and stone and other stuff. (It was not a good metaphor.) A bunch of people fell out, generally dazed, gibbering to themselves or unconscious.

"Oh," Calvin said as the rest of the spheres did the same thing. It was pretty cool to watch, if you didn't have nausea problems. (Fortunately, no one was.)

"That's it, I am so becoming a mechanist or whatever a gadget guy here is called," Tucker decided. "The tech you have here is too freaking cool not to."

"Think there's plenty of stuff to start from-" Calvin froze. He recognized bits of that certain lump of mumbling bodies. "No. No...just no. No freaking way."

The lump in question was starting to seperate and get up. "Anybody you know?" Toph said.

"Not exactly. _Know _would imply that I would appreciate them."

A blue bundle flopped away from the body-cushion of Spike and Frankie, the larger two not seeming much interesting in moving away from each other. "Aw man, it's...you again..." Bloo muttered, sliding up into an upright position dispite wobbling something fierce. "Just the crazy-ass jerk I wanted to see...hoo boy." He fell over on his face, but bounced right back up.

Tucker blinked. "...What do you have to do with this guy?"

"He and two other idiots were stalking me last night," Calvin said. "I'm not entirely clear why."

"Fate of the worlds...Heartless need go boom...nothin' better to do..." Bloo muttered. "Big heap trouble-stuff...whoops, here I go." He fell over, or started to, but Toph Earthbended several small slabs out of the ground to hold him upright without hurting him. "Oh, hey, thanks."

"Sure thing," Toph said.

Abel blinked at Spike and Frankie. "What the heck happened to you guys! What was with the exploding? And the red lights! And...hey, your position looks a bit suspect. Must take pictures!"

"Try it and I'll rearrange your insides," Spike said weakly.

"Hmn, you're not in much of a position to do much about it."

"Will you be serious for five minutes?" Calvin said.

"Nope!" Abel said cheerfully. "Hey, I been around a long time, of course I've gone a bit 'round the bend, y'know?" He made sounds approximating spooky noises. "_It runs in my family_."

"...Did you just make _thematic sound effects?_"

Abel said nothing.

Spike rolled off Frankie, pulling himself out of the sunlight and into the safety of the shade; every movement was like trying to haul his way up a mountain by his fingertips. "...Destiny's playing silly buggers with us if'n it's you we see first thing out of the ball," He said quietly. "What's the odds? Must be at least twenty dozen of us flying around town, and first people we sees is _you_."

"That is really contrived," Toph agreed.

"Law of narrative convention states that if you are put into a position where probability governs outcomes, the most dramatically or themetically appropiate outcome happens nine times out of the eight," Abel said. "And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't make sense. I hate numbers, really. I suppose that since you and Calvin just met, it was the most dramatic outcome. What's the point of you popping out and running into some other person and gradually meeting us later? It'd make more logical sense, but it'd be so boring. This way's a bit stupid, but it makes things happen quicker, yeah?"

Tucker rubbed his forehead. "Too much British accent!"

"Wot?" Abel and Spike said. Abel added, "'Pologize for da 'ead-hurtin', guv'."

"Now you're just doing it on purpose."

"Yeh, wot's yer point?"

The other people were starting to wake up. "Ow," Frankie said, rubbing her head, and carefully got off Eduardo's back.

"_Gracias,_" Eduardo said weakly. He grunted, not so much standing up as he unfolded in a generally upwards direction, his muscles seeming to have to bunch up and move out of way for others.

"I feel like my soul almost got torn out and my life consumed in a whirlwind of unending pain," A small sharkman in a Foster's security uniform said.

"Totally happened," said a petty officer wearing a slightly nicer uniform.

"Ah, that'd explain it."

"Wait, what!" Toph said.

"...I don't know," Frankie said, sitting forcefully down on the ground. Spike sat down next to her, easily as exhausted as she was. "Damn...I don't feel right."

"You need to get to a hospital," Abel said, switching his demeanor. "All of you, now."

"Nu-uh!" Eduardo said unexpectedly. "Got a job to do!" He fell over. "Owie."

"Yeah, the minotaur-ogre-thing is right!" Said the sharkman guard, jumping to his feet. He immediately fell back down. "But it would appear that it is a futile prospect."

"See?" Abel said. "You lot can barely stand, let alone go...do whatever. I'm bringing you loonies to a hospital!"

Calvin thought fast. "How about we get you over there, and then you tell us what happened on the way?"

"No can do," Spike said. "Got a job to do. Mostly involving finishing this before it spreads."

Toph tilted her head. "Who did this to you now? I'm serious, tell me who and you'll have a serious deficit of bad guys bugging you. Film it, it'll be great for ratings."

"...You're panting just keeping yourself up," Calvin said to Spike. "Leave this to guys who _aren't _half-dead?"

Spike laughed weakly. "Like I'm going to trust the safety of the house to a kid."

"Hey, don't you dare dare talk down to me-"

"Hey, what's going on over here!"

This came from a loud and authoritive voice, and it's identity became clearer as a truck went down the street. At least, it looked like a truck; it had a cab and a trailer, though the cab was fitted for six seats and the trailer was a big boxy square, but it didn't have wheels, just strange bulbs that were emitting a powerful force that had the net effect of pushing the truck off the ground and propelling it, effectively making it fly a few feet above the ground. The whole thing was painted white with bright blue decals in circuit-like patterns.

The truck turned sideways and came to a stop a short distance from them; the driver's side of the cab-door irised open and a large teenaged boy that was almost all cybernetic systems and prosthetics jumped out, what little left of his flesh a dark brown. (And, notably, his mechanical parts had the same design as the truck's paintjob, or perhaps it was the other way around.)

The cyborg stomped over to them. "Spike! What are you and these other guys doing?"

"Horrible explosion. Other explosions before-hand. Nasty red lights," Spike said. "Do the math."

The cyborg frowned. "Wait." He stared at the bits of building on the ground. "...Oh no. You did an evacuation thing! It got that bad!"

"And then some," Bloo said. "Oh yeah, it got bad."

"Some lunatic blew up those houses," Frankie said. "And made that weird..._stuff _happen. With all the red light."

"Damn it," The cyborg growled. "We just got _done _with the last omnicidal maniac that really meant it, we don't need another one so soon!"

"What makes you think it's an omnicidal maniac?" Calvin said.

"Who else would want to blow up Foster's?" The cyborg said. "Even the usual idiots have _some _class." He paused and looked at them again. "Uh...who are you guys?" He binked. "...And why are you with them, Father Nightroad? I thought you were lost somewhere."

"I was!" Abel said. He gestured at Calvin. "He and some friends of his got me out of a mess and I'm obligated to pay them back by being a nice tour guide and stuff." He hastily introduced them, to varying degrees of interest.

"So who are you?" Calvin asked him.

"Name's Cyborg," He said.

Calvin stared at him; he remembered that this was the guy supposedly fixing their ship. "...You're Cyborg. _You_."

"Yeah. Got a problem with that?"

"...Your _name _is Cyborg. You. Who are the most literal cyborg I have ever seen, and I grew up during the tail-end of a horrific war that left an insane number of the participents in need of such prosthetic surgery that they ended up more machine than living body-bits."

"Uh, what are you going with this?" Tucker asked.

"I'm just trying to pick the logic here. You seriously couldn't come up with a more interesting superhero code-name or posthuman identity then _Cyborg_?"

"Hey, don't tell me it's not creative!" Cyborg said. "I'm a cyborg, it's what people think of when they think about me, I'm not exactly able to pass for normal, so why not go with the self-image that belies my increasingly deteriorating self-worth as a human being and vauge suspcisions that people wouldn't think twice about killing me if I went bad because of the whole 'robots aren't people' bit mixed with the 'big black guys are scary' thing." He paused. "...Did I just say the last part out loud?"

"Yep," Calvin said.

"You need to learn about proper monolouging," Abel said.

"I think I'm half-dead and I still have enough strength to marvel at your bad timing," Spike said. "And I'm already dead to begin with, that's impressive, it is."

"You have problems," Eduardo said.

"Eh, I've heard worse," Frankie said.

"Millennium hand and shrimp!" A delirious survivor said.

"Is this really the time for life-changing expositions about your personal life?" Toph said. "It rarely goes over well."

"At least you're the victim of a trope that gives you a bit of credibility," Tucker said. "When people see me, they're all like 'hah, we can belittle _him_, he's just a walking inversion of the usual ethnicity sterotypes except in regards to the nerdy black student'! And I'm not really that nerdy. I think."

"I once met a undead cyborg-llama with ninja training and a pirate hat," Abel said, not really paying attention anymore. "It refused to stop calling me Jimmy."

"What?" Cyborg said.

"What?" Calvin said.

A pause. Then..."What are you doing here, anyway?" Spike said. "Thought you were working on a ship or something."

"...Sorry, but I think that saving lives is a bit more important than putting the final touches up the ship," Cyborg said. Calvin took note that Cyborg did _not _say that the ship was unfinished. Transport technology was one of his specialties and he knew what 'touching up' might mean. "I've been going around the evacuation sites and picking people up so I can drop them off at a hospital." He frowned. "I've heard some things..."

Calvin raised eyebrows, including Toph's. She smacked his hand away. "I thought you had just stumbled onto us! That's slightly less contrived."

"Well...we, meaning me and my landlord Winry, she works at the shop too...we did see the spheres going all over the place before that last explosion, I bet tons of people did, but...I dunno what you mean, I was just making the rounds to do something," Cyborg explained awkwardly. "And, uh...who are you guys?"

"Just some new guys," Calvin said hastily, wanting to get out of there now. Since Cyborg had showed up with his truck, he suspected that they were no longer needed, meaning they could just go and do stuff now. (After interrogating him about their ship and it's readiness; he was excited at the prospect of a new craft to mess with.)

Bloo wasn't so kind. "They're with Zim," He said, knowing full well what that would mean.

Cyborg stared. "...You're kidding."

"Nope!"

"I know!" Calvin said. "It's so _contrived_!" He turned to the sky and shouted, "_I KNOW YOU'RE DOING THIS TO ME! STOP MAKING THINGS HAPPEN WITH SUCH CONTRIVED OVERTONES!_"

"Who's he yelling at?" Toph asked.

"...I don't know," Abel said, deciding to tune in.

...

_Meanwhile, in realms glorious and mysterious..._

"Do you think he's talking to us specifically, or is that just a weird coincidence?" The hooded one asked the machine-being as they watched this very event unfold. Well, it wasn't the only one, as they were capable of observing multiple events while influencing them and simultaenously multitasking in various means. They were cool like that.

"...Who knows?" The machine-being said. "Then again, he is trained in the ways of the theurgists and he is of the Imperium, he could well know of our existence! Or at least a general train of thought that verges on the awareness of our influences upon the Materium Realms and extrapolate that into a vauge idea of our potential existence."

The lion-man tapped his claws. "I hate people that catch on to us. It's hard to be all subtle and shit when the guy's we're helping keep attracting attention to it."

...

"...Well, I guess it's some good luck I ran into you guys then," Cyborg said. "Really weird and kind of suspicious, but good luck." He had a nagging feeling that some sort of cosmic entity was annoyed at him now.

"What, you mean you finished our ship!" Calvin said, his eyes gleaming; contrary to his image as a slightly more-unhinged-than-usual mad scientist (the destructive super-science of Katastrofi, ironically, was something he was _very _bad at), he just _loved _ships and vehicles. He started out his career making transport wonders of science from scrap and cardboard and willpower; his abiltiy to actually _construct _ships, on the other hand, tended to vary, espicially when he was dealing with people that didn't fully comprehend his brand of 'science'.

"Yes and no," Cyborg said innocently.

"...Which means what exactly?" Toph asked, cracking her knuckles and cracking the entire street on accident.

Cyborg's good eye widened in utter inexplicable terror. The fates seemed to converge on Toph, all of nature desperately screaming in Cyborg's head _not to taunt the badass preteen girl of eath-breaking DOOM_. "She's a friend of Zim's," Abel said helpfully, pushing Cyborg's personal Oh-Shit-meter over nine thousand degrees of Dang That Ain't Good.

Cyborg could only say, "Nothing! Nothing bad, I mean, there might be a _bit _of trouble controlling the ship or powering it due to the special no fuel engine I put in or the slightly complicated means of firing or all the firing-stuff I put on in the first place, I was in a bit of a rush and I had stuff lying around I was dying to test and it sounded like a good time to do it, he just needs to know how to make it work, that's all, please don't hurt me."

"You're a total wuss, man," Abel said.

"Look who's talking, English, at least I don't cower from rabbits."

"_BUNNIES WANT TO BECOME THE DOMINANT LIFE FORM!_" Abel shouted. "_AND THEY'LL DESTROY US ALL TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! _And incidentally, the gene-pools modulated to the basic genotype designed by the Test Tube Babies project that gave birth to me was drawn from all over the British domains! I have the blood of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Britain, England and all the brothers and sisters under the Union Jack! I am Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English, British and so very many more! Not some vaugely defined stereotype that you can assign assumptions on to. It's like when people assume you talk street jive because of your ethnicity. Or date machines."

"...Well, yeah," Cyborg said. "But saying all that is kind of a mouthful."

"True," Abel admitted. "I permit you to stick with whatever sobriquet pleases you, but stick to one that has a modicum of ominousness to it! Like make me look Scottish. Nobody screws with the Scots. _Espicially _the Scots. Wait, that doesn't make much sense..."

"You're both idiots," Spike said.

Cyborg and Abel looked at him. Spike was alone and sitting on the ground awkwardly, Frankie helping him stay up. It was a mutual effort; both of them were so weary that neither of them had the strength to stand on their own for long, but together, they kept each other from falling apart. "Hey, what happened to the others?" Abel said.

"Over here!" Calvin said. Abel saw that he, Toph and Tucker were over at the truck with Winry, helping the survivors into the passenger seats on the cab; Toph had Earthbent chunks of the ground into crude gurneys for them, uncomfortable but it got them there without having to exert them, and Calvin helped get Bloo into the truck, in spite of his protests. (Bloo seemed adamant about getting back to the house, though he wasn't very coherent about why.)

Embarrased, they helped up Spike and Frankie and steered them towards the truck. "You were at Foster's, right?" Abel said. "What the hell happened! I heard the explosions and I saw...whatever that red light was about...and then there was another explosion! Explain, guys, EXPLAIN!"

"It doesn't exactly make a lot of sense when you do have it explained," Cyborg stated.

"Complete lunatic showed up not too long ago," Spike said gruffly. "Went around blowing shit up with his bare hands. Killed someone. The big-ups in the Foster's Security took him on and I helped. Then a whole lot of the houses around the property exploded; guess he rigged them to do it. No idea why. Then he started that red business and..." He gripped at his chest. "Haven't hurt that much since I got me soul shoved back in."

"Your _what_?" Calvin said; this triggered warning bells.

"Long story," Frankie said, employing a tone of voice that implied that he did _not _want to know.

"Oh, fine, in the truck with you, rambling vampire thing," Calvin said. "So...who wants to go check out what's happened to Foster's?"

"Sounds like fun," Toph said gamely. "Might as well make a good first impression and bring down some jerkass."

"That's what I was gonna do!" Cyborg said. "Well, maybe that and bring you guys your new vehicle."

"We're gonna die, aren't we?" Tucker said.

"It'd be dishonorable not to!" Abel said. "...Go and save people, not die. I don't have a martyr complex. Not any much. As such."

"You used to have a _martyr complex?_"

"In a sense. And by that, I meant I had a thing about making _other _people into martyrs. Don't like at me like that, boy, I invented that look." Tucker continued giving Abel a baffled look. "Yes! That's the one!"

"I'm going," Spike said grimly.

"Me too!" Bloo said.

"Me _tre!_" Eduardo said.

"Gotta go save our guys, right?" Frankie said.

"...No," Calvin said after a moment, speaking to Frankie, Bloo and Spike. "Just, no."

"What?" Spike said. "The hell are you on about!"

"Our _friends _could be dead!" Bloo said. "I'm not gonna sit here an'-"

"What could you possibly do if it came to a combat situation?" Calvin said coldly. "Stand there and be meat shields? An interesting idea, but it'd be stupid! _Think_. The bunch of you can barely stand up, let alone throw a punch or whatever."

"...You really expect us to leave the safety of the house and the residents to some guys we barely even know?" Frankie said. Cyborg and Abel coughed loudly; they most certainly knew her! "And you guys, but you're cool."

"Yes," Calvin said. "The alternative is you getting killed."

Spike and Frankie didn't seem very swayed by this argument at all. "Please think!" Abel asked. "He's got a...overly direct way of phrasing it, but he has a point! If worst comes to worst, it'll be combat, and you'd be a liability! And very easy to kill."

"Think your friends would like it if we pulled them out and you were all dead because you were too stubborn to get somewhere safe?" Toph said.

"...Fine," Frankie said sullenly, getting into the truck. "But don't you dare let anybody else die!"

"Wouldn't dream of it," Tucker said. "Not that I'll have much of an impact on things one way or another."

"Okay," Toph said, ignoring him. "I'm taking the wheel!"

"No way!" Cyborg said. "Ain't nobody that drives _my _babies when I'm around."

"Dang it."

Cyborg and Toph went rode to the driver's seat (no one dared argue with Toph there) and shotgun respectively, while everyone else took up a seat in the passengers; there were three rows of them, as this was a supply truck. (Cyborg had learned to make his team vehicles big. You never knew who might decide to team up with you; extra space paid off.) It took a touch of effort to adjust a seat for Eduardo's size and Cyborg opened the canopy so his horns didn't tear anything up, but they otherwise didn't have many problems.

The truck took off, the large cargo in the trailer behind it rattling a bit dispite being fastened down; it took up almost the entire trailer. "Hey, what's that thing you got back there?" Calvin asked.

"Insurance," Cyborg said grimly.

"...You didn't put a ton of weapons in my ship and decide to bring it with you, did you?"

"What? No. Your ship's back at my place, we'll get it set up after this is over."

"Oh, good." Calvin relaxed a bit. "I was, uh, worried that you would have my ship with you just when you _happen _to meet us. It would be so contrived! And therefore suspicious."

"Tell me; who thinks of something like that?" Cyborg paused. "Look, I gotta level with you, man. Any idea who designed your old ship's computer and systems? Because that thing is..._weird_. I've seen stuff like it, but only from the loonies in the Peerage. The guy who made it was a genius, no question, but he had to be completely out of his mind when he programmed it! Or drunk. The code's obviously adapted from basic stuff, but it's been _warped _into some seriously crazy business, it keeps doing not-right stuff with the tech...the ship'll work, but I wouldn't recommend that you start flying around it in a crowded city. Or a abandoned city. Or anywhere near someplace where it can conceivably go wrong."

"_I designed the ship,_" Calvin said, not mentioned that it had been a joint venture between him, Jason Fox and Marcus; Calvin had designed the ship's technology while Jason did the computer stuff (Calvin helped a bit) and Marcus actually constructed it. (Given their respective talents, it was no surprise that things had gone amuck.)

There was a thick, awkard silence. "...Oh." Cyborg started up the truck (by splitting his forefinger open and ejecting the key into the ignition; the dashboard had an electic assortment of instruments that was a uneven mixture of 1950s knobs, dials and lit gauges; and a more space-faring tech predominatly with the glowing panels that displayed solid holograms that, among other things, made a flat steering wheel in the appropiate place) and looked awkwardly around. "Uh...awkward." It was all very awkward.

The truck lifted up and sped away; fortunately, a hospital was not too far away, according to a continually updated digital map Cyborg had. This was good, because the hospital in question had been equipped with sixteen giant feet that moved it around the district like the world's biggest motherly busybody, the scout-nurses hunting down people injured in fights. (They were, of course, en-route to Foster's, considering the explosions and such.)

Calvin was actually looking forward to some good honest adventuring. Also, he wanted to pilot his new ship, which would probably lead to acceptably entertaining hijinks.

...

_Somewhere in the same general area but obviously NOT the same place, but it was the First District en route from the mall, so whatever..._

It was a scene familiar to many an experienced Traverse Town resident of the First District when something bad was going down; Kim Possible's lucky blue car bouncing off rooftops, screaming down makeshift ramps and occasionally making life on the road living hell. Most people had the sense to take cover from the terrifying roar of the engine alone, and a few had taken the precaution of hiding in basement shelters just in case her traditional '_parkour _driving' took a particularily unorthodox turn.

The screaming alien in her car was a bit of a surprise. As well as how crowded the car was.

"_Faster faster faster!_" Zim yelled, bouncing a bit when the car ran straight off a roof and landed on another, only to bounce off again. "Does this assemblege of parts not go faster!"

"You want faster, I _can do faster!_" Kim said, pulling a limit-release gauge on the dashboard from _Well-In-Exceeds-Of-Fast _to _Crazy Taxi_.

"_ZIM!"_ Zuko roared as the car accelerated so fast that blue-white fire roared from heretofore hidden turbo emission-engines in the back and the car ran screaming right off the edge of a roof and kept going, a rocket-jump that could have crossed a small canyon. Fortunately, they didn't crash into an apartment tree in front of them because Kim just extended the retractable wings again, and with the force of her momentum and the favorable winds, they nearly flew. Quite quickly, too, and they simply switched gravitational alignment and then drove _up _the tree, brusing a few laws of physics in the process.

"I cannot believe that worked," Zim said. "Usually I just get someone telling me that they're students or cab-drivers or shamans, not race car drivers."

"I took some classes," Kim said modestly. It was hard to do when you were performing the kind of stunt that tends to infuriate certain types of overly realistic movie critics.

"I cannot believe we're back in this thing," Katara said, covering her eyes so she wouldn't have to see anything alarming, like a building coming at her.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Sam said, looking a little green.

"Ack, not in the car!" Zim said, who was sandwiched between Sam and Katara. "I could get hit and stuff."

After the explosions and other nastiness had interrupted the training and shopping, Kim and Ron had dialed each other's communicators and the two groups had met up outside. On the roof. (But they'd quickly gotten downstairs owing to a convinient accident with a catapult and the world's biggest ball of yarn. Ron refused to explain why it had been there but hinted that it had been a surprise for a traveling kaijuu-kitten.) The idea was simple; go to Foster's and find out what the hell was going on. They were heroes and stuff; this sort of thing was their job. (And Zim thought that if he stopped an evil maniac, it might help his reputation. He hadn't been helping himself much in that regard. Also, it was probably his fault somehow.)

"At least it's better than getting hit in the face by lasers," Hobbes said, his larger mass making things uncomfortable for Sokka and Zuko. "Not by much!" Kim flipped the car over and hit a building wheel's-first and drove straight up it, gyroscopic stabilizers affixing their personal gravity so they didn't fall off. It wasn't a comfortable sensation. "Urk! Not gonna be sick, not gonna be sick!"

"First you guys show up by smashing a casino and now someone's blowing up Foster's or whatever!" Ron said from the shotgun-seat. "Town's really taking a beating lately!"

"I thought this sort of thing was usual business for you guys!" Sokka yelled.

"That thing with the scary red light isn't," Ron said. "Or explosions that big!"

The car roared over the edge of a rooftop and backflipped in midair. (No one fell out, because Kim had been very adamant about the seatbelts.) The wings deployed again, and they righted themselves and flew over the rooftop at the same time. "Eugh," Sam said. "Who taught you how to drive?"

"A tourist named Speed Racer," Kim said. "Why?"

"Rhetorical question-" The car slammed into a large metal loop that was stuck to the roof and the next three ones for no apparent reason; Kim used it as a track, the wheels automatically attracting themselves to the metal so they didn't fall off. "Why is there even a track thing there!"

"Stop questioning the logic! Your brain won't survive it!" Sokka said; he was in a shorter temper than usual; it was very cramped in the passenger's seats.

"YOU ARE THE GREATEST DRIVER EVER!" Zim yelled to Kim; his enthusasim was surprising, given that he was scrunched up between Katara and Sam. (Hobbes bitterly wanted to swap places with him, but Sokka was having none of it.)

"Wow, thanks!" Kim said; she'd rarely heard something like that before. Even Ron, who tended to treat her failing and flaws as good points in clever disguise, disapproved of her overly aggressive driving style. Flattered and excited, she turned up the speed dial to _Patently Ridiculous_, causing the wheels to split apart into little flight engines while the turbo roared; this had the result of them blasting off into the air in a short burst before falling down to the street and bouncing off. Also, lots of screaming. _Lots _of screaming.

"Why even that dial!" Sokka managed, with poor grammer.

"Ron, stop with the fetal position thing," Kim said as they bounced off the street again. "You look silly."

"Ron's not here right now," Ron said from the floor, his voice a bit muffled. "But if you would like to leave a message, it will be forwarded as soon as possible..."

Zuko facepalmed. It would have better to bang his head against a wall, but he made do. After Kim nearly smashed through a building and dialed down on the speed, he was comfortable enough to say, "How are we supposed to find Aang's group? Toph's group is supposed to be in that general area, so no worries, but Aang could be anywhere! You know how he is!"

"I'm sure we'll just meet up with him on the way somehow," Katara said. "...But what exactly are we going to do when we _get _there?"

"Er, what?" Hobbes said. "...Oh. The 'and then what' point. Is it just me, or do we end up running around and just doing things a lot?"

"We should have some vauge semblence of a plan!" Zuko said. "I'm the first one to want to go help people, and those people at the house _helped _us. We owe them. And likewise, it's probably half of our respective duties to hunt down people that do stuff like making that explosion happen. But we should have a plan! Even the skeletons of one; that works best, you can build them up as you go. But just running to the scene and hoping it works out?"

"I have a plan," Zim said unexpectedly.

"Care to share with the rest of the class?" Sam said.

"It is the very easiest of plans." Zim grinned like a madman, the wind whipping his antannae so furiously it hurt, but he appeared indifferent. It was no trick that for a moment, his excited exhalation carried embers and smoke. "We _burn _them. We will fall upon them and make them burn. They shall burn until their works fall to ash, and the smoke clouds their voices. Whatever their plans, whatever their purpose or grudges? They burn all the same. Burn burn burn burn _burn_." He paused. "Fire is pretty."

A brief horrified silence greeted him. "That's a pretty good plan," Zuko said thoughtfully.

"No it's not," Katara said sternly. "Zim, do you _need _to go back on the medication?"

Zim grimaced. "No..."

"What was that? I couldn't hear you!"

"I said no!"

"Then start acting like it, little mister!"

"I'M OLDER THAN YOU ARE!"

"Then start acting like that too!"

"Sorry to break up the team dynamics," Kim said to Katara as they pulled to a stop on a rooftop. "But I don't think we'll have to look for your boyfriend much longer."

"Huh?" Katara said.

Ron pointed; up in the sky, to the apparent interest of lots of people on their own rooftops, was a short message written in lines of red-yellow flame, moving with the wind and burning without fuel. They said, _Bad stuff going on at Foster's! Meet us right here! -Aang._ Beneath that was a slightly smaller arrow pointing at a distant building. Also, a P.S.: _Don't come snooping if you're not my friend! It's not polite to be nosy!_

"...Aang doesn't have much to do with subtlety," Sokka explained to Kim and Ron.

"Ah," They both said.

The car took off again in another rocket-jumped that became flight.

They crossed rooftops and streets with great ease, the curious, the bored and those desirous of a team-up scattering in utter horror of being near Kim Possible when she was driving: in short order (due to her frickin' insane speed and absurd use of driving stunts better suited to the more outrageous of anime films), and when her car smashed into the rooftop thus indicated by the giant burning arrow in the sky, it startled Appa badly enough to almost make him fall off the roof in surprise.

"Hey, they found us," Danny said as Scar warily moved behind one of Appa's legs.

"It wasn't that hard," Kim said, unlocking the doors. They fell open, and the overcrowded backseats were swiftly emptied of their occupants, Hobbes, Zuko and Sokka spilling out on one side and Zim, Katara and Sam out of the other; a few of them whimpered a bit. Kim's driving was a frightful menace. Zim just giggled madly.

Aang snickered at the sight of it from atop Appa's head. "It's like watching a clown car!"

"I show you clowns!" Sokka said, a bit muffled from Zuko and Hobbes' weight.

"Learn some proper angry grammer," Zuko said, a trifle hypocritically.

"Stop ranting about getting what you think is a proper education. Spoilt Fire Nation prince."

"Water Tribe hick that can't even track a tiger-seal."

"Your dad's a jerk," Sokka said, with great understatement.

Zuko said, "Your grandfather-by-marriage is a misogynic curmudegon."

"How'd you know that?"

"I had to spend a day around him at the camp, remember? And Aang tells me stuff."

"Oh. Think you guys can get off me now?" They did.

The girls and Zim had already gotten up; Sam made a beeline for Danny and locked her arms around him with such ferocity that no one would have dared seperate them for fear of horrible doom. "You. Suck. You suck so bad!" Sam told him. "Do you have any idea what kind of idiocy I've had to deal with!"

"Huh?" Danny said.

"I had to fight lunatic shopping idiots in powered armor! Me! I _don't do big fight scenes!_ Next time, you can go to the freaky place with the curb-stompers who get trouble like you do!"

"...Okay," Danny said, not entirely sure what was going on. He hugged her anyway.

"Hey, Boss," Morte said, floating down from Appa as Zim approached. "Feeling up for a touch 'a fighting? This sort of thing always ends up in fighting."

"Hello," Zim said to Scar, completely ignoring Morte. "I understand that this exploding and red light stuff is unusual even for this town."

Scar nodded curtly. "...I feel that this will not end well for anyone."

"Oh, _come on!_" Morte yelled. "He's not even on your crew! Pay attention to me, dammit!"

Zim glanced at Morte. "...Who are you?" Morte uttered a strangled scream that suggested he would quite like to strangle someone. Probably Zim.

Aang Airbended a twisting disc larger than the roof that he funneled into a column and slid it into the sky, wiping the burning letters out of the sky. (Disappointing the people who were following it to see what the deal was. But they were nosy and impolite.) "Who wants to ride on Appa?" He asked.

"ME!" Hobbes, Sokka, Katara and Zuko all said. Even for those who were...uncomfortable with the prospect, it was a marked sight better riding a ten-ton flying beast then being in Kim's car when she was driving it.

Kim sulked. "...So this is what it's like to be the unpopular one..."

"Relax, arbitary ostracizion and isolation aren't that bad when you have precisely _one _person backing you up," Ron said. "I've lived with it practically all my life until things got awesome. You got me, right?" Kim smiled faintly.

"_I _like your driving," Zim said.

"That's because you're insane!" Sokka said, already in Appa's seat.

"Thank you!"

"I shall accompany you," Scar said. "They are in need of more room now on the litter anyway."

"You don't want to abandon me either?" Kim said, her eyes a-sparkle.

Scar paused. "...Once, Ishvala spoke, and it has been passed down in the holy scriptures and teachings of the warrior-monks as this, rendered in our inexplicably common language: Endure. In enduring, grow strong."

"...And now I'm a living test of character," Kim said. "Joy."

"Deadpan snarking is a mark of wit."

"Guess I can live with that."

"Perhaps we should regroup with those that remain of us?" Zim said.

"You mean Toph's bunch?" Aang said. He smiled and held up hands that burned from within. "I got an idea for that..."

With that settled, they respectively piled into their car and Sky Bison litter, the two groups rejoining and taking off once more.

...

_Deep under Traverse Town..._

There are places under Traverse Town that run deeper than many know and more suspect. Tunnel-warrens below even the Underdistrict. Places guarded by mysterious sentinels and avoided by the sensible, where the dust of the ancients had not yet been cleared away and yet were still filled with the disintegrated ashes of the aeons-long dead, corridors and subterranean buildings filled with still-functioning thinking engines and self-maintaining machines and living libraries and other wonders that remained undiscovered except by the few who had stumbled onto them and kept their secrets.

There was a particular complex nestled deep under the division between the Beach District and the First District, bolstered with a ancient force field to keep it secure in the shifting earth and preventing flooding from happening. It was not a large complex, but it was big enough for the exploits of the twisted mad genius that had once dwelled there, convinced that the town could be the begining of her vision for turning the world into a ecological wonderland born in fevered dreams from her breakthrough as a mad scientist. A grand vision of six-legged beasts with tendrils and flying vehicle-rhinos, where dragons roared from the abandoned buildings and all the people had been freed from the constraints of species evolution to freely mutate into forms more properly befitting their stature as sentients mighty enough to survive the darkness. Buildings that _lived_. Machines that _loved_. (But they had plenty of those already.) A ever-growing and shifting menagerie of wonders fit to take this world for their own and make a stand against the horrors set to consume the multiverse and take back the lost spirits of their dead, one Heartless at a time. In this many-chambered, self-maintained, perfectly protected place, she salvaged ancient technologies with her great genius and applied her gift for the biological sciences to create hybrid-beasts, whether of animals or things that blurred the lines between machine and beast overmuch, and she got far enough before Jarod (in his role as the Pretender) had found her lost lair through a series of third-party contacts she used to supply herself without letting any of them on and questioning those servants of her's that dwelled outside as the vanguard for her eventual takeover. He didn't defeat or kill her, but convinced her of the error of her ways; that mad scientist had since joined the Peerage, ashamed and confused, and now made a living as a vetinerian with a hobby in creating life. (She made custom pets and brought extinct species back from the dead as smaller, cuter versions when they paid for it, or as the real thing when it was a conservationist issue. She hadn't had a single backlash since the incident with mixing up the terrorbird and dodo genomes.)

Jarod had since taken over her complex with her permission, and he had refitted the place for his own ends. This basically amounted to selling off all the old technology the mad biologist had left behind (for reasonable prices and under no less than sixteen pseudonyms over the intergalactic auctions, of course) and using the money to purchase and move in a battery of computers, survillence technology, a very small but operable forge-factory, his own personal armory, and, among many other things, the world's only drink dispensor in the shape of a Pez dispensor. (The man loved his Pez.) Since then, he'd hacked into the cameras scattered throughout the town so he could keep an eye on things. He'd done the same towards the private survillence of just about all the important and dangerous people, and coupled with his enormous list of contacts, information guys, semi-friends and anonymous tipsters he paid regularly, he was a very well-informed man indeed. (He was properly paranoid.) The place had become something like a secret base for him, more so after he modified it even more to connect to various secret tunnels and entrances all over the town to enable him to move in secret; he was honestly uncomfortable with it all, as it reminded him entirely too much of the secret organization he had grown up and been controlled by as a child, but he endured. He had a job to do; taking down the corrupt and evil, one poetic act of justice at a time.

There are those, among the multiverse, who are said to be incarnations of that idea known as the _nemesis; _an unstoppable force sent by the heavens to punish the wicked and avenge the good. Men and women who could not be defeated or stopped. Could not be held back by any false authority. Who burn with a rage at the inherent injustice of the multiverse, who would tear it apart and _force _mercy and justice into it if they could, and build a path to a proper state of existence on the suffering and screams of the evil.

When people said that under the goofy affability the Pretender was a very scary man, they _meant _it.

So. Alone, and away from the people he so desperately _needed _to have around, he endured regardless, now sitting at a computer monitor sitting on a desk, a keyboard with a touchpad on sticking out of the monitor, bulky enough to hide the essential operating hardware inside. Cables ran out of the back and entered the walls and banks of computer towers hooked into each other, tapping into wireless signals and hitchhiking on other signals that transfered video/audio captures from all over the town. It was collected as data, and countless Web pages and online news entires were scanned by other computers, all of it fed into _other _computers specifically designed to analyze all this data and create likely scenarios and possibility projections to within seventy-five percent accuracy, all for Jarod to keep ahead of his enemies and figure out their plans or discover on-going probability trends to give estimations on whatever they would result in and make contingency plans for each and every one. (The computers were seperate for security reasons, even though they were bolstered by anti-virus and firewall programs Jarod had programmed himself, light-years ahead of anyone else.)

And that was just for starters.

Jarod was too deep down to have felt the explosions from up-top as more than a momentary collection of rumblings, the first ones barely more than a tremble from the ceiling, while the final one was powerful enough to get his attention. But that paled next to the influx of data run through his computers amd brought to his attentions like a swift kick in the teeth _by _the teeth.

News programs, broadcasting emergency news after they found out from their own video/audio recorders over the area. Panicked calls by the surviving bystanders. Crossguard and Justice Maines hailing each other over (theoretically) private frequencies and urging their fellows to get the hell over there and do something. Numerous unaffiliated but altruistic heroes and adventurers calling in their friends and people that knew when things were going on.

So very little that was concrete.

Jarod's machines, born and harnessed of his will, found it all. They assembled the disparate bits of information in such a short time, and assembled four prospectives on what had happened, along with theories on what the maniac who had done this wanted, how to find and stop him, and what the heck was going on to begin with. And still more were coming.

Jarod tapped a finger on the keyboard as he finished the last of the reports. He seriously doubted that, as the computer claimed among other things, it was a twisted eldritch abomination tearing it's way into reality, the act of the harbringer of a cult of destruction or a random mad bomber just killing people out of boredom. Not everything was accounted for. He suspected the data was incomplete - the purpose of the previous explosions, so unerring precise, and the blazing red lightflashes that had somehow killed more than half of the Foster's populace before the place was destroyed in a final blast of light and the survivors had escaped, those things were unaccounted for - and until he discerned what that was, he could not act. A plan with incomplete data was one doomed to fail without outstanding luck, and Jarod didn't like the idea of trusting people's lives to chance.

The explosions and the red light were more important somehow. They struck him as being significant. And the sudden ferocity of that final blast...it didn't make much sense. If destruction of Foster's was desired, why not do that to begin with?

Five explosions. Powerful enough to crack the ground and make a neat circle shape around the house; shallow, but recognizable. That was important. The suggestion of an idea teased him, but so did six others. He considered them all, but that first one was a half-formed ghost, eluding him.

Jarod was getting worried.

He made up his mind, coming up with a course of action as he got up. It was dangerous; he still wasn't certain of this new instigator's actions and he still didn't have concrete conclusions, but he had _very _strong suspicions, and his suspicions had an annoying tendency to be right. Right now, things seemed to require a...hand's on approach.

He set up his computer to continually adapt data analysis as more information was fed into it and to send the results to a receiver/reading device in his watch. (It was a simple device; it only received information from these computers and were acessed via a holographic interface. Jarod had adapted it from a Hitchhiker's guide interface.) With that last bit dealt with, he went to a phone and dialed up a number of someone he was currently dealing with, in the form of convincing them to work for him under the guise of community service for trying to take over the town a few times.

"_Who the devil is this?_" The peevish voice of Stewie Griffin said. "_I'm quite busy, you know! I've half a mind to hunt you down and burn your house down! Then I would remove your eyes and shove them down your pants, so that you may witness me beating the crap out of you! Then I'll use you tongue to paint my boat."_

"You don't have a boat," Jarod said.

"_I'll get one! Oh, it's _you._ Whatever do you want? I helped you track down those buffoons from that odd interworld kingdom from some twisted universe or another. Are they even in conjunction with our own?"_

"They are now," Jarod said. "The dimensional-sifting is getting worse. And as for what I want...I assume you heard about the damage at Foster's?"

"_What about Foster's? Did I miss something?_"

"...You could say that. Go get into a smaller vehicle that won't attract much attention and meet me there."

"_...Bah, if you insist. Why do I even bother working for you?_"

"Because," Jarod said coolly. "If you don't keep to your end of our little bargain or try to kill me to wriggle out of this, I have _many _means of exposing your crimes against humanity, decency, common sense and sexuality sterotypes to destroy all your plans forever." He held this threat over Stewie's head like a sword, in case Stewie inevitably started acting like a classical megalomaniac again with all the horrors that entailed, and unless his attempt to reform Stewie worked out, it really would be inevitable. He wasn't certain if it would turn out well, though he had met with some success. At least now Stewie freely used his genius for the common good instead of being a selfish monster of a midget. (Jarod was convinced that Stewie wasn't a baby at all but a very small person, or perhaps even a nebulous entity that masquereded as a child. He just did not have the characteristics of an infant.)

"_I was speaking rhetorically!_"

"Really? Sorry, I don't have the hang of figurative speech. I'd prefer it if people said what they meant." He hung up, no doubt infuriating Stewie, and chuckled as he made his way to an elevator that tunneled into a sub-basement under a house he owned under a false name in the First District; it would be a short walk from there to Foster's.

It paid to be prepared.

...

Stature had broken her way out of the evacuation sphere she and a few others had been caught in, in spite of feeling like her life had nearly been torn from her body, but that had been exhausting for her; it had been hard enough to grow to a size where she could exert enough strength to do it without growing so large she crushed the others or broke herself.

So, lying among bent pieces of metal that was flowing and growing bits of leaves and doing stuff metal really wasn't supposed to do, she had lost a little control and grown to a bit under twenty feet and sat against the side of a small apartment building, her hair peeking over the rooftop and her back pressing into the wall to make a sizable impression in it. Her legs were curled up so she didn't take up the street, and she'd positioned herself such that no one was inconvienced by having a giant girl in the way.

She shivered. She felt..._violated_. The red light had washed over her and she'd almost died back there. Like so many people did. More than the pain, that hurt; for all her strength, she couldn't save anybody. That had been the evacuation system's doing. All she had done was fight the madman that had done it, and without doing any good for it.

Stature hugged herself. She had failed. That was the truth of it. She had _failed_.

"Unh..." A small (from her perspective) lump said, somewhere near where the swell of her hip met the pavement. Rustling cloth was answered by metal grinding against metal; she turned very slightly to push Razor up on his shoulders now he was awake, feeling intensely glad that she had been near enough to him for them both to get sucked up into the same evacuation sphere along with a few other guards.

"Razor?" She whispered. "Are you okay?"

"...No, but I'm breathing..." Razor said, his voice cracking.

"...That's good enough," Stature said, trying not to laugh in relief.

A fist-sized lump of water hit the ground. "...What're you cryin' for?" Razor asked her, managing to grin a little, his mismatched eyes dimming. "We're alive. Good enough."

"Yeah..." Stature said, wiping at her eyes. "We can go back and finish this."

"Okay...s'right...maybe get some back-up first," Razor muttered, leaning forward and closing his eyes. His breathing eased into a gentle rhythm.

"...Okay," She said, and folded her arms over her knees. Reinforcments. That was a good idea. Get some people together and kick that Kimblee lunatic's ass and hand him over to the Justice Marines. Get the survivors together. Rebuild Foster's.

Same old, same old. The way it always worked out. Sometimes she wished they could cut out the middlemen and stop people from dying.

She was so tired.

Stature had no idea how much time passed between her dozing off and the sudden wind that blew her hat off and her hair over her face (Five minutes? Fifteen? Half an hour? A full hour? Longer?). She blew her hair back and reached down to pick her truck-sized hat off the ground, and a small weight landed on her head. She blinked, a strand of her hair being tugged, and a small green person swung into view, using that strand like a vine in a jungle-movie.

Zim landed on her nose, a manically grinning alien with a fire in him that roused her. "You're that guy that Mr. Herrimen talked to," Stature said dully. She would haven shaken her head, to clear it, but she didn't want to knock the little guy off.

"Hello," Zim said. "My friends and I have a proposition for you and your organization as a whole."

"Wha?"

"Hi," Another one said, from her shoulder. Stature very delicately looked over, so she didn't upset Zim, and saw a tiger-boy; the tiger waved cheerily and grinned in a way that made her feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, a bit like the way Peter Parker did when he was being an adorable dork. "I assume you're in the way of looking for big damn heroes. Do we qualify?"

"Hey, look," Razor said dreamily. The other guards were sitting up as well, some more along then others. "Back-up's here already. That was quick."

"Yay," Nidah said faintly. She fell back and her head landed on someone's back. "Owie."

Zim hopped down, caught himself on the lapel of her long coat, and jumped over to a windowsill; his Pak split, spider-leg attachments extending and adhering to the building wall. He scaled it, jerking and twitching and generally being spooky; Stature turned her head to watch him, and saw that waiting on top of the apartment building was a serious-looking bison-creature; it had a litter on it's back, and it was stuffed full of people. "Hello," Said a nice-looking boy riding on his head, with an elaborate arrow-shaped tattoo on his head and a flight helmet under his arm. He put it on, and the bison-thing flapped it's tail; a blast of wind propelled it up, and then down to the ground by the other guards and residents she'd gathered up.

The people on board looked at her. "Huh," A cute-looking Inuit teen said. "Grow 'em big in this town, do you?"

"Too tired...to snark..." Stature said. "Or swat."

"I'll take that as implying that you're a special case."

A multitude of engines roared; a bunch of motorized vehicles came down the street, and at their head was a blue car, driven by a red-headed girl she vaugely knew, and those behind her were ambulances and a number of trucks that were mostly the muscle ambulances of Damage Control; it was their job to show up at nasty incidents and get the injured to safety and first aid, and later to fix the damage. Property restitution was another matter, of course.

"Hey, looks like they got our message," The boy with the flight helmet said.

"Wha' message?" Nidah slurred.

"The one I burned into the sky."

"...get a answer, more questions..."

The car slowed and stopped, as did a blue-and-white truck behind her. "Guess who we found at the Walking Hospital!" Kim said.

"Hoy!" Calvin yelled, sticking his head out of that truck's window.

"Oh good, I was worried you'd done something insane," Hobbes said mildly. "As par the course."

"They're coming out like weevils," Razor observed. "...Yay?"

The Damage Control ambulances came to a stop quite near Stature, and operatives came out with wheeled stretchers and first aid kits and scanners made bulky with guages and LED screens and boxes of kittens for emotional problems...they had lots more of that kind of stuff but Stature didn't really pay attention. They immediately went to fussing over the other survivors and politely asking Stature to shrink herself to a more managable size; Stature noticed that the other ambulances kept going past them, and she hoped that it was because they were going to collect more at the designated Foster's evacuation sights. (This was, in fact, the case.)

Scar left Kim's car and went directly to Nidah, helping her up into a offered stretcher. She was his kinswoman; they were both Ishbalan, last of a race too stubborn to see their world vanish and say that it implied their doom: they had faith in their continued survival, and that faith would simply refuse to let them die. "Hey. Godhand Scar," Nidah said. "Heh. The real heroes are always late."

"Do not demean yourself," Scar said. "You are not some faceless extra meant to show off the villains strength to make the hero look better."

"Really hope so. It'd suck to be a random person thrown in at the last minute." She laid down in the stretcher, sighing deeply. "Master Scar...we are in so much _danger_."

Scar said nothing, but he quietly gestured for her to go on.

She smiled faintly. "I was there. I saw what he did. He exploded the houses...killed people. Made that red light happen and it killed _more _people...heard the other explosion too." She laughed. "Figures that we'd get away in the nick of time, you know? Up to his old tricks, that crazy psychopath..."

"Who?" Zim asked her urgently. "Who did it! I need someone to aim the guns at. If I can find any. Did I bring my guns? Must check."

"Spike said it was some nut named Kimblee," Cyborg said, sticking his head out of the truck.

Scar froze. He went completely still, his eyes wide and curiously blank. His expression was a mix between _Oh shit _and _I really should have seen this coming._ "...You are certain," He said after a moment.

"Hmn, Spike is a bit of a dumbass," Calvin said.

"No mistake," Nidah said. With unexpected fervor, she reached out and grabbed Scar's collar, bringing him closer. Medics swarmed, with restraints and tranquilizers at the ready, but Scar waved them away. "I _saw him. _Fought him. Bastard blew me off the roof, same as he nearly blasted my jaw off way back when!" She laughed again, and it had a ragged half-mad edge to it. "_I was there and it was just the same as Ishbal, that monster standing up there like a god and handing down death and laughing about it!_

"No lie, no exaggeration, no bullshit and please listen, _the Red Lotus Alchemist is HERE!_ He killed us at Foster's and he did some crazy alchemy that didn't touch our bodies but killed us anyway and he blew up some buildings to do it first!"

"We're not going to like the implications of that, are we?" Hobbes said.

Scar didn't turn to look at him. "...You should leave," He said after a moment.

"What!" Zim said.

"You have your ship prepared, right?"

Cyborg frowned. "Well, it'll _fly, _but-"

"Then go. This is _not _the correct place for you to get involved! You...you have no idea what Kimblee is capable. What he has done. To _me_. He will not stop here, and he will _destroy _you if it amuses him." His voice turned soft. "Flee, and attend to your own works. This business is our's, and it is _mine _to end him."

"Nope," Zim said. "I got here first, so I have dibs on kicking this guy in the teeth, hah!" He paused, and added generously, "But after I remove his arms for backscratchers, I'll be certain to give you a shot at his head."

Scar stared at him. "This is not a joke. I _mean _it. Kimblee is not to be trifled with. You are putting yourselves in grave danger simply _standing _in a place he has happened to walk by."

"I fought a man who tried to abuse the power of the Great Comet to _set the world on fire,_" Aang said grimly. "...We've been in worse danger tons of time. We won't just leave you guys like that because you say so."

"Besides, there's no problem that point-blank anhillation won't solve!" Calvin added optimistically.

Scar seemed undeterred. "Your bravado lends little to your understanding of the situation. You must not put yourselves in harm's way like this-"

"Oh, let them go!" Abel called out. "Everybody gets a free shot at being awesome when they come here! Do you really want to stain their honor by shooing them away because the monster is that mean?"

"...Do not confront Kimblee," Scar said finally. "And I will not permit him to ruin what little hope you have left." He turned to Nidah, who had been patiently watching this argument. "...Nidah. Kimblee will not leave this town. That is my solemn oath."

She looked at him, full of naked hope and grief and a frightening hate directed at a single man with empty eyes and the shapes of death in his palms. "Tell me."

"I swear it on the blood of Ishbal, the blood of our people. I break it never, lest my life take it instead."

"By the grace of Ishvala," She whispered. "_Send him to his judgement._ No revenge. No human justice. Put that monster down like the rabid dog he is."

"_I will_." Those two words, coming from Scar, were formed with such raw sincerity, and born of hatred mingling with grief and loss for so long that it had become something red-hot and half-insane, were far more terrifying than any longer statement could have been. It didn't sound like a vow, or a promise. It was a simple statement of fact. _This shall be so._

Zim laughed. He had no idea what the hell they were talking about, but it sounded like it involved killing a bad guy in the face and that prospect made him all giggly. "Hey hey," He said, looking down at Cyborg. "The guy that's fixing me a ship. Wanna come and do some good?" Zim somehow made that sound like an invitation to causing the Apocalypse.

Cyborg grinned. "I barely know you and I have no idea what the hell I'm getting into, but why not!"

In quite a short time, they returned to their modes of transport (whether truck, car or Sky Bison) and headed straight to Foster's, followed by a number of ambulances, a few curious bystanders, a hero or four, and just behind them now, something was following them. Something that made the ground shake a little where it walked. Something _big_.

As it approached, Stature quietly shrank down to a relatively petite six feet (from her perspective; she spent a lot of time much bigger than most people in Traverse Town, because giants didn't really fit. The biggest people had forged a friendly allied town in the mountains) and allowed the medics to assist her into a stretcher.

_Damn it, Andre...Freya..._ She thought as a mechanical behemoth loomed over her, immense and blocky and non-threatening. _I'm sorry I couldn't save anyone. Some hero I ended up being._

"You're alive now, aren't you? And your friend? Could have been much worse."

The voice came from her side. She looked and saw Lu-Tze in a orderlie's uniform. Her mouth opened wide, and Lu-Tze put a finger to his mouth. She quieted, and wondered why no one had yet noticed the stranger in their midst. Perhaps they didn't notice him at all, or maybe he had _always _been there, from their perspective...

Still, she had to admit that maybe Lu-Tze had a point, and smiled just a little.

...

On the outskirts of the more densely populated part of the First District that Foster's was (or had been) the center of, a bus screamed onto the corner of a bus-stop; it is difficult to ascribe emotion or mood to an inanimate object, even a sentient one when it doesn't have a clear means of expressing itself, but this bus found a way, it's wheels spinning at a pace similiar to somone walking very fast because they were extremely nervous.

It slammed it's brakes down, opened it's doors, and by dint of a ejector seat, mobile floor and a acute sense of geometry, shoved a certain man out and onto the sidewalk before it drove out of there so fast that a few immaterial passing spirits were frightened. (Fortunately, they were concept-spirits born from the need for excessive speed, so they were delighted about it and proceeded to 'arrange' things so that the bus could move really fast for a long time.)

The man, one Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang, stood up and dusted himself off, checking his pocket to make sure his ignition gloves were still there (strictly speaking, he didn't actually _need _the gloves to fight, assuming he was in the appropiate environment, but it made things much more efficient; all combat alchemists figured it out sooner or later), and put his hat back on his head after finding it nearly under a trash can. "Damn panicky buses," He muttered to himself. "...Things must have gotten bad if they're that nervous." Most people didn't take the neurosises that tended to develoup among sophisticated AIs very seriously (after all, it was better than them going crazy and killing everyone); Roy Mustang, on the other hand, did. This was partially because he came from a world without robotics, so he had no pre-deterimined opinions about killer robots anyway.

"Now the buses are going crazier?" A nearby pedestrian complained. "I thought it was bad enough that they were just skirting the place, and now they're dumping people on the streets."

"Easy for you to say," Roy grumbled. "You're not the one who met the street ass-first...that sounded less wrong in my head."

"Sure did," said the pedestrian, a humanoid brass-colored dragon about a head short of ten feet of bruiser-material. He did a double-take. "Ah! Commander-Admiral Mustang! I didn't recognize you! Uh, sir!" He saluted awkwardly. poorly imitating a television-inspired idea of what military people did.

"Calm down, you're not under my command yet," Roy said evenly. "Not much point in adhering to discipline that doesn't even apply to you. And your hand isn't supposed to be jabbing against your horn like that."

"Ah. I was wondering why it was hurting so badly."

Roy knew the value of informants. "I heard there was some sort of large disaster going on around Foster's Home. Know anything about it, er..." Roy racked his memory. He made it a point of pride to remember people's name and the faces to go with them, though given Traverse Town's population and the ease of census taking (at least when people didn't decide to leave town for a bit) didn't make this very hard. "Dolanja Hamslapper."

The half-dragon gasped. "You know my name! _The Flame Alchemist knows my name!_" He skipped about on the spot.

Roy raised an eyebrow, waiting for Dolanja's little happy dance of joy to stop. "Apparently. So...like I asked...?"

"Oh! Right. Well! I heard from my buddy's foster-uncle's grocer's doctor's sister's husband's grandpa's priest's sifu's bandage salesman's daughter's son's wife's overly long gag instructor that some nut went and blew up Foster's Home and did a freaky flashy light-thing and _killed _half the people there!"

Roy blinked. He'd been going cross-eyed from the stupidity of that statement. "...You really heard that from all those people in less then ten minutes?"

"We're a very tight-knit circle. And we got telepathy implants in our heads! Doesn't work so well. Radio interference. And the minor problem of going a little insane from overexposure to perverted thoughts. My girlfriend has a thing for tea cozies and this one sock in the worst way..."

Roy tried very hard not to think about that. "You're sure about that stuff about Foster's? No exaggeration?"

"Sure! Well, aside from everything else I heard. You want to know?"

"Uh...ah, thank you," Roy said. He was trying very hard not to freak out. "I'll just...uh, go now."

Dolanja waved at Roy as the Flame Alchemist left; the half-dragon did not question just why Roy, such a high-ranking member in one of the most powerful factions in town, should be rushing over to a potential incident by himself without any clear authorization as to why the incident deserved his attention: that sort of thing was normally reserved for full-scale invasions or wide-spread Heartless attacks.

Foster's true significance was not widely known, or else more people would attack it. Roy hurried; if the building _had _been attacked...(or Truth forbid, wiped out), the entire First District was at risk.

"Huh," Roy said to himself as he went on his way. He really meant, in the privacy of his head, _What the hell is going on here! Foster's was DESTROYED! The people there are DEAD! Shit shit shit!_

Foster's very structure was a bulwark against the flood. The _things _that destroyed their worlds and corrupted their people still lurked in the dark and lonely frontier of this town that was still largely a stranger to them all; most people assumed that the occasional pack of Heartless or roaming Soldier-type were all they had to fear, with the occasional mecha-sized one to liven things up. They were only drops, trickling through the dam. Foster's Home was a central part of the defenses that had been rigged by geniuses and research-priests after they had realized the import of what Hohenheim had left on the subject of the Heartless' ways of breaking into these universes and _more _of them would becoming, they would drown in a sea of darkness and blood and fire and the unstoppable tide-

Roy had gone a few blocks, thinking things in these general theme before he realized he had already seen, just at the edge of observance, a duo of figures flickering around the rooftops, only appearing for a moment before they were gone again, but long enough for him to see them.

He was being followed. By people that _wanted _him to know about it.

Roy ducked into an alley and took stock of his options before he climbed up a nearby ladder, shimmied atop a thick windowsill and hauled himself up to the rooftop.

No sooner had he gotten to his feet than he saw the teenaged Xingian boy smiling mysterious at him from atop a air conditioning unit, a green-skinned woman in a matching outfit next to him. "Hello," said Lin Yao. "Took you long enough to notice, Commander-Admiral Mustang."

"For a guy with fire for a theme, you're not too hot on the mark," Shego remarked.

Roy grimaced; insults from a beautiful woman always stung hard for him. "That's pretty far to go for a fire-related pun."

"Eh, I work with what I got."

Roy glanced around the rooftop; no one else was there. He sighed in relief. Lin's _other _bodyguard was...not pleasant to be around. "What do you want, Yao? I have something important to deal with."

"Oh my, you're being a bit short-tempered," Lin said, grinning like a jerk. "More so than usual. Always a pain to have a nice day interrupted by duty, isn't it? Such is the tribulations of authority."

Roy raised an eyebrow. "...Haven't gotten over being an Emperor-to-be, have you."

Lin grinned again, but this time his teeth looked..._wrong_. Sharp and pointed, almost like a shark's. "Who says I'm not going to rule?" He said, and his voice had an odd reverb; two voices speaking at once, another one overlapping Lin's.

One of Lin's eyes was turning red.

Roy didn't rise to comment. One got used to such half-transformations after a while, and the ambitions of Lin (or was it Greed?) was simple snarking material for Roy. Most of the time. "Why are you following me?" He said. "You're up to something."

"You could say that, yeah," Shego said.

"I presume you heard about the..._incident _at Foster's Home, didn't you?" Lin asked, a hint of Greed's voice lapping at the edges fervently. "Five houses destroyed before hand. Some sort of massive light show that sounds _quite _similar to Amestrian alchemy. And all kinds of people just dropping dead."

Roy didn't say anything. _Lin suspects. Greed knows._

Lin continued. "And then...well, as some people might say, 'shit got worse'." He glanced at Roy. "I saw Foster's, you know. It got _worse_, Mustang. Much worse." Roy continued to say nothing. He'd seen those pictures too. He was in a hurry for a reason. _'Pick up the survivors'. 'Clean up the mess'. 'Take down those responsible'. _That was standarding operating procedure in scale-problems like this, and he'd already ordered squads to the population-dense areas just in case the worst happened.

He didn't like silence very much. "Where's your other bodyguard? The stupid one."

Shego snickered. "Funny you should mention that, spark-fingers."

"Yeah," The boy by her said. And this time, it was definitely the voice of Greed. "It's a funny thing, Mustang; we put two and two together. Not hard, with two minds to work with. And I'm sure you know what happened there."

"I do, huh?" Roy said neutrally. He didn't trust Greed all that much. He _liked _Lin and Greed well enough, but he just wasn't sure where they stood on the alignment grid.

Greed laughed and stood up, sauntering over to Roy. "Come on, don't be so stand-offish, _Flame Alchemist_. Don't act like we're two of those idiots you have to deal with. We're from the same world; in this situation, that practically makes us..._family, _doesn't it? Human, homunculus...what's a little species differentation mean considering what we've been through?

"Me and you, Scar and Ed, Armstrong and her brother, Missus Curtis (Or is it Mrs. Gibbs now?) the other guys...we all fought off the Heartless as long as we could. We saved so many of our own people! Enough to make the records for the most survivors. We kept them alive, even after my '_Father'_ got his psychopathic ass chewed up by the darkness and his shell of a skin spit back out! And more than that: we're _conspirators_. Ready and willing to do the impossible for the sake of the future."

"The Promised Day never happened," Roy reminded him wearily. "We never really got the chance to take down your Father and the other homunculi." _Or avenge our friends_, he thought with a pang, remembering a eternally happy man with rectangular glasses and a pocket full of his wife and daughter's pictures. The friend he had failed to save. "I don't know that we can call each other conspirators."

"Intent is pretty much the same thing as going to do it," Shego remarked. Roy frowned, but nodded in consent.

This talk of their failure to save their world from the conspiracy they'd known about and the horrors that caught them completely off-guard was making the hidden marks around his false eye itch, old scars acting up.

"Yao...Greed...whoever the hell I'm talking to. You're leading up to something and I don't think I like where it's going."

Greed grinned. "You're a smart guy, Mustang. See, we both saw that red light. Very familiar, wasn't it? I'm no alchemist-"

"Or me," Lin chimed in.

"Yeah, that, my point is that we both recognized just what that sort of light means. I mean, I'd be a complete idiot not to, y'know? It's pretty unmistakable at the site. Even with all the wreckage.

"But I realized something," Greed said. "Or rather, I did," Lin's voice added, their dual-voices shifting towards his. "It's a bit stupid to go off on a hunch...even such a staggering clear one. So, given that Foster's little evacuation system was working, I figured, hey, let's go find some survivors that know something!

"And, to make a short story even shorter, we did. A few confused guards, some very traumatized residents...but we found someone with a clearer head, with a eye for detail. Someone who knows first-hand what went down and isn't too panicked to confuse details." Lin grinned again. "And then...who else should I find going to the scene of the crime but you! A powerful alchemist, and one of the best ones we have, with Edward and Alphonse out of town."

Roy frowned. "You were following me. I knew it!"

"Hmn, yes." Lin's grin softened into a faint smile. "I knew some things too. Such as that you were sure to come down here yourself instead of sending out a squad in your place. And that once you realized you were being followed, you'd confront the tracker on the grounds that you can just incinerate them if you don't like them. Or that you'd do it speedily enough for me to have to send my signal rather quickly."

"What signal?"

Roy heard a loud clanking sound, just under the noise of propulsor engines.

"The one that I sent five minutes ago," Lin said cheerfully, and then a giant black robot head (roughly the size of a large car) with arms and feet smashed into the rooftop next to them, bouncing across the street and off again, spinning in mid-air and finally landing on their rooftop.

Roy blinked. "...Is that your giant fighting robot?"

"In it's compact mobility form as opposed to the full-sized version, yes," Lin said.

The top part of the robot head irised open, and a red-and-black-suited lunatic that Roy groaned at seeing waved a big greasy bag, much to the displeasure of a surprising passenger. "Hoya boss! I'm only late because I had to pick up some nachos," Deadpool said. "More than some. A lot of nachos. Enough nachos to _take of the world! _Of course. But then I ate most of them. Also, chimmichongas. _TOUCH THEM AND DIE!_ Also also, jaywalkers. They had to be punished. Protect the fast food salesmen, punish the neutrals and poke the poodles! Or does that go another way, I don't remember. Hey, Roy Mustang. Didn't you have an eyepatch once?"

"That never happened," Roy said.

"Sure it did, people were pissed about it. Also, I brought a guest. Lemme get him out, I'm sure I have a bazooka or ejector seat or toaster in here somewhere-"

"I can get out qute well on my own!" The passenger said angrily, hopping out and proving himself to be Mr. Herrimen; he nearly collapsed, but he held himself up. "I don't even dare to imagine what purpose a toaster would serve in getting a man out of a vehicle..."

"It's worse when you know what it's for," Deadpool said.

"Mr. Herrimen?" Roy said, not too surprised at this turn of events. Lin had alluded to finding someone significant, after all, and who better than Mr. Herrimen (who, incidentally, was a member in good standing of the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and Roy decided to make that more obvious to keep away any other claims of human bias)?

"Hrm, what?" Mr. Herrimen swayed dangerously, remaining standing; he refused to bow to something as improper as injury. "Ah...ah...Commander-Admiral Mustang! How good...to see a familiar face in circumstances as these..."

"You mean Foster's going boom or riding in a robot face with me?" Deadpool asked.

Mr. Herrimen glared at him. "...In all honesty, I cannot say which is worse. And good God, men and women and children have just died! Where is your sense of propriety!"

"Is that something you eat? Sounds fancy."

"I sense my protestations fall on deaf ears."

"And I sense that someone loves his thesaurus too much. Them things get vicious if you give them too much attention."

Mr. Herrimen sighed. He looked like he desperately wanted to sit down. "Hey, you should sit down, old timer," Lin said. "You're in no condition to-"

"Please, Mr. Yao, I...am doing quite fine for the...the time being," Mr. Herrimen said. "Besides...a little thing like escaping an explosion and nearly dying in whatever that red monstrosity was is hardly going to do me in!"

"You should be at a hospital!" Roy said. He glared at Lin.

Lin waved his hands. "Hey, don't pin this on me. I wanted to do that, but he insisted on telling people what happened. And...well, I found out about you, so he decided to get me to arrange things. Good thing it worked out that way." This last bit was delivered in a needless facetious way.

"...Yeah," Roy said. "Good thing." It was no accident that he had volunteered to investigate this disaster, after all. He knew alchemy when he saw it, and he had felt the explosions rock the Council's diner and seen the red light pierce the skies.

"Hrm," Mr. Herrimen murmured. "This is, regardless, a brilliant stroke of fortune. I dearly hope it continues." He glanced at Deadpool. "I am certainly due one..."

"And don't worry about the giant robot suddenly being small," Deadpool said to none of them. "We got some kind of crazy packing/unpacking technology that compartmentalizes bits of the robot, seperates them into components and stuffs them in hyperspace pockets so we can pull them out later. Which is why the giant robot from before is now a walking face-thing. No worries, just go with it."

"...I'd ask who he's talkin to, but the answers never make sense," Shego said, disgruntled. "Panda Bubba at least does good banter, not this idiot's word salad."

"Oh, you fought Panda Bubba again?" Roy said. "Did you capture him?"

"Nope!" Lin said. "Unfortunately, while Shego and Deadpool fought him in a truly epic fight that no one appears to have recorded dispite it's awesomeness, it was interrupted during the chaos after the explosions. People panicked and Panda Bubba fled. His robot head flies. Who knew?"

"Eh, we can deal with him later," Shego said.

Mr. Herrimen twitched an ear irritably. "By all means, keep going on about these issues of your's. Why, my home and house to hundreds is clearly insignificant in the face of your inability to catch a crime lord that makes a point to go out of his way to combat you instead of hiding."

"Whiner!" Deadpool said.

"Mr. Herrimen." Roy spoke in his most authoritive voice; there was no room here for the calm and easy-going researcher, or the mildly military commander. This was the voice of Authority, the voice of the man that aspired to the rank of Fuhrer-President to change the country even if it meant getting sent to a firing squad one day on war crimes. "I'd like to ask you some questions on what the hell just happened at Foster's Home, so that I can hunt down the individuals or singular responsible for it."

Mr. Herrimen narrowed his eyes. "_Gladly_."

The result exchange of information was very..._informative_. On both sides.

...

Kimblee could be a patient man, but he was losing interest in it.

He toyed with the Stone, rolling it along his knuckles, watching how the light hit it just _right _and screaming faces glowed in the uncut facets...

It could be so beautiful.

He flipped it with his thumb and caught it. _That's a bit dangerous,_ Ghostfreak warned. _Suppose you dropped it?_

"Then I would have lost it, and all this would be for nothing." Kimblee continued to play, rolling the Stone back across his knuckles to his thumb and flipping it to his other hand; it fell across the inner curve of his thumb and across the tattooed mark on his palm. His pink flicked it into the air, and was caught neatly between two fingers.

(Kimblee had once spent some months in confinement with a artificial man made from the parts of vicious criminals but was quite nice in spite of it. He'd taught Kimblee a few sleight-of-hand tricks; Kimblee considered them good practice for staying focused.)

Kimblee did not, in all truth, care if he failed. He didn't care if he lost the Stone. He didn't care if he couldn't capture this Jarod person. He didn't care if the Heartless turned on him, and he espicially didn't care that he could well die here, or be captured by the lawkeepers of this town.

It was enough that he try. If fate saw fit to have him fail here, he was content with that. There were those who railed at life's evey little twist, who screamed and fought like rats in a slick pipeline as they fell and died on the blood of their ruptured throats. Kimblee was one of those who smiled at ultimate misfortune and said _Oh well, it was fun!_

He'd learned to embrace that way of thinking. He had heard of the notion of fighting fate, of telling destiny to do horrible biological acts to itself, and he had dismissed all those notions. It was just too stressful. Better to go with the flow of the world, to accept what happened whether for good or ill, and to die knowing that you had done it by your own code of conduct. Kimblee did have such a code; it tended to surprise people that knew him well, and this never failed to bother him. Just because the closest thing to sexual feeling he ever felt was when the roar of explosions mingled with falling fire and gore didn't mean he was a _complete _monster.

(This was a point that could be often disputed.)

He flipped the Stone again (how did they feel, in that whirlwind of souls, that typhoon of lives torn from their living bodies and screaming for their shells?) and caught it between his teeth. It did not chip or crack; it was made of sterner stuff that that.

He was bored. He didn't know what he was supposed to be looking for, but that wasn't the problem; people were slow in coming, slow to realize that this wasn't the usual sort of madness. Men and women were arriving now, some dressed in the official uniforms and others in uniforms belonging to more specialized groups (so few of them, too) and more concerned civiliians, but it did not appear to be an appropiate time to act yet. More people had to show up before he could be certain of his quarry.

He flexed his fingers and paused, interested, as a new troop of vehicles approached: a small car, a white-blue truck and a...well, a ten-ton mantaee bison cross-breed, floating in the air by blasts of wind. Curious. Behind them was a small squad of trucks with a decidedly ambulance bent, and even further in the distance, there was a amazingly loud stomping. The lumbering of a machine-behemoth.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow as it came closer into view. Well. People would certainly be coming now, if only to see what the noise was about.

He still did not know what to do. He didn't know if Ghostfreak offered the powers of mental scanning or if he was expected to go and psychically probe every single individual person, if by some chance this 'Jarod' went in disguise.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the picture of the man in question; he looked at it for a moment. A pleasant-enough looking man, but hard to notice. Nothing about his face stood out or called attention. (Although, it did bear a striking similar to an ancient figure of myth, legend and nightmare that Kimblee had heard of when he had spent some time in the Outer Planes...but it was mostly nightmare.) But Kimblee was good with faces; he noticed details regardless. In a lifetime of working with a lot of people, he had never forgotten a single face. Not ever. Regardless of the condition it was in at the time.

Kimblee glanced back at the vehicles; the 'leaders', or at least the ones at the head of this procession, had stopped in the middle of the street, with the most wonderful view of his handiwork, from Foster's remants to the soulless shells on the ground to the wreckage lining the street. There was a beat, and then all the doors opened and the people nearly fell out of them and the Sky Bison's cargo (which was people) followed in turn and they all stumbled and stared and just beheld the fruits of Kimblee's work: the ruins of Fosters, cracked like an eggshell. The grounds of Foster's, where even the most conscientious interloper's attempts to sort out the fallen had not made much of a difference. (So much for respect and integrity.) The very neighborhood itself, the northern side wiped away by the same blast that shattered the mansion and that was supposed they missed the massive break in the ground encircling the property, crumbled buildings marking the point of a massive transmutation circle. (Kimblee was mildly interested if anyone could see it for what it was.)

They could taste the ash freed from simple minerals. Smell the smoke that had been uninteresting wood. Perhaps even string out the blood from the hapless pedestrians, crushing under falling debris. They were in the perfect place to witness his glorious work, to feel the slightest trace of his art, the faintest echoes of the joy that only he that stood before the brillant lights and feel the vibrations rock their souls.

Kimblee tilted his head. He couldn't hear anything they were saying; he was up much too high on a nearby building so no one could see him. But he could see them well enough, and people that stood like _that _and hit the ground like _so _and just stared like _this _were not usually appreciate of proper work. He shrugged. Proper coinnisuers were hard to find.

He prepared himself to retreat and wait in a safer location when he noticed that one of the men below, one of the ones that stared at his doing with a stoic silence, was rather familiar. He noticed the dark skin and white hair before he pegged him as an Ishbalan. That alone would have served for fond recollections. But then he saw the long coat, a specialized outfit adapted from the traditional robes of an warrior-priest of Ishvala, and it was a impressive feat of his eyesight that he could discern that X-shaped scar twisting the man's face.

Kimblee grinned. He _knew _that face, of course. One of his finest works, and an admirable imitator of him besides.

"Well now," He said softly. "This is an intriguing develoupment."

Several of the children down there did not seem _quite _as affected as expected, though. Notable among these were a teenaged tiger-human creature and a runty boy, both of whom seemed to be regarding the destruction with...curiosity, not rampant sentimentality.

Scar glanced up and Kimblee ducked behind a complicated array of interfacing equipment on the rooftop.

_What the hell? _Kevin said.

_That man saw us, _Ghostfreak fretted. _I am certain of it._

"So much the better," Kimblee said softly. "My orders are to capture the Ishbalan alchemist-killer named Scar. I never forget an order."

_Uh, what are you talking about?_ Kevin asked. _No one told you to do anything like that_.

"Of course not anyone you know! My old superiors in Central Amestris. Those were my orders. Capture Scar. Instigate a bloody battle in the nothern coutnry of Drachma. I succeded at one, but not the other. I find this...displeasing."

_...How many years ago was this?_ Ghostfreak asked.

"I did say I never forgot an order."

_Your devotion to your superiors is admirable, if somewhat unhealthy._

"When I say I'll do something? I do it." Kimblee stood up and checked. The group down below was moving onto the grounds, obviously intent on doing...something, the scarred man with them. He could see them, moving together in a loose cohesion towards the house, and behind them were their followers, piloting their trucks and vans of medical equipment. Not that it would do those here much good, but Kimblee smiled at the thought of the surprise they would get once they analyzed the bodies. _Death comes in many sorts, and the body doesn't even have to stop working for some of them to qualify._

He would have to be careful now, though. He couldn't just barge in there and search faces, not with Scar there with his power of destruction and that peculiar Ishbalan sense of irrational familial piety. But he couldn't very well just sit here like some smug overlord with a throne of skulls getting a depression in it in the shape of an armored rear.

_Patience_, counseled Ghostfreak. _Wait for them to become aware of the full extent of what you have done. They shall discover it. They will grow to be _afraid _of you who has done this. Fear will color their hearts, and cloud their minds. When you act, they will think of you as a monster, not a mortal shell they can take down. To them...you will not be a man, but an idea. A dark and fearsome idea, and ideas are _bulletproof_._

Kimblee was not bulletproof. But the idea, allowing them to make psychological warfare without him even doing a thing, was appealing.

"Patience," He whispered to himself. "A good idea."

He resolved to wait.

Not everyone had arrived yet. But when more people came...then he could prune them a bit.

...

Zim was starting to wonder if he had some sort of vaugely defined curse of explody-ness put on him at some point.

He had been born on Irk; it exploded. He had gone to countless worlds; they'd exploded, sometimes because he wanted them to but more often not. He had found a new home on Earth; it exploded. (Well, technically it was more like 'consumed by the unnamable forces of darkness heralded by heart-consuming nightmares born from the darkest depths of sentient life', but that wasn't very catchy.)

He stared at a charred piece of wood he had picked up from the ground after clearing off the rubble from a small and sad pile of bodies. (He couldn't think of anything else to do.) It had been part of a building less than three hours ago. Now it wasn't, because Foster's had exploded.

The others had become notably subdued, he had noticed in the short time they had tried to do something for the place. Danny was doing the worst; he hadn't said _anything _since they got back to Foster's, and Zim thought he had seen Sam crying when she had snuck away. Tucker just looked...blank. He suspected they were irrationally blaming themselves for the death of all these people, but then they weren't in much of a state to be sensible.

Aang and his friends were more ready to be reactionary; Toph had almost immediately taken to helping other on-the-site workers excavate the dead from the ruins, perhaps because she wanted to do something useful, or else she found it distasteful to leave the dead abandoned and uncared for; soil was gluing itself to her feet, dust and dirt swirling around and condensing on her body like the armor she desperately wanted. After the initial shock of it, Zuko had darkened into a disturbingly quiet state that would have seemed callous indifference if you didn't notice the righteous indignation burning just under surface, turning his breath black and smoking and made his eyes, already burned yellow by his lineage and element, glow like embers. At the other end was Katara; she had busied herself with first sorting out the survivors that had rather foolishly wandered back into the area, but she did not bother to hide the almost inhuman degree of rage akin to Zuko's, but where he was a raging inferno under the surface and begging for an outlet, she was a tsunami, building up before the inevitable undersea quake set off a tidal wave that would anhillate anything in it's path. Her steaming breath left little icicles that dropped, grass froze and broke under her step, and it scared the hell out of anybody who saw her. Sokka was a milder example of this; he had no bending power, so his expressions of emotion did not visibly effect anything, but Zim knew him well enough to be aware that him organizing around a number of leaderless and amiable locals to great effect like he'd been doing was him doing something useful instead of standing around moping. Even the animals felt it; Momo seemed to have disappeared (perhaps too frightened by the circumstances) and Appa was gently herding the survivors on his own accord, and doing a good job of it. Very few people oppose the will of a ten-ton hybrid monster with aerokinetic powers.

And Aang was even scarier than any of that. Zuko burned; Katara froze; Toph hardened. This was because they were Benders; the elements they manipulated were engraved into their very souls, moulding their personalities. Zuko could not help but be passionate and loyal; it was his nature as a Firebender. But Aang was the Avatar; he was both of and apart from the Nations, and he was also an Airbender, the people of the autumn, the ones who had become the air...and air was not an element known for being eternally calm. Distant, perhaps, unfettered certainly, but never _safe_. Where Aang walked, as he helped herd survivors into hastily made zones where medics and healers could help them, the grass crystallized and incinerated in rapid succession. The eath cracked and reformed in his wake, grass rolling like some great worm moved underground. His breath, when he didn't concentrate on control, was a rolling gust carrying shards of new ice and tiny whirls of flame. And most of all, there was the wind; spiraling around behind him and churning with every movement, so full of life and furious action that it seemed that his anger had seeped into the world itself; Zim half-believed that Aang had woken up the land with his own feelings, and like him, the land was _angry._

Zim was a bit wary when he had seen Aang's tatoos briefly burn white from time to time, or his eyes glow with a unearthly light, like all the stars in all possible universes shone forth, burning away humanity in favor of terrifyingly pure _rage_. (It was, on balance, a very good thing that Air Nomads had rigorously believed in distancing their fetters and letting go of harsh feelings. It did not do for people with the power to call down storms to be subject to violent mood swings, let alone someone with the power of the Avatar.)

Most devastated by this was, of course, the locals. Ron was espicially horrified, and he was so disoriented by the destruction that he kept zoning out of conversations and discussions on what to do that they eventually left him be; Kim was almost as disturbed as him, but she forced herself to keep a level head and focus on the now. Grief could come later. Rufus was...a bit of a mystery. Zim had no idea _what _the little animal was thinking: he seemed to be adopting a more stoic attitude and doing his best to convince the ones that could understand him to stay on task. (Zim had considered that he didn't understand the situtation, but on reflection, Rufus did not seem that simple. Zim didn't know how sentient the animal - or care - but he was certainly intelligent enough to understand the horror of what had happened.)

He had expected Cyborg to be devastated, after he'd joined their group on a whim, and Zim was right in a roundabout way; certainly he did not have any hysterics or quiet weeping fits. Cyborg's horror and grief was a quiet sort: he'd grown solemn and eerily calm, and after he'd been told of the catatrophic system failure of last night, he wasted no time in concluding that this whole thing had been planned from last night and that this 'Mr. Lyle' character was working with Solf J. Kimblee, perhaps as a schemer that had sent the mad bomber there for...something involving blowing the place up for some reason, they hadn't figured that part out.

Scar and Abel, as the eldest there (biologically, anyway, or at least Scar was) were less affected. Both of them were visibly shaken and saddened, but neither of them were devastated. Abel seemed sickened and, weirdly, _annoyed_ by what this Kimblee had done, as though he had seen things like this too often for it to affect him very much on an emotional level. Scar had been even more withdrawn than usual, conversely. This seemed to hit far too close for him; his homeland had been utterly wiped from the face of his home world in a manner such as this, apparently. Scar seemed strangely reluctant to join in on discussions of what had happened, and Zim suspected that he actually knew what had happened but found the subject too painful to elaborate on.

Zim was finding it notable that as things got more serious, Abel seemed to become a different person. He seemed the eldest of them all. Even older than Aang. When he spoke, Zim heard echoes that lasted longer than the lifetimes of cities and memories that stretched back longer than civilizations could lay claim to. Even Aang, whether you counted his physical age or his chronological age, was still a child next to the..._entity _that was Abel Nightroad. Catholics, Zim concluded, were very spooky.

Calvin and Hobbes...were not acting normally. They had both delved into figuring out what was going on by examining the ruins and determining how it was done after an initial horror, but they weren't acting at all shellshocked like Zim expected. It wasn't something you normally got from a preteen and teenager, no matter what the species. The overall impression was that they were _used _to stuff like this, at least enough that while it was a tragedy, it wasn't particularily notable to them. All death was regrettable, but they had seen far worse, or so Zim got the impression. Hobbes even mentioned in an aside to him that he'd 'seen worse in a tour with the Adeptus Astartes', whatever that was.

Zim himself didn't have enough information to make a conclusion, but he never let that stop him before; in spite of that, he wasn't sure what to make of this Kimblee business. He didn't know if this 'mad bomber' actually _was _a minion of Mr. Lyle or an agent of some larger conspiracy; he apparently had a conspiracy in this town working in his favor (or so he hoped), so it was perfectly likely that there was some kind of evil conspiracy set _against _him. Mr. Lyle _had _been a little too well-informed: perhaps he had gotten his information from very powerful sources? (Then again, it was sort of obvious.) On the other hand, blowing up Foster's didn't make a whole lot of sense, even if it was some kind of defensive node. If it was helping to keep the people safe from the monsters that wanted to kill everyone, what was the point of it? What was the _reason_?

Zim knew that some people didn't _need _reasons. There didn't have to be a valid purpose in blowing up buildings and murdering hundreds of people in the process. There didn't even have to be an excuse; just the right sort of mood swing, or even a vauge feeling that it seemed like a good idea. Some special sorts of monsters just liked doing murderous feats that were epic in their lack of purpose or rationality; motiveless evil without either a real benefit or rationale.

Zim had found that his past as a loyal follower of an evil empire who jumped howling over the line to 'insane stupidity' was pretty helpful in understanding complete monster psychology.

On the other hand, he didn't really care about this Kimblee's reasons for doing this anyway. Catch the bad guy, kill the bad guy or hit him in the face with a truck on fire; just so as long as some measure of 'right and proper' was dealt, he'd be satisfied. He wasn't particularily interested in the mental state of lunatics and sociopaths anyway, he got enough of that when he remembered things too clearly.

He was trying to explain this last point to Calvin (who seemed insistent on following him around for some reason), without much success. "Look, you misappropiated lump of stupid, mental and moral mutants rarely require a reason to do these things!" Zim said. "A means and a desire to do so are good enough!"

Calvin disagreed. "I know enough about my share of sociopaths to say differently, xeno dumbass! Assuming that this guy is a sociopath." Zim pointed at the piles of the dead (now somewhat neater piles and busy being recognized and tagged by concerned doctors; apparently getting your dead sorted out was a really big deal in Traverse Town) and the broken mess that could be dimly recognized as once being Foster's Home. "...You can blow houses up and kill tons of people without being a moral defective. How many evil empires had gone and genocided random people because they just happened to be there? You expect me to believe that the people who carry stuff like that out are all complete monsters? Sometimes all you need is a guy with a punch-card and a paycheck to take by the end of the week." Calvin seemed to be speaking, not by personal experience, but at least by heavy knowledge of this.

"I acknowledge that," Zim said. "But this man was laughing about what he was doing. Making deranged speeches and such. Hardly the act of a man simply doing what his job entails."

"Well, I give you that, but that's not really the point here. Way I see it, we figure out exactly _how _he did it and why, we know what he'll do next. Boom! Curbstomping ensues and we do a Good Thing."

"You want to face down a man that can, from what we've heard, make explosions with his bare hands?" Zim spoke quietly, as if mulling it over.

"Well, when you put it that way..."

"That sounds awesome! What better way to test our nerve and resolve than by going all-out against a force that can summon artillery-scale attacks in the blink of an eye!" Zim laughed and clapped Calvin by the back of the head, knocking him over. "You have great fighting spirit, boy! I may have misjudged you."

Calvin got back up and grimaced. "Considering the way you fight and your enthusiasm at fighting a psychopathic mad bomber that doesn't need explosives to do his dirty work, I'm starting to wonder if maybe your kind are distantly descended from the Orks back home." He would know, he'd spent a good part of his childhood among them.

"Eh?" Zim said.

Any clarification was not to be forthcoming, at least at that moment. "Hey," Bloo said from behind him, Eduardo following. "You guys seen my buddy Mac? I've looked all over but I haven't seen him."

"Oh, it's you," Zim said, disinterested.

"Hey, sucks," Calvin said, gesturing at the house.

They paused. They blinked.

Calvin did a double-take. "What are you doing here!" He said.

Zim realized that you were supposed to act like Calvin was when people supposed to be staying at a hospital suddenly showed up again at the scene of the attack. "Aren't you supposed to be recuperating or not bothering me anymore!"

"We snuck up on Cyborg's truck," Eduardo said. "Since me friend Wilt not here; sorry, that okay?"

"Eh, it's not my truck, I don't care," Zim said, and tilted his head. "You are looking for your friend? The boy waiting for you here last night?"

"_Si,_" Eduardo said. He was, Zim noticed, being quiet subdued.

"Ah." Zim glanced at the nearest of bodies. "Hrm. Well...I do not wish to be needlessly pessimistic..."

"But?" Bloo said.

"How do I put this politely...or nicely..." Zim muttered under his breath, trying to find a good way to do that.

Bloo frowned deeply. "Mac's not dead."

"Of course not," Calvin said. "But you-"

"_Not. Dead._"

"...Can't be dead," Eduardo said, quietly. He wasn't crying; that would have been preferable to the way he seemed to be slowly and sadly breaking. He was making a serious attempt not to look at the bodies and recognize anyone, but it was proving hard.

"If they _are _alive," Calvin said. "Then they'd be over at the place where everyone else is; the other survivors and the non-apathetic citizens that showed up. Or just wandering around."

"Why would they be wandering around?" Zim asked.

Bloo started to answer and stopped, looking at something behind Zim. His eyes bugged out and he screamed something inarticulate before shoving Zim out of the way and running off at something.

Zim turned around. "_BLOO!" _Mac screamed, running at Bloo and joyfully tackling him, the two bouncing off the ground a bit.

"Ow, pain!" Bloo squealed. "I don't like pain! It hurts me. Wait, why can I deflect red killing stuff and not you?"

"I don't know but shut up, I thought you were dead, I didn't know where you and Eduardo had gone, I didn't know what that explosion was or that red light or you alive or not and we got here and the house was gone and everyone was dead and I _thought you guys were dead!_"

"...Geez man, you think I'd let something like this kill me!" Bloo said, He thumped his chest. "I'm the toughest blob in all creation! When the big bad punks talk about the manly badass Blooregard Q. Kazoo, who survives the end of the world, random accidents and species definition lawyers, they're talking about me! I'm not gonna die and leave you alone, you idiot!"

"...Bloo," Mac said, but he didn't get the chance to continue, because shortly afterwards Eduardo gathered both him and Bloo into a big sobbing hug punctuated with anguished declarations of relief. It only got worse when Wilt and Coco came out of apparently nowhere and joined in on the hugging and crying and general emotion.

"Oh, guess pessimism was wrong then," Calvin said, regarding the waterworks along with Zim.

"I'm glad they had a happy ending," Zim said. "Take that, cynicism! Your death will be slow, painful and filled with absurd levels of..._**IDEALISM!**_" He laughed maniacally, the sound painfully similar to a rabid animal's howling at the phantom thing killing it from the inside.

Calvin didn't appear to notice. "At least _you _don't have any random people jumping out to say hi, I don't think I could stomach it."

"Yes, well, I-MINIMOOSE!" Zim yelled as Minimoose squeaked joyfully and rammed into his stomach in a cheerful way. "Ow! My mysterious organs!"

"...I have officially lost all credibility for whatever entity is organizing my life at this point," Calvin said bitterly. He yelled to the skies, "Subtlety is important, y'know, look into it! Cheap and contrived reunions are not worth the cathartic release!"

Aang landed from above in a shower of dirt. "Why are you yelling at me?" He asked, hurt.

"What? No, I wasn't talking to you...never mind, I'm just having a minor nervous breakdown. Career hazard."

"...Oh...did I miss something?" Aang added, looking pointedly at the sobbing Foster's residents.

"Not really," Zim said. Minimoose squeaked.

"Oh. Hi, Minimoose." Aang absently patted the small robot, who bobbed agaisnt his hand like an affectionate housecat. "Um...hey, I was looking for you. Katara found out something that she thought we should all know about." He paused. "Zim, you know all kinds of crazy science stuff. Maybe you can figure it out."

"Hey, I'm a mad scientist!" Calvin said indignantly. "Bet you a dollar I run circles around this guy in the Supernal Sciences."

Aang scratched his head. He didn't look like he was in the mood for posturing. "...If you think you can help, come on."

"Oh, whatever," Calvin said. "Whatever gets us to this Kimblee guy sooner, and therefore sooner to a proppa scrap." Zim was starting to notice that when Calvin was particularily agitated, he had a tendency to talk like an English football hooligan. The boy had unexpected depths. Rather like a dank lagoon.

Because he always liked showing off, Aang assumed a wide rooted stance and cut the ground with a sharp jerk of the elbow; the part of the ground they stood on fused into a single piece of rock and seperated from the soil, and Aang flew it into the air with a mixture of Airbending to make it stable and Earthbending to propel it. And so they didn't fall off, bits of earth slid over their feet like little belts.

"Ack! Again with flying in the air on dislocated earth bits. What a week." Calvin said.

"Interesting design on the ground. Explosions are evil and such but lovely designs they make," Zim observed, holding tightly to Minimoose so he didn't get left behind.

"What the Warp are you-" Calvin took notice of the massive tear encircling the Foster's property, and the exploded buildings on it. He recognized the type of pattern (if not the specific form) almost at once. "...Huh. But that's...no way. There's no way it could be like that." Aang landed before he could finish, which pleased Zim; Calvin had a rare talent for annoying him.

They landed right in the middle of the 'salvage zone', where the survivors were being tended to by the attendent rescuers and medics, and he landed with such a noise and lack of preamble that a good number of people started yelling at them after nearly having heart attacks. "A bit soon for sudden surprising explosive things, right?" Calvin said.

"Whoops," Aang said softly.

The bits of earth holding them fast crumbled, and the rest of their flying rock did the same, sliding them down the resulting pile of soil onto the ground, now covered by a tarp someone had pulled out after Toph and Aang had Earthbent the area into a single floor of solid ground for simplicity's sake. From the medical vans had come a plethora of wheeled gurneys and similar things, including a fold-out gazebo on legs. There were a _lot _of people around, at least fifty in the immediate area, and that was simply the Foster's residents where were fit enough not to need immediate medical attention. (For the most part, they were simply exhausted beyond reason; some proper stimulants, like coffee or chocolate and a bit of rest and they were capable of speaking without having to make pauses.) The other returning survivors were hanging around on the property, not having anywhere else to go and at a loss of something to do.

On the street through the fence, unpeturbed by the massive break in the earth, was a huge machine-building. It was smaller than Foster's had been, at least enough to fit on the street without knocking over the other buildings, but it was even more bizarre, a hulking titan of machinery, an unknown quanity of metal and pistons and nearly-organic sensory machines grouped like inquisitive faces in random places, all assembled over a huge number of surgery rooms, emergency wards, all manner of medical wings, classrooms, offices, specialized medical branches; the end result was a huge building that moved through the air, suspended by propulsion bulbs, it's suspended weight dispersed and crashing lightly to the ground like massive footfalls. Straw-like tubes had emerged from angular apetures, set up to transport people into it's mysterious depths for proper medical care. Sometimes people went in and out of them; medical professionals, Zim assumed. On one of the infrequent moments when Zim had taken an interest, Abel had explained who some of them were. Zim filed the information away for later; knowing who was in charge of the people that knew how to take people apart and put them back together was a useful knowledge.

The mobile hospital, as the moving machine-building had proved to be, was a subject of some interest to Zim once he had seen it properly on the way over to Foster's. According to what Cyborg had to say (since he lived in the area, he made it his business to know about pernitent things for a superhero), it had been intentionally built as such, opposed to the usual tradition of people tinkering with something over time and culmative effect snowballing. It was actually a collaborative effort between a chapter of the Crossguard and the mad medicine branch of the Peerage; annoyed with the fact that incidents tended to leave unskilled or ill-prepared people seriously hurt or even dead (but if they got there soon enough they usually could be zapped back by the Peerage's somewhat unreliable resurrection science, but they had a tendency to come back..._wrong_), they took the empty shell of a mobile fortress salvaged from a minor war in the mountain ranges north to town and redesigned it from the ground up, the bare bones of a complex inside, and added the Crossguard's bizarre awesomeness-fueled mastery of bending reality to the Peerage's mad science to create a flying magi-tech hospital that could patrol the town, homing in on disasters and send down medical technicians to tend to the wounded. (And, if they came in time, to zap back the freshly dead; there was a reason that Traverse Town had such a low casualty rate in spite of all the chaos.) The whole ensemble worked fabulously, espicially after they got a number of skillful doctors and researchers to take up residence, particular Dr. Knox (Chief of Medicine) and Dr. John Dorian (Resident Boss Physician; he came up with the title himself).

(Supposedly, the Crossguard's Pope at the time - a agreable and intelligent beast-woman named Lizriah with a touch of mad genius herself - had wanted to expand the project and make hospital-ships to launch into space and terraform dead planets to create landmasses for, among other things, creating automated farming worlds, eco-systems where extinct species could be revived and propagated, self-contained bio-spheres fit to grow heavily specialized natural pharmacies to cure otherwise expensive diseases or physical malfunctions or even create a safe environment to mould new sentient species from potential animals that could be guided to greatness and at the very least prove that bastard-liness wasn't hardwired into sentient DNA. This was, unfortunately, prior to her death in a bitter fight with a mad biologist who integrated the remains of the dead to his body, making himself larger and adding their power to his. His intent had been to kill everyone in Traverse Town, transforming himself into a living _city _with the powers of a decently popular god. Since her death and the lack of a Pope to authorize such a massive project, the idea had been left on the backburner. At the very least, one such Genesiscraft, as the project was termed, was already being built and funded by Bruce Wayne as a memorial to Lizriah. Exactly what it was going to be used for, since they didn't have the requisite technology yet, but there were rumors of dealings with a disenfranchised but advanced alien race from some small-time universe or another. Zim thought the whole thing sounded a bit idealistic but really cool. He wished he could make a deal with the town and trade with technology like that; he had lost all that kind of stuff with his house.)

Zim watched as a hatch appeared in the morphic outer shell of the mobile hospital and a large platform floated out. "Looks like that one's carrying people," Calvin said, observing that it had few people on-board. "Could be for autopsies. The people here work fast."

"I suspect it is experience, from all the stories I have heard about daily life in this town." Zim looked through the crowd around him - rows of people awaiting transport into the hopsital for care; physicians, pediatrics, xenobiologists, vetinarians and other professionals bringing in supplies and tools when they hadn't decided to simply bring people in for more intensive care; dead bodies lined up in neat respectful lines and such - and looked for a familiar blue outfit and long brown hair. He needn't have bothered; Aang was much better at looking for Katara and ran off with a gust in his wake, tearing up the ground in his path. (It annoyed people.) Zim followed after him, and without anyone else to suggest otherwise, Calvin did the same.

They found Aang anxiously hovering around Katara in the middle of a sterilized tent that had been fired into the ground by the mobile hospital. (It was suprisingly low on the collateral damage.) Zim's stomach lurched unpleasantly when he saw that she was bent over the body of the guard Andre with an air of fascination, the corpse lying on a makeshift autopsy table made from a flat section of ground raised up. The cutting had yet to begin, and water streamed around her and winding around the dead monster's body, now stripped from the waist up, and the water was glowing faintly where it touched skin, whether Katara's or Andre's, though it was almost imperceptible around Andre.

"What's with the glowing?" Calvin asked.

"I asked the same thing," said a synthesized and pleasant voice. It came from a thin and uncomplicated robot with insectile limbs on it's lower side, a pair of small antigravity turbines on it's back and a small face on the front of it's body. It's arms were a capsule-shaped revolving array of instruments and tools, currently hosting a delicate set of long-fingered hands. "I am physician-in-training Stitchup Wrenchworker in service to the people of Traverse Town, formerly Service Drone 100023 of Medical Mechanica, set free by She Who Breaks Your Head." It - or he - made a beep. "I presume you are among those summoned by Miss Katara?"

"Yes?" Calvin said warily. Minimoose squeaked, politely puzzled.

"Ah, good! Perhaps you may bear witness to her most fascinating discovery?"

"Eh?" Zim tilted his head at her. "...Is this an autopsy? Should you not be cutting him up?"

Razael popped up, concerned with the whole 'Andre being someone we saw just a little bit ago and now had ceased to be alive' thing. "...We just saw him a few hours ago. We slept the night here. All this happened in a few hours. Someone's gonna _burn_."

"I don't think we even spoke to him," Sammael said, appearing as well. "Why do you care about avenging him?"

"He said our hat was nice," Razael insisted. "And he was a pretty cool guy! There will be burning afoot, and the evil responsible for this is gonna burn good. Purge the evil. Purify the foul. Fire works good for that. And if that doesn't work, more fire will. The thing about fire? Eventually, _everything burns._"

"Yeesh, fine, just don't get _me _killed too."

"Uh, Zim?" Katara said.

"Eh, what?" Zim said.

"You were zoning out again."

"He keeps doing that," Calvin muttered to Aang. "Why does he keep doing that?"

"Oh, Zim's just a little crazy," Aang said nonchalantly. "You get used to it."

"About what you said..." Katara tilted her head at Zim. "I'm good at slicing people, but I don't do it to see how they died. Ice wouldn't work well; a good sharp edge on ice would tear too well to make a good clean incision. Anyway, I think that's a really bad idea. This guy's...er, well..."

"What's with the glowing?" Calvin repeated.

"You know, I had the very same question!" Stitchup Wrencworker said brightly. "Evidentally, Miss Katara possesses a spiritual-slash-genetically derived psychokinetic talent for manipulating water or anything that could scientifically be categorized or otherwise thought of as being akin to water. She had demonstrated her ability to freeze water to make ice packs for a child with a bad deliurm case, and she had informed me that she has learned a talent common among her people that allows her to synchronize the internal bodily energies of a given individual and manipulate them for better or worse, and thus can promote tissue regeneration, psychological restoration or any number of useful healing capabilities! And she mentioned that, in theory, any such weilder of the elements might learn to do so on her world."

"...Uh, I just said that some Waterbenders know how to heal with water, manipulating the _chi _of a person by using water as a medium and pulling their energies the right way to heal them,," Katara said awkwardly.

"Ah," Calvin and Zim said, understanding in different ways. Minimoose squeaked again; he was still confused.

"Anyway," Katara said, trying to get back on track. "I've been healing the people around here, and I thought I'd try to see what these...people's _chi _looks like. It still flows after you're dead for a little while, and since injury and emotional suffering affects it, I thought that if I took a look, I might be able to get an idea of what killed them." This was a valid concern; in spite of the multiple explosions, very few of the dead on the Foster's property looked like they had been killed by an explosion. "So I talked these guys into letting me try it and they didn't really have any reason to say no."

"So what'd you find out?" Zim asked, trying not to notice the various bodies that Katara had presumably checked out before Andre. He could see Freya there too. It wasn't a pleasant thing.

"These people aren't technically dead," Katara said simply.

"What," Calvin said flatly.

"It is true," Stitchup Wrenchworker said. "Here, pay close attention!" He scittered over, the broad ends of his feet clicking on the ground, and grabbed Calvin's wrist before dragging him over to Andre's body on the table and pressing his hand to the side of his throat.

"Hey, what the Warp are you-?" Calvin stopped. "...Is that a pulse?" Stitchup let go and Calvin lightly touched a prominent vein on the side of his neck, a look of mingled curiousity and maniac excitement twisting into a huge grin. He grabbed Andre's wrist and put two fingers under it for a moment before gently putting his arm back to rest. "Heh. He's got a _pulse_."

"Say what?" Zim rushed over and did the same as Calvin had done, though more carefully and without much experience; generally, when Zim was around dead bodies, they were in too many pieces to make checking for a pulse a good idea. Much to his surprise, there _was _a pulse beating under his fingers. It was faint, with all the substance of a snowflake drifting into a broken window, but it was there all the same. "...These people are alive."

"There's a reason I said 'technically'," Katara said, her eyes downcast. "...I'm not entirely sure how to explain this to you guys, but these people's energy isn't moving at all. I could say it feels dormant...but that makes no sense. Dead people's chi just fades away as the body falls apart and living people's just keeps flowing; sometimes it's stagnant or muddled or even twisted up when you have something bad, but it _moves_. These guys, though...I can move it around, I can make their injuries heal up a little, but it's not doing anything on it's own."

Minimoose blinked his little eyes. He squeaked. "Minimoose wants to know if they're in a coma," Zim translated.

Stitchup 'bzz'd a negative. "If so, we could find ways to counteract that. There would be signs in their brain chemistry, reflexive reactions. Our victims here display none of that."

"These people are dead while still being alive," Katara said. "I know that sounds like a cheesy intro to a talk about the undead, but really, that's the best I can come up with." She frowned. "And something's just _wrong _about the way they feel. When I'm bending their energy, I mean. It's not...it feels incomplete. And it's starting to fade, but it still feels like living chi to me. Like they're falling apart. I think..." She grimaced. "I think _something _was removed from them. It dropped them, and now it's killing them all the way."

There was a profound silence. Aang bit his lip and put one hand on Andre's forehead and the other on his chest. He closed his eyes and appeared to do nothing

(but that didn't explain what Zim suddenly felt, the massive burst of pressure that wasn't physical, like Aang had become a black hole, the entire _world _bending around him, concentrating and being _refined_)

and Andre's body lurched. Calvin jumped back, his hand going for one of his bulkier pockets while he muttered about zombies, but Aang simply stepped back and Andre fell back, the blood on his claws dripping slightly. "I can't do it," Aang said miserably. "I tried to bend him, but...it didn't do anything."

Katara went over to him. "I know," She said, and she stared at the top of his head, unable to meet his eyes. Zim envied her height and ability to avoid seeing that powerless look in Aang.

"That red light..." Calvin said, while he took a test tube out of another pocket and scooped up some of the blood on Andre's claws when no one was looking.

"Huh?"

"The people we talked to said that this Kimblee guy did _something _and there was a bright flash of red light. When that happened, people started dying." He raised an eyebrow. "Whatever that was."

"If we can figure that out, perhaps it can be reversed?" Zim said.

"Could be!" Calvin said brightly. "I've seen all kinds of screw-ups that could be fixed worse than this! If we know what caused it and how it was done, than yeah, sure we can!"

"You're awfully optimistic," Katara said, smiling faintly. "All morning you've been a grouchy fanboy. Now all of a sudden you think you can bring the dead back to life?"

"Anything is possible with the right capabilities! And besides, part of being a mad scientist is dividing extreme parts of yourself into seperate pseudo-personalities." Calvin frowned. "What do you mean, 'fanboy'? I've been around your friend Toph, what's this about being a fanboy?" Katara snickered. "What are you laughing about!"

Aang poked his head into the tent. "Hey, I found some of the others, but I don't know where Mr. Scar or Father Nightroad went...wait, what are you laughing about?"

"I dunno," Zim said, walking past him. "Let the others find out this stuff, I have some thinking to do."

Aang watched him go. "Is he normally like this?" Calvin asked. "Weird and with wild mood swings?"

"Sometimes," Aang said. "But he's been having a really bad week. His favorite science show with explosions went off the air, his computer went on strike, the grocery store refused to stock his favorite kind of TV dinner and his planet blew up. Or so I assume."

"Ouch." There was a faint buzzing noise. "Hrm?" Calvin reached into his pocket and pulled out the weird thing he'd made last night.

"What's that?" Katara asked curiously.

"I have no idea!" Calvin said cheerfully. "I made it in my sleep last night. I must have been sleepwalking half the night and dumpster diving or something." Ignoring Katara's puzzled look, he fiddled with the machine a bit, focusing his what looked like a LED alarm clock screen modified to be a crude gauge. Above it was a small lenses, glowing weakly with green energy. "...Huh. _That _wasn't happening before."

His comment may have been directed towards the numerous small instruments that had extruded from the device automatically. A wire hanger, bent and coiled so many times it was a short metal tangle...a tiny sattilite dish from who-knew-where...a large tuning fork...a few other odds and ends, all seeming to have unfolded out of the device somehow. Calvin tapped it, clearly longing to push the button. "What'd I put into this thing? Metatropi? Apocalypski? Really hope it's not a bomb again..."

Inside his pocket, where the tube filled with pilfered blood (stolen because Calvin was a bit of a freak for science; if it was the killer's blood, they might track him with it, and if it was Andre's, Calvin could reverse-engineer super-soldiers from it) lay safely stoppered, that tube's contents flickered the same green as the energy slowly being absorbed by the thing Calvin had invented.

...

Scar stepped onto the rooftop.

He was searching.

Red eyes, set in a perpetual frown (possibly from nerve damage from his massive facial trauma) glowered out at the world.

There was no one else on this rooftop, but he hadn't expected much else. In the event that he _had _foud Kimblee, though...

His hand clenched, seemingly on it's own. Not his left; his _right _arm, his destroyer's arm.

It was not the arm he'd been born with, and sometimes he wondered if a trace of will lay within it. Ishvala's or his brother's or perhaps both; he didn't know. Under that hand, dozens had died, torn apart by the same heretical arts of alchemy Amestris had slavishly followed, those soldiers and alchemists obedient to the last to the inhuman abominations that forged their country in blood and warmongering.

Many of them, he regretted killing, mostly the soldiers and guards who'd gotten in his way. (_But the Rockbells, doctors and husband and wife and parents of a girl, the lives taken after saving his own wretched life, betrayed and murdered and he would NEVER rest with their memory on his conscience) _Others, he felt nothing for: he did not learn of the favor Basque Grande, the Iron-Blood Alchemist, had done for the Living Prophet of Ishvala, Louge Lowe, by coldly shooting a superior officer that simply wanted to murder them all, but Scar only found this out after Grande had died under his hand, and even now, Scar did not think that his soldier's generosity excused his unquestioning slaughter of Ishbal. Some, like the Silver Alchemist, who openly talked about Scar's people like they were sub-human...well, that was a favor to the human race in general. He felt no remorse for him.

Nevertheless; Scar repented of all his deeds, even though he knew himself unworthy of forgiveness. He worked to _make _himself worthy of Ishvala's consideration, and he enjoyed the prospect of dying in the process. It would be appropiate; the murderer returning to God with his earthly shell stained in blood.

Kimblee would be the one man he could be honestly _proud _of killing. Twice, he had stood before Kimblee after his brother had saved his life and damned(_graced_) him with his destroyer's arm. One on a train that left Kimblee nailed to a speeding train but very much alive, again as part of a gambit to remove Winry Rockbell as a hostage. Both times Kimblee had not perished, and that offended Scar's honor as a man of Ishvala.

_Kimblee is the last to pay. Mustang has repented. Armstrong went mad with grief. All others on the list are dead. Only Kimblee is left to die in Ishvala's name._

His hand clenched on it's own. This time, Kimblee would _not _escape him again. His blood would spill on Traverse Town and consecrate the land with the final murderer

_One more to go. One last death._

He had seen Kimblee, only for a moment but he had SEEN him. He had waited long enough to make certain for his own eyes that these people were beyond saving (more blood on Kimblee's stunted mockery of a soul and so much to atone for in the face of Ishvala's holy wrath), long enough to ascertain what had happened here (alchemy, without any doubt, he had been briefed on the Promised Day, he KNEW what savagery Kimblee had wrought on their souls) and he had given them that much before begining his hunt.

But Kimblee was not here now. He had disappeared, perhaps into the crowd.

Scar bit back a vile curse, appropiate though it was for the occasion. "So _close_..." He whispered. He was so close to his final battle of atonement for his failure to save his family and his people and his country and his own honor; the hour of reckoning was at hand. He could taste vengeance, but the subject of it was nowhere in sight.

He would find him, though. Of that, he was absolutely certain. _No one _would survive him now. No matter where they ran...no matter where they hid...no matter what guardians they had to save them...no matter the weapons they armed themselves with or unholy monsters they allied with...none would survive him now. He would find Kimblee. He would face him.

And end him.

Scar almost smiled. At the very least, his grimace lightened a bit.

A nagging impulse tugged at his thoughts. It did not seem quite _fair _to let the others, caught in this duty with him, remain unaware of Kimblee's actions, the full import of what he had done here. He had not revealed the truth yet, sparing them the horror of what had happened.

Perhaps...now was not the time to be gentle. He loathed the thought of it, knowing himself the nightmare they were so freshly free from

(_the blackest night falling from the sky as the darkness steals away the sky, the stars going out as an ocean of living terror swallows their world; blood is raining down on them and he can hear Amestris SCREAMING as it dies, eaten alive and twisting in the monstrous gut of some vile thing and EVERYONE is dying, the homunculi have gone and May, like a DAUGHTER to him is screaming and falling away from him into the waiting claws below her and fades into other worlds than these-_)

He sighed. It was a long-broken echo of the man who he had once been. Uncomprehending of one truth of the teachings. Uninterested in what his brother could discover. Mindful only of obvious glory, not knowing of the holiness in everything. That man closed his eyes.

It was Scar who opened them again, red eyes burning with the awful _knowing _of the pain that had broken him like a glass statue, shattered beyond recognition until even the dust was breaking, put back together into a twisted mockery of what it had once been. Duty became obsession. Faith guttered in his heart, the words of Ishvala half-hearted excuses for murder and violence (_not an Ishbalan anymore, not a man of the desert but a beast, a selfish animal biting at anything that came near)_. Love twisted and warped into white-hot loss, scraping at his insides until he wanted to _break _everyone with blond hair and blue eyes to shake them out of their complacency ("_Scream, Amestrian scum! SCREAM LIKE MY PEOPLE DID!") _and the memory was just poison in his veins, and he soon caught himself wishing none of them have ever lived, to spare him this pain.

Ishvala worked in the strangest ways. Even a beast, an _animal_, can learn to look up and think clearly. Even a murderer can be shaken by a girl that he wronged (_looking him in the eyes, her voice shaking with such hate when she whispers that he murdered her parents in cold blood: "I'll never forgive you. But this-" She binds the wound shut, the lifeblood pouring from an arm impaled on metal remaining where it should be. "Is what my parents would have done.")_ and be reminded of the true path. Broken and worthless and monstrous though he was, by the grace of Ishvala he had been reforged into something with some small semblence of _worth_.

Scarred and mutiliated beyond recognition, inside and out. But he knew things now that he could not have known then. Knowledge that might _save _these people.

He set out back to the tent where the others had gone. The boy, the blond child with red eyes much like an Ishbalan's (_but wrong somehow, darker and haunted and they almost _glowed _sometimes, those monster's eyes), _was an alchemist. He would understand what Scar could tell him.

It took little time for him to reach the tent, where he had seen him being led by the sky-rider, the boy that danced through the air and seemed like an old spirit-tale brought to life, hardly fit to be contained in his false pretense of base humanity.

The tent flap fell behind him as he approached; it was largely crowded, the others (save the Keybearer and Abel) present, all listening closely to the nice responsible girl that had tended to the dead. (But they weren't, the Stone was tricky that way.) The boy was out of the way of the lecture, puzzling over some object while the girl looked at Scar (perhaps, a bit repelled by what he _was_; maybe she could smell that innocent's blood on his hands, or worse things; Kimblee ruined everything he touched and Scar was no different) but paying him little attention when she saw that he was going straight towards Calvin instead.

Calvin looked up. "Hey. You. The guy with the other guys. What's it?"

Scar folded his arms neatly. "I request a moment of your time."

"Hn?"

"You are an alchemist. Yes?"

"Sure, yeah. Why?"

"...I have a theory I wish to discuss with you. I have reason to believe it is..._conclusive_."

Calvin pocketed the device. "Sure, I got time." Scar left, and the boy followed, leaving the others confused for a moment, but only that; what Katara was telling them left them too shocked to be surprised too much by a random interruption.

"So?" Calvin said, when they found a area where few nosy busibodies would overhear them. "What'd you got?"

Scar explained it to him.

The boy was, to put it mildly, enthusiastic about the revelation.

This worried Scar a bit. Regardless, the two of them made plans for a brief presentation to have it explain to their team.

And then, of course, they'd have to get someone to fetch Zim and Abel...

...

Zim wandered the grounds aimlessly, thinking troubled thoughts, Minimoose floating anxiously behind him. He glanced at a row of the dead - or very close, apparently - and shivered a little.

Dead,, yet not dead. Alive, but not quite. And so soon in the wake of a mysterious encounter with an unknown foe that seemed well-informed. Disaster had followed in his wake as surely as the tides were pulled by the moon.

Zim couldn't shake a guilty feeling that he was, indirectly or not, responsible for this in some way.

He stared aside at the ruins of Foster's, a big broken pile of lumber and metal and dead people who hadn't gotten outside before the red flash struck. It didn't matter, he decided, if he was responsible for this; he had been _there_, he had spent a night here, and that made this place _his_, in a small way. That was enough reason for him to take revenge. And if it could, by some insane chance, be _fixed_...

The idea was insane. But then, so was he.

_But_, he asked himself, not in any sort of whiny brooding way but in a spirit of honest inquiry. _What can I do to make this situtation _work_?_

The answer seemed simple: find whoever was responsible for this horror and hit them until they were no longer capable of voluntary movement, toss them to the authorities and be done with it. (Or blow them into many interesting bits.) As plans went, it lacked a certain finesse, but so did explosions but they got the job done.

He laughed to himself as he passed a tree that had been smashed by a flying couch. "You sound like you're in a good mood," Jarod remarked as he stepped behind it, busily seperating couch from tree.

"I guess," Zim said. He processed information. "ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME!" He screamed, whirling and pointing a accusing finger at Jarod.

"Your finger's on fire," Jarod said politely.

Zim, noticing that his finger was indeed alight, blew on it, but that just made the fire bigger, so he shook his hand until it went out. "Besides the point! What are you doing here? You're stalking me, aren't you! Why do I attract stalkers?"

"You'll just shoot me if I lie, but I doubt you'll believe me if I tell you that this is a coincidence that we're both here," Jarod said, not paying much attention to Zim's rambling. "That leaves us in a bit of a conversational dead-end, doesn't it? On the other hand, once I worked out you were here, I decided to see what you were up to...and I deduced that you would end up around here through careful analysis of what I know about you and the usual probability measurements. And here you are."

"...No one says 'deduced', you sound like a...a guy that says stupid things with a straight face and makes everything look silly." Zim decided that Jarod was very creepy.

"Never paid much attention to fads. I never had the _exposure _to them as a kid."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes, I'm sure you had a horrible childhood-"

Jarod looked at him, sincerely astonished. "How'd you know?"

"My point is, _I know you're up to something!_"

"I am?"

"Yes! I worked out that you're some kind of secret vigilante that goes about harrassing the sneakier criminals and makes them suffer ironically! You wrap yourself in mystery and power-of-personality-cult to make yourself into a dramatic and scary thing that no one believes is anything more than punishment incarnate! A _living nightmare _to the evils that escape the attentions of everyone else! The dread of the foes of good and stuff! And no one knows who you really are, allowing you to roam at will undetected, unsuspected and leaving those you associate with free from vicious reprisals!"

"I got the idea from Batman!"

"Whatever! So I want to know what you and everyone else wants from me! You _knew _I would come to this town! You _knew _I would have the Keyblade, and you _knew _what I would be capable of!" He didn't say, _And you knew my world would be destroyed._

"...Yes. You're right."

"Good. I knew it would be so. What I want to know is what the frak you and the rest of your inane conspiracy wants from me!"

Jarod wrinkled his forehead. "Conspiracy?" He seemed genuinely confused.

"I think he's talking about those guys that know what's going on with the Keyblade and Heartless and stuff," Abel said, poking his head out from the other side of the tree.

"_You too!_" Zim screamed. "You're both in on this together, aren't you! It IS a conspiracy!"

"Those are some lovely clouds today," Abel said, staring at the sky. "They're so...um. Looking for a word here. Floofy...no, not it. Phoomfy? Not a word! Doofy? No, that's me...possibly Ron too."

"Poofy?" Jarod suggested.

"_**POOFY!**_" Abel screamed joyfully. "That's the word!"

"Will you pay attention to me when I'm ranting at you!" Zim yelled.

"You're doing what-now with the sheep under the sun with a see-saw?" Abel said. "Is it unsanitary? Because if it is I'm pretty sure I'm obligated to smack you with something heavy until you stop being gross."

"He thinks we're in some kind of spooky conspiracy or something," Jarod said.

"Oh. Smacking avoided then!"

"And..." Jarod frowned. "It's..._technically _true. After a fashion. We are a group of people that want to keep our activities and knowledge secret to avoid the wrong sort of people getting ahold of it and don't generally let it be known that we know each other..."

"I KNEW IT!" Zim shrieked.

"But we're not a bad conspiracy," Abel said.

"Of course you'd say that. Only an idiot claims to be part of an evil conspiracy, whether or not they simply are deluded or try to lure you in."

"But we're not," Abel said. "Really. Hmph, this is the sort of thing people expect from me because I'm Catholic...and British. Also because I have white hair and look pretty. Wait a tick...I'm a walking sterotype collection! Any moment now I'll start wearing body glitter and whining to girls I know! I don't want to wear body glitter! _I already sparkle sometimes because I'm a bishonen, that's bad enough as it is!_"

"And you kept being weirdly syncophantic last night!" Zim told Jarod. "That does not mesh with an avenger of the downtrodden and unmourned innocents! WHAT ARE YOU UP TO!"

"...And that time I spent with Biff!" Abel continued. "He taught me how to avoid this sort of thing and yet I do it anyway! Have I learned nothing from Judo! My precursors must be laughing at me!"

"...I was trying to be _nice_," Jarod said. "I might've gone a bit too far in trying not to upset you, since that somehow upset you."

"Damn well it has! Wait."

As Zim considered the flaws in his argument, Abel abruptly said in the middle of his hysterics, "If you want to prove our loyalty for yourself, read our minds or something. That'll prove it."

"What?"

"Isn't the power of Light sometimes associated with psychic powers? Telepathy and stuff."

"But I don't know how to do stuff like that!"

Abel smiled infuritiatingly."Have you tried?"

Zim started to say that of course not, he _just wasn't psychic..._and then he remembered that just the other day he hadn't been a Firebender either. The implications astonished him.

For a moment, he wasn't sure what to think. "I know you don't have any reason to trust us," Jarod said carefully. "And you certainly shouldn't assume that we're trying to control you, but-"

"What do you want?" Zim said shortly. "That is all. I do not wish to get bogged down in semantics or histories or whatever dirty dealings you were afflicted with to get this far. What do you want from me?"

Abel absently scratched the side of his nose. "We want you to save the worlds," He said. "That's all."

"Oh, okay then." Zim blinked. "What."

"Don't worry about it, I'm sure you'll do fine. You got picked by the Keyblade, it's a magical artifact of divine awesomeness, it must know what it's doing!"

Zim opened his mouth to contest that, vis a vis the whole _saving the world without prior notice _thing, but then someone walked behind Zim and poked him in the back. "Hey."

"WHY IS EVERYONE SNEAKING UP ON-oh, hello Danny," Zim said.

Danny frowned faintly at Zim. He furrowed his brow in deep concentration. "...The others want you back," He said. "Katara filled us in too. We need to figure out what happened here. Your new friend Calvin thinks he has a good idea what happened."

"He is not my friend," Zim said shortly. "He is a egotistical short-tempered madman I have the displeasure of being saddled with."

"...Whatever you say, man," Danny said, clearly not listening. "Come on. Or whatever, I don't know."

He left, in the general direction of Katara's tent. Jarod frowned. "That boy needs help," He said, in the decisive tones of a professional psychologist.

"Yes," Zim agreed. "And since you seem to raise an interest, I volunteer you for helping him! Because you still won't be clear about what you want."

"I thought I was pretty clear! But okay."

"Hah, I-wait, what?"

"Okay. I'll do it. I'll help your friend."

Zim blinked. "...How? I was _kidding_."

"I'm a qualified psychologist," Jarod said. "As well as a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, paranormal psychologist, pediatric psychological doctor...and a few other degrees, I may have misplaced them. I'm eminently qualified."

"How did you find the time to learn all that?"

Jarod shrugged. "I'm a very smart person?"

"Bah, whatever. But I shall hold you to this. If you back out of it or mess up Danny, I shall hit you in the face with a universe made of cheese! Or learn to be psychic and make you think you're a little girl named...Miss, uh, Parker. Or make you do a silly dance with fire on you feets."

"...How'd you figure out that name! I know a woman named Miss Parker! Literally, that's her entire name as I know it."

"I dunno. Bye." Zim ran off, leaving Jarod scratching his head in bewilderment. Abel shrugged, and followed.

He found the tent soon (after getting very lost, tripping on a tree and taking the time to incinerate it, fleeing from an outraged adventurer that disapproved of that sort of thing, getting into a fight with that adventurer, becoming friends with that adventurer, and some other stuff happened) and only finally made it back to see everyone (Team Avatar, Scar, Team Phantom and team Possible, as well as Cyborg. Also Calvin, Hobbes and Morte who Zim still didn't really consider his team) standing around in varying degrees of moodiness, disbelief or quiet thoughtfulness. Scar and Calvin had apparently claimed the table in the center as their own, Andre's body cleared from it so they could put down a large piece of paper Calvin was scribbling on while Scar patiently waited for him. "Hello," Zim said, Minimoose squeaking helpfully.

"Hey," Zuko said to him. "Any ideas on what the hell happened here?"

"Nope."

"Good, no preconceptions."

Abel walked in. "Sorry, lateness!"

Minimoose squeaked. _What's going on here?_

Aang sidled over. "Your new friend-" He pointed to Calvin. "And that cool guy with the tattoos put together a little presentation. They think they figured out what happened here and what we can do about it."

"He's not my...never mind." Zim shrugged. "So. This is good news, yes?"

"Probably not," Sokka said.

Abel rolled his eyes. "Pessimist."

"Realist!"

"I've been around a _LONG _time, kid, I know what the odds are! And I can't really stomach negative thinking; I've seen otherwise!"

Calvin stopped bustling around, indicating that he was done with stuff. "Okay," Calvin said, as he and Scar finished whatever they were doing. "That looks good enough...okay everyone! Listen up and don't fidget, the first person to complain gets shot into the stratosphere with a super-bazooka. So! Let's get this show on the road, and for starters, recount the facts we KNOW!"

Calvin started doing just that. "Got a flair for the dramatic, does he?" Toph muttered to Hobbes.

"He's a mad scientist, it comes natural," Hobbes said.

"He is?" Sokka said. "Huh, just like the Mechanist."

"I think it runs in his, er, _our _family. Dad..." A stormy look briefly passed over Hobbes. "He's a mad science-guy too. Does different stuff. Mostly with sympathetic principles in theurgistic alchemy-"

"Ahem?" Calvin said. They shut up. "Okay, now that the _loud mouths _are quiet-"

"Whiner!" Cyborg shouted.

"-We can move on. Now, from all knowledge, it started when this Kimblee jerk showed up and made bad stuff go down. Starting with explosions."

"Kimblee engaged the others in a fight that was, from all accounts, a delaying tactics," Scar said. "A short time after the fight was begun and the authorities were alerted, a number of properties on the outskirts of the Foster's land exploded with such force that they cracked the ground in a rather distinctive pattern."

"Big circle shape?" Toph said. "Real deep?"

"Yes. How do you...?"

"Earthbender? I see through the _earth_. I'd have to be...well, you know, feet-blind not to notice it. And it all feels wrong around here now. All twisted up and junk."

"See?" Calvin said. "That feeling...ties into my theory. Now, see, after those explosions...Kimblee did something. When we consulted them after arriving, Spike and the others said that he ranted and shouted and did something that made a bright red light flash on for a few minutes, and during that time...people started dropping dead. They don't know how." Calvin nodded at Katara. "And given your analysis of the bodies, they might be capable of being brought back!"

Tucker raised a hand. "I'm sorry, did you just say something about bringing the dead back to life."

"Yes," Abel said.

"...I've put up with a lot here," Zim said. "I have been attacked by angry mobs, menaced by alley-dwelling monsters of annoyingness, gotten very lost, attacked by monsters and generally annoyed. And now you claim you can reverse the process of death? You have lost all credibility."

"It's not that tough," Calvin said, surprising him. "Sure, _normal _science might find it bad and iffy...but _mad _science doesn't work like that, you know? Apparently this 'Resurrection Consortium' they have here worked out a number of methods of bringing people back from the dead in strict limits owing to mechanical problems. They can't do it if they're in a bloody mess, had severe brain trauma or stuff like that. Basically just restarting brain functions and getting the body back to work...but none of that applies, since the ones here are, y'know, basically alive."

"Wait, WHAT?" Abel said. "They're not dead!"

The others stared at him. "You didn't find out?" Katara said. "I told everyone!"

"No! I was around stalking Zim!"

"ADMITED IT!" Zim howled.

"And I already knew they would be like this," Scar remarked.

"What," Sokka said. "And you didn't say anything, because...?"

"Would you have believed me if I said so immediately?"

"...Good point!"

"Yo," Morte said. "Yeah, still a bit mixed up on the details here," Morte said. "The deaders are just barely there? So how'd they get not-killed? It's not like I haven't seen stuff like this before, but, context! Important."

Calvin stared at him. "...Who the heck are you?"

Morte's serious deficient of eyebrows was a pitieous crippling, leaving him little ways to express his annoyance. "I'M THE GUY YOUR QUEEN SENT TO HELP YOU, YOU DUMBASS!" Fortunately, there was shouting.

Calvin laughed nervously. "Sure, okay, whatever you say. _Watch that one,_" He muttered to Cyborg. "Anyway, I've got my theories on how Kimblee killed them without leaving a mark at that point...but then their evacuation system kicked on - no idea how, the thing was busted last time I heard anything - and the survivors got away! And then Kimblee blew up their house and disappeared into the alleys, based on eyewitness reports."

"Not for long, he won't..." Scar said grimly.

"So now, before we catch him and make him feel the hard stabby end of justice and stuff, we need to work out how he did whatever he did," Calvin said. "Don't want him pulling that trick on us. Luckily, he have an expert on our killer right here!" He pointed at Scar. "...Uh, you are an expert, right?"

"That man anhillated my home city and personally murdered every last member of my family, and holds the record for the most number of people killed during the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign. _On both sides_. Yes. I know Kimblee. Perhaps not personally, but I know how he will behave here."

"...Awkward. So...that red light. That's important. Figuring out what it is and what it's for. Ladies and gentlemen? May I take your attention to this!" He pointed at the paper.

Zim frowned. "...Is that a smiley-face?"

"No, it's a duck," Aang said. "A really weird looking duck."

"Nah," Cyborg said. "Totally a connect-the-dots-puzzle. That opens the gate to Hell. Don't connect the dots, we only just got over the last time!"

"What," Calvin said flatly.

"I think it looks like a mountain range on a map," Katara said. "...Drawn by a drunken platypus-bear with a mental disorder. And possibly some kind of social disease that attacks the eyes."

Toph poked it. "I think it's a piece of processed lumber." People at her. "...I assume you're staring at me, so let me point out that me, being blind! Have no idea what's on this thing. Let me have my fun."

"It's totally a dancing lesson thing, right Zuko?" Sokka teased.

"WILL YOU JUST LET THAT GO!" Zuko yelled. "It's a coincidental name, stop ramming me with it! You don't see me making fun of Wave-Style Island Waterbending!"

"Oh yeah, hula dancing with magic water. Hard to insult me with Waterbending when I don't give a arctic hippo's tooth about Waterbending, isn't it?"

"...It's obviously a face with goggles on," Zuko said, ignoring the point.

"Are you guys even trying?" Calvin said.

"I think it looks stupid!" Hobbes volunteered.

"Hey!"

Minimoose squeaked. "Minimoose thinks it looks like you can't draw," Zim translated.

"HEY!" A loud snort almost blew the paper away; Calvin threw himself on it while Zim observed that Appa had poked his head into the tent flap, Momo clinging to his horn, both of them making noises. "They're making fun of my drawing, aren't they?"

"Yes," Aang confirmed.

"I think it looks like a bullseye!" Abel said.

"This is childish," Scar said. "...And it's clearly a cheat code for a game controller designed after password pads."

"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING ME!" Calvin screamed. "AND YOU _KNOW _WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE!"

"I apologize. Group-think is a powerful force."

"Group-think is doubleplus-ungood," Abel joked, with so much hypocritical humor you could shove it off a mountain and make an entertaining mess before the authorities came to arrest you for violating the rights of a metaphor that had gotten out of hand.

"Then what is it?" Danny said, finally tuning in after not paying any attention at all the whole time.

"A smiley face with goggles on?" Zim said.

"Are you stupid!" Calvin said. "It's a transmutation circle, a restructuring matrix! Look at it!" He got up; the shape on the paper was a crude circle with five marks on it, and a small shape in the middle.

"Totally a similey-face," Zim persisted. "See? The two shapes on the top are the goggles, and the two others by them are the eyes, and the one at the bottom is a chin! And that thing in the middle is a nose. Huh...just realized something. What kind of smiley face lacks an expression! You fail miserably at smiley-faces."

"IT'S NOT A SMILEY-FACE!" Calvin yelled.

"Aww," Some of them whined.

"Ugh, stop being idiots for five seconds and just look at it!" Calvin snapped. They did. "This is the same shape made by the explosions prior to Foster's going boom! The circle carved into the earth...the five points made by the destroyed buildings, the shock and suffering of the people in their staining the earth...this is obviously a large-scale restructuring matrix!"

The response was, shall be said, underwhelming. "...And?" Morte said.

"I'm sorry, I was watching some birds fly outside, did I miss anything important?" Aang asked.

"No, I don't think so," Sam said.

"I saw a bird," Aang said. "...It was pretty."

Calvin looked like he wanted to smash his head into something to blot out the stupid. "Calm down, calm down, all great minds are afflicted by laymen at some point or another..."

Cyborg shrugged. His home and workshop was rented from the Elrics, who dropped in all the time for various reasons, so he'd be a fool not to be at least aware of alchemy (Edward and Alphonse Elrics were total nerds about alchemy), but it wasn't something he trusted very much; it was just so much wacky voodoo-science to him. (A remark that never failed to earn a screaming freak out from Edward.)

"The young boy is correct," Scar said. "I found a vantage point to see more clearly, and the destruction is unmistakably that of a massive restructuring matrix. One I am...familiar with."

"That significant pause bothers me," Zim said. "It bothers me very much."

"But what does all that mean?" Kim asked.

"Don't you see?" Calvin said. "It's _alchemy_!"

Once more, he failed to impress. "What, that discredited science from the Earth Kingdom?" Zuko said. "Over a dozen Earth Kings died from ingesting mercury because they thought it'd make them immortal, and the later ones tried spirit-grafting before Avatar Roku slapped the stupidity out of them. What kind of an idiot would delve into forbidden sciences for immortality?"

...

_Somewhere else..._

Ling sneezed.

_Gesundheit_, said Greed.

...

"...Obviously," Calvin said to everyone in general. "You're mistaking what I'm talking about for the common and low-tech form of alchemy...the one that involves pure chemistry and stuff." He turned to Hobbes beseechingly. "Help me out here!"

Hobbes shrugged. "I don't know about this stuff! And it's fun to watch you squirm."

Calvin turned to Scar. "I don't know anything about Amestrian alchemy, which this clearly is," Scar said flatly. He didn't sound like he approved of it much.

"You draw circles in the ground and it makes weird stuff happen?" Cyborg said. "...Sorry, that's all I got. And how do circles make that happen!"

Zim did some thinking while Calvin inched closer to a freak out. "Alchemy...I remember you mentioned your skill of it from time to time last night? The majority of your practical abilities are rooted in alchemical devices? And it's accompined by flashes of colored light?"

"Right!" Calvn said, relieved at some modicum of sense. And from Zim of all people. "Yes! Someone remembers! I might not even have a reason to go on and on!...But I'm going to anyway, because you guys are jerks." Much groaning ensued. "Suck it up, whiners!

"Now, first things first. Alchemy, the kind I'm talking about, is a science heavily linked to chemistry and the larger study of physics, but in pratice it's really the science of recreating the structure of matter through a variety of means, though Amestrian alchemy involves channeling the energy of tectonic movement by the use of a restructing matrix...it's more complicated than that, but those are the bare essentials that aren't really accurate at all but are close enough to give you laymen a understanding of the concept at work here."

"Uh...yay?" Sam said.

"Be grateful he's not giving you the whole-hog lecture," Cyborg muttered to her. "I had to the last time I said something wrong about alchemy in front of my landlord...I dropped by for some basic property expansion permission and I didn't leave for four hours."

Calvin continued. "According to what I've heard, alchemy as it exists today was most heavily used and develouped by the same world Scar here is from, mainly in a country called Amestris-"

"Wait, you use a skill from a different world?" Aang said. "They weren't part of your worlds, were they?"

"What? No."

"So...how can _you _use it?"

"Believe or not, Scar and I discussed this a bit. This _could _be pernitent to the situation at hand, so...Mr. Scar, take them away!"

Scar crossed his arms. "This is just a hypothesis. But I believe, based on careful analysis of legends from the ancient civilization of Xerxes, the original capital of alchemy prior to the it's destruction ages before the formation of Amestris, as well as what we have learned from a wide number of alien worlds where we have also found Xerxian alchemy, that deconstruction alchemy did _not _originate on my world.

"We believe that it may be part of a much older form of scientific develoupment with potential thaumaturgical roots from somewhere much further in the past than we ever thought; it is certainly vastly older than even the most ancient ruins of Xerxes, based on alien texts and cultures we have encountered. One particular culture, called...well, the Culture, and a world-traveling Doctor whose name I can never quite recall...have informed us that they have found many varieties of 'our' alchemy. Ones vastly different often, and often lacking the hubris and transgressive nature of Amestrian alchemy." Scar seemed downright pleased at this. "We believe that some ancient explorer may have made contact with ancient Xerxes, perhaps in the guise of a Xerxian god or spirit-hero, and spread the seeds of alchemy into their culture. Something similar occured with Amestrian and Xingese alchemy in our own world after Xerxes was destroyed..."

"As for me," Calvin said. "Way back in the back history of my world, I think a thousand and some years ago...it's hard to get a certain date, historical records are insanely hard to find the further you want...well, our universe operates on different laws than others, and owing to some of them, it's touched by a messy realm of chaotic psychomorphic weirdness we call the Immaterium, or if you're talking about it's past hellish incarnation, the Warp. You see, the Warp touched all things, or so it's said. It spans across all things, shunning such meaningless things as 'time' or 'space'. We have it on good authority that we've made brief contact with thousands of worlds for brief moments, but they slipped away from the Warp before the daemons could get their claws on them...or worse, the Chaos Gods." He shuddered. "Sometimes, they stayed.

"One of these worlds carried it's secrets to the Kingdom's precursor, which we call the Imperium of Man. I don't recommend you look into it's practices if you like sleeping without nightmares. They didn't like new stuff, I hear; or old stuff that sounded wrong...or talk that sounded like heresy...or anything from people's noise-bits if they were in a bad mood. Touchy, the Imperium. Anyway, the precursor of Alchemy, or Shapecrafting as they chose to call it before we rediscovered the current term in interworld exploration, somehow caught the interest of the Inqusitors that first found it, and not in the bad way. Seems they really _really _liked the idea of a form of honest science that gave humanity power without exposing people to the corrosive madness of the Warp or putting precious technology at risk. It spread, pretty slowly due to some effort figuring out how it worked...they develouped it, evolved it, and a good long time later, it became our modern form of alchemy, after we mixed it with our develouping thaumaturgical traditions unrelated to the Ruinous Powers of the Immaterium, and thank the Powers That Be for big favors on that one." Calvin grinned. "And then I learned the original form from the guy that taught me and Hobbes how to be all awesome and stuff. After he went back home - probably one of those other worlds with alchemy, he knew a _lot _about it, used to joke about being a Sage or something - I melded it with the teachings that survived the chaos of the post-Imperium era. My own unique style, I can safely say."

"Oh, the Comic Kingdom used to be the Imperium..." Abel said absently. "Huh, I keep forgetting what a one-eighty it's made. I remember when it used to be a genocidal xenophobic dogmatic grim hellhole...truth in anything being reformed, y'know? Even the _Imperium _could ally with the Eldar, Tau and Orks after the Chaos Gods were defeated and the ensuing messiness of the existing circumstances nearly killed all of them...and gradually evolve into the Brighthammer Kingdom of your's. Or is it Comic Kingdom?"

"How do you know about all that! And what do you mean, _remember?_!"

"I'm older than I look."

"Well, what's that supposed to-oh, never mind, I have more important things to obsess over. Heh, and Dad never thought I'd amount to a Staunen..." Calvin pointed at the circle. "Now, me and Scar did some thinking, and that thing around Foster's is indisputably a transmutation circle; I believe that Kimblee blew up those houses in order to create those marks on the circle, as alchemy is rooted in the concept of the circle, representing the cyclical flow of energy, but conceptual shapes and runes are required to _direct _it. On the other hand, while I know my alchemy, I've never seen a circle like this. I have no idea what it does."

"So all this was a waste of time?" Sokka complained.

"No," Scar said. "Not at all. Because _I _know what this circle does." He tapped the paper. "I have seen this...in my brother's research, in the very soil of Amestris, with my own country as one of the markers. This particular version is...unrefined and hastily made, but it's unmistakable."

He could not be mistaken here. He _knew _that transmutation circle. He had spent the last months of his life as the Alchemist Slayer of Amestris preparing for what would happen when it activated. They all had, knowing what would happen on the Promised Day of that twisted thing under Central and it's sin-born 'children'; his brother had _died_, knowing what would happen to the country, and (Scar felt a surge of fierce pride) he had prepared for it, designed a flawless countercircle that would have spelled the doom of that plan and of the monsters under Central, if not for the Heartless' arrival and the doom of their world. All their plans had been for nothing, but on the other hand, Amestris had not been consumed in a blaze of pestilential red light for the ambitions of a arrogant abomination, and that was a victory, Phrryic though it might be.

"So it's what now?" Toph said impatiently.

"...I wish I could not tell you," Scar said. "The knowledge of this is _not _a pleasant matter, and I resent the knowing of it. This aspect of alchhemy is known as the Devil's Work for a _reason_, and I would not blame you if you struck at me and the people of my world for even being responsible for such a thing ever being discovering or invented."

Toph waved her hand irritably. "Enough grandstanding."

"What is it!" Morte said.

"_A human transmutation circle_," Calvin and Scar both said. Scar finished, "A work of alchemy...specifically designed to sever the lives and souls of live human beings and condense them into a high-energy substance that serves as a nigh-impossibly powerful form of alchemic amplification; and this substance is known as the _Philosopher's Stone._"

There was a long, bleak silence.

"_What_," Aang, Zuko, Hobbes and Kim said in the same flat tone of voice.

"I KNEW ALCHEMY WAS VOODOO!" Cyborg yelled. "And evil. Don't look at me like that. My great-great-granny came from the Carribean, she knew stuff."

"...Huh," Morte said weakly. "That's a new one."

"Why would you know something like that?" Zim asked.

Scar glowered at him; not like he was angry, but that he was considering whether or not to tell them, and it would not be a pleasant matter. "...Know this," He finally said, his voice tired and bitter. "My people, Ishvala's chosen, had NOT been kindly treated by our world. Our land of Ishbal was holy, not because it was hospitable or because we had come from there, but because it was _OUR'S_. Our defense from a world turned against us. And _KNOW _that one of the first things done in war is to _DEMONIZE _your enemy. Deny them their humanity, and _ANY_ atrocity can be justified, and it _WILL _be.

"In the Ishbalan Civil War, they did NOT kill my people always. Sometimes, when the killing streams of fire and blasphemous living earth only left them barely alive...they were dragged to the holy places that had been turned into abbaitors and slaughterhouses for the doctors and scientists they coerced in their butcher's work. They had work to do, these men of science, and my people made such PERFECT materials for their twisted mockery of science. They discovered many things then, in those places. The first Philosopher's Stone in current history was made there, from those Ishbalans that had served the Amestrian military at the time that the mock-human Fuhrer-President King Bradley had them caged away and shipped to their deaths.

"I _KNOW _of these things. Do not doubt my words."

There was yet another bleak silence. Scar went silent, horrors going back to the memory of racial mnemonics haunting his eyes.

"...They experimented on your people," Zuko whispered, who for his part seemed to be going quietly insane with impending violence. He would know about that; the Fire Nation was known for doing _things _to the Benders they had captured. The Airbenders had given a merciful death, some said. The alternative was worse. "That's how you know all this, isn't it? This government, this...Amestris, did this to your people."

Scar looked at him, thoughtfully. Very slowly and deliberately, he nodded his head once. "Was that not what I just told you?" He said dryly.

"No wonder you're so grouchy all the time," Cyborg said, disbeliving and resorting to bad humor in his horror.

"So...that's what happened to these people?" Katara said shakily, clearly horrified by this latest atrocity. None of them had _ever _heard of something so debased, so monstrously _transgressive _against a living person. It was one thing to kill a person, another to cripple a culture, and yet another to destroy a civilization...but to mutilate the soul...

The people they had met so shortly ago, whether brief enemies or allies or even friends, were _worse _then dead. "He...removed their souls and turned them into some kind of weapon?" Aang said, looking a mix of sick and righteously indignant. "He blew up their home...with _themselves?_"

"What do you think they did with the first Stone?" Scar said sourly. "They gave it to Kimblee. The very one he used when he destroyed my city."

"He's going to do it again," Zuko said.

"No," Danny said suddenly. "No. No way. I don't believe it. That can't be real. It makes no sense. You _can't _remove a soul and turn it into stuff. That makes no damn sense. I am putting my foot down here. The stupid ends here, and I refuse to acknowledge the stupidness any longer. See you guys, I'm going home!"

He left the tent. An awkward silence occupied them. "When do you suppose he's going to realize the flaw in that plan?" Morte said.

"About now," Toph said, having otherwise been unusually quiet, Disturbingly so.

Danny walked back in, looking sheepish. "...I forgot I don't have anywhere to live."

"Them blue-screens-of-death hit the people today hard," Hobbes muttered to the person closest to him, which happened to be Aang.

"Does anyone else who just nearly got killed by monsters born from the metaphorical darkness in the heart the other night have any arbitary objections?" Calvin said dryly.

"Or for that matter deals with the waking dead?" Sam added. "Or ectoplasmic entities from another dimension...what the heck are the ghosts from the Ghost Zone anyway?"

Tucker tapped his chin. "You know, it's never very clear. Pretty sure that Ember used to be alive, though. I always just figured that the Ghost Zone freaks were mostly sentient bits of ectoplasm that took on iconic form based on powerful archetypes and images from our plane of existence, with the occasional _ACTUAL _ghost thrown in." They stared at him. "What?

Danny opened his mouth in retort to Calvin. He paused. He thought about the relevant logistics. "...Dang it. I _REALLY _wish I could respond to that. Damn my increasingly insane life!"

"I'd tell you to be grateful you still have a life...but you're half-ghost or something, so you missed it there," Ron quipped.

"...Did I just get burned by the guy with the monkey's tail who's spent all morning fanboying over Zuko!" Danny said incredulously. "THIS! IS! A! NEW! _**LOW!**_"

"WHY IS HE YELLING!" Ron shouted.

"HE'S BASICALLY AN IDIOT!" Zim yelled.

"HEY!" Danny said.

Calvin shook his head at poor Danny and clapped his hands twice. "The world-spirits have pity on you."

Aang raised his hand. "I feel sorta bad for him. Does that count?"

"Look, let's just put this whole argument away for a bit?" Ron said; a part of him felt deeply guilty for stopping an argument instead of continuing it. Arguing was in his heritage. "So the question remains...what does this guy want and how can we use that to find and stop him?" He addressed this clearly at Scar. "Is he...I don't know, going to run around blowing everything to bits and us with it?"

Scar tilted his head thoughtfully. "...That is a distinct possibility."

"Of course it is." Ron threw his hands in the air. "No offense, but this Amestris place was too dumb to live! Their leader was called the Fuhrer. They went to war with everyone around them! They liquidated minorities because they were told to! They commited horrible atrocities in the name of medicine! And they were mostly _blonde and blue-eyed!_ Honestly, were they ripping off Nazi Germany on purpose or is it one of those nail things!"

"Actually, Amestris is closer to your Britan or _post-_World War 2 Germany than the National Socialists," Scar said. "But I see your point. I make it a point of pride that Ishbalans were never ethnically Amestrians. It was an alliance of convienience. Not that it helped much." Scar shook himself, reminded him to get on track. "...We lack information desperately. Any action we make could work into whatever Kimblee has planned. But we cannot simply wait; we invite the deaths of the entire town in such a manner."

They grew silent. "...You do not exaggerate?" Zim said.

"No. The power of the Stone is...beyond your knowing." Scar twisted a bit. "_I do_. He holds the power to wipe out a building like Foster's in the blink of an eye...as collateral damage. If his intention is to destroy the town and kill everyone in it, that is in his power."

"He wouldn't get far," Kim said. "It's happened before. People go too far in their attacks on us and try to kill the whole town. All it gets is the best and most powerful of us plus an _mob _of faction members and skilled civilians who don't want to die. Kimblee would go down!"

"I believe so, after extensive effort," Scar said. "And so many of us would die in the process. And I must stress this on you: _he does not care if he lives or dies_. The thought of a given action leading to his demise is likely to be considered a acceptable outcome if it helps whatever his plan is." Scar frowned. "And something else concerns me.

"Kimblee destroyed my city because he was ordered to do so. He instigated a bloody seige on the fortress of Mt. Briggs on the word of Central. He has done worse, all on orders. He is not a man to strike out on his own and make the world his toy; he requires a framework to make himself useful to do anything. I highly doubt he simply came here on a whim."

"You believe he was sent here," Zim said.

Scar inclined his head. "Perhaps he is connected to this Mr. Lyle that accousted you. And the dismantling of the Foster's security networks, the root of a major defense network of the First District, is too serious to be something minor. And had it not been done, I doubt Kimblee could have created a Philosopher's Stone as sucessfully as he did."

"Mr. Lyle was an advance scout, or perhaps made an error and Kimblee could have been sent to clean up his mess, then. He certainly didn't seem to have accomplished anything significant while he was here."

"But _what _sent him?" Cyborg asked. "I mean...I have no idea half of what's going on here, but that sounds pretty important. Some kind of evil conspiracy? A extradimensional law firm from Hell or Evil incorporated? A devil that's doing all this to get some guy to sell his marriage!"

"That last one sounds really stupid," Aang complained. "Wouldn't it be easier if we just caught this guy and _asked _him?"

"Oh come on," Calvin said. "We'd have to interrogate him and stuff first-"

"That may just work," Scar interrupted. "In the dealings my Amestrian allies has had with him in the past, he has not known to be particularily loyal to his employers, whoever they are. He does as they ask without fault or moral qualm, but he is not concerned with banal things like secrets."

"...Well, that does it then!" Zim said cheerfully. "We simply find him, defeat him and convince him to speak. Simple, yes?"

"...Zim, you mean to tell me that you want to fight a guy that took out a mansion in a single shot," Zuko said. "Along with most of the street behind it. And prior to that he set up five buildings to simultaneously blow up. There's something I don't like about this plan. It involves us not surviving the execution."

"Oh."

"Wouldn't it be a better idea to lead this guy into a trap?" Hobbes suggested. "Maybe find out what he's after and lead him...no, we don't have enough information to know what he's after, if he is after anything."

"Bet he's got a ton of pride going on..." Katara said. "You can always use something like that."

"True," Scar said. "I have heard Kimblee to be a man of incredible pride. I remember I once saved a girl from his hands, and he took my statement on the matter as a personal offense, simply because I was looking down on him."

"...So, he doesn't like you," Sokka said as he and Hobbes stared at Scar thoughtfully. "You're like an enemy of his."

"He once said that I was the Ishbalan he missed. He seemed to resent failing to catch me, even if it was extenutating circumstances...why are you looking at me like that?"

Sokka grinned. "I think we have a way to draw him out."

This did not appear to please Scar. At all. "...I am not going to like this, am I?"

It was quite clearly a rhetorical question. Cyborg cackled ominously. It seemed appropiate. After a moment, Zim and Calvin joined in, and Ron took the time to correct them on their evil laughing techniuqes. Toph got bored and joined in, and Zuko ruluctantly followed after she bullied him into it.

...

Kimblee once more walked down a sidewalk, but in a much better mood then before.

Blowing up Foster's had been a fine start to his mission, he'd decided, but it wasn't enough. Wuya had wanted _chaos_, had wanted _panic_; in his mind, Kimblee imagined a thousand voices crying out as once, lips stained with bloodied tears and the ground underneath them burning.

It was just one house. It was not enough.

Kimblee knew of destruction. He knew about people. He knew how the first related to the second, and he knew how to bring them together in ways that make people break like fragile glass.

He also knew that his normal method, making the meaningless disappear in showers of fire and gore, was not always the most effective way in spite of it's fun. His mission to spread chaos _could _technically be done if he simply blasted everything around him at random, but he didn't like the timing. He wouldn't have the time to make it look pretty just yet.

What was he to do?

It was not a question he addressed to himself. It seemed to come from the half-there shapes capering in the spots and pools of shadows he passed, without words. It was a curious mode of communication. It was...liberating.

He liked plans he made up on the fly. They were fun.

Kimblee snapped his fingers once, spinning the Stone in his fingers, feeling it's incomprehensible power flowing out into him and into the ground under him, the energies of hundreds of souls blazing and screaming and raging and _singing _their despair; how he longed to hear it!

The ground under him shook free in a shock of red and lifted itself into the air, stone stretching itself far beyond it's limits even before it stopped just high enough for Kimblee to neatly step off onto a handy rooftop. It held together; the Stone's power surpassed such simple things as the laws of physics.

That was the intent, after all. It was the ultimate alchemic amplifier. Gold from lead. Power from dust. Life from death. It was a thinking man's dream; reason conquering the world. And in deference, it was called the Philosopher's Stone.

Kevin had been largely quiet and uncommunicative since Kimblee harvested the resources of Foster's and wiped the house out of sight; he stirred and remarked, _That's damn arrogant._

"Arrogance is the inevitable result when a man mistakes his capabilty for worth and overestimates his place in the world," Kimblee said. "You cannot expect men and women who are handed the power to remake the world as they wish to treat it with reserve and humility. Perhaps...the people of Ishbal do have a point on those grounds. I suppose they renounced after they saw what became of those who used it. Madness begets madness, and it is sensible to stay away from such, is it not?"

_I thought you hated them_, Ghostfreak said.

"Hate is a meaningless trait. Investing yourself so negatively in someone else is a waste of valuable time and effort. There are many more admirable things to find in a person than there are to detest, I think."

Ghostfreak seemed amused. Kimblee felt _nothing _from Kevin. "Are you still there, little half-breed boy? Or has the culmination of my art pulled back the rose-shades too far?"

_...Don't have anything to say to you._ Kevin was quick to speak, and quicker to lapse into futher silence.

"You pick an odd moment to express humanist qualities," Kimblee mused, walking towards the roof's edge, where he could see the blackened ruins of Foster's. "You used to crash trains to steal the money on-board, and kill the people on them quite intentionally."

If Kevin had a body, he would have expressed some tangible form of expression, perhaps shuffling about anxiously or refusing to look at him. Kimblee felt emotion roil from the boy without pause or control, a tar-sticky mass of many things, self-loathing layered over regret and bubbling with envy and coated with a blind black hate for everyone and everything that didn't make houses black out when he drew near or touch a pipe only to have his hand come away as something stiff and cold and the hand of a _monster's_...

Kimblee smiled. "Such an interest childhood, and yet not even done with growing up...whatever will you become if you survive me?"

Kevin, again, said nothing. The hate poured forth, enough to twist and corrupt a child's heart, damaged and torn as it was. There are many things that could twist a soul, and Kimblee smelt the noticable traces of _betrayal _and _rage _all mixed up and twisted together.

Such beautiful _potential_, all twisted up and simmering inside. It was surprising that the abyss-black morass of his heart had actually be pulled a little more towards baseline human behavior by his time under the scientist's ministrations; normally it just made crazy people worse. But it seemed a shame to let such interesting possibilities fade away.

"Tell me something," Kimblee said after a moment. "Do you hate these people?"

Kevin said nothing. Kimblee felt a trace of surprise from the boy.

"I can feel the rage that burns through you like lightning from the skies. Building up, ever since you were a small child." A pause. Good for building up. "Since your false father cast you out as a monster."

There were again no words, but that could be taken wrong, implying that Kevin did not react. He most certainly did; the rush of _hate _and _fury _and _loss _hit Kimblee like a riptide. A sore nerve had been struck.

"You were condemned to die on the streets," Kimblee said quietly. "And yet you did not. That would just be giving him his wish, would it not? He _wanted _you to die there. You endured, you survived, and every moment felt like another strike to his face.

"And you adapted. You fought. You did _terrible _things to live, and in time you grew to _enjoy _them. Your false father was a powerful man, and hurting the system he served was revenge by proxy."

_Don't know anything_... Kevin whispered.

He was wrong. Ghostfreak had told Kimblee much. "And little by little, you became the monster your father believed you to be. People stopped mattering to you. How could they, when they had cast you out to rot on the streets? When your own _mother _had loved you enough to let you be born but hadn't loved you enough to protect you? When they slept in their beds every night knowing they were _safe_, they weren't _monsters_, _they _didn't have the entire world for an enemy.

"Such a terrible way to live. It felt so much better when the lightning crackled through your body and burned their faces away so you didn't have to hear the hate and the disgust. So much better when you stopped caring."

Kevin was silent.

"So look down on that town down there," Kimblee asked softly. "Those people down there don't have monsters. They don't worry or care about species issues or inter-human blood mixing. They don't cast _their _halfbreeds out to die. No one here knows the horror of being a monster like you. Being a _freak_. So, with that in mind...

"Would you like to see them _burn?_"

Kimblee felt his heart skip a beat. It was nothing to do with his own physiological or psychological state.

Kevin _knew _revenge. He _knew _hate. He _knew _the satisfaction in draining away your pain by inflicting it on someone else. Burn down a house because you were cast out of your own. Burn down a warehouse because the owner kicked you in the street because homeless people are like _animals _to so many others. Burn everyone that calls you _freak _and let the horror of your own existence sift away until night comes and the nightmares come calling, the awful _truth _of the universe pressing down like a falling anvil.

He also knew that his problems, while _his_, were fairly minor in the big scheme. _Don't care anymore_, Kevin said, shuddering and small, and if he'd held his body properly, he would probably have been crying and glowering at the same time.

Kimblee's expression did not change. He still grinned. "You have resolve," He said. "...I admire that.

"Please try to enjoy this even a little, though. I promised you this town will burn...and it _will_."

Kimblee had his plans ready. The pieces were all in his hand. He simply needed the proper moments to play them.

"But first..._we find this Jarod_," He said aloud.

_May I_? Ghostfreak hissed.

"You may." He extended his hands as the green life flowed.

His forearms crunched and twisted slightly off-course, the bones elongating to an extent foriegn to the human skeleton. They became thin, almost like a bird's, and his muscles looked akin to tumors, freakish bulges on those frail looking sticks, and a shuddering jerk drew back his unnecessary flesh, pulling it taught across the bones and melding them (_he could see his bones and the veins running inside his body, fusing into a beautifully efficient superstructure)_, small black spines bursting out of his flesh here and there, a large bunch just in front of his elbows, and then his hands changed; not like water, in flowing shifts, but like a landslide, jerky and shocking in it's suddenness. They grew larger, his flesh taut and translucent against them, and his fingers hardened, skin turning into plates of some chitinous material and forming jointed claws.

Black veins appeared on skin that had gone bone-white in odd patches over his body; these veins ran streaks all over his body, most prominently his arms, but as his spine curved slightly and small spikes grew down his back and twisted his shoulders, he could feel his mouth twisting into a nearly-shut hole and his skull itching like mad; he closed his eyes, his shifting bones whispering like the damned, and when it stopped, he opened his eyes to see that more hair than usual was in view. He waved a hand, now an unrecognizable monster's claw, and determined that one of his eyes had moved up into the curve of his forehead, almost on the side.

He relaxed his posture as the changes finished. _There, _Ghostfreak said. _Lovely._

Kimblee glanced at a nearby child, who took one look at him and ran away screaming. He saw his reflection in a mirror and blinked. His migrating eye did it twice, it had four eyelids. "...I seem to be bothering a lot of children today."

He shrugged. "Ah well, time to move onwards."

Kimblee moved out, in a soldier's practiced step. The target awaited.

...

A/N: Only going to get worse from here, y'know.

Danny's going through a bad Heroic BSOD. I'm being partially influenced by Simon's from Gurren Lagann, and also my own experiences from a few years ago.

Little known fact; as Film Brain stated, Deadpol's power is being 'freaky awesome'. I love Deadpool. He's made of awesome. (Also coolness.)

I'm not good at plotting. Just trying out my skill with this Red Lotus arc.

Zim is not getting along very well with his newer allies, is he? But, really, it's _ZIM_. This is the guy who still juggles the Sanity Ball even after he's done a Heel Face Turn from Lawful Stupid Evil to Chaotic Good. (I think. What does Zim's Character Alignment seem like in this story?)

When in doubt, I suscribe to the tenant of all escalation-guys: Make. Things. WORSE.

In case you're wondering, the 'nail' thing Ron talked about is a reference to the trope 'In Spite of A Nail', wherein things stay EXACTLY the same in spite of an event to cause it. (Like say, a fantasy world where dragons are real and so is magic, but World War 2 and attending atrocities still occured. Which for some reason seems to be the cornerstone of the trope. Damn those Wacky Nazis for such a stranglehold on the hearts and minds of writers! Incidentally, the bit about Amestris being pararel Nazis is a common theme with fans; Ms. Arakawa, the manga-ka being the series, has stated that it's based on Britian, but one gets the feeling she went everywhere for inspiration. The Ishbalans, by the way, are inspired by the Ainu, the original natives of Japan. It's not a happy story either way.)

Wondering what's up with Calvin and Hobbes? Well, while it wasn't an original part of my mythos for the Comic Kingdom (not that I really had one), Warhammer 40,000 is now firmly the distant past of the place, and with that in mind, develoupments are snowballing.

Cyborg was a bit of a random addition, but since he lived near, it wouldn't make sense for him NOT to investigate, right?

I like Stature. She's awesome. (Also, for the crack shippers out there, she dates Spider-Man's Traverse Town incarnation, who is closely based on his Ultimate version. Also, I watch _I'm A Marvel, I'm A DC._ Think about the implications of THAT!)

Think I should give King Garfield more screen time than King Mickey had in the first Kingdom Hearts? I already have a team set-up to join with him. And if so, how about King Garfield meeting Zim's team later on, BEFORE the big ending?

Few more chapters to go before this arc is done. Promise!

People who pay good attention may notice that Calvin's been dropping his fair share of terms from the fangame Genius: The Transgression. If you're confused, check out the entry for it on TVTropes. It's awesome, and comes with an elegant and finely crafted link to the game itself. Savvier people will consider just WHY he's dropping terms like that.

Been playing Fallout 3 a lot. Think Zim should pay a trip to the Capital Wasteland?

(Also, for the Avatar fans: who is else looking forward to Legend of Korra?)


	13. Red Lotus: The Hunt Commences

...I got a story recommendation on TV Tropes. THAT. IS. AWESOME.

Hello again, after a brief absence! (And forays into Cody/Sierra pairing fluffiness.) I promised this sooner, but life got in the way. I caught the worst toothache I've ever had, I got locked inside a bathroom because I'm a a Genius Ditz (with Informed Ability for Genius there!), and just recently, I seriously hurt my foot when I stepped on a rock. I only realized it when I noticed the blood in my footprints, seriously.

(Yes, I'm a bit of an idiot, as previously confirmed.)

I've also done my share of thinking, and I have my share of shipping ideas to implement later on (for all my pretensions at being a misanthropic cynic, my soul-core is made of soft fluffy sweetness). I've already got next chapter nearly finished, so that's good for you, and I also have another semi-epic story going on at the same time. (It's got a Warhammer 40k/Total Drama Island crossover with Gurren Lagann characters and themes. If that doesn't prove I'm a certifiable loon, nothing will.) Since the chapters on that one are shorter, I figure I'll post one chapter here and another chapter there to prevent the dread curse of schedule slippage or...worse..._deadfic_.

(Or I'll just post whatever I write first without worrying too much about it. That tends to work better, in my experience.)

Originally, this chapter was going to be part of the next oner, but it was too big for my current specifications (over 250 kilobytes), so I split it up. On the bright side, you'll have another update soon!

And for those of you with a case of Arc Fatique...two chapters of this arc left after this one. And then the REAL adventure begins. And I will make it AWESOME!

Disclaimer: I don't own anything I don't own. (I'd list things I've referenced, borrowed, camoed or whatnot, but that would take FOREVER.)

...

It's a funny thing, desensitization.

Enough exposure to the extravengently weird, and it ceases to be truly _weird_. People tend to get loopy when they aren't bounced across each other; when people stick around a small group for long enough, their behavior, no matter how absurd, gradually assumes some approximation of 'normal'.

This is why small insular groups are such a mess; whether it's religious zealots, political fanatics or small children (all of which tend to cause global anhillation for petty reasons), they all tend to congregate in small collectives that quickly assume a given standard of behavior to be _the _sole establishing standard for all good-hearted people. Because they refuse to associate with outsiders, this conceptual awareness shrinks lower and lower until they reach a horizon of behavior whereupon attempting to contact them when you're an outsider is the equivilant of facing a porcupine in a butt-kicking contest; you _might _win, but it's a bit of a longshot and anyway you're going to be feeling some serious pain for quite a while.

Traverse Town does not have much of this problem, owing to the sneaky ways the Free League has managed to keep all the factions and adventuring teams and private businesses and other people bouncing off each other in the Brownian motion of civilization. However, this long-winded rambling does have a point, and this point is that when people get used to even the most unusual behavior, an outsider's view of such things tends to be uncomfortably over the top.

""WHY IS THERE A ROBOT HEAD JUMPING ACROSS THE BUILDINGS!" Yelled former Irken Invader, Skoodge: a short, fat and rather messy Irken who, owing to being conned into various dirty jobs last night, was now wearing a janitor's jumpsuit.

"Being really cool?" Suggested Cosmo, a green-haired fairy, that sort that currently resembled a dimunitive human-like creature with insectile wings and a crown floating just above his head.

"What are you talking about?" Said Wanda, a pink-haired fairy with the dubious distinction of having Cosmo as her husband. She had been occupied with a large hunk of transparent stonelike material presentally containing a small child with a goofy pink hat. (He was, of course, Timmy Turner.) "I don't see any robot."

At that moment, the mobile compartmentalized robot head now carrying Roy Mustang, Lin Yao/Greed, Mr. Herrimen, Deadpool and Shego slammed out of the sky and narrowly missed hitting her. "Sorry," Roy said, not even looking at her and giving the impression that this was such a frequent occurance that apologizing was a matter of habit that was really quite pointless.

Deadpool leaned over, pushing a rather twitchy Mr. Herrimen out of the way. "And if you're going to open up with exposition, don't do it so hamfisted! Like pigs. Really big pigs with brass-knuckles. And they work as bouncers, even though their moms wanted them to be lawyers but they couldn't get into college for it because of anti-porcine specisim and they spend all their time writing angsty poetry that reads a lot like suicide letters. They sound fine, you know, they talk tough and throw the deadbeats good, but they cry in shame whenever they see pictures of their mother or see nice flowers or watch lousy police procudural shows that law people actually HATE, and no one ever sees them cry but, really, they're dead inside."

Wanda stared at him. "...What?"

"Hi," Deadpool said.

Lin leaned over. "Why do you have a child frozen in carbonite?"

Wanda looked from Timmy to Skoodge; Timmy was frozen in a posture of abject bewilderment, just as he had been right before the Heartless had torn his house (and parents) apart in a gorey horror; in a last ditch attempt to save his life, Cosmo had somehow seen it fit to freeze him like this. (At least the Heartless had lost interest, and for some reason the fairies, and had wandered off to go tear Vicky apart after their hunger won over their initial feelings that she was somehow kin to them had creeped them out big-time.) On the plus side, he had missed seeing his world explode and everyone he knew die, but on the negative side, he was going to have to emerge sooner or later, with all the horrors that would ensue. "Uh..." Skoodge said. "We discovered this ancient human from another time line and we're taking him to be de-frozen and annoy him until he tells us how many licks it takes to get to the center of a lollipop?"

Roy frowned, and then shrugged. "Works for me."

Deadpool pulled on the controls. "Hi-ho Argyle, away!"

A rocket pack emerged from the back and waves of force started pushing everything around. "It's name is not Argyle!" Lin complained.

"Bah, if it's good enough for Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood from that totally awesome world with the giant bugs and radiation, it's good enough for me!" Deadpool said defiantly, and the robot head blasted off and flew away. "Wait. Why didn't we just fly instead of jumping around to begin with?"

"Because we have to conserve power, you loony," Shego said.

"Hey, I'm not a loony! Loonies get big long lists of things they're not allowed to do."

"You _do _have one of those," Mr. Herrimen said. "'Deadpool's List of Things I'm No Longer Allowed To Do In City Limits'. It's quite popular with the more..._unruly _sort."

"Oh, okay." The robot head disappeared over the buildings and left.

Wanda watched them go. "...Cosmo, do you really think it was a good idea to ride the darkness and wash up here when we could have just poofed to somewhere with a modicum of sanity?"

Cosmo glanced at her, his finger in his ear. "Wazzat, Wanda? Hey, cool, I think I feel my brain! No, wait, those are just some gummi bears."

"...Skoodge?"

Skoodge shrugged. "I think we should get out of here as soon as possible before something crazy happens. Crazier, I mean."

Wanda snorted. "Well, if there wasn't something diminishing our powers, we wouldn't be talking about it!"

"Is that why you couldn't directly fight the Heartless? Your reality-warping psychic powers don't do anything?"

Wanda's eyes darted about suspiciously. "Yeah..._psychic powers_. That's exactly right. But those monsters better not come back again! I'll give them _INDIRECT!_"

Cosmo got bored and starting rapping on the carbonite-frozen Timmy, producing a loud noise that went _klonk!_ "Is it supposed to sound like that?" _Klonk! Klonk! Klonk!_

"Cosmo, stop trying to prematurely wake up Timmy! Do you want to give Timmy the bad news?"

"Sure!" Cosmo said. "How bad could it be? Ahem: 'Timmy, good news and bad news time! The bad news is..._._ But on the plus side, _WE'RE GOING TO GET ICE CREAM!_'"

"...I _really _don't think that'll work, Cosmo."

"Sure it will! Ice cream makes everything better! Espicially horrible traumas. And not getting any presents for the sixtieth time in a row for your birthday. Or being told you're going to be a virgin sacrifice and they're going to make darn sure of that by taking your circumcision REALLY far. Or getting into a butt-kicking contest with a guy made of acid. Or-"

"Did you get hit on the head on the way here?" Wanda asked, almost bored. "At least, I _think _there were things you could have your head on."

"I saw such horrible things there," Cosmo said dreamily. "They will haunt me forever."

On the other side of the relevant-to-the-situation-meter, Mr. Herrimen glanced back at the people they had seen. Of course he knew them for new refugees. "I shall send some people to tend to them after I find some," Mr. Herrimen said. "It won't do to have those misfortunates running about without being properly informed of the best ways to help thier unfortunate situations!"

"Isn't it little bit of a bad moment to be thinking for bereaucratic things?" Lin said.

"Bah, it is _never _a bad moment for proper organizing! And you know well that it is my duty as president of Foster's _and _current holder of the Office of Inflow Regulation to assist newcomers to our town to the appropaite housing possibilities! Foster's is a bastion for the needy."

"A bastion that no longer exists?" Shego said dryly.

"It exists!" Mr. Herrimen snapped.

"Sure. In bits and pieces, but at the plus side you have a ton of materials to make a new house. Dunno if they're any good after being exploded-"

"I _meant _in spirit," Mr. Herrimen said testily. "Anything, whether a building or the ideals of an organization, begins as an idea. A figment of the mind, if you will. And ideas are _indestructable_. No mortal force can _ever _destroy the spirit of Foster's."

"And yet it's such a lousy substitute for body armor," Deadpool mused. "I should know, I shot a missle launcher at the house last week."

"_**THAT WAS YOU!**_"

"Relax, it was just at a little addition no one was using anyway. And by that, I mean 'I was aiming for your room but missed'. And by that I mean, 'porcupines are GOD'. Figure _that _one out."

Mr. Herrimen resisted the urge to throw Deadpool out of the robot. It would be cruel, potentially fatal, and most importantly, it was highly impractical with their present situation. "...Where are we going? We must make due haste to Foster's and find this madman!"

"In due time," Roy said mysteriously. "First, we're going to need to get you somewhere safe, Mr. Herrimen. You're not exactly fit to engage in a fight." This was self-evident, but it was still a bit rude. Mr. Herrimen sniffed. "And secondly...we're going to need a bit more firepower if we're going to face down Kimblee, and I have just the man in mind."

"Hello?" Shego said, waving her hands around, green fire swelling out from her flesh and passing harmlessly through her clothes to burn the air with a distinctive crackling noise like the noise of lightning in miniature. "You have _me_! What more firepower do you need?"

Roy raised an eyebrow at her. He waved his hand, drawing attention to the fact that he had the power to summon energies that outranked artillery strikes in raw destrustive power. "...If it was simply about raw power, I could have gone alone and that would be the end of it."

"Hey."

"We ought to think strategically," Mr. Herrimen said approvingly.

The information Lin and Roy had given him had not been heartening. It had been terrible enough to know that Foster's had been destroyed, but to discover that the people under his care were worse than dead, that their very _souls _had been torn away and forged into a weapon of mass destruction...

It was unspeakable. It was monstrous. And it was an unforgiveable insult against him, Mr. Herrimen, against his duty given to him by his dear maker. It was an insult to Madame Foster herself. And he could not let that stand without retribution.

And when they had revealed, reluctantly and in worried tones, that it was possible for those souls to be restored and his precious people live again...Mr. Herrimen had already decided on the course of action. Roy Mustang was a great believer in rules, because he didn't trust himself to be unfettered: he would follow Mr. Herrimen's decision. (And if he didn't like his orders, there was every possibility that he would simply undermine it in subtle and creative ways, but at least he wouldn't be direct about it. Roy Mustang's directness was worse than being hit in the face with a train, because at least the train didn't incinerate you.)

Mr. Herrimen continued. "We have already had this discussion, did we not?"

"We did?" Deadpool said cluelessly.

"We must gather together capable men and strike down this Kimblee now!" Mr. Herrimen said, ignoring Deadpool.

"Hold on, we talked about this?" Deadpool persisted.

"But first we require enormous force, and we cannot risk this in small numbers, but if we gather too many, we shall be seen," Mr. Herrimen said, still ignoring him.

"Seriously," Deadpool said. "When did this happen?"

"So it is fortunate that you already have a man in mind that will be all we need to start the battle," Mr. Herrimen finished.

"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!" Deadpool yelled. "That never happened!"

"Yes it did," Shego said. "You were there!"

"I was?"

"Yeah, you didn't shut up the entire time! While eating those snacks you brought. It was disgusting."

"...I was wondering where those went."

"You, sir, have a serious memory problem," Mr. Herrimen said to Deadpool.

Deadpool stared blankly at Mr. Herrimen and then yelled, "GIANT RABBIT!"

Everyone but Lin fell forward and hit the floor of the robot from overexposure to stupidness. "You'd think they'd be inured to the stupidity by now," Lin said aloud; it was fortunate that he was the one driving or something very bad might have happened.

_I blame the reality TV,_ Greed said. _That stuff is evil. EVIL!_..._And I'm the living embodiment of avarice. I KNOW what evil is!_

_Technically, _Lin replied. _You know what occasionally antagonistic neutrality is._

They kept moving for a while (recovering from Deadpool-induced stupidity by now) and finally came to an up-scale house in the nicer part of the First District. (In other words, it was where all the rich people that liked adventure lived.)

To call it a 'house', though, was not entirely accurate. There was some evidence that Traverse Town had been adopted by a succession of people between the refugee's arrival and the disappearance of the original inhabitants, and one of the bigger foundations of them was the fact that a number of buildings were nearly identical to various architecuture from many other worlds; some believed that these people came to Traverse Town and attempted to use it as a base to estabilishing some kind of dominion that went awry when the anti-social robots that disliked the intruder's presence showed up and killed them all, vaporizing the bodies but leaving the buildings intact. But that was stupid, so there was the possibility that something _else _had happened...

This particular building was a bit out of place, because it looked very much like a town hall from North America circa the 1950s. (The giant llama-head for a door made it pretty egregious, though.) It wasn't too different from the rest of the buildings around it, which tended towards a similarily out of place but still quite nice look; high-class and important buildings with a certain Traverse Town touch.

Roy jumped out of the robot and walked to the llama-mouth door, passing a complicated mailbox with three names on them: _Gibbs, Possible _and _Stoppable_.

He watched his step as he walked across the small lawn; the woman that ran the household was more than a little dangerously eccentric, and it wasn't uncommon for people to run afoul of cleverly hidden traps. (Given that the house was occupied by a high-ranking officer of the Peace Marines, two famous adventurers and a mad scientist-in-the-making, this wasn't unjustified.) He made it to the door without incident, and knocked on the door while Lin Yao and Mr. Herrimen followed him, the latter more nervously: the trap thing was a well-known danger of the house.

An intercom buzzed, static crackling. "_Watch it, careful with that...that...the hell is that thing, anyway?"_

_"I told you, it's a lot of things,_" A young boy said back. "_It's a wrench, it's a set of pliers, a self-contained toolkit, a soldering iron, a blowtorch..._"

"_A blowtorch!_" A man said. _"Now wait a minute, what are you doing with a BLOWTORCH at my knee!"_

_"Calm down_," the boy said. _"I'm not going to burn you! Unless something horribly bad happens. I should have probably tested this thing before I started..._"

"_Izumi?_" The man asked. "_Help?_"

"_Hold on a minute,_" The woman, presumably Izumi, said. "_We got someone at the door."_

_"Please hurry. I enjoy having legs."_

The woman scoffed. _"Suck it up, tough guy."_ She cleared her throat, and her tone became much more level and welcoming. _"Hello, whoever you are. It's Izumi Gibbs. Who are you?"_

"Isn't your survillence scanner working?" Roy asked.

_"Nah, thing's broken. Hang on, you sound familiar...Roy Mustang, is that you!"_

Roy laughed a bit, ignoring the distrustful undertone that come into Izumi's voice. "Yeah. Been a while, Miss Curtis."

_"It's Izumi _Gibbs _now, you idiot." _This wasn't said with a great deal of rancor, at least no more than usual. _"Keep it straight."_

"Whatever you say."

_"So, what's got you calling down here?"_

"We're going to need to borrow your husband for a bit," Roy said.

There was silence. Then, in a rather frostier tone; _"He's on leave. You KNOW that."_

"Sorry, but it's a bit of an emergency."

_"Like what? Mustang, my husband is NOT some rook for you to pull out whenever you need someone shot. What the hell kind of emergency would be important enough for you to go back on your word and pull him back into duty prematurely?"_

"How about a rampaging State Alchemist that blew up Foster's?" Lin said. "Emergency enough for you!"

There was silence at the other line. It wasn't shocked exactly; grim, and slightly pensieve.

"Izumi?" Roy said.

_"...We're in the basement. Get you and whoever else you roped into this down here; we need to talk."_ The intercom switched off, and the door, a rolling vault affair, slid open.

"Hey, boss!" Shego called. "We're supposed to wait out here or what?"

"I don't think it'd be a good idea to drag you guys down there," Lin said. "Just occupy some space and keep bringing down the real estate."

"Okay!" Deadpool said. He pointed at a random pedestrian. "Your tie is ugly! It's totally a brain-eating monster that you bought. Like a sucker. Hope you enjoy having your brain cavity excavated!"

"NOOO!" The pedestrian yelled, tearing off his tie and running off in horror. "MOTHER WAS RIGHT!"

Lin and Roy glanced at each other: _Is it really a good idea to leave them to their own devices?_ They looked back to see Shego, in the depths of her boredom, shoot a laser from her fingertip to write _Shego Rulez _in a nearby warehouse; Deadpool, disagreeing with this assesement, had pulled out a pair of sub-automatic machineguns and rapid-fired into the wall: _No, Shego Is Total Lamer! Dedpool Rokz!_ This had inspired the both of them to start retaliating with arguing messeges while otherwise ignoring each other, producing a rare non-online flame war.

"Let's just hurry, shall we?" Mr. Herrimen said. Lin and Roy nodded and they went through the door.

They came into what had probably been a large lobby and had been converted into a rather pleasant living room via a creative application of nice wallpaint, lovely floor-tiles, and some nice furniture arranged arround a complicated entertainment rig: a TV, a array of video game consoles, a recorded media player...

It was all quite nice. A perfect little family room. The one off detail was a small table set against the wall, quiet and unintrusive. It had quite a few ever-burning candles on it, set on little mounts, and behind each one was a portrait. There were names on the cold-iron mounts, looking like they had been sculpted by alchemic forces. (They probably had, they were too perfect and smoothly shaped.) Roy _knew _some of the people there.

_Sig Curtis_; Izumi's first husband and long since deceased, an extremely large and dour-looking man who had nonetheless been extremely kind and annoyed with the fact that he looked so scary; a mild-looking older man with graying brown hair and a beautiful woman with short-cut red hair: _James Possible _and _Anne Possible_. Kim's parents, long dead in the Heartless attacks. A small and wild looking six year old, looking much like his father and grinning like a total maniac. _Timothy Possible_. The younger of Kim's twin brothers, and he'd died with his parents back then. A stocky balding man and a stately woman with blonde hair; _Eugene Stoppable _and _Jo Anne Stoppable_. Ron's parents, among those murdered by Abel Nightroad's twin brother Cain some time ago for reasons that even now no one understood. (Abel had even said that 'Cain was always a bit cracked even before he went insane'. Given Abel's eccentric behavior, this was very worrying if Cain was crazy by _his _standards.) And finally, a elegantly gilded portrait of a woman and a young girl; _Shannon _and_ Kelly Gibbs._

A memorial to the dead. Most everyone in town had one of these. To be touched by the darkness, to survive it, was a horrifying thing. People latched on to thing's to cast the memory of it away, and so often they held to the memories of their lost loved ones with such tenacity that some went completely insane when their poor battered minds lost hold with reality. This memorial was more restrained than others; whether that meant that this household was letting go of people that were just memories or that they kept it under tight restraint was uncertain.

Beside that memorial was a door, fashioned after an old elevator; a brass two-piece sliding door in front of a simple lift as flat as a disc and shaped to fit in the tube-shaped elevator, the stainless steel walls engraved with a large spiral groove sliding down. Roy, Lin and Mr. Herrimen stepped inside it, the seemingly delicate-looking lift not so much as creaking under their combined weight. It was a product of alchemy and mad science, this lift, and it was unsurprising.

Roy had been to this house before and knew how it worked. He directed his attention to a control panel that the designer had seen fit to design in a retro fashion, all large knobs and directional switches and a big lever next to four little buttons. (It was probably Jim or even Ron's idea to do it like that; one fashion these days for sheer epic coolness was rooted in brass rivets, bulky machinery and retro mechanisms, better known as the steampunk school of design. Ron had liked it before it became the Cool Thing.) After a moment's consideration, Roy hit the 'Basement' button and twisted the lever down. Machinery quitely hummed to live, the door in front of them sliding shut before a concealed door slid out of the wall and went over the elevator door; by some mysterious process, this also caused the mechanism that kept the elevator lift locked in place to release, clamps unclicking and others clicking into place. There was a brief jolt and then a pleasantly smooth sliding noise that didn't quite stop but simply quieted until it was nearly unnoticable.

The lift took them downwards, not that it was easy to notice. Roy had become aware that, in spite of certain public perceptions, the clearest evidence that a truly efficient machine was at work was the lack of any overt noise or machines doing things or spinning lights; a truly useful device did it's work in peace. Roy had helped fund the considerable redesigns to this house as a personal favor to Gibbs some time ago, so he knew what to expect, but the other's didn't. (Though Mr. Herrimen clearly approved of the elevator's design ethic.)

The elevator went on for a fair bit; how far down, even Roy didn't know. This wasn't because he'd been lazy or unconcerned with the redesigning; it was almost literally impossible to be sure of how far down they were, or even if they were still technically in their own universe. Traverse Town engineers had access to a great deal of advanced technology, and at least one specialized branch of it made things like dimensional space a bit more...elastic than it ought to be.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide has a few entires relating to this sort of thing. It is notable that almost all of the pre-refugee buildings tend to be somewhat bigger on the inside then seems sensible. There are plenty of theories about this: they figured out how to compress time to expand space, they generated energy that warps the laws of physics, the town itself was a few decimal paces askew on the dimensional axis...the point is, space has never been a problem for most Traverse Town residents, though acquiring the technology to keep it that way is rather expensive. It also makes odd things happen; it's not uncommon for people to find that their home has suddenly acquired a closet that inexplicably leads to a closet with reversed gravity and a thriving proto-society of very smart fruitbats. This is, as yet, simply another small problem that most people take in stride.)

They eventually came to a stop (but not after a few turns that Roy was reasonably certain weren't physically possible in a downwards slide), clamps and bolts sliding into place to secure the elevator. The doors slid away, and they were immediately greeted by a small chaos of noises.

The ring of dozens of machines working together in concert, sounds of the life electric echoing in supremely balanced unity until they _sang_. The mingled mob-echo of over a dozen media displayers activated all at once. The hiss of molten metal cooling, the creaking of metal joints moving, and above all us, a lot of noise that was too indistinct to make out.

It was, in effect, a mixture of a laboratory, a tinkerer's workshop and a forge.

Roy, Lin and Mr. Herrimen walked into a large room, low-ceilinged and smooth-surfaced. There were racks and shelves everywhere, lined with a stunning array of bizarre devices and strange machines, many (but hardly all) looking like mockeries of sane science made from the assorted parts of half a dozen normal applicances and electronics. Small, uncomplicated but sturdy robots patrolled the room, navigating across the room's walls and ceiling on compressed tendrils, their arms thin and delicate instruments that picked up fallen devices while the robots carried them to their appropiate places.

The family sub-basement, Roy recalled. This complex was the territory of this family's very own mad scientist-in-training, Jim Possible, and later on, after he started to crawl out of his own crippling fears of incompetence, Ron, if to a lesser degree. The place where Jim expressed his own brand of genius, warped in his own half-mad grief.

It was not a place for unwelcome intruders to enter. Fortunately, Roy had the decency to have announced himself, so when one unoccupied robot scittered up to them and extended a hand from about knee-level, it was not bristling with gauss-claws to flay them to the bone but a delicately long-fingered technician's hand, offered in greeting and supplication.

Roy gently shook it, feeling a bit stupid. This seemed to please the robot; it gesticulated wildly before calming down and gestured hopefully at a nearby open door, from which a degree of noise was coming from. The robot ran to it, moving with all the disquieting ease of a spider, and glanced impatiently at them.

Mr. Herrimen shuddered. "That thing..._knows _us for who we are. That can't be right. Man was not meant to fabricate life like that..."

Lin open a eye lazily; it was red, inhuman. "That's fine thing to say, coming from an _imaginary friend_," Greed said.

"Hmph. There is a difference between the fruits of a child's pure imagination, and the artifice of arrogance."

"Not really." Then again, it was a bit of a personal insult at Greed...he was an artificial being, after all.

Roy held up a hand, signaling silence and forestalling the argument before it could break out. "Why is it no one can hold a straight conversation anymore? Everyone always take left turns in mid-speech. Just follow the damn robot and get this over with."

Mr. Herrimen bowed his head. "I apologize."

Greed shrugged; he twitched violently, Lin's more amiable personality turning it into a consenting gesture. "Fair enough."

Roy grunted. "Good." He paused, and before he stepped after the impatient little robot, added, "And the creation of intelligent life, mechanical or otherwise, should be considered on a case by case basis."

"Now wait just a minute!" Mr. Herrimen said. Roy had already left. "Bah, that man is too good by half..."

Lin scratched his head. "What does that mean?"

"It's a flavour of British that's a tad difficult for foriegners to grasp, I'm afraid."

"...But you're _not _British. Your creator is American and she imagined you. _In America!_"

"Yes. But. That's. Er. That's how I like it."

"But-"

"How I like it!"

"_Will you two hurry up!_" Roy yelled at them from somewhere further on. They yelped and did just that.

They passed through a short hallway (happening to see through the open doors elegantly-crafted and curious things: a bathroom with a idiotically complex mechanism of many moving parts for a toilet; a trophy room neatly arranged with memorbillia in glass cases of varying sizes, including a plastic cactus; a rather larger room filled with vats full of noxious and strange materials, and out of one a horrible slime-monster had crawled out to read a book and wave amiably at them; a small dojo with a hulking training robot covered in padded mats; and many other oddities) before finally coming out into a large circular room.

If the sub-basement entrance and the smaller project rooms had been thought cluttered, they were now proven to be merely pretenders to the idea-rule of that very thing. 'Cluttered' was, in fact, too narrow a word for this room: some lunatic had seen fit to line the rounded walls with a large extended series of self-contained automated foundries; enclosed behind walls lined with great big panes of transparent glass and built with astonishing complexity, working with glasswork and metal and stranger materials, all completely automated, the finished works making their way towards conveyer belts that transported them to deposit bins that could be pulled out.

That was the outermost row. The in-between row was a series of tables of unequal size, slightly rounded and presumably shaped for the individual task at hand. They appeared to have been, not wheeled in or something, but were actually part of the floor; the floor was patterned with odd grooves, and the shallow spaces under the tables matched the aforementioned tables perfectly, and the mechanisms forming the 'table legs' indicated that they could extend and retract quite readily. These tables were, frankly, a mess; a truly deranged plethora of half-finished machines, concussive firearms, energy-based weaponry, a few suits of powered armor and even, tucked away into one corner, was a hulking piloted fighting robot, badly damaged and inoperable.

There was more: flying trays moving around the room with exaggerated care so the tools they held didn't fall out, large operating tables chained to the ceiling for the repair of the powered armor suits; a towering mish-mash of sensory equipment, scavenged from what Roy was pretty sure was amazingly powerful communications technology (probably to get an actual signal down here; he also saw the set-up for a intercom there) and more all wired into the wall, and over a dozen video-monitors, televisions and even a few rare holographic glyph projectors were part of it and tuned in, each single one displaying a different channel, mostly presenting music but others tending towards news programs and cartoons. But Roy's attenion was solely focused on an operating table at the very middle of the room, bright spotlights hanging from the ceiling illuminating it, a few tables pulled up directly around it and rimmed with a fascinating array of tools; there was a man on the table while a young boy was doing mad science-y things to him, a stern woman watching the operation like a mother lion watches the universe and dares it to tick her off.

It was, according to a handcarved wooden sign hanging from from animated chains forged of glass and plasm, _The Workshop_.

"...Oh my," Mr. Herrimen said. "I've heard stories about places like this, but I never knew...is this all for that little boy!"

"Well, not just him, but then wonderworkers like this like to do lots of stuff," Lin said; he would know, a lot of mad scientists worked for him. "I hear the Ron kid got into mad engineering a little bit ago, and their friend Wade does most of his best work here with Jim. He's not quite _mad_, but he is scary good at what he does, you know?"

They approached the center, the obvious place of business. "Yo," Roy said, announcing himself.

The voice of the woman watching the whole thing arose from the mess of noise like sea foam from a storm. "Is that how esteemed military officers announce their presence these days?"

Mr. Herrimen sniffed. "The lady does have a point. Although...who exactly are you? I don't quite recall."

The woman gave him a look that could curdle milk, kill a yak at thirty paces and give a tarrasque a serious case of indigestion. "_I'm a housewife_," She said, and while an innocent enough statement on it's own, spoken by her, it neared levels of ominousness that was normally used by wealthy men with right hand cats and a good mad laugh.

The woman in question was Izumi Gibbs, and before she'd remarried after the death of her husband she'd been Izumi Curtis. She was a strong and stern-looking woman with a faint Asiatic touch to her features, though the curled dreadlocks were a bit egregious. She _looked _matronly, in both attitude and build, but Roy'd heard horror stories from the Elric brothers about her teaching methods and general despotion, so he took all the care in dealing with her that other men reserved for eldritch abominations. (Even more so. Even eldritch abominations could sometimes be defeated.)

She glared at Roy for a few more moments; she looked like she was seriously considering ripping one of the tables from the ground and hitting Roy with it. True, it was bolted to the floor, but that would only mean a delay of a few crucial moments. She eventually grunted and said, "Jim! Don't be rude. Say hello to the military interlopers."

"We are not military!" Mr. Herrimen said, indicating himself and Lin, who looked rather panicked at being put on the spot like that.

"But you admit you are still interlopers by omission."

Mr. Herrimen started to retort, but Lin clapped a hand over his mouth. "Quiet, you fool! You'll doom us all! Have you any idea what that woman can do to your insides with her bare hands, let alone alchemy!"

"Huh?" This was from Jim; a preteen who was a bit small for his age and looked a fair bit different from his picture upstairs. He, apparently, had used to have a upraised bit of hair on his forehead, but now his hairstyle was distinctive by it's absence, replaced by a fairly standard messy brown mop. He was wearing a labcoat armored with padding. and held a bizarre tool made from a dozen other tools into an unwieldy thing that was nearly bigger than he was. His round face was a bit haggard looking, with slight bags around his eyes. His eyes, though...

They weren't, by any stretch of the imagination, normal. They were brown, which was fine, but at the same time, they were some other color. A color that came from light, but not the visible sort; a terrible and awesome light from within that shone out in his every erratic movement, that was burning his brain from the inside with the raw force of Idea...

A lot of people in Traverse Town had gone a little mad. Jim went a few steps beyond that. He'd been a smart kid before his brother had died, according to Kim, but he was now something above mere intelligence now; the horror he'd endured had _broken _something in him, made a hole in him. And, as if to chase away the darkness, a light had filled that hole.

The light, so they said, of Inspiration. The light that had driven him into a comfortable madness that came with the _knowing _to create wonders that followed only the laws of science that Jim pretended to use or just made up. His madness had catalyzed in sorrow and loss, and something of that colored everything around here; these wonders that were a bulwark against the darkness that he would never _ever _forget.

Roy didn't like looking into those eyes very much. Just like every genuine mad scientist he knew, they reminded him, if only fleetingly, of Shou Tucker. Here was someone who might just look at his family and, even if only for a moment, wonder if an new wonder might work better if they were powered by human hearts instead of inefficient engines and then briefly forget that he was looking at _people _and not, say, annoyingly loud raw materials.

Jim stared at them for a moment longer. "Hey," he eventually said, presumably acknowledging that they existed and were not warped figments of his imagination like a lot of other stuff was.

The man on the bench tilted his head up. "Good morning, Commander-Admiral," He said. "I'd salute properly, but my hands are inaccessible."

Roy glanced at the tidy little restraints around his arms, legs and lower body, presumably to keep him from moving around too much. "You may consider yourself excused from protocol; I'm here on unofficial business." He could feel Izumi staring a hole in his neck. It was extremely uncomfortable. "So...needless to say, I'm sorry to bring your vacation short."

The man shrugged vaugely, as if to say that duty called and he wasn't one to refuse to answer. Mr. Herrimen bowed his head. "I must apologize, sir, for intruding into your household. But this is, of course, a dire emergency."

"Yeah...I heard," The man said. He went quiet for a moment. "...I'm sorry, Mr. Herrimen."

"It is no fault of yours, mister...I apologize, but I seem to have misplaced your name."

The man on the table, a strongly-built man with short-cut gray hair, peered at him. Mr. Herrimen was well-known for his faculty for remembering names and faces; clearly, this was a very serious thing indeed. "I'm sorry to hear that. Field-Admiral Jethro Gibbs, at your disposal."

Izumi grunted, in very plain distaste. "Only dogs let leashes be put around their neck." Roy rolled his eyes. Izumi didn't miss it, and glared at him.

Roy had seen hell on Earth. He had seen the sight of men and women murdered like animals in their own streets, falling like flies that had flown into a cloud of poison. He'd seen entire city blocks erupt into firestorms ignited by his own hand, heard the screaming of the families his soldiers had forced to the walls cut off (_burned with such intensity that their eyes melted and their skin was charcoal and the evaporated fat made his lips sticky and oh God, how many times he should have just pulled the regulation gun from his holster and fed his brain a bullet)_. He'd look into the mirror, dully thinking about how many thousands of his own country dead on his hands and the Fuhrer-President's orders and how that warped country he'd once loved was either going to change so that the survivor's either came home to Ishbal and no atrocity like that would _ever _happen again or that Amestris itself would _burn _in revolution and something less monstrous would be born of it.

Izumi Gibbs' glare, a hot point on the back of his neck like a sniper's light, nearly made him take a step away from her. Years of training, conditioning, soul-searing horror almost broken out of the terror that Izumi inspired in every single sane person that was aware of just what she could do.

He collected his thoughts, took a deep breath. Exhaled. "...So you guys know about the destruction of Foster's."

"Yes," Gibbs said.

"Certainly," Izumi said.

"Wait, what happened now?" Jim said.

There was a long pause. "Nothing," Izumi said, after a moment. "Absolutely nothing that you need to dwell upon or possibly destroy your faith in your life being safe."

"Oh, okay," Jim said. He went back to doing...whatever weird experiment he was doing to his step-dad.

"Uh...what exactly are you doing here?" Roy asked Gibbs, uncertainly.

Gibbs grimaced. "After that...unfortunate business with the platypus-goblin, my leg keeps reverting to a bazooka. We're trying to stop that."

"It's probably a residual irrational flux interacting with his morphological field in decidedly unfortunate ways," Jim said. "My guess is that Dad's morphological field is already weird enough with his Devil Fruit curse, which would explain why his leg is transforming into a massive firearm specifically."

"Did you solve it?" Roy said, understanding every word he said because he bothered to do his research.

Jim shrugged. "Well, the best thing is to wait for his morphological field to reset itself. That sort of thing happens naturally. It does, actually; it's easier to change the nature of linear time advancement as experienced by temporal beings than to keep a morphological field from reverting itself. In the meantime...I'd be _really _careful where I put that leg."

"So...you're fit for combat duty?" Roy asked Gibbs.

Jim frowned. "Hey, wait a minute. First, you were talking to _me_, not my dad. It's rude to just wander off on someone in the middle of a sentance. Second, what are you doing taking my dad into a fight? He's on vacation!"

"...It's really really important?" Lin said honestly.

Jim scowled at them. For a moment, _something _flickered behind his eyes, a vaugely sociopathic impulse to stop what was intruding on _his _domain and keep his world-view safe and intact and _his_; it was gone just as quickly as it had appeared, and he shrugged in disgust. "Whatever," He said, turning away. He paused. "...Kim's out there. And Ron, and Rufus. They're right there in the middle of the action, aren't they?"

Roy raised an eyebrow. Mr. Herrimen, to his surprise, nodded. "Indeed, I met them earlier. Escorting a band of refugees about town, I believe. They may well be in harm's way, but I wouldn't worry about it, lad; they are far too skilled to suffer a terrible fate."

Izumi's eyes widened. A subtle clenching of muscles in her lower jaw seemed to indicate that mental processes were gearing towards a very specific conclusion. Jim bit his lip and said, "...But that didn't save Kim from being kidnapped and taken to that..._place_."

This was, admittedly, a good point.

"Go," Izumi said suddenly to Gibbs. "Hurry up and do something awesome."

Jim hurredly undid the restraints, allowing Gibbs to get up in time for Izumi to throw a shirt in his face. "Don't let them die," Jim said. The small tone of his voice turned a normally cliche line into something miserable and afraid.

"No," Gibbs said flatly, stepping off the table. It wasn't a promise or even a statement; it was simply a declaration of the nature of historical inevitability: empires crumbled, peace was harder than it sounded, and his adopted kids (and Ron; Gibbs wasn't sure how Ron figured into their little family except as a definite in-law someday) were never going to get hurt while he was in the immediate vicinity.

Roy waited for Gibbs to get his boots on before he cleared his throat. "Let's go," He said.

"Hold on a second," Izumi said grimly. "Mister Herrimen stays here."

"What?"

Mr. Herrimen nodded. "Ah. I see. It would be untoward to leave your household undefended. Very well, I accept."

Izumi blinked. "What? No, you have it backwards. It's _you _that's being protected. Jim? Get the weapons."

Jim gasped in joy. "Does this mean we get to pull out the rapid-fire sub-automatic flaming drill machine-chucks!"

"We'll see," Izumi said indulgently.

"WHOO!" Jim yelled, running off somewhere.

"What," Mr. Herrimen said flatly.

"Oh, come on, you don't think we're about to take you into an active battlezone, do you?" Roy said. "You're basically useless. Besides, it'd be a blow to the town if you died. Or something. Madame Foster would yell at me anyway and no one wants that. Espicially me."

"_What._"

"Look on the bright side, you'll be perfectly safe," Izumi said. "Also, we're getting paid for this."

"You are?" Mr. Herrimen said.

"Yes."

"Ah..." Mr. Herrimen found he couldn't quite argue with Izumi. It was like tapdancing on quicksand while wearing cement shoes; you could try, but it was a stupid idea and anyway you'd only end up dying or at least end up in severe discomfort. "...But why?"

"For interrupting my husband's vacation and dragging him out is why!" Izumi snapped.

Mr. Herrimen recoiled. "Ah, well, if you insist...but I must wonder. Why do we require the help of Field-Admiral Gibbs in this matter?"

"Firearms expert," Gibbs said.

"Ah. But I don't see any weapons being carried out...?"

Gibbs chuckled. "I don't need to _bring _any guns with me."

"I...don't understand."

"Me neither. This Devil Fruit thing doesn't make any sense to me either...but that's part of the point of them, I've learned." He nodded to Roy. "Let's go then, sir."

Roy nodded. "Lin? _Lead the way_."

Lin nodded, and grinned. As they left, leaving poor Mr. Herrimen down there, Gibbs said, "So why is Lin Yao leading the way again?"

"He's Xingian royalty," Roy stated. "No matter where he goes, no matter how far he flees, our enemy will _never _escape us with him there."

"Why is that?"

"Xingian royalty and their bodyguards are taught to recognize the flow of living force in the world," Lin remarked. "We can...sense living things, you see. It's related to Rendanjutsu, but I've never learned it. Pity now..." Lin trailed off. "...But regardless, because of all the lives he's carrying around with him, I will be able to sense Kimblee as long as he's carrying the Philosopher's Stone."

"What are you talking about?" Gibbs said.

"...What, we didn't mention what really happened?"

"No. And what's a...'Philosopher's Stone'? I remember hearing Ed and Al talking about it their last night before they shipped out abroad, and I've heard legends about it off-world, but...wait. This is going to be one of those things I'm really not going to like. Is it?"

"Sorry."

Roy sighed. "Gibbs...I think you're missing a few pertinent details about our enemy..."

...

"Let us in!" Zim told a large burly armadillo-man blocking his way into what he'd been told was a TV stationo. "It is a matter of vengeance and stuff."

"No."

"I said, let us in!"

"No."

"Let us in NOW!"

"No.

"Please?"

"No."

"Pretty please?"

"No."

"I'll have Zuko come over here and tell his childhood traumas at you if you don't."

Zuko poked his scar. "I don't have a left eyebrow for a reason!"

Zim and his group were standing in a small, slightly rundown neighborhood a short distance from Foster's, most of the buildings surprisingly tall with a lot of canopys and tarps everywhere. (It was to cover up a few holes or to illustrate that this was a street well-known for selling miscellaneous goods, but otherwise there was no reason for them. It just looked neat.) They'd left Foster's behind, hoping in their vauge way that the people tending to it knew what they were doing.

Sokka and Calvin had come up with a plan. It was not the sanest of plans. It was a plan lacking in subtlety or sensibleness. It was probably why Aang, Zim, Toph, Cyborg, Abel and Ron approved of it. (And why Kim, Katara, Hobbes, Zuko and Scar disapproved. Appa, Rufus, Momo and Morte were largely indifferent, as they were just along for the ride.) This plan required the use of a broadcast studio, and it just so happened that the three-story building recently refurbished for the purposes of the young but ambitious WUBA station was perfect for their purpose.

It was a nice looking studio, if a bit battered; there was numerous cracks and marks all over the concrete facade and the whole building's general look managed to appear like it was hunching over like a paranoid animal. It had an abnormal amount of windows with sniper's-balconies, a holdover from it's previous incarnation as a bunker for a short-lived band of crazy survivalists who disbanded when they realized that since something insane tried to kill Traverse Town every other week, there wasn't much point in trying to abandon civilization waiting for it. At the very top of it building was a modest little communications tower with four sattilite dishes to do whatever it is that they're supposed to do, and at the top of _that _was a little..._something_. Calvin had said it looked like a 'Class-3 Apokalypski Node' but no one else had cared, except when Hobbes had quietly explained that 'Apokalypski' was that branch of super-science that dealed with communications and scanning and wasn't anywhere as threatening as it sounded.

The WUBA studio building was sandwiched between two other slightly smaller buildings, currently unoccupied (Zim made a note of this and thought he might be able to appropiate them later), which gave it a good defensible position; you could only really go in from the front or top. The roof had it's problems of being pretty well guarded by a few guys at the top (it was vulnerable with the communications tower up there), and the front door was a nice security-minded one; big and round, like a vault door, designed to slide into the wall of the building and made of about a solid foot of metal.

On the other hand, Zim mused briefly, looking back at Appa, who was guarding their backs and peacefully watching the proceedings with a genially detached air, it probably wouldn't stand up to an enraged Sky Bison. Or, for that matter, a Metalbender. (And then he could probably just use his Keyblade to unlock it. He still wasn't sure how that worked, though.)

The armadillo-man blinked. He hesitated. "No."

Zim sighed and waved his hand. "You heard the man. Armadillo-man. Whatever. Bring on the horrific backstory exposition!"

"I resent the nightmarish reality of my formative years being used this way, but okay," Zuko said, walking over.

Hobbes held out an arm and Zuko walked right into it, stopping him in mid-step. "Wait. Guys, I'm still not sure this is the best idea..."

"What, you mean getting into a TV studio, convincing them to halt all network broadcasting and televise you making fun of Kimblee and daring him to come get you so we can set a trap for him?" Sokka said. "Is that it? Is that the idea you don't think is good?"

"Yes. I have a problem with it, that being that it is very, very stupid. But also, this plan hinges entirely on us managing a series of difficult hurdles, and we can't even get past the bouncer."

"Security guard, actually," The armadillo-man said. "...And that's what you want to do?"

"Yes," Calvin said. "That is what we want to do."

"...Who and what is a Kimblee?"

"The sadistic sociopath that blew up Foster's, sucked up the souls of the inhabitants and shoved them into a crystal thing."

"...Oh. Well, that's too bad, you're not getting in."

"Come on!" Cyborg said. "People are already _dead_ over this guy, don't you want to prevent the loss of life? People _like _preventing the loss of lives."

"Meh," The armadillo-man said. "People; I can take 'em or leave 'em."

"You suck."

The group pulled back, starting to get discouraged, and Sokka gave Abel a dirty look. "You said this sort of thing happened all the time in town!" He said.

Abel shrugged helplessly. "I _said _that there isn't anything to prevent people from getting the newsies around us to send out emergency reports like this if the need is dire enough! Never did I say that they _had _to cooperate just because we ask them to! Right, Aang? Aang?"

The young Avatar in question was staring at the sky, fascinated; not by clouds, but by a big holographic projector screen that had appeared about fifteen minutes ago and seemed to be made of a vaporous mass in the sky; it was showing cartoons, and thus he was interesting. "How did I not notice this before?" He said excitedly. "And how are they doing that?"

"Oh, yeah," Ron said. "We put our public feeds way up in the sky. They'd get smashed in all the weird stuff that happens if they weren't! There's a ton of weird science involved; the clouds up there are really tiny friendly robots, our Internet is based with them as routers and data storage units 'cause they've been scanning data from every world system in range for the last six hundred years..."

"And they turn on around this time of day, 'cause that's when most people are out and about and ready to watch!" Abel said. "We have special projector nodes all throughout the town to display them and-"

"Focus!" Scar and Kim said.

"Sorry," The two goofballs said.

"So, basically, our situation is thus," Katara said. "We need a TV studio to pull off Sokka's plan-"

"It's my plan too!" Calvin said.

She ignored him. "-But we can't get into this one. And finding another one would waste precious time!"

"Probably," The security guard said.

Zim glared at him. "Hmph. I think you are all missing the obvious solution."

"Whazzat?" Aang said.

"Destroy everything. We smash every building in sight flat, pick through the rubble and continue our search until we find Kimblee, as he would then launch a devastating counterattack. Since he would just have a building on his head, it will be simple to incapicitate him and then do something about that stone of doom. And stuff."

They stared at him.

"What?"

"Sometimes," Aang said. "The things you say frighten all of us. Really, they do."

"Don't you have any clout here?" Calvin asked Scar and Abel. "You're with the Crossguard. You should have some political power, right?"

"Yes, but we're _priests_," Abel said patiently. "Our founders were notoriously paranoid about what excessive idealism, zealotry and short-sightedness would result in the hands of people with political power. As it is, the Crossguard's clout basically amounts to 'play nice or we'll murder you in the faces with flamethrowers.'"

"That seems a bit excessive," Toph commented. "...I _like _it."

"Yeah, we get that a lot," Abel said. "People always expect the religion-oriented faction to be ineffectual or useless if not evil."

"Maybe we could just break in here," Zuko said, only half-joking.

"Okay," Zim said.

"Wait, what?" Morte said.

Scar sighed. He rolled up the sleeve on his right arm. "Much as I resent the idea...we don't have many other options and Kimblee needs to be dealt with _now_."

The armadillo-man squeaked. "Eek! I mean...if you need to broadcast something emergency-type so bad, why not try those guys across the street?"

Zim turned. Across the street was a large crater in the ground that no one had bothered fixing yet. He blinked and turned back. "What are you-"

The armadillo-man had gone, and slammed the door and locked it. From the sounds of it, he also armed a security system, rammed restraining bolts and shoved some furniture there too.

"We've been suckered!" Zim declared.

"Obviously," Morte said.

"Silence! Ah well, perhaps we should find another station-"

Various windows open on the television station, from a strategically convienient approach. A motley and heavily armed team of assorted sentients in body armor looked out, holding weaponry of great potential violence. "The sanctity of this station will not be violated! Your mission is of no concern to us; whether by our deaths we make a blockade or you are defeated, _you will not pass into this place!_"

"...Okay, I can understand the people here having to be tough just to survive, but this is getting ridiculous," Hobbes said.

"That guy up there has a _laser gatling gun_," Calvin said. "How'd they prime the electron charge packs? I want one!"

"That guy gots missle launcher!" Rufus squeaked.

"Eh, it's only a Maverick Skydropper Mk. 2," Kim said dismissively. "It's nothing special."

"And _that _guy has...I don't know what that is," Sokka said. "What do you call a combination of a flamethrower, a drill and two paired plasma rifles?"

"Really cool?" Zuko suggested. They stared at him. "What? I'm not allowed to be interested in heavy armaments?"

"Perhaps we should reconsider _this _news station," Abel said. "We have one back at the Monastary; it's a ways, but I could swing things so that we could make a quick transmission and-"

"They have heavy weapons to keep me out!" Zim said. "And they don't even know who I am! I am _interested now!_" He laughed madly. "_PREPARE YOURSELVES, GUARD-SLAVES!"_

He charged, blasting the door partially out of alignment with a massive blast of fire. (Zuko nodded approvingly; Zim had already learned something of proper power allocation now.) The metal had bent double from the heat and force, bucking against all that stood in it's way. Toph and Appa slammed into it and _pushed _it the rest of the way with Metalbending and sheer brute force, to resultant screaming.

"Can we stop to think about this for a minute?" Sokka said.

"No," Scar said. "No arguments. No heisitation. No turning back." Xiao-Mei popped up from his shirt and growled. "For better or worse, _we're going through_."

Sokka shrugged. "I was afraid of that." He unsheathed his sword. "...We're not going to get lynched for this or anything, right?"

"Nope," Abel said. "We've an _anarchic _society. We practically live by the laws of dramatic neccisity! So stop fussing and make with incapacitating. And please no maiming or worse, it will make things not good."

"An interesting mode of speech," Zim said, as the defenders of the TV station retreated, no doubt to face them directly. "Let us commence with the awesomeness!"

"Uh," Hobbes said carefully. "I have a small problem with that. It's _one _thing to defend ourselves against a mob riot - that _you _caused, incidentally - but seriously, invading a TV studio? Can't we, I dunno, jury rig some sort of super-big hologram thing and get Kimblee's attention that way? We could do a song and dance number! I like song and dance numbers. Also not getting into fights with people that are carrying big guns like this."

"You'd think so," Zim said. "But no, that's boring. FIGHT! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!"

And so they did.

...

Back at Foster's, the clean-up was proceeding...well, not smoothly, there simply hadn't been enough time yet, but it was proceeding nonetheless.

None of the workers was feeling espicially good about this job. Massive problems resulting in collateral damage was a problem in Traverse Town that they had all gotten used to, but Foster's had always seemed..._safe. _But now all the people that had lived here were either dead or seriously injured, and either way homeless. It was a disturbing thought; if even the people that lived _here _weren't safe...

Paranoia was starting to rise, and no small degree of stress.

One small group of workers was trying to pull a bathtub out of where it'd lodged into the ground, rocketed from the house with such velocity that it had struck with the force of small artillery. "Why are we even bothering with this stuff?" One guy complained; he was a rather scrawny parrotman, his wing-arms equipped with a set of slim opposable digits on the 'thumb' of his wings, and he was rather dextrous with them; a few of his co-workers were miffed at how good he was at delicate tasks. This was ameliorated by his incompetence in everything else he did.

"Eh?" The largest of them, a spindly sandworm with a communcation vox in the general vicinity of her throat to enable speech. She was small, as sandworms went, only about the size of a truck.

"I mean, it's not like anyone's gonna used this wood, or anything we can salvage; whatever isn't totally burned is in dozens of pieces. What's the point of it?"

"Isn't this sort of thing the alchemist's problems? We just pile it up and let them put it back together later."

The parrotman shivered. "Damn circle-magicians. Can't stand those circus freaks. And they're always going around breaking stuff and turning it into weird stuff. A alchemist turned my toilet into a seige engine once, you know. Never trust a man that makes glowy circles to turn your toilet into a engine of death, that's my motto."

"Is it?" Said the sandworm. "That's a funny motto."

"It's a, whatjercallit, rhetorical thing to say."

"No, seriously, alchemists don't always do the circle thing, that one short kid that goes around the world and does stuff just claps his hands it makes stuff happen-"

"Yer missing the point!"

"And besides, that alchemist that trashed your house was legit-"

"ALRIGHT!" The parrotman squawked. "Geez, I get the point."

Another of their crew, a large dark-skinned human who had been appointed the leader because of his awesome baldness, glanced around. "Ey now, anyone see Lofurt?"

"Thought he was on his break," Someone said.

"That was fifteen minutes ago," The sandworm said.

Their leader shook his head. "Bit long for a break, innit? Hey, you, parrot-guy, go fetch him, hey?"

"I have a name, you know!" The parrotman complained; no one ever seemed to remember him. "Oh, whatever. Where'd he go?"

"Said something about getting a smoke break," Somebody else said, pointing towards a nearby bit of rubble that hadn't been taken care of yet. "Wanted to go somewhere out of sight, blamed it on his mom constantly spying on him with sattilate technology and dark spirits man was not meant to wossname of."

"Of course he goes and does it out of the way," The parrotman grumbled, and left.

He didn't bother flying, it was too much trouble getting proper lift-off for a short distance that walking could handle as well. A little bit inside a copse of trees that had been mostly flattened by the blast that had taken out Foster's and the rest flattened by a good section of a room that had been blasted right off the house and smashed into the ground without crumbling completely.

The parrotman choked a bit; the falling plaster had mixed with loose dust to produce a atmosphere that was unconducive to casual breathing. He ducked under an uprooted bit of plumbing and noticed a pair of feet from around the corner of a wall. "Hey, lying down on the job, are you? Come along, break's over! Faster we get this done, sooner it's, well, done!" There was no answer. "What's this about? I say something to offend you earlier?" There was still no answer. "Oh, real mature, Lofurt. I never make fun 'a ya like the others do. Don't sulk, you know the boss hates that, we got poker night later." Again, no answer. "Come on, you know it's me-"

The parrotman turned the corner and stopped. Lofurt, a small dragonoid similar to a Discworld swamp dragon but without the short-lived tendency to explode at the smallest provocation, was lying against the wall, a smouldering cigarette in his claws. Spread-eagled, in fact.

His face had turned a horrible pale color, thick black lines spreading in erratic and sickly patterns from a thick cluster along the sides of his snout, now twisted and half-crunched into an grotesque wreck. His eyes were wide open, and his jaw hung as if in shock. The parrotman put his claws over his mouth and tried not to throw up; his eyes..._his eyes_...

It wasn't right, seeing that. Purplish and glowing a bit, squarish pupils and rolled up at the wrong directions, like something had wormed behind his eyes and tried to push them out...black stuff was running at the corners of his eyes, twitching and moving and horribly _alive_...

"Lofurt," The parrotman whispered. "What...?"

A shadow tilted, moved.

Behind him, something jumped.

The parrotman was slammed against the rubble-wall, a smaller but infinitely more malevolent weight pressed against him, sharp points pressing under his arm. Another arm - _loathsome, skin moving like it's alive and HUNGRY, so horribly cold and DID SOMETHING JUST BITE ME -_ looped around his neck, sharp cold points sliding through the thick ruff at his neck and against bare skin.

"My apologies, but I'm in a hurry," Kimblee's cold, calm voice said pleasantly, and lightly touched the side of the parrotman's neck.

If he'd had time, the parrotman would have screamed.

-_Coldness, utter damning coldness, spreading in from his neck and into his body like poison, tingling and itching and SEARCHING, brain itching like mad, why is it so cold, it hurts so bad, EVERYTHING HURTS_-

_Something appears in his mind, like every single night and chickhood bogeyman and awful memory brought to life, cold and monstrous and EVIL. "Hello," it whispers, this alien monster of grey-white flesh with streaks of black and long clawlike fingers and a head like a elongated skull with a single purple eye and extends the mental equivilant of a claw directly into the parrotman's brain._

_It searches through him, shuffling through his thoughts and memories like it's reading a book, all careful attention and noting details, and it's so FOUL and WRONG, he would scream if he could, GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT GET OUT, he can feel IT clawing him down to the core, taking and find and KNOWING EVERYTHING, it hurts so much, it won't stop and it's getting WORSE, IT wants something and he can't take it anymore-_

The parrotman collapsed with a weak cry, falling onto the ground unceremoniously, his face twisted and mutated even more badly than the last one had been. Kimblee watched this happen with a bemused look. "Is that supposed to be happening?" He asked.

_It is a curious question, _Ghostfreak said, stretching a mental equvilant of arms. _When I posesses others, they tend to take on some of my outward characteristics, but I've never seen THAT happen before. Pity, it looks quite amusing to observe in a controlled environment. My guess would be that you channeling my abilities through Kevin's Osmosium powers, even with me directing their use, is dulling their usual potency. Or perhaps...control would be a better word. My telepathic powers function effectively enough, but it's having a more adverse effect than it'd ought to._

_Sure, _Kevin groused. _Blame me._

_An acceptable proposal._

"Enough," Kimblee said. "Not that I don't find your banter amusing, but I don't intend to linger here. Have you found any pernitent information?"

_No, _Ghostfreak said. _This subject has had no contact whatsoever with our target. If he is on site as you suspect, he is well hidden._

"Well, I did not expect this to be a trivial matter...but I've had to do this to almost six people now. And still nothing."

Kimblee frowned, at least as close as possible for his current shape. He was begining to find a hitch in his plans. This wasn't upsetting, so to speak, but it was an unexpected develoupment. Clearly, turning himself into a monster so he could sneak up on people and steal their memories on the off-chance they'd seen a man that apparently every sane person in town believed to be a urban legend had not been a particularily efficient idea.

In retrospect, it seemed kind of stupid, really.

_Now, that is most impolite!_ Ghostfreak complained. _My idea is fine! I never said it would work FAST, now did I?_

_He does technically have a point, _Kevin said. _It's a stupid point, though_.

Kimblee sighed. He _had _learned a few things through his mind-searching - more people had survived than he'd thought, they'd been rounded up and put in the mobile hospital parked outside the Foster's property, most of the bodies had been rounded up for whatever reason, wading around in someone's psyche was both fun and educational...

But nothing of practical use. None of the workers seemed to realize that someone here didn't quite belong; Jarod _might _have been in some recollections, but as a phantom, a wanderer moving just out of sight before he could be identified, on the outskirts before Kimblee could identify him...it was quite frustrating.

He needed, he decided, to draw him out. Making a deeper mark on this town seemed an appropiate action. Kimblee looked around, staring at this place he had so recently visited, and his eyes settled shortly, on that massive mobile hospital that had come to take away the people who had survived his attack.

Big, lumbering and so very inefficient. The very sight of it offended him.

"Well," Kimblee said softly. "If you wish to lure out a bear, shoot the cubs, and the bear will run straight onto the lances you set in it's way."

Cupping the stone between his fingers, he raised his hands up, ignoring the rush of negativity from Kevin regarding this turn of events - the boy was so fussy now - and brought his hands together-

(_wipe that hospital from the face of the planet, finish what was started, END those insignificant meatbags, give their senseless lives MEANING, fulfill their DESTINIES, shatter the deathly gloom with such glorious MUSIC_)

-And his hands stopped just short of clapping, palms almost but not quite brushing.

Kimblee stared at his hands, trembling and twitching as he tried to put them together, muscles pulling his hands _away_. His hands were not his own, his body would not obey him, he could not do it-

"What?" Kimblee whispered, an unfamiliar emotion rising in him. He remembered it as the same feeling that Mr. Lyle and Azula's advances had wrought in him, and he realized that it was horror. "My hands...they won't _move_."

_Gotcha,_ Kevin said, and seemed to grin like a monster. Some guarded shield in Kevin's mind had broken, and Kimblee _felt _such awful emotion rolling from Kevin, the breaking storm of frustration and hate grown too vast to contain. The destruction of Foster's and the creation of the Stone had been the last straw. Kevin had had _enough_.

"...You can't," Kimblee said, eyes wide. "You cannot control me. This body is _mine_."

_Says you, _Kevin said. _It's MY body! ALWAYS MINE! Nothing take it from me; not you, not energy warping my brain, not that Ectonurite freak squatting in my skull, not every freak in the MULTIVERSE if they try! NO ONE'S STEALING MY BODY AGAIN!_

"Damn you," Kimblee whispered. His hands would not come together. Like magnets pulling at metal; his arms refused to move, compelled by some greater force than his own will.

He wondered. Was Kevin's will greater than his?

_No one else is going to die today because of ME_, Kevin declared. _No one, you psychopathic jerkass. NO ONE. Only way someone dies because of this body, IS BECAUSE I WANT THEM DEAD. You hear me? YOU HEAR ME! THIS BODY...IS __**MINE!**_

His thumb shivered, flashing green; for a moment, it spasmed, cracking and transparent, bones and flesh warping and turning into silicate matter, green and glassy, and then it was not human flesh touched by Ectonurite DNA, but a sharp flexible crystal, completely straight and sharp like a dagger.

_Never going to be a monster again_, Kevin said more quietly, with an air of terrible finality, and then Kimblee's hand moved on it's own and shoved a thumb's-length of Petrosapien crystal directly into the side of his throat.

Kimblee made a strangled noise, blood spurting out on dead-white flesh, a spark of green crystal amid the red.

_NO!_ Ghostfreak shrieked. _YOU MADMAN! YOU'LL KILL ALL OF US!_ Kevin didn't seem to care.

Kimblee managed a choking laugh as Ghostfreak frantically tamed the Omnitrix energies, his mutated flesh returning to normal. The wound in his neck was still bleeding, and the now-human thumb jammed in there wasn't helping. "You..." Kimblee said. "You are more resolute than I thought. How _admirable_."

"I'd ask who you're talking to," Said a voice behind him. "But that's really not an issue right now."

Kimblee blinked as, inexpicably, his limbs obeyed him as the humanity flushed fully back into his body and the alien aspects receded. Kevin howled in disbelieving frustration, his brief rebellion and attempt at taking Kimblee down with him all for naught.

He turned and saw, to his mounting surprise, a man identical to the photo Mr. Lyle had provided him. A man of average height and built; dark red hair that was nearly black. A grim expression, like a nemesis of Greek myth. A man known the people of this town as the Pretender.

Jarod.

"Well," Kimblee said. "On the one hand, my thumb is jammed in my neck, the voices in my head seem to be capable of hijacking my body and I may just be losing a unpleasant amount of blood, but on the other hand here you come right to me. So...a pretty average day."

"Solf J. Kimblee I presume?" Jarod said. "The Red Lotus Alchemist?"

"None other," Kimblee said, pleased. Introductions were unneccesary then. "I'm afraid you'll be coming with me." He did admit, to himself, that it was hard to make that seem credible with his thumb in his neck.

"You have it backwards," Jarod said, reaching into his pocket and shoving a small capsule right in Kimblee's face.

Warm chemicals splashed everywhere, smelling faintly pungent; almost immediately, his head swam, and the world went briefly out of focus. "...Oh damn the luck," Kimblee said. "...Of _course _you have some form of...knock-out toxin...

"I know," Jarod said. Even through the haze, Kimblee heard the rage in his voice.

Kimblee stumbled; any moment, it would be over, he would collapse-

He twisted his thumb in, scrapping torn muscles and other important neck-bits. The pain screamed out through the drug-induced haze, snapping him back to a moment of precious alertness even as green energy crackled around him, his nervous system shifting into a collection of alien forms that wouldn't be affected by the chloroform as badly or at all (he felt Kevin stirring, waiting to seize his chance), and before he lost any element of surprise, he pulled his thumb from his neck in a spray of blood and screaming nerves to clap his hands, held the Philosopher's Stone tight, and split the _air_.

The entire copse of trees disappeared in a roar of fire and noise.

Smoke and ash fell, surronding Kimblee in a suitably dramatic curtain. "This will not go over well," Kimblee said, mildly suprised to notice that the wound in his neck seemed to have healed (that was odd). He wasn't supposed to have killed this Jarod; Mr. Lyle wanted him alive.

_Acceptable losses. After all, we did learn something from this exercise_, Ghostfreak stated. He turned his attention towards Kevin. _Your influence over this body will be curbed. NOW._

_DAMN IT!_ Kevin screamed.

"Don't be so harsh on yourself," Kimblee said. "After all, you only blew your change to ensure my death moments before we were ambushed by the very man we were looking for. If you had not wasted your moment, I wouldn't have been in a position to use the pain to fight past the toxins and would surely be captive by now. I must thank you."

Kevin didn't say anything so much as he emanated a surge of utter frustration and hate.

"I believe the word is..." Kimblee thought. "Aw yes. 'Epic fail'." He glanced around; the smoke was falling. He needed to _leave_. "...Perhaps I did not destroy the body. I may be able to remove Jarod's brain; Wuya can have it preserved and reanimated, and Mr. Lyle will have all he needs from there-"

Something moved from behind him. Kimblee spun around, but he was not a man focused in direct combat, and he only moved in time for a strong fist to smash directly into his face.

Kimblee hit the ground and rolled away just before a foot could hit the ground where his throat had been. He got up, the ground flashing red and pushing him up on a dozen tiny pegs as long as spears and dense as bridge cables, and he saw Jarod. His clothes blackened, his body nearly burned, all the hair on one side of his face gone and the rest _on fire_ and blood streaming from the eye on that side of his face, but he was still alive.

Still moving. (_he runs and grabs a rock from the ground and raises it up high; Kimblee can only move bare moments before it smashes to where his chest just was_)

Still attacking. (_The stone is smashed into Kimblee's chest; he chokes, his ribs cracked, and a vicious kick to his crotch knocks him to his knees. Another kick is delivered to his teeth and they _crack_)_

Still _hating_. Such inhuman, monstrous hatred. What, Kimblee wondered in childlike horror, had he done to this man to earn such hatred? (_The foot rises and smashes into his sides, again and again and again; no concern for his own condition, not thought for his own survival, only this insane desire to FIGHT-)_

Kimblee closed his eyes and snarled as Ghostfreak funneled a brief surge of Omnitrix energy into his arm as Jarod raised his foot once more; his arm _twisted_, becoming the arm of a Ectonurite (not enough for Kevin to twist to his own means) and Kimblee let the kick smash into his stomach and choke out his air just so he could grab Jarod's leg, Ectonurite claws biting deep, and pierced skin.

And so he pierced Jarod's _mind_.

(_white walls, so stark and cold, pressing on him like things alive and EVIL, the cameras everywhere, always WATCHING HIM, they watch him always, there is no safety or hope even IN THE SHADOWS)_

"What the-?" Jarod said, his voice strained, a whisper of a thing.

Kimblee probed deeper. Curiosity as well as neccisity guided him.

(_he's so scared and alone - 'where's my mom and dad?' he asked the strange men again and again and they won't tell him and they never do, these men who have taken him to this secret place of white walls and hot lights and cameras everywhere, it's so cold and quiet here, in this room they have brought him; they have given him puzzles to solve, books to read and...'simulations' to make, little scenarios to create and make things happen. He does not know why, but he obeys them. They have told him that if he does them well, he might go home or see his parents. But they're lying; he never sees them again._

_He's so scared and alone, so he has no choice. They tell him that he is SPECIAL, he is what they call a 'Pretender', he can use his head and become anyone or anything he pleases in his imagination and KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN but he doesn't understand it at all. He just wants to come home, but he never does._

_Perhaps, though, he is not wholly alone; a man meets him when he is there, a kind-looking man named Sidney. He tells him gentle things and is there to listen when Jarod (is that really my name, the boy comes to wonder) can bear to speak, and in time Jarod forgets the face of his father and it is only Sidney's face that comes to mind-_)

A hand gripped Kimblee's throat. The hold was weak and unsteady, but fingernails pressed against his flesh with surprising tenacity, absurd determination. "Out...of my head..!" Jarod hissed from a lopsided snarl.

Kimblee grinned, his mind awash in the on-rush of memories; it was not as he had expected, not pictures and coherent ideas but the _idea _of them, impressions and passing thoughts and emotions all bundled up and somehow sorted by his own brain into stable things.

It was glorious, intoxicating. "Let us see what else lies in your tricky brainpan," Kimblee whispered. He pressed the attack.

Layers of mental armor peeled away, like skin under sandpaper: shaven away, but no, Kimblee realized, it wasn't right, there were things there making him feel such _mad _things. More fell away in strips and fragments and no small amount of screaming pain, from _both _of them. Jarod was the one being violated, but _Kimblee _was feeling such bizarre things from this man, emotions and thoughts that made _no sense at all_.

_(-he's made so many simulations over the years, perfectly plotted and directed situations; not merely planning, that was small time, not manipulating people or places, that was foolish, but to create a simulation was ART, to shape the future by molding the past, to establish things with such perfect timing that reactions were not likely but CERTAIN. Jarod knows of the power he holds; the mind is the greatest tool of all, and his ability to plan a scenario that ends with thousands dead with only a single shot fired that sets off a chain reaction of events troubles him. They have assured him that his simulations HELP people, he helps to combat terrorists and revolutionaries and all unsavory sorts, just like all his inventions made in his spare time help EVERYONE too-_

_He learns that they have LIED to him. The simulations go to whoever pay the highest, and those who have profited from MURDER and glorify in EVIL have so much money to offer. He is not saving people; he is helping them to DIE. So many are dead because of him. So many horrific things consigned to history as accidents or politically unfortunate assasinations, but Jarod knows better._

_So many are dead because of him. Their blood is on his hands. If not for him, they'd still be alive. It was not his hands that pulled the triggers, but it was his hands that put the pieces of puzzles together. His fingers that brought their destinies to a close keystroke by keystroke. His brain that engineered their DEATHS. He is more to blame than those that used his precious work; his mind, his hands, his work, HE IS TO BLAME._

_There is blood on his hands. He is GUILTY beyond all reproach, and in the white walls, knowing that his parents are GONE, that Ms. Parker is more like her father than the world deserves, that Sidney does not understand how EVIL the Centre is. Jarod can smell the ROT at the core of this place, the evil infesting it like slime from a decaying man's lungs. So many have already died; how many more will these butcher's demand for their purposes?_

_He knows that they will NEVER be satisfied._

_Jarod tries to be cautious. He sabotages his simulations. He hinders the Centre in secret. He tries so hard to prevent more death without being noticed. But it is not enough. He CANNOT avenge these deaths or salve his conscience with such pitiful means. He is safe, but that is no longer relevant. He soon decides something._

_Jarod, he decides, does not matter. He has murdered by proxy, doomed so many to death or worse. Blood is on his hands and he has dared to be SUBTLE. No more time for subtlety, he decides. No more allowing the Centre to exist unopposed._

_He leaves then. He destroys what he can, steals so much of their foul wealth to turn it to the good._

_He finds a world corrupt and filled to the brim with misery. He finds a world where the ceiling is a vast vault of blue and light without end or limit, where the sun on his skin is a GOOD burning, where life lives and good EXISTS without being counterbalanced by some evil intent like the Centre._

_There is so much that is new. So much to find, so much to help._

_He finds them, one after another. Criminals, villains, monsters. He makes them pay, never with bloodshed. He shows them how it FEELS to suffer, how it feels to be tormented by a monster. And he forces them to confess and ensures their imprisonment. _

_When he finds the needy, he gives them the closure they deserve, and the happy ending they need. There are good people in the world, and he REFUSES to let them suffer alone and unhelped and in pain. Not while he has a moment to spare._

_He searches for who he is. But that, in time, becomes irrelevent. He stops caring about who Jarod was or why he was taken. He doesn't matter anymore._

_People do. They deserve justice. And he gives it to them, becomes a nemesis to chase the darkness away and bring even the slightest hope of light._

_The world falls in blackness and horror, but he endures. There are so many worlds to go to, to save, to help, and he WILL NOT turn away-_)

Kimblee could not understand it. It..._hurt_, feeling these strange things. To look at a person and feel such..._odd things_.

It was incomprehensible.

It was inhuman.

It was _monstrous_. Kimblee felt revulsion, and horror at this _monster_ that called itself Jarod. Why, Kimblee wondered, was he himself the only sane person in the universe?

_Y'know_, Kevin said. _What you're feeling right now? It's called EMPATHY...man, it feels weird saying that._

Kimblee thought it was awful. His eyes narrowed even as Jarod wavered, still fighting but unable to keep his body from collapsing for much longer...

Kimblee threw his mental power into the fray, one last time. "There must be a shred of sanity in you!" He shouted. "A bit of intelligence, some degree of rational self-interest! Slide past, this insanity, and show me the _REAL YOU!_"

Kimblee tore through; memories scattered around him and he shuddered at them. They were so wrong. So absurd. Wasting time with people for no true reason? Delighting in the strangeness of a world as new to him as to a newborn baby? Finding a little boy's stray cat while also hunting down a mob boss to punish him and accomplishing BOTH? Shutting down a slaving ring, having all the perpetrators sent to prison? It was pointless, Kimblee knew. So insane and foolish.

So why did this man BELIEVE in it so? How could he be so insane? What...was...the..._point_?

Something appeared to meet him, in the depths of Jarod's mind. The echo of something _vast_, and ancient. Human, yet not quite. It was old, so very old, and it _saw him_.

For a moment, it considered. And in that moment, Kimblee saw that it was _of _Jarod, but somehow...different. Older. So much older and..._powerful_. It was to a man what humans were to insects, so far beyond his comprehension that Kimblee couldn't comprehend. It was without name, an entity that held no descriptor at all.

It spoke, in a voice that was like Jarod's but ragged, inquisitive, and so ancient there were stars that were mere children to it. Celestial Sapiens...Time Lords...the Great Old Ones...all those mighty and powerful alien races were less then babies to this thing that had no name. _You can't win_, it said._ You will be undone. You don't even understand that you don't need a reason to do good._

Kimblee panicked, and dove even deeper. Past the consciousness. Into the sub-consciousness and even _deeper _than that. To a level beyond his understanding, the same place where man's dreams of ape-life came from. Where lives gone and ancestors past still remembered.

A memory came. An _old _one. So old, Kimblee shuddered at it. It did not feel like one of Jarod's memories, nothing he had experienced in this life, but it was something of his soul, nonetheless.

_(-the wasteland around is grey dust, muted and devoid of anything to color it. No hue, no energy, no spirit, no life. A featureless horror of dust and emptiness: there are other hells in the multiverse, places of fire and torment and rigorous punishment and insane savagery, but this is the one so many consider to be closest to perfect evil; it is evil without consideration for Law or Chaos, and at it's core are the evils of APATHY and DESPAIR._

_He cannot give up. He has a chance, just one, to atone. HE MUST DO THIS. No matter the cost._

_He marches through the wastes, drained of life and color. Shades of things long dead linger in his wake, little more than mobile shadows and sad wretches, soon to become part of the Lower Planes themselves. He pities them, but does nothing._

_He finds her soon enough. A short and horrible mockery of a woman, blue-skinned and ragged-haired, eyes glowing like campfires and teeth like jagged knives. A Night Hag. And no ordinary one at that._

_"It is said that you are the greatest of the Gray Sisters, Ravel," He says, all sweet tones. "I have traveled far to reach you."_

_She nods, slowly. "But _why _have you traveled so far? Your need must be great...yet you seem to have brought _nothing _that would interest me. You must pay for your services..."_

_"My need is great. My currency is this: a challenge. Perhaps an impossible challenge...one I fear is beyond even _your _abilities..." The words are spoken with calculation, and the manipulation is that of a master's, a subtle twist to pull at the strings of the Night Hag named Ravel Puzzlewell, a being of pure evil and immense power...and also curiousity, vanity, and pride. Her eyes blazed with a heat foriegn to this hell, and some of the greyness eating the landscape ebbed from her._

_Yes, Ravel cannot resist a puzzle of any sort, whether question or riddle or mystical problem. One day, she will try to unlock the very cage that is Sigil, the City of Doors, and set the Lady of Pain free-_

_"There is nothing that is beyond me, foolish man!" She says. "Nothing! Pose your challenge, I will hear you!"_

_The great question. His ONE hope to escape the doom waiting for him. "Death waits at the end of life for all men. I need it to wait for me no longer...can you do this, beautiful Ravel?"_

_Echoing in the memory is a single question, distant and strange, a whisper on the wind. It has not been spoken yet, but it is IMPORTANT nonetheless. It is said in Ravel's voice, though she does not speak it._

_"What can change the nature...of a man?"_

There was a sharp thud. Kimblee blinked.

Jarod was lying on the ground, in much the same horrible state as the others.

Kimblee shook his head. "What are you?" He asked again, the Ectonurite receding from his flesh and humanity restoring it self. "What manner of creature are you, really?"

Kimblee decided to interrogate Mr. Lyle later. He picked Jarod up, the unconscious man still quite heavy, hauled him over his shoulder, and left.

It all happened so quickly - the explosion, the brawl, the mind-searching and kidnapping - that the first of the nearby workers to investigate came _five minutes _after Kimblee left. No one questioned the sight of him on his way out, seeming to only be a solitary man carrying away a terribly injured person. Obviously, he was just trying to help.

...

The primary broadcast studio of the building Zim and his group had commandeered was probably a decent-looking room before they'd trashed it, but it really couldn't be helped.

It was small, as such rooms went, and sparsely filled except for all the equipment an enterprise like this demanded: small banks of computer equipment for editing footage and other such tasks, monitors that folded out from the walls, sophisticated cameras mounted on rolling supports, a long desk for the announcers and newscasters to sit for the news...

The technology, they hadn't taken care not to damage any of it, and the actual employees were, at worst, knocked out or immobolized. But collateral damage followed Zim where he went (some said that his mere presence made _concrete _flammable) and in the spirit of things...well, the table had been smashed through a wall in an effort to slow down the security, a huge hole had been opened in the floor when they charged in, the walls and ceiling and floor were scarred with soot marks and air cuts and cracks and generalized trauma, and then there were all the people lying around everywhere; not terribly hurt, of course, but generally in a dour mood.

The intruders in question were running around the room, flush with victory but in a hurry to do a job that few, if any, of them were really qualified for: getting the cameras up and running so they could send a broadcast message to Kimblee in the hopes of riling him up.

Some of them were...unethusiastic. "We just smashed into a building and took over," Katara said miserably. "...We're going to be _lynched,_ aren't we?"

"Probably not," Ron said with a shrug. Sokka gave him a dirty look. "Uh, what I mean is!...Uh, well, at worst, these guys will hate you forever and try and get their friends to beat you up, but it's not like they'll get the _law _after you."

Katara stared at him. "...Why?"

"Well, stuff like this? It's not _technically _illegal."

She stared some more. "You're kidding."

"No, actually," Kim said. "We take a relaxed approach to things here. See, there's a horrible psychopath running around, and we have a nearly-surefire way to get him found out and taken down! It was an emergency, no one will blame us."

"We will!" Said a computer technician.

Kim frowned. "Look, we tried to do this nicely, but you didn't give us a lot of choice!"

"We would have helped if you'd _asked!_ Probably."

Kim inclined her head apologetically. "...My dad's gonna kill me for this, if that's any consolation."

"Not really, no it's not."

Other in the group were more enthusiastic. "Okay, heroing time, let's go, let's go!" Aang said, sitting at a computer and randomly pushing buttons.

Danny stood over him and said, "Do you even know how to use a computer?"

"Nope!" Aang said cheerfully.

"Over here, guys!" Tucker said, a few computers over, carefully circumventing the rather weak computer security. (Obviously, these newsguys were new at the whole thing. A rival could have stolen their reports by now.) "I think I'm getting close to breaking through...YES! I did it!"

Aang went over. "What, no beeps or loud sounds?" He complained as Tucker went feverishly to work getting an emergency broadcast set up. "That's how it always happens in the movies! There wasn't even all that much typing."

"Computer science is a lot less demonstrative then movies would have you think," Tucker said. "...How the heck do you get a emergency broadcast going! I can hack, but I don't have the slightest idea how these guys set things up here!"

Kim came over. "Let me try," She offered. "I took a few computer classes last year, and I've done my share of hacking on missions. Two months ago? I had to highjack a mechanical parasite that had taken over a giant transforming robot's brain and controlled him. Nice guy, this robot; calls himself Wreck-Gar, he works at the Sizzler down the street from my house. Got Employee of the Month by putting out a greasefire with his face."

Tucker scooted over and pulled another chair over. "Be my guest!" Kim sat down. "Okay, unexpected lab partner, let's see if we can get some heroing done!" The two got to work.

Aang watched them, bemused. "...I have no idea what you guys are doing," He confessed, and decided to find out if computer data could be Bended. Then again...it was all electrical impulses in silicon...perhaps some form of extraordinarily subtle Lightningbending could do it...?

"Think we should do something?" Morte asked Calvin, from a short distance away.

"Nope!" Calvin said cheerfully, looting cool stuff from the security guards they had curbstomped. "Ooh, guns. I want me some _DAKKA!_"

Scar loomed from behind like a grim spectre of vengeance. (To be fair, this was pretty much his defined purpose in life.) "There is a difference between commandeering a news studio for a good purpose, and _looting_."

Calvin jumped back and dropped the sub-machine gun. (It was loaded with rubber-bullets; they were heavily-armed, not _insane_.) "Waah! Where'd you come from!"

"Ishbal."

"What? No, I mean...oh, never mind." Somewhat disappointed, Calvin dropped the stuff he had looted. A pity; in the partlance of his old Ork band Da Stormbringerz, it was some real flash dakka.

Through it all, Zim sat, cross-legged, atop a pile of unconscious guards who had the displeasure of having met his shoes face-first. Also his fists. And whatever he could wrench out of the walls. Also some fire. "Are we ready to broadcast yet?" He asked impatiently to the person who happened to be closest.

It was Abel, who was sitting at a computer and doing much better than Kim and Tucker combined; he'd already hacked through, but setting up an emergency broadcast required tandemn authorization. "I'd say so," Abel said, after a moment of thoughtful consideration. "We've already tricked the mainframe into accepting us as trustworthy users-"

"Traitor!" Cried a techie.

"-So we have a few more hurdles to clear; getting a broadcast, having it up and finished in a few minutes once we do, getting it spliced into regular viewing and more importantly _interrupting _scheduled broadcasts...but there are already protocols and processes for that sort of thing, so it's bascially a question of making our broadcast a round peg and putting it in the hole. I don't think I'll have much problem once the others pick up. These guys have pitiful security."

"Whatta ya want, we're poor!" Said the weather-girl, tied to a column and looking like the world's noisiest ornament. "We just do cartoons, dramas, the minor stuff the big networks don't deal with and a little bit of news relating to giant robot charity auctions!" Zim gave her an incredulous look. "More common then you'd think."

"Well, at least we didn't pick a _big _one," Toph said airly, having been looting with Calvin until she got bored of it and didn't care for the stuff she was finding anyway. (And Scar had guilted her out of it.) "Otherwise we'd probably knock the place over dealing with the security. What's with all the security if you're small time?"

"Criminals want to know where they can steal giant robots."

"That makes sense."

"Ahem, excuse me!" Said a teenage girl news-anchor that seemed to be in charge, a Latina freckled girl with short brown hair and a rather arrogant attitude. "Mr...Zim, I believe you were called? You're the leader of these...malcontents?"

"I prefer 'maverick gang of heroic sociopaths'," Zim said. "And yes."

"No you're not!" Calvin said. "And what's heroic about you?"

"Am too!" Zim said. "...Now wait a minute!"

"Well..." The newscaster gave him a studied look. "You just said you wanted our studio so you could send a message to someone evil so you could fight him, right?"

"Sure. Why?"

"Tell me something! What did he do? Something...big?" This was deliviered with a mixture of genuine curiosity and journalistic greed.

"He blew up Foster's Home," Abel said. "And did something unspeakably horribly with them that would make true death a kindness."

Her eyes got big. "..._Oh_. I see." Her leg twitched nervously, some sort of hurried decision being made. "...In that case, well...I might have a deal for you."

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Oh?"

"Courtney!" Cried her fellow newscaster. "What are you doing!"

"What's best for the studio," She said primly.

Zim hopped up and went over to her, with a groaning chorus from his 'seat'. "Miss...ah, Courtney, is it?"

Courtney nodded. "Yes."

"What matter of deal do you have in mind?"

Courtney looked back and forth, glancing at her companions. "...Could you scootch us together so we can have a quick huddle?"

"Okay," Hobbes said, walking over and untying her before bringing her over to a nearby collection of important looking people and tying her there.

She wasn't happy about this, and said so. Hobbes replied, "Well, me neither, but the alternative is paralyzing you with my super-special-awesome skills of doom, and frankly I don't like fighting women."

She frowned. "What? You think it's wrong to hit a woman because they're supposed to be weak? Is this some sort of chauvinistic thing!"

"No, I just don't like fighting women," Hobbes said. He felt deeply in his bones that it was wrong to hit a girl that didn't start it. It wasn't the result of a cultural perception of women as 'the weaker sex' or anything like that, it was just one of those whims taken as beliefs. (On the other hand, he was training to be a proper knight, or high-class warrior of the Kingdom, so he might have been adopting some older beliefs without being aware of it.)

Courtney frowned; she glanced momentarily at the sound-studio, where their DJ and phone attendent, a tentacle-alien girl-thing, had been locked inside through alchemy. She was actually grateful for it, as it meant she didn't have to fight. (True, she'd been alive longer than most cities had been around, but she didn't like hitting things.) Courtney mumbled something under her breath, said, ""Whatever," and huddled as best she could with her co-workers and made her intentions clear.

A few minutes later, she pulled back. "Me and my co-workers have come to a decision. In exchange for exclusive media rights to the full extent of this story, we'll put out a broadcast to enable you to lure out this fiend."

Abel gave her a look. "...I'm not sure if you're thinking about the logistics, but people already know about Foster's going boom through the news. Kind of hard not to hear about."

Courtney smirked. "Ah, but do they know who did it? Why he did it? And what he _looks _like?" She paused, worried. "You...do know those things, right?"

"We do," Zim assured her.

She sighed in relief. "Well, do-"

"Wait!" Morte said. "How do we know that you won't just turn us in to your security monkeys or pin _us _as the guys that did it? Nice revenge, isn't it?"

"Uh..." Courtney looked confused..

"Mutual trust based in the fact that you could all kill us horribly and we can't do anything about it?" A technician said helpfully.

"Oh," Morte said. "...Sounds right to me!"

Courtney seemed a bit worried, but she still asked, "Do we have a deal?"

"Okay!" Zim said.

"Shouldn't you discuss that with us first?" Calvin said.

Zim grinned cheerfully. "Nope!"

Courtney frowned. Zim reminded her of a few of her old 'friends', even though he couldn't look more different than, among other things, a certain tall girl with purple hair and _way _too much energy. It was the insanity, she presumed, that they had in common. "If you'll untie us...?" She prompted.

Zim glanced at the others. They rolled their eyes and got to work untying everyone. Zim got up and summoned the Keyblade to cut some ropes (some untied by themselves when the Keyblade got near), freaking some people out, a few being his friends that hadn't seen it yet. (Ominously, the shadows moved, like something was checking out the situation. No one saw it, and no Heartless emerged or anything, so there was nothing to worry about. Presumably...)

Eventually, newsies and heroes alike got together. "Alright," Courtney said grimly. "While the techies are getting your broadcast set up, tell me _everything_. We can kill two birds with one stone: a emergency report to warn everyone about this madman, and a message to _him_!"

"Okay," Zim said. "Our friend Mr. Scar of the Crossguard knows more than I do."

Scar stepped forward, grim and haunted. "Miss Courtney," He began. "Allow me to tell you about the man called the Red Lotus Alchemist and what he has done today.."

...

Once more, the Flame Alchemist stood on a rooftop, surronded by his entourage of convenience. They weren't far from Foster's, now, and he could see the moblie hospital in the skyline of buildings, overshadows the great wall-like construct that divided the districts.

It worried him, that hospital. It was a big target for someone with a mind to make as much chaos and destruction as possible. Expecting a..._man _like Kimblee not to want to blow it up and mop up his leavings was like expecting a curious monkey not to push the big shiny doom button.

Fortunately, that was why he'd already scattered small but skilled men and women and whatever under his command to likely targets that might be attacked in the immediate area. Civiliian centers...civic buildings...large home complexes...and espicially hospitals like this one. The ones sent to the mobile hospital ought to have already arrived. And if not...

He made sure his pyrotex glove was on. He would _end _it. He would not permit anyone else to die today. Not even, if it was possible, Kimblee; the man would stand a proper trial before they sent him to the Vault. It was a feasible option; you'd be surprised how much burning a body can withstand before frayed nerves shut down and burnt muscles stop working but still not die. Roy Mustang knew. He knew _quite _well.

Flame alchemy, his teacher had said, was the most powerful sort of alchemy known to man. It was presumptious to say. But it was true: cannons constructed from buildings, explosions generated from air, blades made from the conversion of air molecues and even the raw power of destruction alchemy were as _nothing _next to his flames.

_Everything _could burn. Fire killed _everything_. If enough fire to disintegrate a city block didn't do the job, you needed more fire. The only enemy to ever give him trouble were regenerators, and even that only slowed him down.

Roy sniffed the air. Crisp, a bit cold at his altitude. He wanted to keep that smell in mind, before he had to taste the burning flesh and ozone that he hated so.

"Ya done being dramatic and badass and all _Still In Saigon-_ness or what?" Deadpool asked flippantly.

"Shut up," Roy said curtly.

Lin, sitting in the robot with Shego, stood up abruptly. "He's coming," He said.

"You're sure?" Gibbs said, sitting next to Roy and preparing himself for his role in the fight. There was an odd clink of metal when he moved now, a strange sheen to his skin. A _gunmetal _sheen.

"It feels like there are dozens of people approaching this way," Lin said. "No...more than that. Fifty. Even more; a hundred?" He shook his head. "Even _more _than that."

Gibbs looked down with a sniper's practiced stare. "...The streets certainly aren't crowded." This was a plain way of pointing out that the streets had become deserted except for the odd straggler or stubborn fool; so many had fled in panic after the explosions. People had come gradually back, but not in enough numbers to confuse Lin at all.

Lin bit his lip. "...I have not felt this much presence since I saw..._him_."

Roy nodded. They did not need to say the foul name, give respect or honor to the monster by repeating the name he'd graced himself with: _Father_.

Father, who had destroyed the entire nation of Xerxes an eon ago and taken their souls. Enough power to choke a nation, and turn it to his will; such was the curse of Amestris, and the limits of it's alchemy.

If Lin was reminded of that homunculi's reserves of human lives... "Gibbs, keep an eye out for anyone that doesn't look right. Lin, _find him_. We need to know what he looks like now!"

Gibbs stirred. "Sir. Look."

Lin turned the same moment Roy did. "Aha," Lin said softly, shaking and staring at a small white figure on the street below, sticking to the shadows. Shadows that _moved_.

Roy _knew _Kimblee. He knew how the man loved to dress in white; he'd said that it made him feel like a proper composer. And felt _clean_. "This is going to be easier than I thought," He said, raising his gloved hand. "First, we need that street evacuated without even a _chance _of civillian casualties. Then lure Kimblee out into the open with superior firepower so me and Gibbs can get a good shot at him; I need to have _everyone _out of the way before I can take a shot."

Lin nodded, wincing with inner pain. They'd already worked out a plan, but they hadn't counted on what the proximity of so many souls packed together was doing to him. "Deadpool? Shego?" He said, and gestured with a hand. "See to it."

Deadpool stood up and saluted ironically. "Gotcha, boss."

Shego followed suit. "Bet you twenty we get it done without even needing you there."

"You're on," Lin said with a grin.

Deadpool pressed a button on his belt while Shego grabbed him around the neck, and they both disappeared in a flash of light.

Roy stood back, and looked at them. "Well, that's the begining of the operation set into motion," he said. "...Lin, are you alright?"

Lin shook his head. "...So many of them. So many people. So many _voices_..."

"Your part's done," Gibbs said gently. "Maybe you should let...your other side take things over."

Lin grinned weakly. "Hate the idea of letting him have all the glory...but why not?" He closed his eyes, and went still.

For a moment, nothing appeared to happen. His lips twitched, and pulled back; they had become razor-sharp, like shark's-teeth. He opened his eyes, and they were the brilliant red of a Philosopher's Stone, slitted and strange but still somehow _human_.

"Well," said Greed the Avaricious, grinning like a jerk. "Looks like I get to play too."

"Take your time," Gibbs said absently. "We can't rush this."

"Right, right." Greed stretched, frowning at Kimblee below. "...The hell? He's got someone with him!"

"What!" Roy said.

Gibbs put his thumb and forefinger over his eye. Noiselessly, a small scope appeared from his flesh over his eye. "...That bastard brought a hostage," He said, unsurprised. After his briefing on the situation, Roy had told him everything about Kimblee, a man who would happily smash the universe just to see what it would sound like.

"Unlikely," Roy said. "Kimblee's too impulsive to think of that sort of thing. A kidnapping?"

Greed snarled. "Like hell he's going to steal from _MY _town! Come marching in here, killing _MY _people, trashing _MY _buildings, and take one of _MY _future minons away? Like hell you're getting away with that!"

A dull blackness crept down his flesh. It thickened, bulged oddly. It crept up his neck, down his arms, and his legs, hardening into a perfect defensive shell. Roy could see it gleam dully under his pant's-leg, just about everything but his head covered in the carbon-dark material. It spread over his hands, elongating fingernails and bones into knife-sharp claws.

Greed punched an open hand furiously, making sparks as his shell scraped against itself. He laughed. "You know, this feels so much like old times, doesn't it? The three of us, tackling a criminal with so much power that we dare not let him unleash it? A proper surprise attack."

Gibbs smirked. "Sometimes I forget about the old days."

"Our day is far from over," Roy said pointedly. "...Gibbs? _Get ready_."

Gibbs nodded. "You know it." He got into position and pulled his sleeves back before he extended his arms, fingers lightly touching.

Skin rippled, like there was something under his skin _moving_. Then, without blood or tear or any discomfort at all, metal emerged, skin sliding smoothly away from it. A great mass of machinery appeared around Gibbs for a moment, an undifferentiated mass of shining metal and revolving bearings and electromagnets...

Roy remembered, as the machine assembled itself into a compact form. He remembered that Gibbs had not always been a Peace Marine. Once he had traveled the worlds as a member of an organization more illustrious and well-renowned; the _Brotherhood of Steel_, an outfit from a world damaged and ruined from nuclear fallout ages past, but a chance discovery of alien spacecraft had spurred true travel through outer space, and in doing so, they had found the other worlds. Devoted to honor, compassion and justice (mostly that was just the Capital Wasteland ones, though), they melded with other like-minded organizations but retained their incredibly cool name, soon becoming a star-spanning organization devoted to maintaining a measure of peace and harmony in the worlds. By force, if need be.

They worked in secret, and one of their agents was Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who was the sole survivor of his world's devastation, only to join the Brotherhood. He, at one point, had found himself infiltrating a chaotic world of a Golden Age of piracy, many of them no better than the brutal World Government that rules that world, endorsing slavery for the elite and taking their concept of justice to a warped extreme. Gibbs had hoped to find a way to redeem the organization, or failing that, devise a means to remove it from power with a minimum of casualties. He was sadly unsuccessful at either, but he did get something out of it; at one point, he foiled the exploits of a brutal band of pirates and saved a island of engineer-savants that hoarded mighty treasures. In thanks for his help, they gave him one of their most valuable treasures: one of many rare fruits from their world, unique 'Devil Fruits' said to hold a curse that conferred immense power upon whoever ate it at the cost of sinking like stone when immersed in water. Gibbs didn't consider power worth the pay-off, and intended to sell it off-world.

Unfortunately, he was soon captured by the very pirates he had fought, or more specifically, the giant monster they had used as a living ship. Without many other options, he ate the fruit, in the hopes that it would have some sort of useful power to save his skin.

The locals had called it the 'Bura-Burae no Mi', apparently, because they thought langauges like that were really really cool. The appropiate translation to English, according to Gibbs, was the 'Dakka-Dakka Fruit'.

And that, Roy thought with a grin as Gibbs finished forming a massive sniper rifle a little bigger than a truck; he'd had to move back to fit it on the rooftop; a barrel large enough for a grown man to sit inside, a swiveling post as big as Gibbs to stabilize and manuver it from underneath, and there was a sniping scope as big as a intersteller-range telescope right in front of his face.

There was the sound of a bullet the size of a person's torso sliding into a firing chamber. Greed stared, momentarily caught off-balance. "...Impressive," He finally managed. "You've been practicing."

"Thank you," Gibbs said. "Used the inverse of the 'more Dakka theory' for a precise destructive strike."

Greed grinned. "I want one."

Roy smirked at his companions, and cracked his knuckles expectantly with a shower of sparks around his hands. "All right. Let's get to work."

...

A/N: I'm still learning about pacing. I'm not really happy with the speed of this arc, but I feel that the best way to learn right now is to do it and see what works. And if I get a nice arc out of it? All glory to the Hypno-Toad! And by that I mean, "I'll be happy with it'.

I don't intend to have Skoodge or much of the other survivors of Nickolodean-Earth be a large part of this story, but some have asked about whether or not they're alive. So there they are, with a customary cameo that serves no real purpose aside from cheap laughs!

I like Lin Yao/Greed. He needs to have ninja bodyguards. So I came up with Shego and Deadpool. If nothing else, this has resulted in great hilarity.

By the way, if you need to know, Gibbs is a great big important guy in the live-action drama show NCIS (which I like better than most dramas because it's damn funny a lot. And I like Perky Goths.); while Gibbs has no Devil Fruit powers, he IS a Memetic Badass in-show. Izumi is similarly a Memetic Badass in Fullmetal Alchemist, being just about the only person Olivier Armstrong gets along with. For her alchemy test, she survived for a month on Briggs Mountain (which is basically a really cold version of Death Mountain from Legend of Zelda) and ate cave bears for food when she wasn't raiding the toughest military installation in the world for giggles. Naturally, I set them up! And had them adopt Kim and Jim. Since Edward and Alphonse Elric are Izumi's surrogate sons in some weird way, that makes for an...interesting household.

For those interested, Jim's a Genius (as in Genius: The Transgression) and he's clearly a Klagen, or a Genius that Catalyzes in sorrow and grief. (If Calvin's a Genius, he's probably a Staunen; one that Catalyzes in curiosity.)

I've realized, I'm turning Zim into a bit of a Blood Knight. Weird.

Took some liberties on Kimblee mind-warping people with Ectonurite powers. Also, Jarod? Traumatic childhood doesn't really cover it for him, as he never got a chance to _have _a childhood. Also, an oppertunity to see what a psychopath like Kimblee makes of the mind of a Messiah like Jarod. The answer? A total Mind-Screw? And that one weird memory of Jarod's?...Yeah, put your Wild Mass Guessing here.

Yeah, that's Courtney from Total Drama Island/Action/World Tour. You can _certainly _expect one or two others from the Total Drama crew to show up later in a big way. (I even suggested who.)

I totally made up the Dakka-Dakka Fruit. Easy to tell, huh? (It'd be an AWESOME Devil Fruit, don'tcha know?) Part of Gibbs' Super Sniper Cannon of Doom was modified by the trope entry for More Dakka's inversion; a huge sniper rifle with a scope the size of the Hubble Telescope and tons of stabilizing gear.

Now, the next chapter is actually mostly written, so no worries on late updates. This arc is drawing to a close, with next chapter being the penultimate chapter before it ends, then ON TO THE REAL ADVENTURE! (Finally. I mean, this arc is bigger then the REST OF THE STORY. My laziness and slowness to write this thing is showing. At least I've learned a lot from it.) Things will get better, other things will get worse, MUCH WORSE. Have fun with that.


	14. Red Lotus: It Gets Worse

I did say I had the next chapter nearly done, didn't I? This one's an action-filled chapter, people, because I was itching to do an awesome fight scene. Also, the escalation hits a peak! I'd feel bad for everybody at this point.

I have also decided that one of my current goals is to make this story awesome enough to warrent an entry on TV Tropes. This will be difficult; I've come to conclude that my real talents lie in characterization, over-the-top wackiness and dialouge, not epic-scope. (I have a ton of random story ideas, for example, usually based on intriguing crossover ideas, but I rarely put them into practice simply because I can't usually think of a decent plot to pin on it. My earlier attempts used to be kind of weak, so I tend to do one-shots when I bother to write any of them down.)

Also, I've gotten the idea of putting in worlds that don't corrospond to any in the games, either thematically or plot-wise, to help the plot out. (If I did things the same way as the game, it would both be derivative and short. Probably.) Any thoughts on that?

Disclaimer: I don't own anything I don't own. (I'd list things I've referenced, reused, repurposed or whatnot, but that would be impractical.)

...

Ducking through allies is, in Traverse Town, considered a traditional and acceptable means of going about your business. Thus, Kimblee was largely able to escape suspicion, but even though he wasn't being accousted, his mood wasn't feeling so great.

For starters, it was starting to become apparent that the body he was currently using was not as reliable as he had hoped. The healed wound in his neck still twinged with pain as a reminder of that fact. And for another...

He gave closer consideration to Jarod, black-veined and injured and twitching in nightmares Ghostfreak had implanted on purpose; not carried over his shoulder anymore, but scrunched into a mixture of a wheelbarrow and a restraining harness Kimblee had transmuted from a staircase no one had been using. (It was more efficient than carrying him around; Kimblee had all sort of aches and pains now.)

Kimblee shuddered. What he had seen in Jarod's mind was...wrong. Something about the way the man thought was pushing all sorts of absurd feelings in Kimblee's mind, fleeting ideas that he'd never before considered and were, frankly, _painful _to think about.

He kept thinking about all his 'jobs'. All the people he'd killed. He'd never thought much of them in this context before; not as tools to use, instruments to work his music with, but as _people_. It was torturous to think about them; he kept wondering how they had _felt _as they died, their last dying scream scraping their throats raw and bloody...

He'd never cared or even _conceived _of such concerns before he had started to see the world the way Jarod did. Kimblee shuddered again.

_You're not going to win,_ Kevin said quietly; he hadn't spoken in a long time. Ghostfreak was keeping him buried, shoving him back into the deepest reaches of the consciousness to prevent him from wresting control once more; at best, Kimblee was only feeling a trickle of emotional input from him, Kevin's vaugest reactions to what Ghostfreak permitted him to experience.

Kimblee ignored him. Kevin's attempt to kill the three of them had...unsettled him.

Still, on the other side of his mood, he _had _captured Jarod. The object of Mr. Lyle's request. Yes, he was a bit banged up, but that shouldn't affect whatever Mr. Lyle had in store for him.

_You assume, of course, that Mr. Lyle doesn't harbor some sort of 'affection' for him,_ Ghostfreak observed. Kimblee twitched; the thought was...all too likely. If Jarod had been in a state to be made aware of this sentiment, he would have thrown up. (Mr. Lyle had that effect on people.)

For that reason (Jarod on his shoulder, not thoughts of Mr. Lyle's deviance), Kimblee stuck to the shadows. Moving in alleys and sneaking over rooftops (which wasn't easy with a wheeled contraption with a person inside it, even if you had alchemy to make bridges from rooftop to rooftop). It wouldn't do to attract attention, and walking through even this town with a severely injured man around you would get _some _attention. No. That simply would _not _do.

Kimblee, quietly sliding down a bridge from a walkway into an alleyway between a defunct trading card store and a thaumaturgical bookshop whose owner was off on vacation, ventured a jaunty whistle when he heard something odd; screaming and yelling, and...explosions?

"Hmm?" He said, thinking briefly that people had seen him after all and were about to attack, and transmuted a peephole in a wall to look into the street, only to see...a ninja in a red-and-black outfit fighting a green-skinned woman throwing blasts of emerald-bright fire at him, the ground, trees, trashcans, stationary cars, some overhead birds, and just about anything that moved. (She was missing a lot, too. Perhaps on purpose.)

"...I might say that you do not see that every day, but clearly that is not a consideration in this town," Kimblee said. Heat flashed over him and he ducked just before fire roared like a dragon and smashed through the wall, flooding the alley way with baleful green; he stood shakily back up in a alleyway that was now scorched black and looked through the rather larger hole. Deciding to do the smart thing, he grabbed Jarod's cart-thing and quietly walked away, hoping to get out of there before he got killed or something.

In the street, continued shennigans were happening. "DEATH TO CURTAINS!" The woman cried, blasting a random house and destroying the curtains.

A man poked his head. "Oy, what the hell!" He complained. "You can't just destroy those curtains! They've been just like curtains to me!"

"Tough!" She tilted her head. "Death to curtain lovers?"

The man paled. "Ah. Sorry, I must be going now. Like...um...FAR AWAY!" He retreated, and a few moments later, blasted straight through the roof of his house on a rocket-chair.

"Well, that makes no damn sense at all!" The ninja said cheerfully. "And neither does me carrying this!" He held up a pair of rubber ducks with pulleys in the middle, joined by a length of chain. "And now, a traditional Ysmirchian war screech. _Yor-blibl-bla-TOOK-bah!_"

"That wasn't a victory screech," Someone complained. "That wasn't a victory screech at all! You have to use your diaphram more. Also, that sounded like something some idiot just made by smashing his face into the keyboard!"

"How'd you know! Wait. I mean, how dare you wear those shirt with those shoes while having that skin color and living under that astrological sign without ever listening to rockabilly polka rap while dancing under a full-moon naked and eating crispy crackers and dancing a merry Irish jig and bribing a troop of miniature giant space hamsters to lead a complicated song and dance routine with some very lovely chereography, espicially from Uncle Steakcharmer?"

The somone stared at him and said the only sane thing you could possibly say under the circumstances: "What?"

The clearly insane ninja gave him a look. Possibly, he was wearing a mask, it made it hard to tell. "...Say 'roota-tonga-splitta-cloaca' five times fast. Please the Irony Gods!"

"What? No!"

"You will please the Irony Gods either with your chanting or your _dancing!_" The ninja said; he pulled out a pair of guns and fired at the ground by the someone's feet; the someone very quickly ran away. "Aw man, you're supposed to dodge 'em! Tch, some people have no respect for the classics, y'know?"

Kimblee, passing by an open alleyway, watched more chaos happen, to the net effect of everyone in the street or attendent buildings except for the two troublemakers emerging from their homes or business places to see what the hell was going on. Kimblee, in spite of his earlier decision to just get away, stayed there and watched it happen. _Should we really be remaining here?_ Ghostfreak asked. _We could well be killed! Or found out._

"I want to leave..." Kimblee said slowly. "But these two...the stupidity is _entrancing_. Quite annoying, really."

"If I don't get fifty free meal coupons to Mama Biscotti's All You Can Eat Fried Foods right this instant, I'll kill you all!" Deadpool announced, to a horrified streets. "Because I've got...a _thermal detonator!_"

Some people ran. A few paused, willing to fight. Shego alone pointed at the thing Deadpool was holding and said, "That's a can of tomato soup."

"I know," Deadpool said. "Wanted to see if I could sucker anyone into it. Damn, I love Mama Biscotti's! And reruns from the All Cartoon All-Star channel! And the laughter of things that have no business existing in the first place. But I _hate _short shorts."

"Why?"

"Lady, some people ain't got not business showing off their inner thighs, know what I mean? Not you, you've got some nice leg-meat." A blast of green fire hit him in the face, not appearing to bother him at all. "Oh yeah, you know what I mean! And riiight now you're wondering how I _know _what your inner thighs look like. Two words! Hidden cameras. On trained weasels." Another blast hit him in the chest, knocking him down. "Wait, that's five words," He said, getting back up. "And you've got no idea where the weasels can hide. Heh. By the way, your diary has a lousy lock. You can blow it off with grenades so easy!" A final blast of fire, hotter and angrier, hit him squarely between the legs. "Eek! My crotch! MY MORALLY AMBIGUIOUS CROTCH!" He fell over, in pain. Then he shot a firecracker into the sky. Where he'd been hiding it, no one knew. "And yet I still have the strength to spite the ozone layer. Take that, you whiny layer of atmosphere!"

Shego let her hands drop, still ablaze with green flame. Or plasma, or electromagnetic energy or whatever the hell her powers were. "Idiot." She noticed that a few men (and women) were looking at her, their heads tilted. "What?"

"He's right," One loose-lipped fool remarked. "You _do _have nice legs. Bit thick in the thighs, but some people like tha-" A blast of green fire took out the wall behind him, the room behind that and rather frightened a small bear that had been passing through on a leave of tourism. The fool in question did not blink or otherwise react overtly. "Point taken. Must go now!" He ran away, not in any real hurry but a generally telegraphed desire to not be there at that moment.

"ANYONE ELSE WANT TO SAY ANYTHING!" Shego yelled.

"Yes," someone else said. "That outfit you're wearing emphasizes your chest just a tad more than it ought to. Dispite it being a multi-layered bodysuit with an overcoat on." A bolt of energy, focused into a thin green laser, burned through this critic's incredibly ugly hat. "Hey, I like that hat. It wards away the spirits of poor civic planning because of it's bombastity. Is that a word?" Another laser landed inches away from an ear. "Sorry, must run now!"

More people ran away too, getting the hint; a woman of mass destruction in a lousy mood is not conducive to getting people to stay in the area. Deadpool got up, having recovered by this point. "You wussies! And mouthbreathers! And guys named Jeppi."

"Hey!" Said a guy named Jeppi.

"How dare you ran away from bolts of green...something, no one knows, but it burns and it illuminates and stuff so we call it fire! I'LL MAKE YOU ALL PAY FOR NOT GIVING THE COUPONS!" He tossed the can of tomato soup in the air and unsheathed his katanas in a single economical movement. He swung them in a series of practiced and highly skilled katas, the air whispering along the slashing blades as the can of soup fell. The last of his poses ended with his katanas over his head, pommel to pommel like he wanted to make them into some kind of impractical but really cool dual-blade weapon. The can fell closer; Deadpool spun the katanas so fast some people flinched from the glare of the sun reflected of the blades dozens in times in seconds, making a sharp whistling noise and appearing as a circle of gleaming metal; Deadpool's improbable fencing prowess was so great that his katana's couldn't even be seen in mid-swing. The poor unfortunate can landed right into that spinning arc of blades; mere instants later, three perfectly equal sections of metal hit the ground at his feet, and a large splash of tomato soup fanned out from Deadpool in a perfect circle, splashing a bunch of people. (Shego would have been hit to but she generated a burst of green fire that vaporized the soup before she could be hit.)

"Hey, what the hell?" Someone complained. "Eew, it's cold."

Deadpool struck a cool pose; one blade arced behind his shoulder, another held peripendular to the ground, both completely spotless and unmarked. He sheathed them and pointed at the complainer. "Ooh, you think it's bad now? Just wait until the nanobots active."

There was a pause. "What nanobots?" Someone asked.

That phrase was, actually, a cue to the aforementioned nanoites clustered in the tomato soup; it was not meant to be eaten but spilled on people as a prank. They activated, and the soup turned solid in the shapes of big fists and hammers and other implements of beating. "Those ones!" Deadpool said proudly. The soup-fists immediately set to punching however they were on. Much screaming and panicking and fleeing of unfortunate bystanders commenced.

One big hurried rush later (punctuated by many a scream of pain or condemnation of Deadpool) and the street was abruptly deserted. Except for Shego, Deadpool and still unseen, Kimblee.

"Well, that was interesting," Kimblee said to himself. "...This town really is full of maniacs and lunatics. I'm sure Wuya won't mind if I blow one or two districts off the planet; it'll lower the total insanity of the multiverse as a whole, I hope-"

_I'd permit you to indulge your whimsies at another time,_ Ghostfreak interrupted. _But I can't help but feel concerned that they are abruptly ceasing their childish hostilities._

Kimblee blinked. Deadpool and Shego had indeed done just that and were now staring right at where he was hiding. "...Ah," Kimblee said, reaching for the Philosopher's Stone and putting a careful hand on the handlebar of his meatbag-roller (AKA, the thing he was carrying Jarod in) while slowly walking away and going for a passage away from here...

A bolt of green fire struck Kimblee dead in the back, knocking him clear off his feet and into a nearby collection of trashcans. _Sucks to be you!_ Kevin taunted, in spite of the agonizing pain and horrific burn setting on his transformed back.

The meatback-carrier fell over, but Jarod's unconscious body stopped shortly before hitting the ground; Deadpool had teleported to catch him, on the ground that if this guy had kidnapped him, then clearly it was a good idea to take him away. "Yoink!" Deadpool said.

"Hey," Kimblee said lazily, sitting up and ignoring the agony of his burned muscles and shoulder. "I already kidnapped him. Find your own victim."

"Hmn..." Deadpool appeared to think it over but decided that thinking was too much effort. "Nah, I'm good. Chaotic Neutral tending towards Good-ish, whatever."

"...I see." Kimblee grabbed the Stone and put his other hand on the ground; red flashed around his hand and the alleyway rippled, arcs of red flashing everywhere as the walls and ground cracked, incredibly thin and sharp spikes transmuted from them and stabbing Deadpool right in the base of the spine, his actual spine, through the neck and a large one right in his stomach.

"Huh. That's incredibly painful," Deadpool said, amid all the blood gushing everywhere. His arm flopped, and Jarod fell off onto the ground. Kimblee smirked; the ground under Jaroid flashed red and flipped him up into the air with such force that he crashed right into Kimblee.

This was not much of a hindrance, as the Red Lotus Alchemist was able to get back up moments later. Kimblee clenched the Stone in his teeth so he had a hand free to put on a nearby wall; before he could transmute a hole to escape through, a boot blazing with green narrowly missed his head owing to some slight bad timing and put a sizable hole in the wall.

Shego swung again at Kimblee, grinning like a sadist, and this time her clawed gloves caught the right side of his face and produced a loud scream before he sent a large fist-shaped projectile out of the ground and into her side, smashing her into a wall. She recovered fast, bouncing off the wall ninja-like and fired a blast of green fire that vaporized the spikes pinning Deadpool's arms. "Your timing sucks!" Deadpool complained as he got the feeling back in his arms and unsheathed a katana and swung; the spikes were sliced apart, and he wrenched the pieces still in him without seeming aware of the pain.

"Ingrate," Shego remarked.

"So," Kimblee said simply, trying to balance Jarod's weight and remain standing with all his injuries. "I have been found it, it seems. What gave me away?"

"Like we're about to tell you," Shego said. "I used to be a villianess, I know all about not blurting out the plan to the enemy just because it's tradition."

"'Used to'?" Deadpool said. "Some would argue. And by 'some', I mean 'everyone that knows you'. Oh, and explodey-dude? All we had to do was-"

"Shut up!" Shego said. "He doesn't need to know about Mustang being in with Mr. Yao on this...oh, _damn it_."

"Mustang?" Kimblee said. "Roy Mustang? The _Flame Alchemist_? You _must _be joking. What would he be doing working with ruffians like yourselves...hrm. 'Mr. Yao'? I don't suppose you mean that Xingian prince that worked with Hohenheim and the Elric brothers and their other allies against the homunculi?"

Shego paused. "...Wait, what?"

Kimblee frowned. "You mean you don't know?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Hardly unexpected, given what a colossal failure that was," Kimblee said, with a shrug. "Partially my fault, I suppose." He paused, noticing that the vicious holes in Deadpool's sides were already sealed up, leaving some nasty bruises sure to fade away in minutes. "...A regenerator, are you? Hrm, I suppose that could be a problem."

"Ya think so?" Shego said with a grin. "It's gonna _be_ a problem. No possibilities about it! Now, uh, how would the boss want it down...?" She waved a clawed hand at him. "Hand over the Philosopher's Stone and your hostage and you'll only be slightly maimed."

Kimblee frowned. "Don't you mean '_or_'?"

"Whazzat?"

"That's a not at all appealing surrender deal. You're supposed to lay down terms that make a foe see the alternatives and decide that surrendering is the more attractive option. The promise of being maimed isn't appealing to anyone. Except perhaps a masochist. Which I can assure you that I'm not."

"We-elll," Deadpool said sing-song. "Maa-ybee normally that's how they do it, but, heh, see, we're not exactly the usual guys to do this, y'know? We're not too good at surrender, anyway. Giving it or accepting it, I mean. She's gonna wanna break a few bones or burn you some more, she's weird like that. Really likes a good knock-down, smack-up brawl with the kicking and the hitting and the explosions. (But who doesn't?) And who _knows _what I'm gonna do! Maybe I'll cut off your arms and leg and replace them with cheap plastic Hogswatch trees! Maybe I'll make you wear a hubcap for a piercing, or nail the world's ugliest hat to your ears! Or, I dunno, just shoot you a lot. Ventilate your bits, know what I'm saying? Nah, me neither, give it a miss."

Kimblee, staring off into the sky, looked back when he realized that Deadpool had stopped talking. "I'm sorry, I stopped listening after the first bit of rambling, can I have that without all the stupid?"

"But then Deadpool won't be able to say anything," Shego said dryly.

"You guys suck," Deadpool complained.

"Well...I'm not exactly sure what's going anymore," Kimblee said. "So...go away please. I'm busy."

"No," Shego said flatly. She drew back slightly, the air around her shimmering green and blasting forward as a beam so bright it was nearly white at the core. Kimblee shrugged, incidentally dropping Jarod while transmuting a great big stone wall in front of him to block the blast. He clapped his hands together, drew upon the Philosopher's Stone, and summoned a blast that completely shattered the alleyway in front of him, cracked the alleyway behind him, smashed the street ahead of him and obliterated the buildings in front of _that_.

Metal, red and melting from the force of the blast, fell around him. He sneezed a bit, the dust that had once been structures of brickwork being bad for his sinuses. Red static crackled around him, sounding like the echoes of distant screams.

Shego and Deadpool were gone, of course. There were no mangled bodies to be seen, but that was hardly a surprise. Kimblee knew all the traditions of battle.

Kimblee heard a blade unsheath, the rustle of cloth, and sighed, grabbing a nearby pipe and transmuting it into a short sword, swinging it over his head just in time to parry the sword-blow Deadpool delivered from overhead while whooping like a crane. (Presumably because it amused him)

Sharp strong metal met inferior but compact metal with a shower of hot sparks. "Hoo-cha hoobie hoo!" Deadpool yelled enthusiastically, flipping overhead and kicking Kimblee hard in the back of the head; Kimblee grunted in surprise and pain, seeing black spots, and was in no position to block a slash that cut a neat wound on his chest.

"Damn it!" Kimblee snapped, stubbornly standing ground and clutching a hand over the wound, Philisopher's Stone perilously close. "Have you ANY idea how hard it is to get blood out of clothing this color? You went and dirtied my outfit. _This is unforgivable_."

"Eh, I get that all the time," Deadpool said carelessly. "You'd be surprised at the things that rile people up. Square-dancing in the nude at their parties...stealing a vampire prince's priceless paintings and artwork, selling them for fish and then dumping the fish in that prince's casket...ordering a sub-orbital strike on a guy's outhouse during football half-time...shaving a guy's pet dragon and giving him a mohawk and a bad attitude...copying your naked deformed butt on all the milk cartons so that everyone who wants a decent breakfast gets to think about THAT all morning long..."

"I did not need to hear that," Kimblee said flatly as he parried another swing, again and again as Deadpool swung into a frenzy. "The things you say will haunt me forever."

"Then my job is done! Aside from, y'know, killing you." Sparks flew, again and again, vibrations ringing down Kimblee's own sword, the metal starting to crack. Kimblee concentrated, and it repaired itself in a flash of red. A moment's pause, slamming it against a ladder, and he reformed it into a much larger sword with a three-foot long blade.

Deadpool pressed the attack, and Kimblee parried again and again, finding it harder with his new sword's increased weight. "How did you survive that blast just now, incidentally?" Kimblee asked.

"Teleporting belt doo-dad." Deadpool aimed, and stabbed right at Kimblee's neck. Kimblee parried it, but not without Deadpool's superior strength throwing his sword off-angle. Deadpool took his moment, and stabbed Kimblee in the shoulder.

"Ah," Kimblee said; before his blood splattered across the ground, he concentrated and used the Philosopher's Stone again, bypassing the need for transmutation arrays or prudence; the ground underneath Deadpool tore apart, rose up, around him, and reformed in the shape of a simplistic cannon larger than a man. Internal machinery roared, and it fired Deadpool straight up in a blast of fire and smoke and a cry of "Look Ma, no wings! Wait, do I even have a mother?"

The ranting red figure arced over a rooftop, flapping his arms like wings, and from the sounds of it, crashing painfully. "That's one interruption down," Kimblee said, wondering where the other one had gone. He waited for a few tense moments for a green-clad woman to reappear and do something horrible with burning pain and such.

This failed to happen.

Kimblee chuckled and dropped the sword, no longer needing it. "That was easier than expected. I'd best get out of here before someone comes-" He turned around to take off with Jarod and stopped. Perhaps because it would be hard to take Jarod and leave when Jarod had, in fact, disappeared.

Kimblee stared at the alleyway where Jarod had fallen, now absent of anyone but Kimblee. "...Damn it," he muttered. Kimblee didn't deal much with anger; strong emotions weren't really his thing, he needed to have a bit of thinking for it. Sometimes he could think exceedingly fast.

Up on the rooftop overhead, Shego ran across a surprisingly strong clothesline, but she would have done it as equally well if it had been frayed and made of thin wire; she'd picked up a few tricks from her time in the local Shinobi Guild. Halfway across, she bounced with the motion of the clothesline and sprung across to the next rooftop and over a elevator lift that hid her from the sight of a potential pursuer. "And they ask me, why do I torture myself with Deadpool? Why do I subject myself to his stupidity? 'Cause he makes a damn good distraction, that's why."

Jarod, slung over her shoulder (he was a pretty big guy, but Shego was far stronger than she looked), groaned. "Ugh...why the self-narration...?"

"Oh good, you're not dead," Shego told him. "Starting to think you looked it. Hang on a sec', got to hand you off to proper rescuin' types, it's not really my thing-"

The ground in front of her sank slightly, flashing red. Shego backstepped and jumped over some overlarge air conditioning units that doubled as cover before the explosion split the building in half and made a big hole in the foundations that tipped what was left of the building, causing the whole thing to start falling apart under her feet.

"Shit shit shit!" Shego yelled, footsteps flashing green with pin-point bursts to blast her across the tilting rooftop, now slanting dangerously; it had gone nearly vertical now, and sinking underground. She jumped over an escape pod someone had installed, landed on it's side as the whole building went completely vertical and jumped away, green fire pouring from her feet with enough force to rocket her away to a nearby building and atop a flat roof shaped like a massive disc.

Green-hued energy swirled around her free hand as she clenched it into a fist; clumsy though it was with one hand, she still could project a blast with deadly accuracy, and she fired off one that could have blasted through steel, punched into concrete, heated Thunderbolt Iron and give secondary adamantium a nasty burn.

But Kimblee was just plain _better _at this then she was, and a alchemist also had a ton of tricks up his sleeve. Rising on a pillar of transmuted brickwall swiftly growing into the air with red static flashing all around, he avoided the blast by simply transmuting his pillar into a hard turn to the left, then going straight up again before he stopped, glaring down at Shego with his arms crossed. "You," He said with that gentle silkiness of the truly psychotic. "Are a nuisance."

"I'm so hurt," Shego said deadpan. "If you're gonna waste everybody's breathing space, could you do me the favor and _try _for better comments? Hmm?"

"Wha' she said," Jarod slurred, managing the strength for this minor comment.

Kimblee glared at her some more. "...Give him to me and I won't force the morgue people to scrape you off the walls." When Shego simpy responded by powered up, a shimmering green aura pulsing out of her and turning more fierce by the moment, he sighed and added, "You don't even know why I have captured him. For all you know, he could be a mass-murdering sociopath with a penchant for eating kittens and laughing at children in a hospice."

"True," Shego acknowledged. "But then I could just blast his face off later. Not that you haven't already done some that way, but...well, between the guy I know nothing about-that being him-and the guy who's running around with souls harvested from a place I actually _like_ and keeps blowing stuff up for giggles-that's _you-_I'm gonna go with the guy that's not you." She paused. "Damn. I've been around Deadpool too damn long, I'm doing that rambling eighty-bazillion words a minute thing he does and _damn _if it's actually kind of fun! But you get my point. Also, why do I keep saying 'damn'? Damn damn damn, for the hellcrap of damn it all, I can't stop saying 'damn', damn it."

Kimblee's eyebrow raised a fraction. "You know of my work today? How...never mind. I will ask you once more. _Give him to me_." He paused. "And you're right. You _do _sound like your companion. Not a point in your favor; the man's an utter lunatic."

"Yeah, but I like it anyway!" Deadpool yelled, teleporting from above.

Kimblee stared. "...I hate this town and everything in it," He said, right before Deadpool kicked Kimblee in the head and knocked him off his perch and start falling.

Deadpool sliced the transmuted pillar Kimblee had made in several piece as he passed them, and kicked the largest one at Kimblee.

"Yeah, that's what my girlfriend said when she found me in the car," Deadpool replied, slicing through the pillar as he fell down; it toppled over and Kimblee fell. "Well, sorta my girlfriend; she was a girl and I knew her and she knew me because I kept sneaking into her place and drinking her beer when she wasn't home and leaving Blocko cities in the shape of my foot on her doorstep and leaving thirty messages on her answering machine with just one word each and hiding in her car to say 'Surprise' in a creepy voice!...Don't judge me."

"How did you say all of that before now!" Kimblee demanded while falling, slapping a hand against the large chunk flying at him, enlargening it and shoving it's pointed ends into the buildings between his fall; he clambered onto it, panting with the effort.

"Talking's a free action, don'tcha know."

"...What does that even mean!"

"Go check a trope entry, ya neophyte!" Deadpool teleported away in mid-fall.

Kimblee sighed, drawing on more of the Stone's power to pull the sides of the buildings into the bridge to push him up. "Why am I always unluckily surronded by idiots and madmen?" Kimblee wondered, sitting up and aching everywhere.

_You do realize that YOU'RE a 'madman', given your own cheerful acceptance of being a freak by society's standards?_ Kevin said smugly. _So...I think it's a matter of attracting appropiate company._

"Oh, shut up."

"Having a bad day, are we?" Kimblee looked up; Shego had spoken, and was standing on the rooftop directly behind him, overlooking Kimblee. Deadpool was beside her, and Jarod was being propped up by the both of them, now sufficiently advanced beyond grogginess to hatefully glare at Kimblee. She chuckled darkly. "It's about to get a lot worse." Deadpool tapped his belt again, and the three of them vanished.

Kimblee frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?" He tilted his head, noticing the sunlight glint off something metal on a rooftop in the distance. Something big, with a odd shape he associated with scopes. "...Oh shit." He slammed a hand on the transmuted bridge, and the facades, walls, internal support and more broke and surged up around him into the shape of a massive craggy shield, far thicker and stronger than any of the materials he transmuted into it, bolstering it by changing the chemical composition of it by making it into a mixture of Raritanium and osmosium; two extremely valuable and strong minerals prized for their strength.

He had excellent timing; no sooner had he done that then there was a distant roar, a glass-shattering shot of immense mechanical force, then the whine of something like a flying missle (only shaped like a drill and fueled with explosive materials no one dared to inquire about) and then it slammed right into the shield Kimblee had made with a truly awesome explosion; the shield held, bending back a bit, but the two buildings it was still attached to, the buildings behind them, the buildings across the street, the buildings behind _those _ones and a sizable part of the street vanished in a roar of rubble and fire, debris fountaining up before crashing back down in a slightly quieter roar. The shield, without anything to hold it up, fell down into the smoke ruin, Kimblee clinging to life underneath it.

On the rooftop where the good guys had assembled for this task (and where Shego and Deadpool had brought a still groggy Jarod), Gibbs tilted his head, still looking through his oversized scope. (If circumstances had permitted, Shego might have made a comment about overcompensation and Freudian psychology and such but Gibbs didn't listen to those sorts of thing. And she might have given Deadpool something to think about...) "I really hate dealing with alchemists," He said after a moment, his massive sniper cannon generating another explosive oversized bullet. From where, no one could say. It just...showed up, perhaps by the same inexplicable processes that allowed Gibbs to produce massive amounts of heavy firearms from his body without apparently violating the laws of conservation of mass. "They're so..._difficult _to predict. It's like hitting a fly with a toothpick."

"I've seen you hit a fly with a toothpick," Roy said. "You made a little crossbow thing with your finger, but you still did it. On a dare, no less."

"A _Bloatfly_. As in a fly the size of a housecat that spits acidic globs at you."

"True, a real fly would have been a challenge, but it still counts, I think."

"Think you got the smug little bastard?" Shego said.

Gibbs shook his head. "Hardly. I _might _have got him with the explosion...but in situations on this? Never bet your life on it."

Greed made an annoyed clicking noise. "Figures. Any ideas?"

"One comes to mind," Roy said smoothly. He raised his gloved hand. "Lay down suppressing fire and cut off the enemy's retreat."

His thumb came flush against his forefinger. Little sparks jumped as the specially designed pyrotex cloth rubbed against itself. He snapped his fingers, the noise overwhelmed by the larger noise of the moisture in the air splitting into hydrogen gas.

Alchemical energy flashed from Roy's hand, energy harnessed and released, the sparks around Roy's hands magnified and amplified to incredible levels...

And then, with a light that forced them to shut their eyes or be blinded by it, _the entire street burst into flame_.

There was a great noise, the kind that hits you like something solid. So loud, you can barely tell what it sounds like, it's just _noise_. Mixed in it was the fire's crackling of anything flammable being consumed, and parts of the street being pulled apart by heat and the ferocity of the fire. The heat was even more intense, just under the roar of the flames, and they could smell bricks cracking, loose dirt baking into glass...and even that was nothing compared to the way the street trembled, as if begining to give way.

"Hmn," Roy said, blue light flashing around his hand; the sea of fire engulfing the street buckled, streamed up, and was gone, leaving a burned street and clouds of smoke behind it. "We're going to need to send someone down here immediately and get all this fixed. I'd hate to let all the residents complain."

When Greed could stand to open his eyes, he saw a street in ruins. Every available surface of the street (except for the buildings) charred black. Half-shaped and ugly glass streaking here and there; melted metal where streetlamps and wayposts had been; and making him want to sneeze, the stink of ash, and smoke. Shego wrinkled her nose, taking a few steps away from Roy. "...When they call you State Alchemists 'human weapons', they aren't kidding."

"Don't remind me," Roy said, sounding bitter and old.

"Psst!" Deadpool said in a stage whisper to Shego that everyone could hear. "Don't remind the old soldier about the whole 'attack dog used by a dictatorship controlled by a person-shaped abomination'! _You'll be next_." Roy didn't give him the dignify of even reacting to that.

"Think _that _got him?" Greed said, after making sure that Jarod was in his robot and more or less okay.

"Probably not," Roy said, with what was startling pessimism under the circumstances. "Gibbs? Wait for movement and fire at whatever moves. And use smaller caliber bullets; this street's taken enough of a beating. We don't want to drop the roof on the Underdistrict."

"And on the off-chance that someone _stayed _after all this?" Greed said.

Gibbs and Roy stared at him like he was an idiot. "..After _Deadpool _started ranting and railing outside their homes?" Gibbs said.

"And all those explosions going on outside?" Roy said. "They'd have to be _brain-dead _to sit still without investigating! And even so, I didn't touch the buildings." This was true; even though they were streaked with ash and lightly burned by the heat, they hadn't actually been damaged in any way. Greed grunted his acknowledgement.

Gibbs djusted the sniper cannon; two sections slid away, and two outer halves of a Dakka-Dakka bullet fell away onto the ground, leaving only a smaller part of the bullet inside. Still explosive and armor-piercing, but less destructively so.

Down on the street below, the rubble of the broken buildings destroyed by the power of a Dakka-Dakka bullet, shifted, and a door appeared in a flash of red. It open, revealed a hastily transmuted tunnel, it's walls made of rubble packed together into solid surfaces, and Kimblee stepped out of it, breathing hard and slick with sweat. "That does it," he said. "A precise strike, is it? I offer a precise strike of my own." He judged the distance and considered. He saw the little robot, and the man sitting in it. (Kimblee had _extremely _good eyesight.) He clapped his hands, drawing on more of the Stone's power, draining away at the lives of the people in it. (In the hospital, two of those who'd had their souls drained died, without any fuss or acknowledgement.)

Deadpool put a hand over his eyes. "Hmn?" He said. "What's that ominous red glow in the distance?"

Roy paled. "_Shit_." He grabbed Gibbs and Shego and shoved them onto Deadpool, toppling into the robot Jarod was still in. "Go go go, teleport us out here _RIGHT NOW!_"

Greed waved at them. "You guys go on. I think I'll handle this one for a bit."

"'Kay," Deadpool said,, and they disappeared and reappeared on the other side of the street in flashes of light, leaving Greed by himself.

Greed chuckled. "...Huh, he really did it. Half-thought he'd take me anyway. Oh well, them's the breaks in using reformed mercenaries and thieves for your personel." The red light of transmutation flashed again, and the street tore apart shattering in a explosive blast and a sound like the roar of the titans cast down by gods. "...Bring it on," Greed said with a grin, not sounding particularly worried as the explosion smashed into the building he was standing on like a truck hitting an eggshell.

Roy and the others, watching safely from the other end of the street that was mostly unharmed by the battle fury, winced. "...He can take it," Shego said confidently.

"I hope so," Gibbs said. He knew of Greed's capabilities, but still...that was a lot to get hit by.

"Greed's tougher than that," Roy said; Shego and Deadpool nodded. "Even being hit by a blast like that won't kill him. A homunculus like Greed will only be slowed down."

"A what?"

"Long story! Not really important right now."

Kimblee went over to the building he had targeted (aside from wiping out most of the street) and considered whether or not to dig through the rubble, or just transmute it into something easier to go through. He sighed; he'd seen the flash of light. More teleportation. He considered what to do, and the rubble shifted. Blood was flowing out from underneath it.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow, and caught sight of something moving under the ruins. A flash of something gruesome; a flayed hand, flashing red like the Stone, muscles and tendons and veins over the bones and skin appearing in patches and spots...and fingerbones that looked like a monster's _claws_.

And, just for a moment, the shine of metallic black, contrasted by the symbol of an dragon biting it's own tail around a six-pointed star, right on the back of the hand.

Kimblee's breath caught in his throat as he instantly recognized the symbol of the Ouroboros. His mind froze at the sheer absurdity of it. _No_, he thought stupidly. _This is becoming absolutely absurd-_

The rubble _flew_, and a jet-black form smashed into Kimblee, the two rolling across the ground, bouncing once, twice; powerful hands pounding him again and again, sharp claws gouging him open, black armor-shell splattered with blood now, every time he hit it, felt like striking _metal_-

They hit the ground again. Kimblee tasting blood and the thing punched him in the shoulder so hard he dislocated it and crunched the bones. The pain struck him mute for a moment, and then he screamed, angry and infuriated, staring into the face of the homunculus that was and was not Lin Yao; the former human's entire body transformed into a carbon-based organic armor that was as flexible as skin, red marks and lines set on tracks on his upper body.

A shell-shaped head, the armor setting it in that form for maximum protection, looked down at him. A face that was a crude mimicry of humanity, a pair of narrow red eyes and a lipless mouth with overlarge fangs bared.

"Greed the Avaricious," Kimblee said blandly. "We've never met. My apologies."

"I'm not sorry," Greed said. "You're kinda an asshole, you know? But if you wanna know me _properly..._"

He threw Kimblee across the street, right into a mailbox reduced to slag. (It was still quite hot, and patches of Kimblee's skin peeled away on it.) Greed followed, unhurried and anxious to break bones and do some properly brutal good. "I am Greed the Avaricious!" The homunculus proclaimed. "Sharing body-space with Prince Lin Yao, the twelth son of the Emperor of Xing! I, created over _two hundred years ago to serve my Father!_ I, who turned against him and his stupid plans to use the country of Amestris as human resources! I, who was captured by him, killed, and reduced to my very core to be returned to my Father's soul! I, who was reborn when Lin Yao accepted me into his soul!"

He kept coming. Like a _machine._ He kept taking step after step, claws twisting with bloodthirsty hate.

"I, who turned against my Father a second and final time; unlike _you_, who allied WITH HIM! And me, I would have stood with the humans on that Promised Day that never came, because the likes of you tore the gates of the worlds open and _let the Heartless IN!_ Because of the monsters like YOU, I lost my world! I lost my precious subordinates! I lost the kingdoms that would have been mine! Those yet to be born and claimed as mine! An entire world that belonged to ME! Those precious to me were _STOLEN BECAUSE OF YOU!_"

Greed now stood over Kimblee. The Red Lotus Alchemist tried to move, to _think_; he grabbed the Stone-

Greed grabbed him by the throat. Claws bit in, and _squeezed_.

"And here we are again," Greed hissed, eyes narrowing a fraction. "I found this world. I have other things that are precious to me. A whole world that is _MINE_. No one will take it from me. Not you. Not the Heartless. Not the embittered machines that think. Not whatever insane masters you serve now. Not whatever gods twist the fates of all things. Because I am _GREED INCARNATE. _And all this world...is _MINE_."

_You know, I like this guy,_ Kevin remarked off-handedly. _He's a pretty cool guy. A bit dramatic and really beating around the bush with his actual motivations, but cool_.

Kimblee laughed weakly, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. "Edward Elric was right...spouting self-righteous nonsense like that, when what you _really _want is so obvious. You really are...an 'evolved human', are you not?"

He squeezed the Philisopher's Stone and gently laid a hand against Greed's chest. A pity he wasn't sure what it was made of, but that mattered little. Greed's hand relaxed a fraction in surprise. Kimblee grinned, and the red light shined. The air shook with the explosion that followed; parts of the street cracked and even caved in, and a nearby building collapsed, a human-shaped figure blasted right into it.

Moments later, Greed just smashed through the rubble, completely unharmed. "It's a good thing I can heal or I'd be dead now," He said, and paused. "Actually, I think I _did _die when the building collapsed on me, but details."

"Who are you talking to? Never mind, I don't care that much," Kimblee said, standing behind him and letting loose with another blast right at Greed's back.

To his credit, Greed turned around just as the explosion came rushing at him and, instead of making some sort of doomed gesture of fleeing, he stood his ground, holding his arms up defensively. It didn't do him much good, as his brief flight arrested by the rooftop of a nearby building and a subsequent tour of all three of it's floors via smashing through them proved, but it was sort of heroic. And, as he smashed right through the door of that building, charging at Kimblee without a scratch, he was _still _not so much as scratched.

"Oh, come on!" Kimblee said, exasperated, as he transmuted a giant stone fist out of the ground and sent it flying at Greed with such force that the air around it bent. "Being caught in one explosion kills you once, but several point-blank blasts only slow you down?"

"I'm the '_Ultimate Shield'_, of course I'm gonna take it without a beat!" Greed bragged (and not mentioned that he'd been unarmored when the explosion had hit him the first time), charging head-long into the fisticuff missle in a shoulder-rush, the unstoppable force of the alchemically created missle against the immovable object that was Greed. (Technically, as Greed was moving, he didn't count as 'immovable', unless you considered the immovable object as a perfect defense and the unstoppable force as a perfect offense, in which cases it was totally a good analogy.)

Homunculus and missle collided in a blast; stone fragments flew everywhere, and dust billowed up like a bomb's wake. Greed, of course, came running right through the dust; in one hand, he was holding a huge piece of a fist-shaped stone, the biggest piece he could have grabbed when he smashed through it and left the rest to fly wherever. "Think fast!" He said, and threw the stone bit (which happened to be a curled middle finger, but it was probably a coincidence) at Kimblee with all the force he could muster.

In normal circumstances, it would have probably squished him like a rather overripe grape. (He was just an ordinary human physically, after all; he wasn't even in very good shape, what with being a tad lazy normally and using a body that had been subjected to horrific experiments and tortured and starved for who-knew-how-long.) Fortunately for Kimblee but unfortunately for the total quality of the gene pool, he was carrying a powerful alchemical artifact that only required a moment's concentration to use, and a massive stone wall rose out of the ground in front of him, pulling from the street around it and sprouting spikes all over; the stone smashed into it without any real effect.

Kimblee smirked. "Is that it?" He said.

"Not even close," Greed promised, and kept going. Kimblee smiled cruelly, and red light flashed around him.

Up above on the rooftops, Roy and his team were getting frustrated at being unable to get a decent bead on Kimblee, as the two of them kept moving around so much. without being in a position to hit Greed on accident. "Gibbs!" Roy said, starting to lose patience. "Do you think you can risk a shot?"

Gibbs peered over a bit of rubble on the creaking rooftop they'd paused on; it was important to stay off of Kimblee's vision, lest he blow them away on a whim. The skin around his right eye rippled, and a thin scope slid over his eye. "No," He said, a touch of irritation in his voice. "I _might _hit Kimblee...but at this distance, the blast might hit too. And even if we have decent cover, there's no promising that it would hold up."

"Y'know, a thought comes to mind," Shego said. "You could...I don't know...try _not using big guns_. Just a little sniper rifle and put a bullet in his brain. Just saying."

Gibbs, Roy and Deadpool stared at her. "...What?" Roy said, as if it were an unspeakable idea.

"Have you no romance in your soul, woman?" Deadpool said indignantly. "Great big explodey guns are a _MAN'S SOUL!_ The romance of a man is the roar of the gatling laser, the cry of the rocket launcher, the scream of the flamethrower! No man, deep in his soul, can deny the boy inside and his love for all mechanical things that make other things go boom, and to DENY it is to DENY your _MANLINESS!_ Is that what you want, us to deny our manliness! What beast, nay, monster, no, eldritch abomination, no! What manner of TAX ACCOUNTANT are you to deny a man's romance!"

"...Actually, making big guns is mostly what my Devil Fruit lets me do," Gibbs explained.

"...Why!" Shego demanded.

"It's called the _Dakka-Dakka Fruit_. "An overwhelming concentration of heavy fire is essentially the _point _of the damn thing.."

"Sniper-type is hardly a heavy firearm."

"It is when it's firing a missle the size of your head," Gibbs said.

A loud blast interrupted their conversation, and Greed's loud yell. They watched him sail across the street, slamming into yet another building; he didn't cave this one in, he just smashed right through it and into another one, amid much cursing and yelling. "I am so glad we evacuated everyone or we'd have one of the worst casualty reports in recent history," Roy said grimly.

"What about when the Lowardians attacked?" Shego said. She would know, having been one of the pivotal figures in stopping that very attack. (It had actually inspired her and her former boss Dr. Drakken to go and make a clean slate. Well, acceptably grubby, anyway.)

"...An entire district was demolished," Roy said, eventually. "I'd rather avoid planning for another scenario like that."

"Wait, when did _that _happen?" Deadpool said. Below, there was another explosion. This didn't hit Greed this time, and he resumed trying to wail on Kimblee onto to have the rogue alchemist transform his limbs into more freakish amalgations of lethal alien species and proceed to fight back with a tenacity and enthusiasm that made up for his relative lack of combat skill.

Roy blinked. "Are you serious? How can you not know? An _entire district _was WIPED OUT! The Factory District was completely annihilated! It took us nearly a _year _to rebuild our major manufactories, and we're still trying to make up for it every time some chief or federal lord or priest-king comes from somewhere on the planet telling us we're falling back on a deal we cut with them because we aren't giving them whatever we promised to because the factory that made them are gone and the people that privatized it are _dead! _The Beach District was built from the ruins of the Factory District because an inland sea filled up what was left because of all the collateral damage and we used what we could scavenge from the ruins to build new homes and buildings and put them on a mobile sea construct! To say _nothing _of all the sea monsters the Lowardians made by mutating sea life, or the pirates they supplied and cut deals with to weaken us and are still running around making trouble for my men. How could you _seriously not know!_"

Deadpool was unfazed. "Oh, all that. I was out of town at the time."

"...You were out of town."

"Yeah. I was on the Discworld doing stuff. Earning brownie points with Death by bringing him cat shelters (by which I mean transporting entire cat shelters to his domain, not _killing _them!); destabilizing Ephebe and Pseudopolis by screwing with their understanding of democracy for giggles; giving the more militant Omnians a few Holy Hand Grenades I looted and watching the fireworks; giving the hidden orc communities in far Uberwald gas-powered automatic-crossbows and steam-powered chainsaw-swords because the multiverse needs more Orky orcs; stealing all the beer from Four-Ecks, sending it to the Agatean Empire where I got it blown up and seeing if I could blame it all on the Breccia; feeding some swamp dragons a super-special-awesome mutagen that turned them into kaiju and then sicing them on the Ankh-Morpork aristocracy; some other stuff...oh, and I stole Commander Vimes' hat. For about five minutes. Then he found me."

"Is...is that so?" Shego said, not having the slightest idea what Deadpool was talking about.

"Such horrible things were done to me!" Deadpool said cheerfully. "They will haunt me forever."

Roy rolled his eyes. "So do half the things that damaged brain of your's vomits up..."

"My brain isn't damaged, just in a constant state of flux," Deadpool clarified.

Shego rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the explaination no one wanted or cared about."

"Your hair is silly!"

Gibbs appeared from behind them and dope-slapped them both in the back of the head. "Will you two focus?" He said.

"Gah! The Gibbs-Slap! It is a dope-slap of LEGEND!" Deadpool said, astounded and bewildered and a little bit gassy from all the fried food he ate. "...I may never wash the back of my head again. Now that I have been struck by pure _AWESOMENESS_. Huh, I'm not sure if I've ever washed the back of my head before, but I guess there's no reason to start now!"

Shego rubbed the back of her head. "Hey, that actually hurt." Gibbs frowned at her. "Uh...not complaining or anything..."

"Not that I have your attention, I'd like to point out something important," Gibbs said.

"Yeah. Where's Lin's robot...head...thing?" Roy asked

"What?" Shego looked around; the robot had gone. "And on that note, what happened to the guy we put in it?"

"And where'd this note come from?" Shego said, ripping a note taped to Deadpool's back.

"Ow! Hey, how the holy hell did that hurt!" Deadpool wondered. "I'm wearing three layers of clothing and a overcoat, I shouldn't feel that at all."

"What's the note say?" Roy asked.

"_I.O.U. one robot thing, signed Jarod,_" Shego read. "_P.S.:I'll bring it back to Lin Yao/Greed, promise! P.P.S.: Please don't waste time wondering how I wrote this note, put it on Wade Wilson's back and stole your robot without anyone noticing, it'll only waste time. P.P.P.S.: Why do people put 'P.S.' at the ends of notes? If they want to tell people, they should just put it in the note itself. And I don't think anyone knows that 'P.S.' stands for Post Script anymore._" She looked up. "Eh, good points."

"_What_," Gibbs said flatly. "...Who the hell is Jarod? I've never heard of anyone named that before in my life!"

"And I thought you paid closer attention to rumor," Roy said dryly.

On the street below, under cover of a canopy Kimblee had transmuted from the entire street and pulled over his head (and making it grow some nice thick pillars to support it, of course), Greed and Kimblee were fighting some more.

It is an extremely hard thing to fight an ordinary person in posession of a Philosopher's Stone. Even a very weak one affords alchemic power that breaks the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass that alchemy operates by; even an uneducated man or woman could use the weakest shard of a Stone to summon machine guns from sticks, or animate statues to do their bidding. Inevitably, such a weak stone will backfire and rebound, all it's power coming back on the foolish person who dares to transgress on the laws of nature...but until then, they are _strong_.

A capable alchemist with a Philosopher's Stone, whether a weak Stone or not, is as beyond that level of threat as a tiger is more dangerous than a housecat. An ordinary person works with assumptions and wishes; a true alchemist knows just _how _their transmutation works, and thus how to best amplify their powers. It's the difference between an untrained civilian with a gun (a credible threat but not particularily skilled with it)...and a professional sniper at the aiming rig of a orbital death ray located three feet from you.

Kimblee was a _very _capable alchemist. And the Stone he'd created, while flawed, was more powerful than any he'd ever held. Brimming with the souls of those who had survived the flood of darkness that had consumed their worlds, bright enough to attract the attention of the Heartless in the first place. All of them flowing together, a great mass of consciousness and will put into _his _hands alone, augmenting his power by a level bigger than his initial projections...

With that level of power, it was a simple matter for him to transmute what he needed to fend off Greed while he thought of a better means to combat the homunculus. "You're not so good at hand-to-hand, are you?" Greed asked Kimblee as the two fought claw to claw; Greed with the natural claws that formed in his transformation, Kimblee with a mechanical set that was part of a exoskeletal rig he had transmuted out of the outer layer of a building he had briefly slammed into, alchemically taking a chunk of metal off it and reshaping it into a intricate armored exo-rig of grinding pistons and sliding bits and mechanical muscles to augment his strength (and still light enough to be carried with ease), fitting snugly around his arms and back, plates of armor wrapped over the oversized and brutish arms, operated by means of a crude system of pulleys he'd hooked his fingers into and transmuting bits of it as he needed.

"I've never needed to be," Kimblee said, parrying slash after slash; the metal he'd created to armor himself was unique, a mixture of a kinetic-energy absorbant metal called vibranium and a much-prized substance called Raritanium; with the power of the Philosopher's Stone, he'd easily created this new fusion of wondrous metals out of baser materials, something he would have to suggest Wuya to create herself and mass-produce as armoring for her warships. As a consqequence, the fight was turning against Greed; his strength, while beyond a human's, wasn't enough to break through Kimblee's armor, and he seemed to rely a lot on his armor.

His armor. Now _that _was the problem, Kimblee mused as he pulled his armored-arms over his face and slamming one into Greed's on-coming claws, giving Greed a split-second opening that the homunculus didn't fail to exploit and rammed a elbow into his stomach.

Kimblee gasped. "Don't suppose...you'll tell me what your armor's...made of?" He asked weakly.

"Would you sit down, shut up, give up the Stone and surrender peacefully?" Greed replied.

"Ah, an excellent point, and one that I suppose translates to 'hell naw' in the vernacular." Kimblee's forearm-armor expanded and extended, creating a very wide blade with a curiously beveled edge. Again, he struck at Greed's eyes; they obviously couldn't be armored, or how could he see?

The blade landed on Greed's face, missing his eyes by a fair bit; Greed wasn't even knocked back, thin cracks shimmered up the armblade, and Greed laughed. "Seriously? You didn't put an edge on that thing. I already told you, I'm the _Ultimate Shield_. That mail-opener of your's won't even scratch me! Have I said that before, it feels like I have."

"While it would have been a good oppertunity, I'm not trying to cut you. Why do that, when there are things I can do better? For example: if I cannot penetrate your armor, I will simply work around it."

His braced his right arm against Greed's chest, and a small explosion shoved Greed back, sending him rolling head-long across the open street. (And through a mailbox. It was fortunately not a living one.) A bit of ground in his path broke and reformed as a hand and rose up; Greed flew right into it, putting a serious dent in it but not destroying it.

He almost fell off; it crackled with red, and more hands balloned from it's 'palm', wrapped around his body and putting him in an awkward position that made it difficult to move. "Aw hell," Greed muttered, dismayed at this turn of events. He knew what happened when crazy science-themed jerks tied you up like this. (He'd been _made _by one, after all.) "This is gonna suck, isn't it?"

Kimblee chuckled darkly. "You have _no _idea!" He took a firm stance, securing himself for when he put a hand on the ground and transmuted it so that it _split_, a large sheaf of rock from underneath sliding up and slicing through ground, red light flashing around it and carrying Kimblee right toward's Greed, air breaking everywhere as it accelerated.

Greed glowered at the on-coming alchemist riding the mobile stone; judging from the way it was tearing up the ground and getting bigger without actually leaving any mess except for the big gulf behind it, it could be assumed that it was moving by incoporating the mass of the street it was ramming through into itself, looking like a bizarre mix of a breaching iceburg and a shark's fin.

He braced himself for the impact; it looked like it was about to ram right into him. Much to his surprise, instead of hitting him, it stopped just short of that, slowing down a bit before transmuting itself solid with the rest of the street, the sudden deceleration snapping it's top half right off and to the ground, taking Kimblee with it. It flashed red in mid-air, and large thick tendrils spun out to stab into the ground right around Greed, stopping the falling projectile in mid-air. Possibly to prevent it from snapping and falling away, the tendrils thickened, the mass of the thing shifting to them until the end result was the world tallest and most threatening looking gazebo. Kimblee came sliding down one of the tendrils, the one right in front of Greed. The surface of it turned into a board-like structure that went down at incredible speeds without detaching from the tendril proper, something like a very fast escalator effect.

Kimblee slammed right in front of Greed, a black-clad nightmare, armored arms dull with the sunlight filtered by all the dust. "I am an alchemist, and so I know this," Kimblee whispered, grinning maniacally. "Whatever can exist must be created...and whatever can be created, can be _destroyed_."

He wound his right arm back; it flashed red again, and for a moment Greed caught a glimpse of an absurdly advanced transmutation circle flashing on the back of the hand. Spikes appeared on the knuckles. "Suffer," Kimblee said, mechanical muscles tensing with such tightness that bits of vapor hissed out from the armor, grinding sounds from deep within. "And know what it is like to be as vulnerable as a human, you traitor."

Kimblee grinned. He held his hand up...and paused. The shadow around him seemed to be getting bigger, and it was too wide, too round, to be something related to the Heartless.

Come to think of that, why was there a sudden deficit of sunlight above him?

And then, Lin's robot slammed right onto Kimblee from above with a tremendous crash. More dust pillowed up, and cleared to reveal the robot sitting half-submerged in the ground, Jarod awkwardly sitting in it.

Greed blinked. "...A little help?" He asked.

"Hold on," Jarod grunted, in a clipped voice that was unusual for him; he was so injured, it hurt to talk. He fumbled with the controls, eventually twisting a lever, causing thin blades to appear from the robot's 'mouth' and stab right into the stony hands holding Greed still and break them, allowing him to drop down after the blades retracted.

They both waited for a moment, being sufficiently familiar with the rules of drama to understand how this sort of thing worked. Kimblee failed to tear his way out from underground. Greed straightened up, and looked at Jarod. "...That's my robot," He said at last. "Why do you have my robot?"

"Sort of stole it," Jarod said. "Left note. Only borrowing."

Greed tilted his head. "...Well, if it's just borrowing I'll only have to break your legs. Don't like people taking my stuff, on account of my stuff belonging to me." This did not appear to make a great deal's difference to Jarod, even if it was (probably) only a joke. Greed paused, noticing that the man was still badly injured enough to need to have pulled all sorts of random junk for a makeshift crutches just to keep him upright. "On second thought...yeah, you've suffered enough. We can consider karma pre-emptively kicking your ass for taking my stuff."

"Fine," Jarod said. "Think he's dead?"

"Nope," Greed said.

Jarod pulled at the grips that served as the locomotion controls, and the robot pulled itself out of the ground, with some effort. Underneath where it had been, the hole was empty, with no Kimblee to be seen. There was, however, a small tunnel at the very bottom, it's sides being smooth and bearing the stretched fragmented marks of transmutation.

They stared at it. "...Damn it, why won't he stay still and die!" Greed demanded.

"Villain code of standards."

"_AHEM_!" Someone said. They looked up and saw Roy Mustang on a nearby building, finally catching up with them. "Could you guys move please?"

They stepped back. A good long way; barely a pause between them getting away before Roy raised his hand, snapped his fingers, and sent a massive blast of fire into the hole Kimblee had escaped down.

Greed and Jarod moved back even further; the ground around the hole had turned red and was starting to fuse into glass. Along the street, burning spouts burst out, dirt fountaining up and blasted around by ten-foot high columns of flame, more and more of them until most of the _entire _street blasted up in a short but intense blast of fire. (Except around Greed and Jarod. Roy Mustang had _exceedingly _good aim.)

"...Do you think _that _killed him?" Jarod asked Greed.

"No," Greed said flatly.

Jarod shrugged, wincing. "Can still interrogate him, then." Greed gave him an odd look.

In a nearby building (originally a training dojo for the renowning martial art of Thousand Wounds Gear Style or, as the dojo's name proclaimed, _Chainsaw Karate_, thus explaining why it was still standing; when you're teaching people to shred things by touching them, you want the building to be tough), Kimblee, having left behind his admittingly useful exo-rig due to it's weight, hauled himself onto the remnant of a training mat, congratulating himself for his brilliance in sealing up the tunnel behind him, or he would have been fried. "So," He said to himself, breathing heavily and grinning so broadly his face hurt. "What a beautiful day fate has brought me," He said dreamily. "So many old foes that have returned to unmake me. Destroyers from the days past, to arrest my future. Yes. So beautiful." He glanced at himself, at the blood staining his clothes, all the brutal wounds and painful aches going to his very bones. A moment's concentration on the stone, applying what he need about medical alchemy, and they faded somewhat, wounds clothing up and his bones mending themselves just enough.

There was still blood on him, though. He still ached. "Am I..." Kimblee stared at the Stone, as if asking the raging multitude he could just barely glimpse within it. "Am I going to die here?"

_I do not mean to sound cowardly, _Ghostfreak said quietly. _But the odds are severely against us._

Kimblee appeared to smile "Oh?"

_Yes. We are being persued by an indestructable man, this human weapon your memories call the Flame Alchemist, and we can only assume that those freaks he brought are still alive._

"I know," Kimblee said. "Yes. It is likely now. I _could _very well die here. My body crushed and my flesh torn and me burned to dust. Thoughts of me to be ignored and abandoned, nothing more than a distant memory..."

Kimblee paused, staring at the Stone again. "...The people of Ishbalan have made this place their own, and seem to be recovering. The Flame Alchemist fights as fiercely as ever even though he lost everything. Has nothing I have done made a difference? Will I really die here? Is that what fate has in store for me?"

_Er, _Ghostfreak said._ Why would you be harboring thoughts of despair now?_

Kimblee stared into space...and then he smiled.

"Despair?" He said softly. "No. Not despair." He laughed, quiet and honestly. "If that is what must be, than die I shall. And I will make my death _magnificent_. And if I do not...I shall endeavor to see to it that _their _deaths shall be magnicent!

"No fleeing now. The game has become higher. They have made it more difficult, more memorable, more interesting! How can I dare to call myself the Red Lotus Alchemist and flee now! No." Kimblee stood up. "I shall pit myself against them. Roy Mustang, that shooter, Greed, Deadpool and Shego. I will fight them, I will stand against them, and I will _exterminate _them and reclaim Jarod for Mr. Lyle. I will finish the mission or I shall die doing it. And even if I die...Foster's has fallen, it's people trapped within the Philosopher's Stone. They will learn to _know _that there is no safety from the darkness, no reprieve in this war. Perhaps...they will see sense, and when Wuya comes calling, they will choose to take her hand and stand with her. I will not die for nothing. And...the odds are not as stacked against me as it would seem. I do have the advantage in numbers."

_Yeah? Assume that Ghostfreak is really on board with you and not pulling some sort of game,_ Kevin said. _And what about me? I'm sure as hell not working with you. So what are you talking about?_

Kimblee opened his right hand. The Philosopher's Stone glowed brightly. "Why, I have _hundreds _to back me up. Their will is my will. Their strength has become mine. What better form of numbers advantage could I need?"

He chuckled and squeezed, red light streaming through his fingers. He clapped his hands, just once, the sound a perfunctionary gesture in the silence. "But," He added, as the darkness took shape in that ruined dojo, strange forms heaving themself from pools of liquid blackness and taking shape. "I feel my friends here deserve a chance to do what they do best."

_...Shit_, Kevin said, as the resulting alchemic explosion smashed through the side of the dojo and across the street, shredding up the pavement and into the building Roy and his entourage were hiding on; it's entire foundation was _vaporized _from the front, the rest of it holding by steel cables and concrete framework that simply couldn't handle such a dramatic shift in weight. Snapping, unraveling and breaking started happening immediately.

"Damn it, not again," Gibbs said, now mildly annoyed as the rooftop they were standing on slowly tipped to one side and an ominous screeching noise suggested that the rooftop was suffering internal damages soon to be catastrophic.

"Hey, I saw him throw all kinds of cool stuff at the boss!" Deadpool complained as the ground got closer, and more pressingly, the rooftop cracked in half, the half they were standing on suddenly in the air but now in gravity's grip. Gravity had a pretty standard response to these situations. "What, we only get the same explosions over and over!"

"Looks like," Shego agreed as the rooftop, carrying them with it, fell. Unable to hold it's own weight even for a little bit, it broke apart in several large chunks. Shego flipped off the piece she was standing on as they accelerated, landed on the vertical front of another, jumped off that, bounced off the spinning top of another piece and finally landing on the mostly flat horizontal bit of a larger piece.

Roy rolled his eyes. "Is this really the best he can do?" He complained, spreading his hands wide and revealing rather intricate transmutation circles inscribed on his glove-palms. He brought them together, briefly looking like a man in prayer, and then slammed them on his falling chunk of rooftop; there was a flash of blue light, cleaner and smoother and _better _than Kimblee's somehow, amd metal cables burst out from around him fanning around him and splitting into hair thin extensions weaving together into a air-tight metal balloon over his head, so light and spread so thin that it weighed hardly anything at all. Without a moment to spare, Roy lifted his hand up and snapped his fingers, producing a single solitary spark that exploded into a flame in the heart of the net, not exploding like his other fires had but simply growing larger and brighter, hanging overhead like a miniature sun. The balloon expanded, hot air filling it and trapped by it's particular shape, and incredibly, it slow down in midair, slowly floating down to the ground.

"Impressive work," Gibbs commented, idlely keeping pace on his bit of rubble as it fell down, not bothering at all to seek escape or some creative means of escape; he was simply endeavoring to stay on the top of it by the time it crashed. Roy smirked arrogantly.

The chunks of rooftop crashed into the street below; or at least Shego and Gibbs' did; Shego turned the momentum of the crash to her advantage by letting herself be thrown off and arcing across the street, catching a lamppost and swinging her way down it to the street in a single fluid movement. Gibbs didn't bother moving once the crashing was inevitable and stoof his ground on the top of it, hitting the ground without being harmed; after the dust from the impact cleared off, he simply walked off it, absently dusting himself. Roy, on the other hand, floated down in a gentle landing and chose to direct the fire animating his now useless ballon and direct it to the dojo the blast had come from, shaping it into a wall of fire around the building, amplifying them into a massive firestorm to cut off Kimblee's retreat and pen him in.

After Roy's bit of flying rubble touched the ground, the flames from the dojo died away, the bits of rubble from blowing it up hit the ground without hitting anyone and Roy deflated the balloon, Jarod and Greed ran up. "There you are," Shego said. "Had him going on the ropes for a bit...at least until he kept blasting you around like a patsy."

Greed shrugged. "At least I'm getting you _worried_," He said as charmingly as he could while looking like a demonic beast-thing with exposed teeth and weird track marks all over his body and no ears or nose...which was surprisingly a lot of charm.

"Don't push your luck," She said dryly. She frowned. "Where's Deadpool?"

A bit of rubble unearth itself; Deadpool, his clothes a lot more bloodstained than before, crawled out, with many sickening cracks and crunches that resolved themself in short order before he stood up. He still looked broken. "Yo," Deadpool said.

Gibbs stared at him. "...You let yourself be hit by the rubble," He said flatly.

"Yep! I mean, you had the badass 'do not care one bit about impending death' thing, the Flamey guy had that hot balloon bit, so not much creative stuff I could pull, and Shego did the flippy-ninja-jumps-of-LAYFE bit, so I figured, what's awesomer than all that? Easy, not doing _anything at all!_ Showed those rocks what I think of them, me not caring if they crushed. Which they did. It hurt. A lot."

"Your head's on backwards," Roy pointed out tactfully.

"Huh, I thought things looked screwier than normal. When I'm not having hallucinations of dancing hot dogs in tuxedos asking me to dance with them into oblivion is what I mean." Deadpool twisted his head in the right direction and a nasty crack. "Wonder if anyone else has hallucinations like that?"

"More to the point.." Roy gestured towards the dojo and snapped his fingers; fire erupted from inside of it, blasting out throught the windows and around it in a startlingly intense firestorm for a few brief moment. The dojo sagged in on itself slightly, blackened and burned.

"A bit much, don't you think?" Gibbs said.

"I'm the _Flame Alchemist_," Roy said. "'Overkill' is what I do." He frowned. "And a guy who has a superpower acquired from a magical fruit called the '_Dakka-Dakka Fruit_' can say that how?"

"With great ease. Think Kimblee survived?"

"Only one way to be sure," Roy said, and moved towards the dojo, intent on frying anything that moved. He paused, hearing a familiar ringtone from his pocket. "...What."

"Your phone's ringing," Greed said helpfully.

"I know what my ringtone means!" Roy hurredly checked it. "What the...an emergency transmission's coming through? Who the hell authorized that!"

"Some random civillian?" Gibbs guessed. Roy grunted, acknowledging the truth of this. Around them, there was an odd noise, everything metal around them shaking and trembing and rattling as each square inch of metal reacted to having specific vibration signals streamed around them and tuning them into proper receiving and sound-broadcast mediums.

In a nearby alleyway that Kimblee had just barely managed to escape to before the dojo had gone up in flames, the Red Lotus Alchemist stared into the sky; the clouds, no, the area directly above the rooftops was...shimmering, with something like rolling static. Like a translucent screen was appearing overhead, big enough to encompass several neighborhood's views but distant enough to keep things comfortable. "Hmm? What is this?"

They had all looked up, the 'screens' becoming clearer. Far from them, unseen but so frequent that they were perfectly aware of what was going on, a broadcast station had sent a specific sort of signal to certain nodes kept safe through the entire First District that were always awaiting certain types of broadcasts. Those nodes, large and blocky things, were quietly coming to life, recieving their signals, decoding them and translating them into the proper sequences that they sent directly into the mass media hive-mind.

(_The Hitchhiker's Guid entry on Traverse Town's entertainment and lifestyle sections mention that the town has an...interesting way of dealing with mass media. True, they do have orbital relays to send signals across the planet and towers set up all over town to facilitate localized networking, but one of the remnants of the lost precursors that built the town happened to be _exceptionally _useful for this purpose; a large cloud of nanoscopic robotic organisms flying two miles above the town like a diffuse cloud, thinning and thickening as the weather changed but incapable of leaving the area no matter what force was thrown at them. And, incidentally, completely harmless and apparently disinterested in anything around them. Dormant and lifeless for how many millenia, until the first radio waves, wireless signals and network broadcasts of the current era played in town: they had spontaneously awakened and, independent of any obvious stimuli, tapped into and absorbed those signals, modifying them and making them _better_. Further investigation proved that they were phenomonally capable information routers, and in fact had been absorbing the data from over a thousand different worlds, and were quite capable of sending it. Experimentation and the work of technopaths led to discovered that the nanobot cloud was a proto-hivemind; not much more intelligent then a bright dog, cheerful and extremely focused on serving anyone that could access it's information core or receive it's signals: it was only too happy to serve as the new hub of a interworld Internet that would up forming by accident. Exactly why ancient precursors would have built such things to survive to the modern day but still knew nothing about the mysterious disappearance of those very precursors was a subject of some debate. A few pundits joked that the nanobots DID know, they just wouldn't say._

_(Many innovations had been created with the nanobot cloud in mind. Among them was Traverse Town's means of sending out public programming, announcements, official news direct from the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and of course emergency news reports regarding sufficiently wide-scale incidents. It was a simple process to create a form of encrypted communications that the lower layer of the nanobots would swarm over and replicate a holographic screen to show them properly, so massive and defined that even people on the ground could hear them clearly. The sound problem was resolved by turning anything metal in the vicinity into speakers with the use of specialized frequencies. The town now uses them daily; anyone sitting outside from the afternoon to late night could watch shows played in the sky for the enjoyment of all, depending on the district and neighborhood; the First District was currently keeping them relegated to day-showings only due to ratings arguments over WHAT shows to run at night, which is why new refugees rarely learn about this until later on._

_Naturally, this has solved many problems - as Traverse Town now became the accidental information hub of many different worlds, making it's continued existence very important to the prosperity and security of those worlds - and created others, but no one cares too much about them._)

Above them (and for that matter, all over the First District), the nodes played their encrypted communications and the thinner layers of the nano cloud drifted closer to condense into screens to play them; they soon become perfectly clear if slightly translucent screens, soon showing the image of a monkey wearing a hard hat and banging on itself with a hammer beside a text box that said _Sorry, We Are Having Technical Difficulties!_ and in the meantime, the accompanying sound was some very annoying easy-listening music.

"...They can afford to muck around with lost technology and use it for entertainment, but they can't make a better load-screen?" Kimblee said, his hands on his ears. He _hated _easy-listening music.

The sound changed though; the music stopped, and the picture changed, showing a cheerfully lit newsroom (that, from the looks of it, had been banged up a bit and alchemically repaired recently); in the background was a slightly translucent newscreen, and the two newstalkers sitting at a table in front of it were positioned in such a way that they didn't interfere with it. There were three other people seated just behind the table too: a short green alien grinning like a maniac, and sitting next to him was Kim Possible, looking a bit pensieve. On Kim's other side was the glowering image of the infamous Crossguard warrior-monk, Godhand Scar.

"...The odds of this are absolutely _absurd_," Kimblee whispered, recognizing the Ishbalan man at once. "First the Flame Alchemist...then one of the homunculi...and now the multiverse has delivered Scar into my sights. This is a _good _day after all! Aside from the absurdly powerful people over there waiting to kill me. But that's exciting too."

Unaware of Kimblee's continued presence, Roy glanced at Gibbs, who was frowning thoughtfully. "What's your kid doing on TV?" Roy asked. "An emergency report like this, too."

"...I don't know," Gibbs said. "I really don't know."

"Hello," Kimblee said, walking over. "I don't suppose you know what's going on, do you?"

"Princess and some other jerks are doing some TV thing," Shego said, while Gibbs, Greed, Jarod and Roy whirled around on Kimblee, aghast at his sheer audacity in just walking up to them.

"Well, yes, I already figured that part. I meant, what are they doing _specifically?_"

"...I dunno." Shego shrugged. "And aren't we supposed to be killing you or something?

"But I want to watch the commercial!" Kimblee said. "You aren't that cruel, are you? To deny me the joy of TV? I promise I won't blow anything up or do anyone any harm until it's over."

"Technically, we _do _have to have a ceasefire during TV hours is both parties are mutually invested in the TV show," Roy said, looking like he absolutely _hated _that law right now. "But it only counts if it's made in good faith on both sides..."

"I said I promised."

"Oh, fine!" Roy said, clearly frustrated. "You just wait your turn or there won't even be ashes left of you."

"I said I promised already!"

Roy grunted. "...You know the consequences of breaking _those _sorts of laws and agreements, don't you? The ones enforced by the _town itself_." (No one was quite sure why some of the laws that tended to deal with drama were magically enforced by the spirits of the town itself but none of the ones relating to actually _stopping _criminals were. Most chalked it up to the local spirits loving narrative convention but not really caring about people dying.)

"No," Kimblee said. "Why, what are the consequences?" Roy told him. "Ah. I shall endeavor not to break them, then. I like having my organs on the insides." (The town-spirits took good-faith agreements _extremely _seriously, or at least they did when it amused them to do so. They liked to keep antagonists guessing.)

Above them, the report was starting, and the newsgirl spoke first, sounding excited underneath her newsgirl's tone of fake affability. "_Hi!_ _I'm your nearest and dearest reporter, news hound, information informant and occasional war corrospondant Courtney!_"

"_What she said, only less so because I have absolutely no real importance in the grand scheme what with being a vat-grown clone and all, I'm your co-anchor Reporter Male Model 13b Designation Zero-Forty-Nine!_" Said the other, a completely average looking brown-haired young man with brown skin and dark eyes, every single aspect of his appearance looking hand-grown for being affable, nice to look at and unthreatening.

There was a brief pause. "..._Wait, you discriminate against the vat-grown?_" The alien said, glaring at Courtney and looking offended. _"I WAS GROWN IN A VAT! HATCHED BY THE COLD UNFEELING ROBOT ARM! ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ANTI-CLONE BIAS!_"

"You discriminate against clones?" Kimblee said. "How uncouth of you."

"...What anti-clone bias?" Greed said, after a moment. "Since when do we have policies on discriminating against clones?"

"We don't," Roy said. "And I'll thank _you _not to be making snide comments when you're killing people!"

"But I haven't killed anyone-"

"I was talking to Kimblee!"

"Oh."

Courtney addressed this cloning-bias-thing. "_Uh...what are you getting at? I've never heard of ANYONE having a problem with you because I employed you off the Internet and had you shipped to this town from your education vault."_

Zero-Forty-Nine crossed his arms and sniffed. "_I can hold out against the universal anti-clone bias for as long as I please."_

Kim coughed. "_Can we focus, please?_"

Courtney nodded approvingly. "_Right! I'm sorry to interrupt your sheduled programmed, whether other news reports, sports games, documentaries or cartoons..." _She said, not looking like she really meant a word of it. "_But I have the pleasure and responsibility to bring you, the First District, this emergency news report!_

"_After recieving special information from parties concerned with the incident, this studio has the pleasure of being the first to break the true story of what happened to Foster's Home this very morning! As many of you watchers surely know, Foster's was recently attacked by a person or persons unknown with myseterious processes that left many dead and incapacitated, and the building itself wiped from the face of the planet in an explosion that did severe damage to the street behind it!"_

"I haven't even been in this town for a few hours and I've already made a difference!" Kimblee said, pleased.

"I hate you so damn much," Roy said.

_"Many other news stations have already reported this, but WE are the only ones who have the true story! We were recently approached by those who have irrevocable proof of the perpetrator of the recent incident at Foster's, and these very informants have stated their intention to stop him and recover a weapon of mass destruction he has created! Please give your attention to the representatives of our informants: one of our very finest town adventurers and local celebrity, Kim Possible!_"

Kim smiled graciously at the screen and waved her fingers shyly. "_Hi_."

"_Newcomer to the town and leader of a team of adventurers that helped stop a incident in Foster's only last night, Zim of Irk!_"

Zim grinned and flailed furiously at the screen in a over-exburant parody of someone waving, his mouth full of sharp-looking teeth all set at odd angles and fitting together so well they looked a bit like zipperteeth. "_HIIIII!_" He screamed, accidentally falling off his chair. He scrambled back, looking unperturbed. "_Ahem. LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I'M ON __**TV!**__"_

Courtney stared at him, an irritated look slipped past her newstalker's expression of amiable indifference. "_...Look at him. And our final guest, one of the most infamous members of everyone's favorite group of endearingly off-kilter faith-paladins the Crossguard, Godhand Scar! You might recognize him as the destroyer of the off-world slaving ring that attacked us last year, one of the leaders behind the formation of the Refugee Housing Movement, and publisher of the highly controversial book of alchemy _Ishbalan Discoveries Into Alchemy _on behalf of it's original publisher, his deceased brother!_"

Kimblee blinked. "...That man wrote a book on alchemy? I really must look into that."

"Given that would imply that you'll either survive the next hour or do so without being imprisioned, no, you're not," Gibbs said dryly.

"Must you stomp all over my agenda? That's very rude of you."

"_Good morning to you all_," Scar said politely, bowing. Kim and Zim frowned at him, clearly wondering why their introduction hadn't been so effusive and glowing.

Courtney's co-anchor spoke up. "_According to our informants_," Zero-Forty-Nine said. "_The diaster earlier today was caused by a man from the former country of Amestris named Solf J. Kimblee, considered to be working on his own but possibly in league with others. He was, by the very detailed information offered by our very own Godhand Scar, a high-profile soldier in the employ of the Amestrian military and certified as a State Alchemist under the alias 'Red Lotus'. And before you laugh at how girly it is, bear in mine that our source states that it's a poetic reference to his specialty in creating explosive reactions with his bare hands capable of blowing people apart in showers of fire and gore and icky bits."_

Kimblee frowned. "...Wait. People think my name is girly?" He sniffed. "How low-brow."

"You're named after a _flower_," Shego pointed out. "People aren't going to pay attention to the implications of your name when they can make fun of you. At least they don't call you something painfully generic like 'the Crimson Alchemist'."

"...They do, actually."

"Oh. Sorry."

Scar spoke up. "_The Red Lotus Alchemist, if in a fair government, would have been tried and convicted of war crimes on a vast scale, and as it is, he was a complete monster even by the Amestrian military's loose standards when that monster is set against the enemy. He was among those set against the people of my country, Ishbal, over seven years ago, and almost single-handedly destroyed the city I grew up in and slaughtered everyone there aside from myself, and I hardly escaped unscathed." _He gestured to the scar on his face. "_He wielded an alchemical artifact known as the Philosopher's Stone that amplified his power considerable, and one constructed through abominable means, as they are forged from tearing souls from their mortal shells and condensing them in a material form."_

"Wait." Gibbs turned to Kimblee. "All that stuff Roy told me was _real?_"

"Yes," Kimblee said.

"And this whole time...during your fights...you've been...?"

"Amplifying my powers by draining the life energies of extracted souls to bypass equivilant exchange? Yes."

"And you destroyed their own home with them?"

"Certainly! I thought it was splendidly ironic. Do you call it irony in these situations? I can never tell."

"You are a _complete monster_."

"I get that all the time!"

"And your outfit looks ridiculous."

"Now that was uncalled for!" Kimblee actually looked a little hurt.

Scar continued. "_He has commited MANY crimes against humanity; he is one of the few State Alchemists that participated in the genocide of my people that did not either turn their backs on the military, atone for their sins or die under my destroyer's hand._" At this rather flagrant reference to his time as a revenge-obsessed madman, Courtney gave him a disgusted look for a moment. He appeared not to give a damn what she thought."_He escaped my grasp, and allied himself with inhuman monstrosities that sought to use the entire country of Amestris to create a Philosopher's Stone."_

Greed grunted. "'Inhuman monstrosities'? Well...technically I can't complain on that score..."

"You're more of an 'evolved human'," Shego said.

"Yeah, you're crazy-awesome," Deadpool said. Greed seemed to feel better about it. Kimblee snickered at how sentimental it all was.

"_I have reason to believe that he was also involved in the Heartless attack upon my world on the eve of a solar eclipse,_" Scar said. "_I, along with a handful of Ishbalans, Xingians and Amestrians, barely managed to survive as a result of those plots, with the predictable results. Since then, I have heard of him roving among the worlds, seeking employ with many cruel and malicious organizations, and I suspect he has allied with a particularily more nefarious one known as 'Wolfram and Hart' for his own reasons."_

Kimblee frowned. "I'm doing what-now?"

"_And might they have an interest in destroying Traverse Town?_" Courtney inquired.

Kim shook her head. "_According to what we know about a hero that fough them - one William Pratt, AKA 'Spike' - Wolfram and Hart are a subtle group that spreads evil through vaugely legal means, though they would certainly benefit from a destructive madman like the Red Lotus Alchemist."_

"_Though I did meet a man claiming to be affiliated with them as of last night_," Zim remarked. _"He assaulted my team for reasons I have yet to discern, expressed improbably personal knowledge of our backgrounds, and left after we beat him up a bit." _(Kimblee thought that Mr. Lyle was not going to be happy about being outed like this. Obviously, Azula and Wuya were going be angrier, though.)

Zero-Forty-Nine shrugged. "_And what exactly did this Kimblee...DO?"_

Zim answered again. "_According to the survivors from Foster's, Kimblee attacked the house directly after rigging several building in the surronding neighborhood to explode; he did combat with a number of Foster's private security team until those houses exploded with sufficient force to create a transmutation circle in the ground and used the lay of the land to make it more specific; it is a means of harnessing alchemic reaction, and he used this one to cretae a Philosopher's Stone himself, killing over half the people of Foster's by removing their souls and binding them into a Philosopher's Stone. He then proceeded to use it's power to wipe the evidence away. Or just blow stuff up, I don't know."_

_"There are some pretty fantastical claims_," Courtney said. "_Can you back them up_?"

Kim stared at the older girl. "_...Foster's is in ruins, the survivors are half-dead, the ACTUAL dead are in some sort of arrested coma, a massive explosion destroyed the neighborhood. And speaking of 'fantastical'...we live in a town of adventure where actual flesh-eating demons came out of nowhere to mug a comic convention last week. And the week before that, a huge clan of gargoyles went to the Crossguard's headquarters and refused to leave because 'it was so appropiately Gothic', and they still haven't left after _joining _the Crossguard. And before THAT, a renegade psychic knight from another timeline tried to kill our leader and take over until he was informed that we don't have a centralized head of government, so he decided to kill everyone anyway until the Xiaolin Dragons literally kicked him out of town. Why in the world are you choosing to be selectively skeptical now?_"

Courtney paused. "_I REALLY feel like I should argue against, but I just can't."_

Kimblee shook his head. "That poor logical soul. She was not meant for a town like this."

Roy nodded solemnly. "Isn't that the truth." He paused. "..._Damn it all, STOP DOING THAT!_"

"Doing what?"

"Being NICE! STOP MAKING PEOPLE THINK YOU'RE PLEASANT! IT'S **FALSE ADVERTISING!**"

Zim laughed at Courtney. "_Now you're learning!_"

"_Your approval shames me." _Courtney brightened and turned to the camera. "_So there you have it, Traverse Town! From our sources to your ears, the latest sociopath to make a name for himself in our blood is Solf J. Kimblee, also called the Red Lotus Alchemist, guilty of countless war crimes in a genocide campaign and certainly guilty of Misue of Supernormal Artifacts of Mass Destruction under the Crossguard-Peerage Charter of Common Sense Guidelines! Already guilty of destroying Foster's and presumably harvesting their souls in some ghoulish manner to fashion _ANOTHER _artifact of mass destruction in clear violation of the Peace Marine's Ordnance Regulation Guidelines-_"

"_NO PRESUMABLY!_" Zim shouted unexpectedly, so excited he burst into flames. "_I was there! HE KILLED THEM ALL! Well, not so much 'killed' as 'ripped their souls and shoved them into an itty-bitty container of DOOM' but that's worse, innit? And ya know what? YOU'RE NEXT! YES, YOU, THE AUDIENCE! THINK KIMBLEE WAS GOING TO JUST DO FOSTER'S! WRONG! MAYBE HE'LL BLOW YOU UP! MAYBE HE'LL HARVEST YOUR SOULS TOO! Maybe he'll just blow the wall in your house and draw funny things on family pictures and make disparaging comments about your media collections because you'll be too busy cowering like cowed things that have been cowed so badly it gives 'cowed' a bad name nad makes the anthropomorphic personification of 'cow' come down to laugh at you. That's how cowed you'll be. Because he blows stuff up._"

Kimblee blinked in bewilderment. "Aw horseshit!" Deadpool said, as Courtney, Kim, Zero-Forty-Nine and even Scar stared at Zim too. "Not a blowing-up-stuff guy with a artifact of doom! I hate those guys. They mess up stuff that I want to mess up. Hope like hell he doesn't come around here."

"...Deadpool, you just fought him," Shego said. "Not very well, you know. And you already knew all that."

"And I'm standing _right here_," Kimblee added.

Deadpool shrugged. "Eh, but I now only know how screwed I really am because the TV told me to. Giant projector screen, whatever. I don't need my opinions! THE MASS MEDIA TELLS ME HOW TO THINK!"

"That's because you're dumber than a sack of hammers," Shego said. "And saying that, I apologize the hammers of the world."

"I want yellow text font," Deadpool complained.

"Is he aware that he's on fire?" Kimblee asked.

On the screen..."_Um, you...DO know you're on fire, right?_" Courtney said uncertainly.

Zim looked at himself. "_Am I?_" He said, looking at himself. He shrugged, still on fire. "_Ah well. It's not a big fire. AND IT'S DRAMATIC! GLORY IN MY DRAMA, VIEWING PUBLIC! __**GLORY IN IT! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!**_"

"_Why are you laughing like that?" _Zero-Nine-Forty asked.

_"It's a hobby," _Zim said.

"_Ah."_

"_And finally, we have a message from our, er, 'heroes', to you, Mr. Red Lotus Alchemist! If you're watching," _Courtney said triumphantly._ "Which I know you are, because the emergency broadcasts work by interrupting all televised signals, so you'll see them on TV if you're inside, and if you're outside, you'll still see them on the giant projector screens in the sky!...Aw, this town is so WEIRD sometimes..."_

_"Ged to ze point!"_ Zim said. _"...Why am I talking like that...?"_

"_Oh, yeah! And these guys are going find you and beat you up and stuff,_" Courtney said hurredly. "_And Godhand Scar is out to get you._"

Scar just glared at the screen. Approximately a third of the audience fainted in terror. The rest was generally frightened, and half of _those _would have horrible nights for the next six months.

"That makes my current agenda much easier to organize, then," Kimblee said.

"_And, with that happy note, remember everyone!_" Kim said suddenly. "_Forewarned is forearmed! Be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice! You know the drills, so keep steady, safe and sane!_"

"_You probably won't die horribly!_" Zim said cheerfully. "..._I mean, I GUESS. Could be. I dunno. I'm not a, a MIND READER if the mind is DESTINY or REALITY or the NEXT FEW HOURS. Meh. What was I saying? Oh, try not to die. That would suck. And be unproductive or something. Oh, and I'm on a bit of a timetable Kimblee, and I have to leave in a hour or two, so if you announce yourself in a less destructive way so I can trounce you properly, that'd be awesome. Like, uh...right outside this news studio."_

_"Wait,"_ Courtney said. "_WHAT."_

"WHAT," Gibbs said.

"Ooh, a challenge!" Kimblee said. "I applaud their valor."

"I don't see you clapping," Deadpool said.

"...It's a metaphor, you buffoon," Kimblee said.

"_We're on the Maineford Duloc plaza the corner of Jerry's Bait Street and Donotgonearthesewer Avenue," _Kim said. "_Big news building. Can't miss it. And just to be safe, we'll put a big flaming sign in the sky for you."_

_"Huh?"_ Courtney squeaked.

_"Let's see,_" Zim said. "_Closing remarks. Yeah...um...blah blah blah, you're gonna pay for stuff and such, yadda yadda, the vengeance of us willl be painful and doomy and whatnot...so on and so forth. PREPARE FOR PAIN! I dare ya. Come on, come on and get us!" _He grinned sinisterly. "_Unless you don't think you can TAKE us."_

_"Can we talk about this for a second!_" Courtney said. "_There wasn't anything about getting him to come HERE!_"

"_And also, there's me," _Scar said coldly to the audience. _"You know me, Kimblee. I am the man you have failed to kill three times now. Once in Ishbal. Once on that train. And again when our world drowned in the darkness you and your foul ilk let in. Such a stain on your record seems...improper. Whatever happened to your sense of pride? Of duty? Can you really forgive the insult my continued existence is to you, or that insult I PERSONALLY gave you when I nailed you to that train with a steel pipe through your stomach?" _His mouth twitched. "_You COWARD_."

Kimblee frowned. "That seems uncalled for." His eyes narrowd. "...If you insist, I will come. I was going to anyway, though."

_"Please stop antagonizing him!" _Courtney wailed. "_Oh no no no no, I don't wanna die...er, I mean...that's all, ladies, gentlemen and other assorted gender-types, now back to your scheduled programming!_" The screen faded out, and vanished in a pretty derezzing effect, as the nano-swarm dispersed.

There was a long silence. Deadpool scratched himself. "...That would have been useful information," Shego said. "If you hadn't already figured that your, Mustang. Or been about FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO!"

"Ah, it was relentless fearmongering due to the newscasters being unsuited to this kind of thing and the guests being grumpy, camera-shy or completely crazy!" Deadpool said, obviously enthusiastic about the whole thing. "It was AWESOME."

Roy's eye was twitching. "Uh," Gibbs said. "Sir-"

"WHO THE HELL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS!" Roy yelled.

"Probably kids that got too deep for their own good," Kimblee said. He paused. "Hrm. Are we going to start killing each other again."

"Yep," Roy said.

"Good to know," Kimblee said. "Before we get to all that, I have a minor request. Give me the man called Jarod over in the robot, and I'll leave."

Shego looked from Jarod, who gave her a frown, and then to Kimblee. "...'Leave', you say?"

"Hey!" Jarod said indignantly.

"What? I didn't say go and do it! Just an option. You know, might wanna think about it."

"No," Greed said sternly. "You can't have him."

Jarod smiled. "...Thank you."

Greed continued. "The reason being, he's in my robot right now. They're a package deal and I'm not giving you my robot. It's a _awesome _robot."

Jarod blinked. "...Going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"So we'll just kill you now," Deadpool said cheerfully. The ground in front of him rose up and reshaped itself into a three-barreled cannon. It spun fast, and fired it's cannonballs straight at Deadpool; the three black missles moved fast, as such things of course do, but Deadpool didn't seem to see things that way. He stepped out of the way of the first one and unsheathed a blade before making precisely three cuts and then sheathing the blades. Six cannonball halves, in perfect poportion to each other, smashed through the windows of a nearby store with a ear-hurting rumble. "Gonna kill you now," Deadpool repeated.

Kimblee shrugged, his shadow moving. "If you insist."

Roy frowned. "You're up to something, Kimblee. But I can't say I'm terribly interested in it. I'll give you this one last chance to surrender, or there won't be bones left of you."

"You wound me," Kimblee said, unruffled. "You should know that I _never _turn down a challenge or abandon a mission. We knew each other so well in Ishbal, I'm surprised that you haven't already realized We were comrades in arms; I thought that meant something to you."

"We never knew each other," Roy said flatly. "We were _accomplices_. Nothing more." His hand closed into a fist. "You're no comrade of mine."

"A shame." Kimblee's shadow moved, growing impossibly large, and then engulfing the entire street around them. "But I have, as they say, other fish to fry."

"Oh shit, his shadows moving around on it's own!" Deadpool observed, unneccesarily. "That's never good. Next thing you know, he'll be making deals with the Devil or turning into a horrible monster that's just the piece of an even bigger monster sealed inside the moon or killing kids on his journey into being the ultimate badass asthmatic or doing creepy voodoo stuff while singing a kickass villain song!"

"Would it be off-hand if I said that I probably know all the people you're referencing?" Kimblee wondered; darkness was pouring off him, spinning into the air like a whirlwind.

"Can't say I really care," Gibbs said, one arm transforming into a massive assemblege of machine guns, semi-automatics, rapid fire pistols and a few plasma rifles. He pointed it at Kimblee and opened fire in a thunderous roar that might've defeaned them all if he didn't tone done the noise. (True, guns didn't work that way, but it was a Devil Fruit power, they were _really weird_ that way.)

Another wall was transmuted from the ground to intercept the attack, and the bullets and energy shots broke it down and blasted through; a large piece of wall hit Kimblee in the head. He didn't appear to even notice, apart from absently wiping the blood leaking from the small cut on his forehead.

Kimblee grinned, glad that he had already set up this little stunt in advance thanks to all the hatred and anger directed at him. Those were emotions that tied to the darkness, and so he could _use _them.

His eyes had turned a brighter shade of yellow, the whites of his eyes turning an unnatural black at the edges. Around Jarod, the shadows encircled the robot he was riding in, sliding up it's feet, the ragged edges of the darkness leaving tiny scratches as they formed into evil little fingers. "Now," He said, calling to the darkness. "Return to the light, and drown it." He snapped his fingers.

From that shadows, a massive swirling tornado of utter blackness erupted from around Kimblee; the sudden gasps of bewilderment were laced with plumes of frost, the tempature dropping dramatically. The tornado, moving faster than they could think or react, twisted together and contracted and compressed, flowing together around all of them into a single chaotic shape, resembling a rounded pyramid, bulging and twisting like something inside too big to be contained wanted _out_.

The darkness-pyramid exploded; for an instant, it was a burst of blackness that was not the absence of light but it's true opposite, a pulse of an even darker nature slamming into the buildings and street and _twisting _them. The blast was silent; it went straight up into the sky, apparently harming no one, for a short awful moment looking like a tear in the world, a ragged bleeding cut in the fabric of reality and such horrible _things _looking back out and clawing and pulling and coming _in_...

It was gone. Gibbs stumbled back, his head aching in ways he didn't have the words to describe and feeling _violated_, a deep and unearthly chill in the very marrow of his bones, bits of frosts clinging to his clothes.

For a moment, he didn't know where he was. For a moment, he had been in a place that was nothingness, a dark void that nonetheless churned with life. He had seen...such things. Such _horrible _things. The loud voices ringing in the back of his head...desperate hands grabbing at him...crying and pleading and _begging _and condemning...voices that he'd heard before, as they were dying. Voices that he had _allowed _to die, that had come off the hard way of the cruel choices he had to make and still had nightmares about on the hard days.

The faces. He had _known _those faces. He remembered a small hand, clutching at his leg and screaming in the voice of his daughter and his wife had been there too, yelling with the rest of them-

He shut his eyes tight and shuddered so hard it hurt, trying with all his might to ignore what had just happened, and realized several things that were wrong.

Firstly, Kimblee was gone, disappearing along with the darkness. The area around them had been..._warped_. The surfaces discolored, twisted slightly out of sync with their original patterns. He saw the broken stones torn by claw marks, the asphault cracked with the footstops of monsters, the melted glass with blurry shapes like faces only _wrong _and he never ever wanted to see what they really looked like, the amorphous shadows rolling across the ground like a gritty wind...

His companions weren't in great shape either. Jarod and the robot he was in had vanished along with Kimblee, and the only one that seemed fit to communicate was Shego, who was still standing and frantically slapping at herself, like she was trying to get some loathsome insect off her, a muted green aura pumping up from her.

"Shego?" Gibbs said, feeling a bit stupid for saying it. It was such a _goofy _name. (Though, he admitted, he wasn't one to talk on that score.) "...What the hell just happened?"

"What? What?" Shego twitched a bit and narrowed her eyes at him; not angry or annoyed, but like she wasn't sure if he was there or not. "Don't know. Dunno, dunno..." She shivered, the green aura around her getting hotter. It didn't seem to be melting the chunks of ice on her, though. "Things!" She said suddenly. "Crying...screaming...cold there. So cold. So _damn cold_..."

Gibbs paused. Something else seemed wrong. He hadn't heard Deadpool chatter one bit. He saw the motormouth mercenary in question sitting on the ground and staring into the air; small layers of ice had frozen his clothes together, probably making it hard for him to move.

"Hey, Deadpool, what the hell just happened?" Shego said, raising an eyebrow.

He didn't respond for a moment. "Didn't used to be my name," Deadpool said in nearly a whisper. "But they keep calling me by my first one. They know who I used to be. Know how I got into the betting pool. Weapon X." He twitched, so violently he would have hurt himself if he could have moved much. "_They knew me_. They was there, everybody. And other people. People I...the ones that I..." He stared at his hands, slowly flexing them. "So many people dead. Just 'cause I met them and had a contract or a deal or was _bored_. Dead. 'Cause of me. Killed them. I killed them." He stared at nothing. "...They know where I am. They know _me_."

Uncertain of what to do, Gibbs turned aside and saw Greed awkwardly supporting himself on a nearby piece of rubble, his armor gone and revealing his human shell. "...Thousand's of them," He said faintly, in the voice of Lin Yao. "So many of 'em. Yaos and Changs and Mings and Fongs..." He went on for a bit, reciting the names of...what, Gibbs didn't know, but there were over fifty of them. "...Failed them. I was gonna be the Emperor. Gonna make things _right _for the clans. Gonna fix Xing." He paused. "...Gone now. They're all dead. Can't save anyone. Nothin' I sacrifice good enough for it." He took a deep gasping breath, and Gibbs understood that this was not Greed talking, but Lin Yao. "Fu...Lan Fan...Mei Chang...I'm sorry, damn it, oh God, I'm _sorry, _I'm sorry I let you die..." Then, with unexpected fervor, "Ed's right, _THE TRUTH IS A SADISTIC BASTARD!_"

Greed twitched again; the shape of his face shifted subtly, a different personality taking over. Lin's eyes turned red again, the brilliant cat's eyes of Greed incarnate; he fell over, clutching at his face. "No," He moaned. "No no no no..." He punched the ground hard enough to split his knuckles, but they healed themselves instantly. He didn't seem to notice and just sat up, covering his face and getting blood all over his forehead. "Not what I wanted. _Never _what I wanted. Not supposed to happen like this, never wanted what _Father _wanted...just me. Always just me." His face twitched. "Me. ME. _Me! Me! ME ME ME ME!_" He slowed down, his voice faltering. "Me," He said again. "Me. Always just me. Never got what I really wanted. Never knew what I wanted so bad it made me want the world and everything in it. Father wanted it to? Didn't want power or knowledge, he just wanted..." He shook his head furiously. "That selfish _BASTARD!_ Took them way. Took them away from _ME_. They were mine! MINE! _MINE mine mine mine..._mine...mine..." Greed trembled. "...Give them back. Give me back my _people_." He kneeled over. He might have been weeping.

Shego and Gibbs stared in disbelief. "What the hell!" Shego said. "What did he _do_!"

Gibb shook his head. "I don't..._Sir!_"

He saw Roy Mustang at last, sitting cross-legged beside a large piece of rubble and staring blankly at something; his back was to them, so they couldn't tell.

While Shego fussed over Deadpool and Greed, Gibbs circled around Roy and found that his commanding officer was staring at a small beaten and old pocket watch in his hand. Gibbs thought it looked like it had a heraldic lion imposed over a six-pointed alchemic star. "Sir?" Gibbs said carefully.

Roy said nothing. He just stared at his watch, and looked like he was staring further than that. At something a thousand yards away.

Gibbs vaugely remembered hearing that all State Alchemists from Amestris were given a silver pocket watch like that when they were certified. It was their ID, a tangible expression of their status as the most elite alchemists in their country...or, as civilians angrily called them, 'dogs of the military'.

Roy did not rant or weep or scream disjointed apologies like the others. He just stared at his pocket watch.

Gibbs stared down at his commanding officer, and remembered something: one time, when they had been out for drinks, Roy had mentioned that they'd called him the 'Hero of Ishbal', after the Ishbalan Cival War. He'd hated that name. _"I was never a hero,"_ Roy had said, quieter than ever before. _"I was just a murderer."_

The look in Roy's eyes then looked very much the same as they did now. A stare that looked back to a time when following his orders meant murdering thousands of his own countrymen because they were Ishbalan. Skin drawn tight and tired. Dark eyes gone listless with the weight of so many deaths, so many burned corpses, so _many _people on his conscience. There weren't the eyes of an idealistic young man who had gone to the military and enlisted as a State Alchemist in the hopes of making his country a better place, of protecting it from it's many enemies...the eyes of an idealist who had _died _in Ishbal, dried up and peeled away as he followed his orders and incinerated the sand-blown buildings of his Ishbalan countrymen on orders, who'd snapped his fingers and heard thousands of men, women and children die screaming as their cities _burned_. An idealistic young man who had killed so many people there that he couldn't possibly remember them all, even if he kept a tally of the burned bodies he knew of to remind himself of what he was supposed to atone for when the nights were too long and the sacrifices started getting too big.

These were the eyes of a soldier who thought himself a murderer. A soldier whose country had been born in darkness, and consumed by it. A soldier who had thrown his life into taking over that country so he could make it so that another Ishbal Massacre wouldn't ever happen again, only to have that desperate ambition torn away and leaving him with nothing but sour regrets, pointless sacrifices and all the gambles that came to nothing.

Roy closed his eyes, and Gibbs was struck by how _old _he looked right then, even though Roy was the same age as he was. The lines under his eyes were too deep for a man his eyes, his skin too drawn and pale. "I understand," Roy said quietly, to someone from a old memory. Gibbs couldn't know it of course, but in his mind Roy saw the last of the Ishbalan people bleeding and waiting to die in front of a firing squad; an old man pinned against a wall with nothing but a dying dog in his last moments. When Roy had asked him for any last words, before Roy had incinerated him that old man had just grinned and said _I will never forgive you_. "I wouldn't accept it. I don't deserve forgiveness."

"Sir?" Gibbs said again.

Roy didn't appear to hear him. "...I'm a soldier. I'm supposed to protect the people of my country. I enlisted to _help people._ Tell me something: I'm a soldier. So why have I killed my countrymen?" Roy laughed, and it was the emptiest, harshest sound Gibbs ever heard. "Falman. Breda. Havoc. Fuery. Everyone." He paused. A glimmer of emotion came to his haunted face; it was grief, sharp-edged and gleaming with madness in it's depths. "_Hawkeye. Hughes._" He bowed his head and gently turned his hand over, so that the surprisingly heavy pocket watch slid off and hit the ground; the long chain got caught on Roy's fingers and slipped off after a moment. "...I'm sorry. I couldn't keep my word." Then, "_None of it was worth it._"

Very slowly, with an air of great deliberation, Roy brought one of his hand close to his face, thumb and forefinger touching and inches from his temple, held as such an angle that the spark would certainly hit his eye, the alchemic reaction leave nothing of him but _ashes_. For a moment, his eyebrows furrowed, and there was an expression of such impossible _rage_, such inhuman black hate for what he had lost, a desperate _need _for revenge like the heat of a sun kept trapped and left to stew for years, hate so intense he needed to blame _someone _for this insanity, someone he could _burn_, and he would turn those flames on himself if he had no one else. He braced his fingers, about to snap them-

Gibbs broke out into a run, one of his hands morphing into a large heavy cannon fit for clubbing someone into unconsciousness. (_He'd always been worried about this, Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang against the darkness so much with so many horrors to his name; rumor had it there was a bet among some of the psychiatrists when he would kill himself out of guilt or some misguided sense of self-loathing, but Gibbs always KNEW that if he ever did it would be fire, Roy would avenge the Ishbalans dead at his hand by killing himself with the same fires that destroyed THEM-_)

Roy heisitated. He frowned, contemplative. A hard look came into his eyes, the grief and shell-shock fading and replaced by a familiar hardness. "I've come too far," Roy said to himself, and lowered his hand.

Gibbs stopped in mid-step, relieved.

Roy stood up. He paused, for a moment, so briefly that nearly no one else would have noticed, and he picked up the old pocket watch he had dropped and clipped it back to his belt. The old reminder of his sins, a symbol of the duty he still lived with. To atone for his part in Ishbal.

He glanced at Gibbs. "...What were you doing?"

"About to hit you in the head to disable you and prevent you from commiting suicide," Gibbs said honestly.

"Huh. Good to know." Roy looked aside, and noticed that Greed and Deadpool had finally gotten up around, though they were less...upbeat than usual. "...Okay. _What the HELL DID KIMBLEE DO TO US!_"

Gibbs frowned. "That's...a very good question, sir. And then...he kidnapped that Jarod guy and the robot he was in." He frowned. "And right after Kim and those others called him out and _dared _him to fight." His eye twitched.

"What the hell was she thinking!" Shego demanded. "I knew she was _obtuse_, but...seriously? Calling out a homicidal sociopath and _daring _him to kill her? Has she lost her mind?"

"You seem a bit concerned about that," Deadpool said, suddenly recovered by now. "I smell _ship teasing_."

Gibbs frowned at him. "Weren't you just catatonic?"

"Oh, yeah, but I got bored of that. Other people get bored with insanity, I get bored with angst."

Roy rolled his eyes. "Please, _enough_. We need to intercept Kimblee and finish this." _Of all the horrible timing, _he thought. They had been so _close_... "...Okay. First things first. We need to-"

Roy froze. In the ample shadows produced by the rubble and collapsed buildings, the innnocous shade cast by blockages in the way of the sunlight had..._changed_. It had grown beyond the confines of the shapes that cast it, thicker and vital and with a life of it's own. And they were moving; thick and sinuous, tearing themselves out of the blackness and reshaping themselves.

_Heartless_. But moving in the sunlight, burning in the light but healing abnormally fast and utterly unafraid of their bane. They hadn't appeared from portals or gaps in reality, but by _tearing _their way in. Maybe Kimblee had given them a way in, but this wasn't right, it wasn't _usual_...

So many of them emerged from the darkness. Soldiers, larger than usual, bristling with all manner of weaponry produced by their bodies. Air Soldiers, much _thinner _than usual, thin blades protruding all over. Red Nocturnes, drawn here from all the flames and explosions cast around so recently; they looked nothing like the cloaked figures they normally were, but whirling masses of fire and smoke with glowing yellow eyes and jarring noise emanating from them, their emblem a design written in utter blackness at their core. There were other Heartless there, too, ones Roy had not seen in a long time and had dearly wished not to.

Bits of the shadows split away and zipped into innocent-looking things around them; a stretch of the street rippled and abrupty tore itself out of the ground, the rubble and stone binded together by shifting darkness and tearing itself into a vaugely humanoid shape lacking a head; it hit the ground, cracking it, and unfolded, revealing it's full height of nearly sixteen fieet and more than half as wide. A Heartless emblem appeared on it's chest, and just below that, it split into a savage mouth with jagged rocks for teeth, molten saliva melting tracks down it's massive legs and sizzling against the dirt.

A utterly black _tear _appeared just above that stone giant, and a triangular blade seemingly made of black crystal fell out, a Heartless emblem glowing from within and darkness streaming along it's flat base. That stream erupted into a thin, jointless arm, bulking up into a much larger muscular limb, and a shoulder that grew that suddenly expanded into a proper body in the shape of a reptillian thing that looked _wrong _in it's dimensions; it's main body was a twisted mass of rib-like protrusions attached to a unfleshed pelvis, it's legs surprisingly thick and resembling those of a multi-jointed insect, ending in blades. It's head, positioned on a long serpentine neck, was just a snoutlike shape with hollow sockets glowing yellow just under the opened jaws. Perversely, it only had the one arm; the other side of it's body was hollowed out and shriveled.

They were far from the only ones to appear. Even more monstrous and twisted Heartless appeared, many of them never before seen in the town limits, and the neighborhood was soon full of them, Heartless clinging to the walls of buildings or crowding around on the rooftops, because there just wasn't room on the streets: abandoned objects or broken bits of architecture proved perfect vessels for more powerful Heartless to materialize with, creating monsters so large they took up all the space.

It was...a _horde_. A huge undisciplined chaotic rabble of Heartless, all staring directly at the small group right there, murderous intentions radiating from the Heartless. And all of this happened in precisely the same amount of time it took for them to realize it was happening at all.

Greed, Roy, Shego and Deadpool stared at the Heartless horde. The Heartless looked back, and would have snarled with a single voice if they could have spoken.

Roy spoke first. "Okay. I officially hate today."

"This," Shego said solemnly as the Heartless broke and charged right at them. "Is gonna _suck_."

...

Across town, reactions to the emergency report was varied, though it quickly got a lot worse as other Heartless hordes erupted from the shadows of buildings and the places between doorways, all at the same time.

At the Temple of Bitter Work that the Xiaolin Dragons lived at, in the training dojo where they had been sparring and had happened to see the transmission through the transparent roof, the four warriors and their dragon stared in horror. Raimundo swore in Portuguese. Clay, who had many depths, knew precisely what he had said and told him off for that. A Heartless made of sixteen cars joined together in a crudely human form had then smashed through the dojo, and a mighty battle ensued.

The Mall Crawlers, having already returned to their base of operations for repairs (AKA the local scrap dump and the basement under the Fry Barn) saw it in the sky, and immediately decided to do the proper Space Marine-ish thing; but first they had to deal with all the Heartless they kept running into on the way.

In the Gibbs household, Izumi, Mr. Herrimen and Jim solemnly watched it from their tower of TVs. Izumi bared her teeth in a grimace. "Damn that bastard!" She snarled. "Warping alchemy like that...tch. Like I'd expect any better from a dog of the military..."

Jim frowned. "It's going to get worse from here."

Mr. Herrimen looked at him, appalled. "...I sincerely hope not, Master James."

Jim shook his head. "It always does. Always gets worse before it gets better." He frowned again. "And James is the name of my first dad!"

"Don't be rude," Izumi said, a abnormally huge Soldier Heartless leaping from behind her from the depths of a table's shadow, upsetting the table in the process and throwing volative chemicals everywhere. Without looking, Izumi grabbed it in midair by the wrist, slammed it into the ground, clapped her hands and slammed her palm onto the ground; wire-thing cords stabbed right through the Heartless and pulled it apart as more Heartless appeared. While Mr. Herrimen recoiled in horror, Jim only sighed and pulled a massively oversized gun right at the Heartless, hollowing out their heads and stunning them long enough for Izumi to transmute several massive fist-shaped projectiles and squish the Heartless with them.

In the mobile hospital still parked by Foster's, activity ground to a brief and horrified halt. Medical doctors, nurses, pediatricians, veternarians, xenocians, physiologists, mad doctors (you got far in Traverse Town if you were exceedingly skillful and compellingly weird in some way) and the vast inflow of seriously hurt Foster's residents (now destitute and homeless) all gaping at what they saw throught viewing ports and patched-in monitoring scans (for those working there) or on TVs (for the patients). The patients were absolutely horrified, at the monstrous revelation of _why _they had been attacked and what had become of their dead friends: their souls torn away and fused into a weapon of mass destruction that had destroyed their home. Many of them broke down or went berserk right then and there. Some just...broke. Mac and Bloo raged. Eduardo cried. Wilt could say nothing. Coco was uncharacteristically silent. Stature's depression shrank her to a third of a human's size, so beaten and tired at her failure. Spike had to be restrained by thirteen orderlies and that took nearly fifteen minutes to do. The Heartless _tried _to attack the hospital, but fortunately there was a sizable number of Peace Marine soldiers Roy Mustang had sent out in case of this sort of thing and they managed to hold the line against them.

For Magneto, Agatha, Olivier, Angilaki, and all the others on the Council, they had already left their diner when Foster's had been destroyed, in their own attempts to rally their respective factions and figure out just what was going on. The emergency transmission in both sky and conventional entertaiment media was a surprisingly helpful bit; though it was obviously met with surprise and no shortage of rage at the atrocity dealt to their people, it allowed all concerned to halt investigations and get to the gritty work of preparing for active battle. (Needless to say, the Heartless that showed up around _them _died quite horribly. In Traverse Town, authority equaled the ability to issue no-holds barred beatdowns.)

In the second-rate apartment shared by Naruto and Gaara when they were both in town, their breakfast (always made rather late because Naruto was a bit lazy and slept in, while Gaara was pretty much unfocused on this sort of thing) and TV watching was interrupted by the emergency transmission. When it was over, Naruto's first impulse was to storm right out, hunt down Kimblee and beat him up for both killing people so horribly _and interrupting his morning cartoons_. (The nerve of Kimblee.) Gaara, posessed of a cooler head, convinced him otherwise, and they both decided to get some guys together to help the people at the studio. This was helped when Tsunade called them both and gave them orders to meet her and the others at one of their many hidden bases. (They were ninjas, of course they didn't have a single, easily attacked base.) Heartless swarmed upon both of them, drawn by the monsters inside both Naruto and Gaara. Their neighbors immediately blamed them for everything, which wasn't an entirely unreasonable reaction when their battle strategy caused their apartment building to have a conspicious hole in it's side.

More Heartless descended upon the town, in hordes and packs, coming from nowhere and savagely attacking whatever they could get their claws on. Kimblee had opened the way for them, and they had come flooding out. It was fortunate that the factions had already been made aware of the disaster going on, or they would have been caught off-guard, and the casualties would have been horrendous. As it was, they were still having just managing to hold the line; it had all happened too fast to muster sufficient numbers to combat them effectively, and for every fighter that managed to take down a dozen Heartless, there were _two dozen _Heartless swarming out of the shadows to take their place.

Attrition would take it's toll. They couldn't fight forever, and a moment's lack of weakness was all that was needed for a single Heartless to slip through past sword or firearm or skill and someone would die.

The Heartless had been aimed at a certain news studio. Few of them were anywhere near it, but this worked in Kimblee's favor. He intended to cause damage, wreck morale and destroy what little sense of safety these people had left. A quick surgical strike, all those Heartless coming down at one studio at once and then departed after their bloody work was done, was not suitable for this purpose.

The Heartless were coming through. It did not matter how many enemies were set in their way, they were coming. And they were _hungry._

...

As yet oblivious their impending doom, at the studio itself, Zim grinned at his dubious friends, apparently oblivious to the fact that Courtney had gone absolutely berserk over the small unplanned detail of daring the homicidal maniac to come down to _her _studio and try to kill them all; the security detail and her co-workers were trying to hold her back from strangling Zim or something. "Well, I think that went pretty well," Zim said, pleased with himself.

"Well," Hobbes said, counting off on his fingers. "We completely blew whatever cover-up might have been going on to keep people feeling safe, we exposed the true horror of what actually happened and may incite a riot over it, and we also dared the guy who did it all to come down here and kill us."

"So, what, a pretty average day?" Calvin said.

Hobbes nodded. "Pretty much. I really have to admit...this is probably the worst thought out plan I've ever been a part of."

"Hey!" Sokka said. It had been mostly his idea, after all.

"What about when I broke through the barrier to the Dungeon Dimensions to summon a horrible eldritch abomination so I could ride it to school because I didn't feel like taking the bus?" Calvin said, while Sokka and Zuko glanced at each other as if to say that _they _could still outdo that.

"This is the _second _worst thought out plan I've ever been a part of," Hobbes amended.

"There'll be trouble about this later on," Zuko said darkly. "I just know it."

"Sheesh, you're so cynical!" Zim said. "Are you going to be like this whole adventure or what? Total buzz-kill!" Minimoose, hovering nearby, squeaked in agreement, though he meant that it would be good that someone with some sense would be coming along.

Aang blinked. "Wait, what? Is Zuko going with you or something?"

Zim paused. "Er..."

Zuko froze. His friends looked at each other, glared at Zuko...and shrugged. "Well, I suppose that's safer than letting Zim run around on his own," Katara said.

"You suck," Toph complained. "You get to run around with the fun friend and do awesome stuff."

"Pick us up if you find our world out there!" Sokka commanded. "Or I'll kick your ass!"

Zuko frowned. "...Huh. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that there's so little fuss about me going off with three complete strangers for very little sane reason...or _insulted._"

"Does that make us the not-fun friends?" Tucker complained. "You guys suck."

In a small glass-walled soundstation that was used as a calling station when it wasn't in use as a radio-station, the rather large tentacle-alien girl had the unenviable task of answering the recent flood of calls by herself; the news report had unleashed near-panic among a certain kind of people, though the phone calls had a disturbing tendency to suddenly have a lot of screaming before they went silent... "Yes, right, I'm sorry for interrupting _Dr. Acula_," She said into three phones at once, all three callers with the same problem. "Yes, yes, I know it's your favorite episodes, just rewatch them, the TVs record them automatically, what? Hold on, hello? Sorry, sorry about-what? What? I said, I'M SORRY ABOUT INTERRUPTING YOUR SHOW, M'AM! Sorry for yelling, thank you for calling, goodbye! Hello? Yes, madam, I'm sorry about...no, we're not sensationalizing! Well, Missus Courtney probably is, but...what? No, I'm not being mean about her, I really don't know what her last name is! Thank you, goodbye! Hello? No, we're not interested in buying a triple-deluxe edition of _How To Screw The System and Still Look Awesome in The Eyes of The Law: A Guide to Chaotic Neutral Heroics _by _Wade Wilson_! Wait, Mr. Deadpool? What are you doing...is that a _fight _in the background? Hello, hello? He hung up on me! No, he didn't get cut off, he really HUNG UP ON ME!"

Danny, observing this, said to Sam, "I think we may have made a slight mistake in misunderstanding how this would affect the town." She nodded solemnly.

"Yes? Hello? Yes, this is Station WUPI, I-I'm sorry, can you repeat that? Your name is what now?" She stopped, frozen. "...Sir, if this is some kind of a joke-" There was the greatly muted sound of an explosion from the reciever. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm _sorry_! Yes, I believe you! What? You want me to what? No, I can't! I don't have the authority-" Another explosion through the reciever. "OKAY OKAY OKAY, please STOP!" She hung up all the phones but one and yelled, "MISTER ZIM! MISS POSSIBLE! GODHAND SCAR! PLEASE PLEASE _PLEASE _COME OVER HERE!"

The three in question hurried over, passing through the opened sliding-glass door into the sound-station and sliding it behind them. This was a bit of a mistake, because with all the phones ringing and echoing off the walls, it was _really really loud_. "I've never been a mister before, awesome! Also, are you by any chance on a sexual offenders register?" Zim asked curiously as the three of them rounded on her. "I ask only for information."

She didn't appear to hear him (probably because it was so loud), but instead held the phone out in a thick tentacle. "PLEASE TAKE IT!" She screamed, in the grip of hysterics secreting some sort of gooey substances from pores in the same way that another girl might start crying uncontrollably. "He'll kill more people, just please, pick up or he'll do it AGAIN-"

"Okay okay!" Zim said, taking the phone; by a surely unimportant significance, he was the closest one. "Hello?"

"_Hello_," A smooth voice said. "_I am_-"

"What!" Zim yelled.

"_Excuse me!_"

"Speak up! I can't hear you over all the phones and the ringing and my foot itching and, wait, wait, is that one girl still trying to kill me over something stupid?"

"I'LL KILL YOU!" Courtney screamed, having somehow found a pneumatically powered supersledge somewhere and was trying to pound Zim's head in with it after shoving the soundstation door open; Scar was forcing her back with his right hand on her face without bothering to look at her, and all she could do was flail around and scream insensibly.

"_I-I don't understand!_" The somone on the phone yelled. "_I can't hear you!_"

"Yep, still trying to kill me. WHAT WAS THAT?"

"_That's what I-sorry? Sorry? I don't...there's a lot of noise in there, I can't make out a word you're saying!_"

"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU, IT'S REALLY LOUD IN HERE!"

"_I'm sorry, what? I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THAT YELLING AND RINGING!_"

"WHAT?"

_"WHAT?"_

"SOMEONE PUT THIS THING ON SPEAKERPHONE!" Zim yelled. The harried tentacle-girl did just that. "Hey, hey! Did it go through?"

"_I think so, yes!_" The someone said, louder and more clearly due to being on speakerphone. Scar froze at the sound of it and almost let Courtney go. (But he remembered himself and disarmed Courtney, lightly tapping her wrist in such a way that she dropped the supersledge on her foot. While she was hopping around in pain, Scar pushed her through the door, shut it, and transmuting it solid with the wall. Naturally, she got started on trying to break the glass.)

"Okay, good, I can hear you now!" Zim shouted. "WHAT ABOUT YOU?"

"_YES! I CAN HEAR YOU FINE, THANK YOU!_"

Scar stared, recognizing the voice on the speakerphone and reflecting that he had never thought he'd been hearing it in this context. "...You _must _be joking," He said, glaring at the intercom. (Since this was very close to the tentacle-girl, this had the consequence of her assuming Scar was mad at her and she fell over on her desk and starting wailing in pure misery. Kim went over to make her feel better while giving Scar a dirty look.)

"WHO ARE YOU!" Zim yelled.

"_SOLF J. KIMBLEE!_" The someone said. Kim stared at the intercom in disbelief.

"WHAT?" Zim said.

"_YES, INCREDIBLE, ISN'T IT? GLAD I RESPONDED SO PROMPTLY, ARE YOU? JUST WAIT UNTIL MY WELCOMING HORDE GETS OVER-_" Kimblee said.

"NO!" Zim said. "I MEANT WHO IS THAT!"

"..._WHAT,_" Kimblee said, somehow managing to yell flatly.

"SERIOUSLY! WHO ARE YOU?"

"_...Solf J. Kimblee. THE MAN WHO DESTROYED FOSTER'S AND YOU JUST CHALLENGED TO A FIGHT? IN YOUR PRESENT LOCATION? NOT A SMART MOVE, BY THE WAY. VALOROUS, BUT NOT SMART!"_

"OH, THAT KIMBLEE!" Zim yelled. "I'M GONNA SMASH YOUR FACE INTO OUTER SPACE! Oh," He said, turning to Scar, who was staring at the intercom with such black _hate _that it didn't seem human. "Yeah, just remembered, this guy's your mortal enemy. You wanna take over this call?"

"No," Scar said. "I truly do not wish to. I do _not _want to talk to Kimblee."

"_I'M SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT?_" Kimblee said. "_I COULDN'T MAKE ANY OF THAT OUT, IT'S STILL TOO LOUD! WAS THAT SCAR? I THOUGHT I HEARD HIM!_"

"YOU'RE RIGHT, IT IS REALLY LOUD IN HERE!" Zim said. "ISN'T IT!"

"YEAH!" Kim said.

"WHY WON'T YOU PEOPLE STOP CALLING!" The tentacle girl cried into the phones, which were _still _ringing on and off. "I'M TRYING TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN HERE!"

Everyone else had gathered around the soundproofed room. "I wish they hadn't closed the door," Morte said. "Now we can't hear them. Why'd they do that again?"

"DIE! DIE! DIE!" Courtney screamed, having taken a chair and trying to break through the glass with it so she could kill Zim. Or something like that. So far, all she'd done was dent the chair. (It was REALLY tough glass.)

"...Oh," Morte said. "That."

"_COME ON SCAR! SPEAK UP! I KNOW YOU'RE THERE!_" Kimblee yelled impatiently. "_I DON'T EXACTLY HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO WASTE! I HAD TO BLOW UP AN ORC AND SOME OTHER STUFF AT THAT ONE DINER YOUR LEADERS LIKE TO FREQUENT JUST TO GET THAT PHONE-GIRL TO TAKE ME SERIOUSLY, DO I NEED TO BLOW UP A NEIGHBORHOOD JUST TO GET YOU TO TALK TO ME? ANOTHER ONE, I MEAN, YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN MY LAST BATTLE TODAY! AND IT'S VERY INTENSIVE WORK, ALL THAT; THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE ISN'T EXACTLY AN UNLIMITED WELL OF POWER, YOU KNOW!_"

"Should he have really said that?" Kim asked. "Explicitly stating that his power source has it's limits, I mean."

"_...OH, DAMN IT!_" Kimblee swore.

Scar's eyes narrowed. "What. Did. You. _Do._"

"_OH, NOW YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME,_" Kimblee said, proving that you can make a yell sound sulky. "_HMPH. SINCE YOUR COUNCILMEN AND WOMEN AND WHATEVER ELSE WEREN'T IN ATTENDENCE AT THEIR BASE OR CLUB OR WHATEVER THAT DINER'S SUPPOSED TO BE, I SAW NO REASON NOT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION AND USE THEIR PHONE! AND EXPLOIT THEIR SERVANTS FOR MY OWN ENDS! LIKE BLOWING UP THE ORC. OR THROWING THE FRYCOOK OUT WHEN HE WOULDN'T GIVE ME WAFFLES. I __**LOVE **__WAFFLES."_

"HEY, ME TOO!" Zim said.

"_TRULY? THAT _IS _A FASCINATING COINCIDENCE! TELL ME, DO YOU TAKE THEM WITH SYRUP OR SOME FORM OF SUGARY FRUIT AND CREAM-"_

"_**KIIIIMBLEEEE!**_" Scar bellowed, rattling the glass a bit, surprising Zim, spooking Kim and making the tentacle girl pass out from being overwhelmed by awesome. "**You **_**bastard**__!_"

"_...OW. YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO YELL SO LOUD, SCAR,_" Kimblee complained. "_I ONLY TRASHED THE DINER THAT YOUR COUNCIL USES AS A BASE. WELL, NOT 'TRASHED' SO MUCH, AS IT STILL EXISTS, BUT THE ORC IS DEAD NOW. ON THE GOOD SIDE, YOU'LL ALWAYS HAVE A PIECE OF HIM TO REMEMBER HIM BY. BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH OF HIM SPREAD AROUND, THERE WILL AT LEAST ONE OR TWO BONE FRAGMENTS OR ORGANIC MUSH STAINED ON THE CEILING._"

There was a long silence, both horrified and bemused.

Kimblee sighed in exasperation. _"THAT WAS A JOKE. AS THEY SAY IN THE VERNACULAR, 'ZING'._"

Zim blinked. "Oh, I GET it!" He paused. The phones had stopped ringing, mainly because the tentacle-girl had lost her patience and unplugged them, and at least now Zim didn't have to yell anymore, but he had something to think about now. "...That wasn't funny. That wasn't funny at all."

"_Oh, whatever. Anyway, Scar. You were about to embark on some sort of self-righteous rant, no doubt-_"

"Hey, hey, hey!" Zim said sharply. "I was saying something. It is POLITE to listen to someone when they are speaking, so _shut the hell up and listen!_"

"_Excuse me?_" Kimblee said. Scar froze, the insane rage twisting his face fading in favor of a more bemused look.

"You heard me. Now listen, you half-baked toaster strudel with a touch of garlic at the top that everyone knows tastes really nasty! That joke, as you call it-"

_"Please shut up, I'm trying to talk with my antiheroic counterpart,_" Kimblee said.

"-Was simply not funny," Zim said. Kim looked from him to Scar uncertainly; an odd expression was forming on the warrior-monk's face. "For one thing, the execution of it was completely off; you actually explained the details of it!"

"_Will you let go of that? It was just a joke!_" Kimblee complained.

"And everyone knows that if you have to explain the joke, then it's just not funny!" Zim said. "And secondly...well, it's hard to make a joke about _killing _someone. Believe me, I know! What with being a reformed bad guy and all. Well, I guess so. Because if I make bad jokes like that, Aang would give me a very stern look and lecture me until I have learned my lesson because I now know that if I tell an evil joke, I'll get _bored!_"

"_Yes, fine,_" Kimblee said, his patience clearly broken. "_WHATEVER! WOULD YOU PLEASE-_"

"And to make my point clear, even if you're willing to take humor in a badly executed joke which only derives it's so-called 'humor' from it's brutal cruelty and therefore laugh at something based in death and suffering, you'll have to get passed the fact that it's just a bad joke!"

"_Shut UP!"_ Kimblee said. "_I DON'T CARE! JUST SHUT UP!"_

"Even if you look past your joke's appalling insensitivity and lack of empathy," Zim said, chasing this line of thought like a kitten with OCD worries at a ball of yarn, seemingly unaware of the fact that Scar was now trembling for some reason, his face contorted in a bizarre expression and his throat making the oddest noises that _no one _had ever heard from him before. "If you analyze it from a structuralist point of view, it's just not funny! And also-"

"_AAUUUUGH!_" Kimblee screamed from his end of the phone. "_**I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! WHY WON'T YOU SHUT UP!**_"

"Ah, now you being to understand my line of reasoning but refuse to submit to my mighty LOGIC!" Zim said, pleased.

"_WHY WON'T ANY OF YOU MAKE HIM STOP!" _Kimblee screamed. From his end, there was the sound of pounding, uncannily like someone banging his head against a wall to shut out the stupid. "_HE JUST KEEPS GOING ON AND ON AND HE NEVER SHUTS UP!_"

"And furthermore-" Zim started to say, and then there was such a noise, from within that soundstudio.

It was a noise that neither Zim nor Kimblee nor any of the Traverse Town residents had _ever _heard. It was a hoarse noise, a series of rough bellows booming out in brief bursts, trailing away in strained heaving bits before booming again and again. It was a..._happy _noise. A amused noise. A nosie expressing a fervent glee that had never before been seen from it's source, a noise that defied all logic, all reason, all past knowledge and wisdom and suggesting that the multiverse held, at it's core, a fundemental insanity for something like _this _to ever happen.

It was Scar. And he was _laughing_.

He was standing there, shaking on the spot with the force of his laughter, face screwed up tight and a hand clamped over his mouth and another on his surely aching sides as he tried to control himself. Xiao-Mei the miniature panda popped up from a pocket, staring up at her owner in shock before starting to bark in imitation. (Given Scar's rough voice, it was uncannily accurate.) He shook and trembled, laughter a bit muffled, and then he wiped the tear away, his laughter booming louder and sounding like he hadn't laughed one bit since puberty set it. (Or possibly since birth. He seemed like the sort of man whose reaction to having his parents make goofy sounds at him as a baby was to look indignant.)

There would have been a long silence but for him filling it up with his hoarse laughter.

"Is..." Kim said, shocked and horrified. "Is _Scar LAUGHING_?"

"What did we _DO _to him!" The tentacle girl wailed.

"...Cool," Zim said. "Make him do a little dance! Then we can make a Internet video! And a meme. I always wanted one of those."

Outside, the others were peering in. "The hell's going on in there?" Calvin wondered, and said to ABel, "Something's wrong with your creepy partner."

"He looks sick," Aang said, worried. "Wait...no, I think he's...no way."

"Is he..._laughing_?" Ron said, astonished.

"No way," Rufus said from Ron's pocket. This was much the same opinion of anyone who was even slightly familiar with him.

"I don't get the big deal," Sokka said. "So the guy's laughing. He is laughing, isn't he?"

"He _is _laughing," Toph said; she was able to feel where he was moving due to the weak vibrations in the wood and from all the metal in the soundroom and the vibrations from the glass. "It's...weird. It's really really weird."

"Dude, what the _hell!_" Abel said furiously. "I spend over a year and a half partnered with him, and I barely get so much as an occasional smile, but he's stuck in a room with those two for a few minutes and he starts cracking up? WHERE IS THE JUSTICE!"

Courtney's attempts to kill Zim faltered at this astonishing sight. "Holy shit," She said. She clapped her hands to her mouth, horrified at swearing. She made it up to herself when she grabbed a camera and started taking pictures. She was thinking of putting it up in a 'lighter side' segment: perhaps title it "_Terrifying Crossguard paladin actually capable of human emotion after all!_'

In a similar way, Kimblee was also upset. _"...He's laughing. Scar's LAUGHING. SCAR's laughing. SCAR. IS. LAUGHING. WHAT INSANITY HAVE I WROUGHT?_" His voice trailed off. "_I'm...ah...I'm...going to hang up now. And...kill you all or something. I guess. I don't know, my brain hurts right now. From both the stupid ranting and my world-view being destroyed. I don't know, I come to call to give you a serial killer call to intimidate and infuriate you like all the great criminal genuises do, and I get...THIS._" He sighed. "_I'm going now._"

"But you didn't say what your plan was," Zim complained.

"..._Oh, that. I was just going to intimidate you a bit. Mock you. The usual pre-fight banter. Brag about my accomplishments, the dead of Foster's that you could do nothing to save and will soon be brought against you. Say something about my fight with Greed and Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang and Shego and Deadpool and Field-Admiral Gibbs to frighten you and make you think they were dead._"

"What are you doing, fighting my archenemy?" Kim complained. "Or evil counterpart. Oh, and my dad."

"Who'd you fight now?" Zim said. There was again from Kimblee's side the lovely sound of head-to-wall-banging.

"_...Oh, never mind,_" Kimblee said tiredly. "_I'm...I'm going to hang up now before my brain hurts anymore. Oh. A considerable number of Heartless will be there to eat you all, and if you're not dead yet, I'll be there shortly to kill you all. Espicially you, Zim. That is, Zim's the one that wouldn't shut up, yes?_"

"Yep," Zim confirmed.

"_Ah, excellent then. And...uh, I suppose I'll kill you too, Scar._"

Scar had finally stopped laughing. "What?" He said. "Have you lost your thirst for a perfect kill record?"

"_Of course not! But I now realize that this Zim character is FAR more irritating to me than your continued existence. Farewell."_ The phone hung up.

"Well," Kim said after a moment, the tentacle girl calmed a bit. "That...that could gone better."

"Perhaps," Scar said. "But I doubt it would have been as thrilling." He laid his right hand on the door and alchemically destroyed it, breaking it apart in a flash of blue light. (Zim made a mental note to figure out if Irkens could learn alchemy, that kind of power looked totally _awesome_.)

Once they were out of the soundroom (and Scar fixed the door with alchemy), Courtney came rushing right at them. Zim flinched in horror, but she was paying no attention to him. "What was that!" She demanded. "You had a long conversation with someone and we couldn't hear it! What was so important the three of you needed to hear it and not _me!"_

"And _WHY WERE YOU LAUGHING!_?" Abel asked Scar. "In all the time we've known each other, you've barely smiled! But here you are! LAUGHING! What in the name of St. Boniface HAPPENED IN THERE!"

"Kimblee called us to heckle and jeckle us stuff, but the crows of his evil were thwarted!" Zim said proudly. "THWARTED! Because he made a bad joke about someone he killed. So I picked it out and made him crazy."

"_What,_" Hobbes said flatly.

"...Let me get this straight," Calvin said, after Kim explained the whole thing to everyone. "The crazy serial killer that's been going around _ABUSING _alchemy called you guys specifically. He makes a stupid joke in the middle of his attempts to mess with Scar, but then Zim starts going off on a tangent until Kimblee freaks out from it and hangs up because he can't handle it anymore."

"Yes," Kim said.

"You drove the serial killer crazier because you wouldn't stop going on about a tangent and dealt him a psychological bow," Calvin said to Zim.

"Yep!" Zim said.

"...I'm not sure if that's the most awesome or the _stupidest _thing I've ever heard," Calvin said.

"Hooray!" Zim yelled. "I'm _INCONCLUSIVE!_"

"AND WHY WERE YOU LAUGHING!" Abel cried at Scar.

Scar frowned. "What? Am I not permitted to express amusement?"

"I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU LAUGH OR GIGGLE OR SO MUCH AS SNICKER!" Abel screamed.

"...If you ever gave me reason to laugh, then I would do so," Scar said flatly. "And hearing Kimblee, the harbringer of my _family's _destruction, one of the destroyers of my country and people, the man who has wrought so much devastation and chaos and death and lived to _laugh _about it, the man who dreams of slaughtering worlds...hearing him brought down and flustered to tears by a single man going on about the structure of his joke and patiently explaining why it was tasteless and unfunny was simply _too much_." Abel gaped in disbelief, and grumbled to himself about karma being a cheating bastard.

"Can we focus on something else besides the crazy green alien making the serial killer coming to kill us?" Courtney said. "Like that _Heartless horde _he mentioned?"

"...Okay, I'll admit that is a little bit concerning," Calvin said, shrugging. "But nothing we can't take care of. Right, boss guy?" Zim didn't answer. "Hey, ZIM!"

"Your hair is silly!" Zim said to Minimoose.

Minimoose squeaked. ("But I don't have any hair!")

"Oh, so you're saying it's my fault?" Zim shook his head. "I thought I programmed you better than that!...Hrm, but perhaps all is not lost. Yes, we shall move on from this! Okay, yeah, we'll do that. I'm glad we had this talk, Minimoose. I'm so proud of you!" Minimoose squeaked, sounding thoroughly confused.

"...Never mind," Calvin said while everyone else stared in confusion or annoyance.

The tentacle girl whimpered. "...We're all going to die, aren't we?" She asked morosely. "There's a million reasons this will never work..."

Hobbes, who had previously seemed somewhat resigned to the upcoming battle, tilted his head at the tentacle girl with a determined look. Appearing to come to a decision, he managed to cross the space between the two of them in a sidle. "Really?" He said smoothly, putting an arm across her shoulder, his furry arm sinking into her squishy flesh. He smiled sweetly, both ears widened in the gesture of a cat completely vulnerable and at ease. "'Cause I can count at least one reason it _will _work." He pointed at himself with a confident grin.

"Huh?" She said, her face flashing with many different colors, rather like a startled octopus; she looked like she was blushing. She stammered a bit, clearly unused to social encounters of this sort; the concept of people using charm on her was a new one, and Hobbes had quite a lot to spare. The various suckers on her body expanded, her many tentacles quivering nervously.

"Or we'll all die horribly," Zuko said off-handedly.

She squeaked, at last on the verge of a stress-induced faint and she trembled, her large pear-shaped body standing uneasily and the large mass of thick tentacles comprising her lower body starting to fall in on itself. Hobbes gracefully pulled an arm around her back to support her and kept her standing.

"Please, never mind him," He said; she looked at him, drawn by his calmness, and the confidence he had now. "You can believe me when I say that I know problems like the one we have. The proof is written all over me. See these markings on me?" He gestured to himself, helping her to stand up. "These markings are...well, in my tribe, a warrior has markings such as these inscribed into his very spirit, so that when terrible monsters and evil spirits behold him, they see every single great deed that warrior has ever done!" As if to make his point clear, he indicated how they covered his entire body. (And failed to mention that these markings were only fur-deep for him; he didn't have the means or the knowledge of being accepted by his people's spirits or the proper creed-marked, as the process was called.) He pointed at a swooping series of conjoined curves on his neck. "This is from when I, armed with only a battle-chainsaw on a chain, took down a solar serpent that was once a part of the legendary Tyranid Hive Fleet Leviathan! I decapitated it and brought the head as a present to my mom." He pointed at a spiral-shape on his forearm. "This was from when I destroyed a band of undying automations fueled by the sins of the most depraved city in it's planet's history by simple application of the fact that if it exists, you can break it until it can longer move!"

He went on. With each brief account and earnest reassurance, the tentacle-girl's mood shifted, from fear and uncertainty to a more guarded optimism, as well as a certain type of interest in Hobbes himself. Eventually, she said, "A-Are you sure we can survive this?"

Hobbes smiled and put a hand over his head, palm straight like a one-handed praying gesture. "I promise on my word as a knight of the Brighthammer Kingdom that I won't let anyone here die. _Espicially _you." He noticed something, and with an air of great gravitas, he lifted a small tentacle growing from the mass on her head that had fallen over her eyes and slicked it back; it stuck with a slight popping sound. "There you go; I bet that one always sticks out."

She flashed colors again. "Oh...my, um...thank you." She smiled widely, awkwardly. Disconcertingly, her teeth were a serrated mass like a shark's teeth (but not very sharp); Hobbes, having his own standards, found them cute.7

Sokka blinked. "...Am I the only that thinks it's _really weird _that the tiger-guy is _flirting _with a tentacle monster?" Calvin shrugged, completely used to this behavior.

"He's only, what, fifteen years old, right?" Courtney said. "Is this legal?"

The tentacle girl giggled. "Oh," She said faintly. "I'm hardly seven hundred years old, that's barely anything, isn't it?"

There were a few puzzled stares. Hobbes snickered. "Aw, you barely look even that, miss!" She giggled again, more heatedly this time.

Zim looked at Calvin. "Hobbes...doesn't have a conventional view on what defines feminine beauty," Calvin explained. "Some of the girls he's dated...well, he raises a lot of serious questions about cross-phylum standards relationships in the annals of taxonomic regulations."

"You mean cross-species, right?" Zim said.

"I said cross-_phylum_," Calvin said flatly. There was a moment, and then Zuko, Ron, Kim and Toph shuddered. Zim looked politely puzzled, Minimoose indifferent, and others largely oblivious to the sub-text.

"Shouldn't we be talking about what to do about the crazy serial killer coming to kill us?" Courtney said desperately, having nearly been sucked into the madness.

"Oh, yeah," Zim said. He looked aside; Hobbes was still flirting with the tentacle girl; she had literally swelled up from the attention, having sprouting a number of new tentacles and at least a foot and a half of height, enough to tower over Hobbes, which seemed to impress him a lot. "...Hey, that is pretty impressive...focus! Okay. Eh, it's not like he's going to be of any tactical help. Okay, I have a brilliant plan! First, does anyone know where we can find a wooden alpaca we can stuff full of potato salad? Wait, where would I find potato salad at this hour...I don't suppose you newsies have a salad bar, do you?"

"Never mind him," Calvin said. "I have a better idea. It involves lasers and guns and rockets and weaponizing. Also, we'll need to borrow the building."

"As something to hold him off in?" Zero-Nine-Forty said.

"Yes," Calvin said. "From a certain point of view. In a _COMPLETELY UNRELATED _note: where is your guy's basement or celler, if any, and do you have any boilers or personal power sources that I _absolutely will not weaponize_?"

"Check the elevator and head to the sub-basement!" A techie said.

"Hey!" Courtney said.

"I wanna see what the little guy does!"

"Hmn, letting crazy mad scientist do stuff is good," Sokka mused. "But it would help if we had an army. Right, security team we no doubt beat into loyalty throught the power of friendship through defeat? Right?" The security in question was suddenly gone, though the door hadn't been open a minute ago. "...Oh, you guys _suck_."

"But they left their weapons!" Calvin said, pointing at the abandoned gatling lasers, missle launchers, plasma rifles and pistols, powerfists and all manner of awesome weaponry. "Now that is some flash dakka."

"That's not even a word! Never mind...any suggestions, people? Abel? Ron-guy?"

"Awww!" Abel, Rufus and Ron said, watching Hobbes and the tentacle-girl be all cutesy and stuff. (And mildly disturbing.) "Young love!" Abel said. "Or at least young flirtation." He took pictures to put in his scrapbook of adorable-ness, with a camera he'd been carrying around just in case.

"Ooh!" Aang said, clinging to Katara and pulling her over. "Take a couple's picture!"

"Aang," Katara said. "What-"

"Smile!" Abel said. She did, because everyone obeys an idiot with a camera. They posed cutely, and then Abel took the picture.

"...Right," Sokka said. "Never mind him or them. Does anyone _competent _have ideas?"

"Well, I don't know about you guys..." Toph said, sensing something outside. "But take a look outside, would ya, I think there's something interesting there."

"What?" Sokka looked outside via a nearby window. He stared. "Uh...Katara? Sam? Kim? Hobbes? Come here a minute."

The four in question (along with a giggling cute monster girl) came over. They looked outside. "...Huh," Hobbes said.

Down on the ground, a band of strange teens in scrappy but effective armor waved up at them. "Good greetings, mighty warriors of the Southern Water Tribe, the Brighthammer Kingdom, Earth and our humble town itself!" Yelled Tesla Man. "We saw your noble challenge to the fiend Kimblee on TV, and we, the Mall Crawlers, wish to add our strength to yours to combat this foul menace!"

"...Okay!" Sokka yelled. "But how did you get here so fast! And fix your armor!"

"Our suits can fly! And I know basic reconstruction alchemy!"

Whiplash saluted them. "We bring terrible news! We have seen that there are _many _scores ofHeartless heading directly here, rampaging through everything in their path. There are many skillful fighters in town, but mobilizing them will take time, and I do not think you will have many reinforcements to rely on! We ask that you accept our aid!"

"...Okay!" Sokka pulled back. "Guys, good news, bad news time. The good news, we have reinforcements. The bad news is, they're idiots. But that's okay, they're tough idiots. Not too many of them, but they should be able to at least hold the line against whatever hits us."

"And there's plenty of weapons to arm themselves with," Zim noted. "Perfect!" He paused. "'Mall Crawlers'?"

"Long story. Actually, not so much long as random and really weird, but never mind that, this has dragged on long enough."

"Okay!" Zim said, turning to everyone. "Let us bring it together, people and humans and animals and humans and me and other humans and miscellaneous life forms!"

"You said humans twice," Morte said. Minimoose squeaked in agreement.

"That's because there's a _LOT _of humans here. Now, I undoubtedly drove Kimblee into a brief fugue of madness and depression and bi-polar disorder and manic-depressiveness with an emphasis on petting kitties to feel better and the ice-creaming binging of DOOM, giving us some time to prepare for the assault. Our usual shennanigans and stupidness have wasted most of that, probably, but we still have some time left to get ready and do...stuff. Big stuff. With _explosions_. Because otherwise it's not worth doing! Explosions are awesome."

Calvin raised his hand. "A question. Do you _ever _shut up and do anything productive, or what?"

"Silence! So. TO IT, LET'S GET! First! Sokka and Zuko! You're good with people, Sokka is encouraging and Zuko scares them into obedience, get those new recruits down there up here and armed."

"They're already wearing suits of powered armor," Hobbes said. "With _incredibly _powerful armaments. Well, at least their leader has powerful stuff."

Zim stared blankly. "What's your point? Get them even _more _armed! Aang, Toph! You guys can analyze our surrondings and see how it can best be turned against this Kimblee."

"Okay," Aang said.

Toph shrugged. "Not fun like shooting guns, but okay."

Zim turned to Calvin and Hobbes and Morte. "And you guys! Eh, do whatever, you're pretty much useless anyway at this point."

"Hey!" Hobbes said. The tentacle-girl patted him sympathically on the back; she was quite a bit stronger than she knew and accidently pushed him off-balance, and he fell back onto her lower tentacle-mass, not at all displeased when her thick limbs wrapped around him instinctively. She was greatly embarrased when they had to get three other people to help extricate him.

"Eh," Calvin said, too much in a plotting frenzy to care about Zim's opinion. He turned his attention to some boxes of old parts. "And since the newsies aren't being useful...get off your asses and help me get this stuff downstairs or do you want to die horribly?"

Courtney sniffed. "We'll just leave before Kimblee gets here. I'm not about to be your minion!"

Calvin grinned, pulling out some wicked looking instruments. "I didn't say _Kimblee _would kill you. The world could always use a few more flesh golems and I've been _dying _to try out some interesting procedures. Or transplanting human brains into automations to be used as war machines! I've seen some stuff around here I could use as operating tables and _buzzsaws_..." There was a strange flicker in his eyes, a suggestion of something not quite right. "I'm feeling a little..._Inspired_."

The newsies yelped. "WE'RE GOING, WE'RE GOING!" They grabbed the boxes and ran off, hopefully in the right direction. Courtney looked surprised, and disturbed.

"But you don't know how to make flesh golems!" Hobbes whispered to him.

"Shh!" Calvin said. "They don't know that! Besides, they can help me figure out if my new..._something _can help us out. It's been acting weird." He held out the device he'd made last night.

"Hey, what's that thing?" Courtney said, taking it away from him while he was distracted and pressing the button.

Calvin stared at her. "No. No. NO. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! YOU'LL DOOM US ALL-" The device trembled with mechanical activity, and with a surprising lack of fuss, unfolded into a concave mechanical thing with wires hanging out of exposed innards, a pair of handles just big enough for someone's hand to squeeze along with several large triggers on either handle. The front of the device was rounded, with glowing circuit lines centering on a circular lens at the front, and on the back was an upraised control panel; several repurposed alarm clocks with reconfigured LED panels made up most of it, along with a bewildering array of switches, slide, buttons, dials, and in one corner a rounded bulb with a compass needle in the middle, positioned so that it could move in any three-dimensional direction. Zim's eyes watered just looking at that control panel; it was a mess just looking at the complexity of it: there was was a universal port there and a plug-switch here and why did Calvin put a _cup holder _over there? "...Huh. Or not."

"...What _is _this thing?" Courtney said.

"I have absolutely no idea," Calvin said, wrenching it out of her hands. "But since it doesn't appear to be killing anyone or horribly mutating or some of the other problems with faulty wonders of super-science, I'll call it a success. And you and your guys get to help me figure out what it is while I juryrig some explosives...er, I mean, do stuff to save us all. Yeah."

"Yeah, you guys do that," Zim said, not really paying attention. If it was mad science, he reasoned, what was the point of _not _making it to kill things? Not even a single laser or micro-filiament blade to be seen.

"Cool," Calvin said. On a whim, he pulled out the test tube and held it near the machine; it flashed green, the blood in the tube, and a screen that looked a lot like a graph lit up. Calvin grinned. "Well now...isn't _that _an interesting coincidence..."

...

After his phonecall to Zim, Kimblee had to sit down in the middle of the Council's diner and personal clubhouse, which was pretty much the same as it usually was aside for the giant hole Kimblee had blasted into the front and the bloody mess that had previously been the orc that served there. (All the other personal had fled, not really being equipped to deal with a psychotic bomber.)

Kimblee's head hurt. Both the general headache he got whenever he traveled through the darkness, and from..._Zim_. Kimblee decided he would hate Zim forever, which was a novel thought; he couldn't recall ever actually _hating _anything...well, ever.

"I really don't understand how you 'heroes' can stand madmen like that," He said to Jarod, who was still in the robot, the Heartless having dragged him into the darkness with Kimblee. "I really don't."

Jarod didn't respond. He was still crouched on the floor of the robot, muttering to himself about '_Curst is a city of traitors, should have known that the deva was there for a REASON_' and '_I've killed so many people just by EXISTING, I can't let this continue anymore_' and other such absurdities. "Ah," Kimblee said. "Never mind, you're insane right now."

Being dragged through the darkness, without even the protection this town cast over people when it dragged them from their dying worlds, had unpleasant effects on the unprepared. There were things in the darkness. Foul forms that could not yet tear through to this part of existence, but still craved the light. And there was a part of the spirit that resonated with that fell place, that _knew _it belonged...

Kimblee had once seen a amusing series of experiments regarding this problem, and knew of the problems of traveling through the darkness firsthand. It was still an on-going study, he believed.

"Well," He said, hopping into the robot's chair. "Since you are in no position to stop me, I'll be taking the helm. Is that the right term?" It took him a few moments to figure out how to pilot the robot, but the whispers of the dark, cold and quiet and so very helpful, told him how to do it: he grabbed the handles and let the _knowing _of his will become the robot's own.

Very shortly, the robot walked out of the hole Kimblee had made. Kimblee realized he needed a plan of action. So many things had happened so fast. That unexpected fight with Mustang and the others...that transmission that had exposed his plan to everyone in the district...and permitting himself to be frustrated by an immature alien. He'd almost forgotten about the plan.

He'd done, Kimblee supposed, enough. The destruction of Foster's would be a large blow to the town, it would rattle their cages, it would _destroy _their fragile faith in their new lives. He'd captured Jarod (and just to make sure, Kimblee transmuted a metal cocoon around Jarod, so that even if he recovered he wouldn't be escaping or fighting); he'd done everything he'd been asked. But it still didn't seem like quite enough. One more rampage, Kimblee decided, and then he'd call it quits. Set up a diversion and get Deidara's ship out of town. Fortunately, he had the _perfect _target to end this mission on, given that it had just been presented to him. (Which was pretty convienient.)

And maybe then he could get the awful _noise _of that alien's babble out of his head once he was dead...

Occupied with these pleasant thoughts of revenge and destruction and such things, Kimblee and his new robot stomped out of the diner's little area. The neighborhood was full of panicking people running around; not fleeing, precisely, but trying to figure out just what was going on. On the other hand...they looked rather soft, Kimblee thought. Not quite as hard as some of the other's in town looked. Yes, that seemed accurate; no doubt these people had slacked off on their preparations and readiness for battle. The vaunted Council, consisting of some of the most dangerous and certainly among the most powerful people of their respective factions, spent their time in their neighborhood. They hardly needed to fear incidents or troublemakers when a Councilmember could just wander out side, vaporize the problem and get back to watching TV or whatever. Their local hangout even made use of the remains of an incredibly deadly giant _robot _to show off how powerful they were, and as a status figure to their skill, it wasn't like-

Kimblee paused his train of thought. He looked at it again, at the remains of the renowned Juggernaut Armor. A interesting thought occured to him as he admired it's harsh fierce lines, studied the shameful way it had just been gutted. A weapon of war as finely crafted as this deserved better than such ignomity.

The darkness offered much power. And when you knew how to create the proper mental channels, it was amazing what happened when you let the darkness fill them up...

Kimblee's shadow expanded again, into a vast pool of questing hands all clambering and dripping over each other. As they dragged themselves off the ground and people started screaming, Kimblee smiled, allowing the shadows still around him to seep into the robot formerly belonging to Greed, joining with it's machinery and circuitry and computers and other such techno-babble, the lines of the machine creaking out of synch with each other, liquid darkness roiling around it like a fearsome aura.

It jerked and twitched, and abruptly transformed as it's sub-dimensional compacting sequence was activated; it rose up on a tide of complex machinery fashioned in Greed's likeness, a titan of machine-life seemingly emerging from thin air; Kimblee soon found himself sitting inside a pilot's chamber, much as Shego and Deadpool had done earlier that day. The machine-titan was once more a mighty metal colossus but _warped_, the essential nature of the darkness that had completely taken over it significantly enlargening it and turning it into something monstrous and brutal. (Surprisingly hard, as it's appearance was clearly influenced on Greed's appearance when his 'Ultimate Shield' was fully formed.)

Kimblee blinked in the sudden darkness. The lights inside turned on, and he saw clearly, and his attention was immediately focused on the wrap-around screen showing everything in front of him, including the giant robot remnants currently swarming with dark energies.

Kimblee'd heard of what this...Juggernaut Armor had done in the hands of Captain Razorbeard. It had been a walking siege engine, a nearly-unstoppable force of deadly techonology wielded by machine-men with no need for restraint, and it was pitable to be reduced to this mockery of a shell now.

He'd also heard that objects had memories, of their own. Some more mystical forms of transmutation alchemy were based on that; they reconstructed objects based on what they used to be, on the _knowing _of their perfect forms. Surely a mighty weapon as this, Kimblee mused as the dark energies on his own new robot crackled, would remember it's titanic might. And if not...the darkness filled all voids.

A massive burst of utter blackness, like the deepest reaches of space untouched by any starlight or solar activity, erupted around Kimblee, pulling away all heat in it's midst. From it's core emerged long tendril-like forms spinning fiercely like drills, thick and huge and buzzing, and they stabbed right into the Juggernaut Armor's remains, going right to where it's core had once been. The energies of them, of darkness itself, of the Void hungering for all light, of the Cold Ones waiting to _feed_, flooded into the robot's defunct power conduits, and for a moment, it's eye-lenses glowed once more.

Those tendrils of darkness, their surfaces webbing across it's surface in thick veins and already _twisting _the machine-titan, wrenched it off the ground and slamming it right into Kimblee's mech; there was a tremendous flash of darkness off-set by a deeper burst of red alchemical light, an odd crunching noise, a stranger sound of transmutation, and then there was stillness.

The darkness faded, and the sunlight gleamed briefly on the metal exoskeleton of a new machine-titan before being swallowed by the darkness radiating from it like unnatural fire. Those people still gaped at the mechanical horror before them, a monstrous fusion of _two _vastly powerful machines, one that had haunted their nightmares and the other a vauge rumor.

Kimblee, no longer sitting in a pilot's seat but directly connecting into a pulsing mass of shadow-mass flowing around him like something almost liquid and solid at once, laughed. He saw clearly, though he was buried deep within the machine. He saw what it saw. Knew what it knew. Their power was shared, and joined together. He didn't think it was supposed to have a mind of it's own, but there was _something _there; not quite sentience or even an animal's mind, but there was a seeking instinct. The primal urges to hunt and destroy, kill and feed.

He squeezed his fist. Without him having to concentrate or focus, the great machine-titan did the same. He raised a foot, the darkness providing enough tension and tightness to let him know of the robot's conditions without restraining him, and the robot also raised it's foot and smashed it into the ground with a mighty quake. With but a thought, he could feel it's many weapons, or rather the _idea _of them, their potential, swimming just under the surface and ready to be used.

The Philosopher's Stone pulsed over his chest, the darkness securing it for him. Kimblee could feel Jarod stirring while buried deep in the darkness, it's cold chill rushing into the many wounds and gaps in his soul, the missing pieces life had torn away and left despair room to move in...Kimblee could feel it, tied to the darkness as he was. The utter _torment _within Jarod, like a scar that had healed over but so badly that it was so easy to open it up. The impossible guilt eating him inside. Guilt for so many things...some the man didn't even remember anymore.

The darkness and Kimblee's will alone were sufficient to power the machine-titan, but the pain of Jarod's innermost spirit, raw and bleeding (the man was so eager to _give _of himself to a cosmos that didn't even notice), was as marvelous fuel. The writhing shadows sought him, chained him down and lapped at his light while leaving him physically unharmed, funneling his pain into the heart of the machine-titan itself; new mechanisms spontaneously appeared, sliding through the dark aura around it, and the entire machine grew a little bit, the whole of it absorbing something of Jarod's own darkness and changing accordingly.

Kimblee relaxed his mind and the mass of shadows binding him to it detached, gently belaying him to the ground, the Philosopher's Stone conveyed to his hand. He dropped with a slight stagger - he'd taken a bit of a beating today - and turned around, surveying his handiwork.

The machine-titan was enormous, though curiously it was actually a bit smaller than either Greed's fighting mech or the Juggernaut Armor; whatever extra mass combining both machines had created seemed to had been funneled into making it broader rather than taller, as well as it's armor. It was even more brutal looking than the Juggernaut Armor, a killing machine wider than it was tall, nothing about it linear or smooth when jagged bulk could do. It's head, set at such an extreme angle that the machine looked like a hunchback, resembled a low-swept spiked helmet with a faceplate shaped like monstrous fangs, the suggestion of a vicious set of _actual _fangs behind it. (Kimblee questioned the logic of this, but then, it had been the Heartless that had channeled themselves into this machine or at least something akin to them, and they had a certain design ethic.)

It's shoulders, and indeed, none of it's limbs were connected to the body but hung slightly off, floating at the appropiate spots like the joints were invisible. Darkness poured out of the machine, expanding into a thick aura that left a bitter frost in the air, and even seemed to be forming much of it's internal structure; it had enormous spiked pauldrons, like articulated domes edged with blades, and it's arms overflowed with the vapor-like shadows steaming out from the insides where they formed the shapes of internal machinery. It's arms were enormous, almost simian in their bulk, but they were jointless and rather like segmented tentacles, ending in massive clawed gauntlets that reached the ground.

The darkness comprising it seemed thickest near it's lower half, where it had to devote so much of itself to make up for the Juggernaut Armor's missing half; it's upper half was almost all machine, with vents of dark smoke streaming out. There were weapon systems everywhere; two massive main fire cannons between the shoulders, rapid-fire guided missle launchers on the back, six plasma blasters on the gauntlets and more, and the heavily plated chest contained the reconstituted wave motion gun from the original Juggernaut Armor where it would have been hooked to the original power core but was now powered exclusively by Kimblee's alchemy. It had no cockpit, no controls at all; it's stomach area was a solid mass of darkness, Jarod buried somewhere there in, and it was here that Kimblee would join with the machine and command it's might; the metal above was formed in such a way that the chest place looked like a demon's skull and upper jaws, and the lower body resembling an open maw to give the impression that Kimblee would be resting in the mouth of a monster.

It's legs were double-jointed and backbent, like a saurian reptile's, with large feet still resembling boots except for the clawed toes; the 'boot' parts were actually simplistic flight-capable intake jets and stabilizers, and there were similar but larger ones on the machine's back. The legs were abnormally thick, possibly to support the machine's weight (in spite of not being connected to it, but that's the power of darkness for you); it was probably that most of Greed's robot had been concentrated here, judging from the thick armor characterisitic of Greed's attempt to create a robot as tough as his own Ultimate Shield by using armor made from an alloy called secondary adamantium. (Needless to say, the characteristics of that armor had been applied to this machine-titan, and strengthened.)

In other words, it was not the giant robot you wanted to show off to your friends. It was the giant robot you showed off to your enemies shortly before you slaughtered them all, pulled their souls into the pain-matrix you used to power it and sucked up their vitality until they were naught but tormented scraps of quintessence. (This wasn't that sort of robot, thankfully, but it sure looked like it.)

Kimblee grinned, and the few remaining people (there are always a few idiots who just will not take the hint and _go_) stared in horror. Except for the ones that thought it looked cool. "...I like it," Kimblee said. "Oh, I like it a lot! But...it would be unfair to march into battle without a title, a name to be bequeathed unto you! If a mind you truly posesses, then listen! I have you a name."

The machine's eyes seemed to glow.

"I have forged you from a dread weapon of destruction, and the greatest weapon of the sin of greed incarnate! You have been touched by darkness before your creation, and so you have _become _darkness, solid and incarnate! The light flees from you. The sun cannot pierce your shell. You are...yes, you are a shelter, a guiding point to those Heartless that dwell in the darkness and still fear the light that opposes them!"

Darkness blazed from it's eyes; it was not a natural thing, not possible, but the machine-titan was an abomination in itself.

"Born of darkness, protecting darkness, _embodying _darkness...you are as a _titan_. Cast down from your rightful place, broken and humiliated! I have broken your chains, I have restored you to even greater glory! Rise once more, great titan, and _destroy_. Destroy everything I give unto you, demolish this town that is a triumph of the light! Crush _everything _you see before, and give their sparks of light to your brethern so that they might know a fraction of peace and silence their hunger, if only for a moment!"

The machine-titan rumbled, it's reformed sound synthesizers coming to life.

"_I name you. _I name you..._Umbra Eternus. _The Eternal Night."

The machine-titan opened it's jaws, as if to roar...and paused. It tilted it's head, as if to say 'is that the best you can do?'. It appeared to reconsider for a moment, shrugged, and roared half-heartedly.

Kimblee grimaced. "No one appreciates my pseudo-latin names." He waved his hand dismissively. "Oh well. You will have your fill of destruction soon enough." The newly named Umbra Eternus (not looking altogether happy with it's name) bowed it's head to Kimblee. It stayed there for a moment, it's shadow-mass flaring up until a massive burst of darkness consumed it; when it faded, the machine-titan had disappeared.

Kimblee still felt it's presence, felt it's proto-mind waiting for him, awaiting the call. Kimblee raised an eyebrow...and paused, noticing that the people around him hadn't fled yet. He shrugged and smiled, clapping his hands.

"All right then," He said, his shadow much _much _bigger than it ought to; it was the shadow of a titan. Or perhaps, a giant robot. "I begin my work anew."

Around him, the darkness surged, and then a brilliant (_twisted_) red flash of light, and then the screaming started.

...

_Elsewhere..._

"I don't know about you," The lion-man said to his companions. "But I _REALLY _hate that Kimblee guy."

They nodded in assent. "Hey, I had to _work _with him," The hooded one complained.

There was a pause. "Ouch," the lion-man said.

"...Yeah. Uh, giving Calvin the idea of building that...that whatever it is through the medium of his dreams was a nice move," The hooded one added, as if in a hurry to make them forget about what he had just said.

"Yes," said the machine-man. "I know. We can only hope he actually _uses _it..."

...

A/N: And you thought that giant robot from the Council's clubhouse was just a bit of scenery and backstory, didn't you? Next chapter, this arc concludes! And awesomeness will happen.

One problem I realized with bringing Roy Mustang into this fight was that when he's directly IN a fight, unless he's capacitated or fighting a regenerator, the fight's basically over as soon as he attacks. Seriously; he snaps his fingers, boom, enemy is dust. So I had to pull some stuff to ensure that his Game Breaker Power didn't dominate the fight. Kimblee was able to even that a bit, though.

Kimblee's psychology interests me a lot; he's been said to be a Deconstruction of the actual psychology of real-life sociopaths (as opposed to villanious characters that are just CALLED sociopaths); he's genuinely chilling in the manga, precisely because of this. (In the first anime, he's a fairly standard mad bomber, though still scary because of just how completely psychotic he is.) I had some...interesting moments seeing what makes Kimblee go tick-tick-tick. (Bit of a stealth pun there.)

It was fun writing Kimblee being affable with his enemies during his brief interlude during the news report; he's very Affably Evil. It's part of what makes his manga and Brotherhood characterization so terrifying, actually, because he honestly doesn't seem to understand the difference between shaking your hand and blowing you to smithereens (though he's perfectly aware that other people find this off-putting) and he's likely to do both at the same time if he likes you.

That bit with the darkness and Roy's team after Kimblee...did whatever he did? I figured that direct contact with pure Darkness by non-Evil people has got to have some traumatic effects on people. Some of these guys have got some SERIOUS issues to work through. (Deadpool's from Marvel Comics and Roy basically commited genocide in the course of following orders and incurred some nasty Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from it, as well as a huge helping of guilt.)

Zim had a surpisingly small bearing in this chapter, given that he's the main character of the story. On the other hand, he got some pretty awesome lines. (It occurs to me that when I'm doing comedic moments, Zim acts like a Heroic Sociopath or Talkative Loon; apparently he drops the Sanity Ball when it's funny enough.) On the other hand, his actions do drive a significant part of the latter part, so it counts, I hope.

Zim's conversation with Kimblee was...a highlight of writing this chapter, I can tell you that much.

Yes, my version of Hobbes will flirt with anyone or anything. And I _mean _that.

First the Mall Crawlers and then the Juggernaut Armor...a few Chekov's Guns fired in this one, and I didn't even plan them for that! Or DID I? (No. I didn't.)

Creating giant robots and combining them before shunting them off somewhere along with hostages being used as power sources; is there anything the Ruinous Powers of darkness can't do? (Create milk for the Dark Side's cookies, I surmise.)

Hopefully, I'll finish this arc before the year is out. Fingers crossed, everyone!


	15. Lotus Resolution Part 1

HOLY CRAP, this took forever.

I'm still not sure why it took so infernally long, and I apologize. On the other hand, it _was _a great opportunity to do some proper action scenes, which I haven't done in a while.

Even so, the end result was still ridiculously long, and since I couldn't cut it down without diminishing the end result to unsuitable degrees, I had to split the chapter in half, and the second half is only _mostly _done. (It will be finished soon, thankfully.) You wouldn't _believe _the number of scenes I already had to cut and redo just to make things more managable.

So, again, sorry for the long wait. Me and Schedule Slippage have to get a troping-divorce before I go mad from the shame of it.

Disclaimer: You know the drill. I don't own anything aside from the things I do own. References abound, and the world may tremble at their illogical-ness.

...

Calvin had been doing mad science since before he had been old enough to be aware of the concept of existence, and he had been working with sub-par equipment, haphazard assistants and horrifying circumstances nearly as long as that.

Thus, the news studio he had chosen to prepare for a last-ditch gambit (should it be neccesary), while not very well-off, was the kind of environment he was used to working with. At least, he had been before he had gotten the benefit of his various high rankings and the research and application grants that came with them, but he could still use what he had here. (Even if he spent a lot of time wishing that they had better stuff for him to use.) Even so, he couldn't help but notice that the basement area he and his 'assistants' were working in was distastefully dusty and sparsely used, and he considered the management here wasteful, since he could think of a whole host of things it could be used for.

Mostly, it seem to be a storage place for the things left behind by previous owners, but to the credit of Courtney and her co-workers, they did an admirable job of maintaining all these things and getting them to operate in tandem to power their building's occasionally expensive power demands. (Like most organized group in Traverse Town, they periodically did some work as crime fighters. With the sheer number of anti-crime units in the town and the amiable nature of the place, it must be wondered how there is still crime of any sort there, and it must be pointed out that these groups are usually reactive in nature, and also that a number of people _fake _crimes and evil-doings to give these crime-fighters something to do. They are usually given a great deal of leeway amongst the authorities for their public charity.)

In this basement, there were, among other things, an impressively large boiler hooked up to a number of pipes in case it was needed again, sandwiched between the kind of power generators popular among people that didn't trust manufactured Blue Eco, powered by all manner of well-known fuels as like energon crystals (exported from a civilization of giant robots that had sadly been supposedly scattered by a civil war eons ago, and more recently decimated by a space-spanning horde of Heartless), solar-charged batteries that collected power from exterior antannae, all those things wired into a pair of massive power circulators squatting right there at the back of the basement, cables and wires and conduits running from them and into the walls, and from there into the building's power grid. He didn't go digging around to find out (fun though that would have been) and he didn't get a chance to investigate the more in-depth nature of their operations, but he didn't have to because Courtney told him everything he needed to know.

In any event, Calvin figured it was good enough for what he had in mind (a plan that required his impromptu assistants to remain oblivious to his intentions or they would _strenously _object), and he wasted no time getting in done, as he had no idea how long it would take for Kimblee to get there. Without more than a simple statement of, "_MINIONS!_ Let's get moving already!" he set to work at rewiring the boiler and transmuting part of it into a crude device to sky rocket the pressure to a dangerous but controlled level.

"Don't call us minions!" Courtney said, crossing her arms.

"Yes, sir!" A stocky girl named Milda Snadolski said (a blameless girl, in the grand scheme of things), completely ignoring Courtney and running over to the boiler and helping him wire some new components into it. Courtney facepalmed on behalf of the ever-dwindling dignity of her workplace.

"You guys!" Calvin said to the others, making them jump. "Get those emergency generators fueled up, I want them overloaded pronto! You two, get those power circulators fired up at maximum!"

"Wait, what do you mean 'overloaded'?" A mostly humanlike anthropoid frog man and an impressively large furry creature living on his head protested.

"It's a means to help defeat Kimblee!" Calvin said, with complete honesty only slightly diminished by his refusal to spell out what that entailed.

"Oh, okay," The frog man said, his living hair piece wriggling in agreement. Several other of Calvin's new minions stated their agreement, and they got to work as Calvin directed.

"But why?" Courtney asked suspiciously. "They could _explode _with that kind of stress!"

Calvin didn't explain that this was actually the whole _point _here. (Or at least a directed explosion, but any way it was crucial that no one be inside the building at the time.) Instead he just said, "You go and fuel up those conduit things that I can't be bothered to identify more accurately until I have the time to take it apart and improve it to such a degree that it will probably violate local bans on weapons of mass destruction."

"I'll have you know, we have practically _no _restraints on incredibly powerful world-busting technology!" Courtney said proudly. She frowned in reflection. "On second thought, that's not really a happy sentence...hrm, I should give a letter to the Council over that."

"Okay, good, you think about that and help me with the conduits," Calvin said gamely.

Courtney pouted, clearly thinking about the possible ramificaitons of just leaving him to his own devices without her supervision, and winced at the potential for damage. "Oh...fine!"

Calvin went to work on those conduits, his minions (except for Courtney) obeying him not owing to any force of personality on his part but something of his manic energy leaking into out and influencing them with a portion of the same obsessive drive he had; a measure of curiosity regarding what precisely he was up to was also a factor. The actual work didn't take very long; Calvin was surprisingly good at directing minions, and wasn't particular rude or abrasive about it in spite of his usual behavior. He'd slipped into a different frame of mind then he usually had, and instead of treating them as annoyingly talkative tools, he talked to them with an obnoxiously loud enthusiasm quite foriegn to his normal behavior, edging on to manic cheeriness as they made progress, and soon enough, the machines were modified to his intended purpose, the generators were fueled up and overclocked while vital pipelines had been moved elsewhere, all done in such a way that no one had any idea what was going on, not even the technical people.

As they were nearing completion of their task (which took around ten minutes under Calvin's direction of his new minions), Courtney took it upon herself to break out of this strangely _nice_ creative insanity Calvin had inspired in them and said, "You're a mad scientist."

Calvin, strapping his specialized pyrokinetic glove for his current task, paused and sufficiently edged away from whatever extranormal frame of mind he had been in. It wasn't a question, but he still said, "...Yeah. It runs in my family." He laughed, and it was nearly gleeful. "Other families have weird toes or freckles, _my _family has a propensity for situationally modifying the law of physics and natural philosophy with mechanism and theory!"

(He wasn't exaggerating. Mad science ran deep on _both _his respective family lines. Deep, and _old_; older than the Kingdom's current incarnation, perhaps even older than their most distant ancestors from the time of the Imperium of Man and the ascendency of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. It wasn't something most of his family liked to keep known, with the horrific atrocities the last ruling caste of mad philosopher-kings that had ruled over their still-wounded realms had commited. Mad scientists had a bad reputation these days, and Calvin's little branch of the family tree, which had cast the family's sparks of mad genius into a roaring blaze, didn't have much to do with the others.)

Courtney knew more than her fair share of extra-dimensional history, having traveled with her own group of misfits before she settled down in Traverse Town; the history of the Comic Kingdom, even though it wasn't in the same universal axis as her current home, was known to her. She was alsoquite perceptive and a great deal smarter then most people thought, and that brief pause before that simple response, heavy with hidden meanings, spoke volumes to her. She wondered whether to push the question and decided not to; he was a tempermental little kid. "I don't suppose you're experienced with this?"

Calvin put a hand on the power conduits at the back of the room. "What do you mean? Fighting, struggling against an unknown quantity of foes or just tinkering?"

"Well, all of them, I suppose."

Calvin didn't think about it much, opting to concentrate on the matter at hand, warmth flickering around his hand and beating in the metal underneath. _Give it to the metal,_ he thought. Memetic theory suggested that all things remembered their history, and so to did this metal remember the heat that had shaped it, years ago; draw on that heat, bring it back and the metal could be changed. "I've been fighting all my life," Calvin said unthinkingly. "And tinkering's a good way to stay alive. You'd be surprised about the weapons-" He heisitated, clearly annoyed that was the first thing he had thought of. "Uh, weapons and _good things_ you can make from scrap and junk."

He found the small space of the basement comforting. Hobbes probably wouldn't; the memory of those long-gone days under the pressure of a hundred streets above had nightmarish associations, not when they had been host to the remnants of a dying magicracy determined to exterminate itself in a final gesture of defiance and kill everything it could. There were nightmares under those dark spaces, and only some of them were people.

On the other hand, Calvin had wrought some truly impressive craftworks in those dark days. He was alive because of them, those works of art born under his diligent handwork. When he was in spaces like this, it reminded him of those times when he'd had no formal training, barely any time to test anything he'd made and the ever-looming threats literally crawling out of the walls...and there had still been the joy of creation, the thrill of success and the satisfaction of learning from his mistakes. That was something to remember, and worth the bad times.

Courtney, not privy to his thoughts but certainly aware of his osscilating mood, gave him a look. Calvin observed that it wasn't confused or annoyed, like he was used to. This was a penetrative look, and he suspected that if he so much as gave her an opening to exploit, she would dig and dig and hit _something _eventually. She wanted to know; it didn't matter what, his brief remark was like dangling a lure in front of a kitten. She just wanted to claw at it now.

Thankfully, she seemed to be aware that now was not the best time and left it at that, watching what he was doing with interest. Calvin resumed his work, guiding his device's heat into the metal, coaxing the distant memory of forge-fires in. There was a spark, a surge of alchemic light, and the metal _changed_, splintering and reforming at the same time, and became a small sphere with a little valve on the top of it hung between the conduits, connecting to both with a thick cable. Calvin adjusted that valve until he was satisfied with it.

He made a few other adjustments. Courtney watched him do it, helping him when he asked her to, but otherwise simply watching, and waiting, and observing.

He reminded her a little bit of people she had used to know; it softened whatever reaction she might otherwise'd had to him.

Eventually, Calvin finished what he was doing and called out, "Somebody get me the stuff I brought!" The stocky girl from before wheeled a trolley over, loaded with many things, and at the top of the trolly was a radio and some remotes and other things he could fashion into something useful; he turned as she brought it over, and Calvin's eyes briefly went gloriously blank with pure possibility; the thousand-faceted gears of his mind spun with suggestions, and out of the churning chaos came a glowing spark of inspired science, begging for his hands to give it _life_-

He closed his eyes and let the divine madness wash over him and burn out without incident. He took a deep breath. Focus. Stay focused. Calm, serene, moored by the Obligation to keep these people alive...

_The power of Science could do it_, he thought with a hint of a genuine optimism that no many people knew he had. _Scientific know-how could save everyone. With the right Science-_

_Well. With the right Science, _anything _was possible. Anything good. Anything that deserved to be real._

"Okay," He said, cracking his knuckles like the hardened engineer that he was. "Let's get this finished! For _Science!_"

"Don't crack your knuckles like that, you'll get arthritis when you're old," Courtney scolded.

He rolled his eyes. "Bah, if it comes to that I'll have my hands sawed off and replaced with pnuematic gauntlets that shoot lasers and project force fields and have built-in TV remotes."

"That's quitter's talk!" Courtney said, not batting an eye.

The hastily assembled pile of assorted tech was brought to him and Calvin willfully rose to the final stages of his idea in a mad frenzy that astonished (and in a few cases scared) his audience, and soon assembled a few crude but servicable device; an old-fashioned transmission radio with a few retro-styled personal phones wired into it, the top of the radio taken away and a motherboard inserted into it, covered with a plastic sheet and plugged into a awkward-looking keypad that looked suitable for entering coordinates. It looked unwieldly and unfashionable, but he pronounced his satisfactory, negelcting to mention what it was for.

Courtney gave it a dubious look. "...You're going to explode the building, aren't you?"

"Close," Calvin said with a wicked grin. Courtney considered pressing the matter, but conscience prevailed over her territorial impulses; if it defeated Kimblee (and got her a front-row seat to his defeat and an exclusive), she couldn't see an honest reason to say no.

The moment fell away when the stocky girl came up, holding the strange device Calvin had built in his sleep earlier. "Um, sir?" Milda Snadolski said nervously. "Your, uh, your mad science-y thing? It's going all spinny and lefty-blinky and stuff!"

"Those aren't even words!" Calvin complained. "Lemme see." He took it from her and saw that one of the radar bits (which was difficult to comprehend indeed) was indicating a large source of strange energy approaching. Interestingly, a gauge was blinking incrementally, like a fuel meter that was slowly filling up, if extremely slowly. So slowly that it couldn't be said to really be filled up at all.

"Hrm," Calvin said. "That's...now, that's interesting..."

"What does it mean?" Courtney asked, a bit leery of the tracking device.

"I have no idea!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Experimentation and poking here and there to see what works, that's what science is all about. However, I do have an idea."

"Like?"

"Well, this is just a theory right now, but I'm pretty sure it's right. I have no idea what this machine is exactly, but I am certain that it's absorbing energy. Not from all around, or we'd be having black outs and stuff; I don't know what it _is_ absorbing, but whatever it is, it's concentrated from a distance, based on the rate it's building up. Furthurmore, I bottled some blood I found at the site of Kimblee's attack-"

"Wait, you what?"

"It was for science!" He looked hurt. "And for humanity! But mostly science."

"That's a _horrible _breach of ethics! Don't you have to ask permission or something?"

Calvin waved the concerns away. "Whatever, the donor was either dead, getting dead or evil, asking permission was ill-advised all around. And hey, I'm a _mad scientist_. Disregard for professional mores comes with the job. What part of that did I not make clear?"

"Um-"

"Exactly! Oh, and by process of elimination, I figured out where the energy is coming from. There was some crazy energy in the blood sample I got, and my little lovely wonder seems to have 'locked on'. Imprinting or something like that, I don't really want to test it further right now. It's picked up on where the main source of it, and by the extension the blood donor is, and I've eliminated the other candidates from the short list. For one thing, it's not anybody from Foster's, given the direction it's indicating. At least," Calvin said ominously. "Nobody who _lives _at Foster's."

"I don't understand-"

"It's from that Kimblee guy," Calvin explained impatiently. "My machine locked onto him and I can pinpoint his general direction! Wow, you're slow to catch on. You suck."

"Wait, you could _track _Kimblee?" Courtney said incredulously.

"Apparently."

"..._Why didn't you do that before!_" She yelled. "You could have saved who-knows how much money in property damage! You could have just gone after him and not wrecked our stuff!" She paused. "...And I wouldn't have the rights to an exclusive, either. I hate ethical condundrums like this."

"Hey, I didn't know it could do that before, I didn't even know what it was!"

"You made a machine and you didn't even know what it does?"

"You say that like it's a bad thing." Calvin glowered and thought of the most worrying thing he could say. "Oh, and according to this, Kimblee's getting really close. Wow, we finished just in time, too."

"...What?" Courtney squeaked, several people echoing her.

"You heard me. We're inching ever closer towards the final fight! Of this morning. I guess. Or maybe your guy's lives. Won't that be fun to see?"

"I guess," Courtney said, not really approving of his cavalier attitude. "Well, if we're done here, we should head up to meet with the other guys!"

"Okay," Calvin said, as did a few of his minions. He frowned. "Hey, when did _you _start giving the orders-"

"I'm in charge here, I have seniority, I could go on!"

"The Great Maker preserve us from such indignities," Calvin said dryly. Courtney huffed, but let it go. "Ah, here's hoping everyone up there is doing as good as us."

"Oh my god, _I BROKE OFF MY HAND!_" A technician who came from the Free League screamed, clutching a curiously bloodless stump; Calvin whirled around in horror. "Oh, wait, wait, never mind. False alarm. It's my prosthetic hand, I forgot to tighten it this morning. Could someone help me put it back on?"

"...Well, they can't suck at it _too _much," Calvin said. "Or get more distracted than that."

On the upper levels...

"You know what would make the world a happier place?" Zim asked Morte, proving Calvin wrong in a single question. "_More show tunes_."

"Show tunes?" Morte said.

"Yeah, the really catchy types of songs they play on urban theater. Big choreographed numbers! Exceptionally well-executed synchronized choirs! And lots of flashing lights! And also nice voice overs when they go viral on the Internet."

"I don't..." Morte said. "What?"

"Aha, you seek explaination! To facilitate this, I offer you the six hundred reasons show tunes are awesome, listed in order from most boring to least comprehensible! I wrote them up last Tuesday, for I was very bored. SO VERY BORED INDEED."

"I feel I have made an error in judgement by responding," Morte said quietly to Zuko, who was sitting nearby and examining a gatling laser, his Fire Nation heritage drawing him to advanced weaponry that would utterly decimate the opposition. (And possibly explode.)

"Never give him an opening," Zuko said. "He will exploit it, he will not quite trying to take it as far as he can, and you will regret it forever." He put the gatling laser down, regretting that he had no idea how to operate it.

"Hey, what are you talking about?" Zim asked him, already bored with the show tunes thing.

"That it's a stupid idea to give you an opening to go off on some tangent, whether conversational or something else."

"Good advice! Why, I'm already thinking about setting my jacket on fire again to give myself an appropiately menacing air! And look cool. Everything looks cooler on fire. Ironically enough."

"And you could use that fire as a source and not have to make your own fire," Morte added.

"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that!"

"Don't encourage him!" Zuko snarled.

Morte shrugged, feeling that he was doing a reasonably good job of distracting himself from his creeping dread over the whole 'incoming horde of creeping abominations to be followed by superpowered sociopath' thing. Having a vested interest in _not _thinking about it until he really had to, he looked around the studio to see if anyone felt the same as him, and was a bit disgruntled that no one else really seemed to share his quiet desperation; the workers at the news studio were the closest, but that didn't mean much; they were quietly resigned, like they dealt with smaller-scale threats like this all the time. Hobbes, currently talking potential strategies with Kim and Sokka, had the jittery movements and snap-shot reflexive jumps of someone feeling stressed, but he as terribly frightened as Morte, merely anxious. Zuko seemed at a strange sort of peace, completely calm if you didn't notice the combative zeal manifesting as a personal heat that made everyone keep their distance from him and sizzle the air against his skin. Zim, of course, was the complete opposite of 'quiet', emitting little sparks with every other movement and completely oblivious to it, half-second fires sparking in his footsteps and ignited by his utter excitement. Perhaps more strangely, luminous light was generated from him without him even noticing, something quite distinct from his fire-themed abilities to date.

It reminded Morte of old times and old friends; it was both a pleasant feeling, and hurt him so deeply that if he still had organs he would have felt like they were twisting around each other. The fact that out of _all _these completely random people and townsfolk, he was the only one who was completely useless; even the friends of Zim's friend Danny Fenton seemed willing to get some weapons and fight as support.

All Morte could do here was bite things and insult them, usually at the same time. That wasn't a useful talent in the situation at _all_. Some days, he got tired of being little more than a guide, and he was begining to think that even the new Boss' book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, could do that just as well. He really had no idea why King Garfield had sought him out and convinced him to join this crew...

Morte voiced his concerns and said, "Isn't _anyone _the least bit worried?"

"No," Zim said.

"Not really," Zuko said.

"We deal with this kind of thing all the time!" Aang said.

"Meh," Danny said.

"I'm scared stupid!" Sokka said cheerfully. "I think. Probably not even paying attention to it."

"We second that motion!" Sam and Tucker added. "Seriously, what are we even doing here?"

"...Moral support?" Morte suggested.

"That's stupid and you know it is," Sam told him. "...Still, we might as well help _someone _out, what with our abysmal failure as heroes since last night."

"Totally. So...do we have a concrete plan yet?"

"Indeed!" Zim said, looking quite pleased. "We wait for the Heartless to show up and we blow them up. Then we wait for Kimblee to get here and then we hit him until _he _gives up! It's foolproof."

"Unless he kills us all from a distance," Hobbes remarked sourly. Aang winced; Appa had gone to the rooftop because he didn't like enclosed spaces, and the thought of Appa getting caught in a blast like that _hurt_.

"Huh?" Cyborg said. "What are you basing that on?"

"I was raised by mad scientists and my adopted brother-slash-best friend is a mad scientist that also likes transmutation alchemy. I've had _plenty _of experience to see it's combat applications! If this Stone thing amplifies alchemic power as much as Scar told me it does, we're probably going to die within five minutes of this Kimblee guy showing up. Our best hope will probably be that the initial blast kills us all immediately instead of lingering on in painful meaty bits. That is a _painful _way to die."

"Also, killing from a distance is precisely _how _Kimblee fights," Scar said from the corner he and Abel had quietly been discussing contingency plans. (They involved lots of stuff blowing up. It is said that the Crossguard has an unhealthy interest in making things explode.) "Provided he doesn't find an alternative means that entertains him more...which is entirely a possibility."

"Yeah," Morte concluded. "This is gonna suck."

Danny face-palmed. "I escaped horrible abominations only to be maybe eaten by a whole horde of them and then blown up by a crazy guy with a explosion fetish. Did I soak up Zuko's bad karma or something?"

"Hey!" Zuko said.

"...Oh, come ON!" Zim snapped. "Would it _kill _you all to show a bit of optimism! The flood of darkness incarnate didn't kill us or even seriously hurt us, how the hell will a loony with a magic rock made of evil gonna do more than give us a good fight!"

"Technically, that Stone thing is made by _souls_, not evil," Katara pointed out.

"_**SEMANTICS!**_" Zim raved.

At that moment, Calvin opened the door that went to the basement and came out with some harrased looking technicians and also Courtney, the lot of them looking vaugely satisfied but also confused by what they had been doing. "What's all the yelling about?"

"There is a minor bit of skepticism regarding our chances of survival," Abel explained. "And I gotta say, you guys are pretty much screwed. Not me though, 'cause I'm immortal or something. I'll get all blown up but I'll just piece myself back together and be on my way. But yeah, you're totally hosed." Everyone glared at him. "What? I was kidding! I hope."

Calvin glared at the room in general. "Geez, what's with all the negativity? Would it _kill _you to show a bit of optimism!" Zim gave him a weird look. "...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Probably 'cause that's _exactly _what Zim said," Morte said.

"Huh?" Calvin stared at Zim, clearly horrified that they had agreed with each other on...well, _anything_.

As Zim and Calvin considered the ramifacations of this, Courtney crept over to Hobbes; he seemed like a nice sensible boy. "Um, hey. He had us do a lot of weird stuff to the boilers and power systems. Do you know what he was making this all do? He wouldn't tell us." Hobbes shook his head apologetically. "Aw..."

"It's nothing to worry about," Hobbes assured her, giving Calvin a sidelong look. "He's not going to do something crazy like, I don't know, turn this place into a giant rocket and hit Kimblee with it or something." Even as he said this, he felt bad for lying to her; that sounded _exactly _like something Calvin would do.

A few minutes passed as they made further arrangements, had Hobbes go and talk to the Mall Crawlers to make sure they were in position and motivated and stuff, talked to the 'Benders and made sure that the battlefield engineering had been concealed properly, and listened to Calvin refuse to explain what exactly he had done. ("It'll be a surprise, you'll see!" He had said. "...But just in case, make _absolutely sure _that no one is still inside the building when we're fighting, or they'll die horribly. Being on the rooftop will be fine though." Naturally, this die not assure anyone much.)

Inspired by this last point of Calvin's Zim got everyone (that was not in for the Heartless and Kimblee) together and asked, "Is there anyone here who does not wish to join in the fight, or at the very least take the fight elsewhere? I have it on good authority that many Heartless are attacking this district in important areas. Like that one hospital outside the Foster's site, probably." He glanced at Aang, as if seeking approval. Aang nodded, and indicated for him to go on. "So, um..." Zim wasn't much good at _sincere _speeches, and was having some difficulty with basically asking the timid people of this studio if they wanted to run away without being cruel about it. "Uh, yeah, say something. I haven't got all day. Well, actually, I do, but then I have to go on a space voyage and rescue mission and also there's that whole impending attack here so...uh, I feel have have mislaid the thread of what I was talking about."

"Wow, you are spectacularily bad at speeches," Calvin said. "I am actually impressed. It takes real lack of talent to be _that _astonishingly bad at something." Zim threw a fireball at him and it went out the window. (By complete coincidence eventually hitting a very distant wall in the distance and blasting a brick that hit Kimblee.) "And your aiming sucks. Amazing!"

There was a brief tense moment, possibly while his audience deleted those embarassing moments from their memories. Then, "NO WAY!" Zero-Forty-Nine the cloned reporter shouted. Zim blinked in surprise.

"This is our news studio!" The frog man with the awesome hair-critter said passionately.

"WE'LL EAT THEIR BRAINS AND MAKE THEM SUFFER FOR ATTACKING OUR STUDIO!" A black goopy symbiote howled ferociously. She paused. "Wait, do Heartless have brains?" Someone told her that they did not. "Crap. Eh, we can still shoot them and stuff. Shoot them with SCIENCE."

"Half of every other news report we do is fraught with danger!" Courtney said stubbornly. "Sneaking into hidden giant robot sales amid the black markets that think it's a good idea to hawk their warse here...fighting through armies of dumb goons to get an interview with mob bosses that are trying to pretend to be tourists...infiltrating big evil armies just for that small chance we might overhear their generals saying something we can expose on the air and break out of our low-scale rutt! _Interrupting Crossguard representatives when it's tabletop RPG night!_"

"Yeah, that last one is the most frightening," Zero-Forty-Nine agreed.

"We can't let you get killed on _our _turf!" The alien lady that had answered Kimblee's call from earlier said passionately. "...Not that I'm saying it would be okay for you to get killed off it. Um. You know what I mean!"

Zim blinked. "This was not what I expected."

"Guess everyone in Traverse Town really _is _capable of fighting," Hobbes agreed.

"We can't just run away from our own news studio like that!" Milda Snadolski cried furiously. "Do you know what we had to do to get it?"

"No," Zim said.

"...Oh, yeah. Well...it was a big deal. Totally."

"Actually, I am majorly okay with running away. Well, not _okay _with it, but c'mon, I'm a realist," Morte said. The others stared at him. "What? I'm a godsdamned _talking head_, how the hell do you expect me to positive influence the course of battle?"

"...We could put you in a robot suit?" Courtney suggested.

"Right. And would you just _happen _to have one of those lying around?"

"Um...no, sorry."

"Oh." For a moment, Morte looked almost disappointed.

Zim considered the matter. While it _was _refreshing to see so many people willing to fight instead of letting him and his group fight their battles for them (something he had gotten used to during his, Danny and Aang's stint as heroes), there was absolutely no way he could possibly field them on the battle; there were far too many of them (the people that he had brought with him was already a large enough number to be pushing his luck), and it was likely that these news people would get killed in the ensuing battle with that kind of ill-thought out recklessness. Further death was not someone he wanted on him, and espicially not when it was a fight _he _started. But he couldn't deny them their vengeance, or the right to fight on their own turf either...

He had an idea. "My guide Morte cannot fight on his own, and requires someone to take him to a place of safety! Who will volunteer for this illustrious duty?" Zim declared, pointing at Morte. Courtney blinked.

"Wait, I do?" Morte said, having intended on just running like hell, or staying out of the way.

"Yes, you do!" Zim insisted. "For you are the last living remnant of a vast intersteller culture of scholar-kings dedicated to knowledge and the empirical analysis of a thousand-and-twenty 'verses! All their vast and mighty knowledge is contained within your skull! Should you perish, all that wisdom that was earned over a span of time greater than most time measuring systems have names for will be gone, and the multiverse shall suffer for it!"

Morte stared. "...That's right, I am!" He said quickly, being the kind of guy who knew a decent scam when he saw one. ('Decent' in the sense that it was for a heroic cause.)

"Wow," Abel quietly said to Scar. "I totally would not have noticed he was one of _those _kind of survivors."

"He's not," Scar said, equally quietly so as not to ruin the scam. "It's a plan to get the news studio employees out of here and reduce potential casualities."

Abel crossed his arms and frowned sternly. "Must you take the romance and wonder out of everything?" Scar sighed.

Several people gasped. "No!" Milda Snadolski cried, utterly horrified. "That's...that's something too horrible to let happen!"

"Not another fallen culture of thinking guys that fell to evil!" Zero-Forty-Nine raved, his arms held up high. "_WHY DO THEY ALWAYS SUFFER MOST!_"

"They never pay their insurance on time," Morte said. "Too busy contemplating the dharmic meaning of the peach tree and stuff like that. Also, gits get jealous."

Moved by this sentiment, the news guys conferred, while Courtney kept quiet on the obvious truth; the others did not, not because they were stupid or credible, but because such a premise _did _happen on Traverse Town often enough that dismissing it out of hand would be silly and mean. Eventually they seperated and Courtney said, "Everyone else, uh, everyone else wants to get your friend Morte to safety at the mobile hospital, which should be the safest place in the district at the moment from the heavy faction presence. I'll stay here as a representative and fight on the studio's behalf."

"Excellent," Zim said.

"Shouldn't we get some weapons too?" The tentacled alien lady said, looking longingly at the gatling laser Zuko had discarded.

At this most appropiate moment, Kim and Ron wandered back in from they had been helping the Mall Crawlers prepped with the defenses and ideal places to hold the defense. "Hey guys," She said breezily. "What's happened?"

"The employees here wish to escort Morte to safety at the mobile hospital that set up shop near Foster's," Hobbes said, putting it all as tactfully as possible.

"...Huh," Kim said. "Why?"

"For he is a living remnant of a lost culture and holds all their vast knowledge," Calvin said snidely. "Would _you _want it to be lost?"

"No way!" Ron said, completely buying the whole thing. "We'll help too!"

"We will?" Kim said. Ron looked at her, his eyes big and his lip trembling. "Okay, okay! Stop looking at me like that!" Ron did so, smirking smugly. Rufus rolled his eyes. "Pretty sure they'll need more weapons than what we have on hand, though."

"I can help give you weapons!" Abel said brightly, reaching into a shadow and pulling out the gigantic cross-shaped...thing he had been lugging around last night. "I figured I'd have to pull 'er out sooner or later for this fight, but now's a good time as ever, yeah?"

Danny carefully moved away. The streamers of darkness still rolling off the bizarre contraption probably had something to do with it. "How exactly did you just do that?"

"And why didn't you bring it to begin with?" Calvin asked.

"Well, I learned my lesson from being lost forever under Foster's, and I certainly didn't think I'd _need _to bring it with me this time! And I summoned it like that because I have many unusual and interesting talents that I'm not really comfortably with telling you right now." Abel carefully placed it on the ground and a sizable dent appeared underneath the extraordinarily heavy device. Abel did...something, the mechanisms of the device weren't at all clear, and then a drawer slid out of a seemingly smooth part of the left cross-arm, unfolding multiple times until it stopped halfway across the room, revealing a rack filled with weapons; chainswords, beamswords, beam-chainsaw swords, chainsaw-beam swords, regular swords, swords that pretended to be regular because they were bored and apparently sentient, semi-automatic firearms, fully-automatic firearms, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, grenade-propelled rocket-launchers bayonets, power fists, power fists with retractable blades, power fists that projected beamswords and also shotguns, many other weapons of that sort, and also a cross-eyed ferret in a habitarium reading a copy of the legendary book of enlightenment _The Kitab al-Alacir_. "Take your pick, ladies and gents!"

"Wow," Calvin said. "That's a load of dakka."

"Hah!" Zero-Forty-Nine said. "This will serve our purposes admirably."

Sokka stared in disbelief at Abel. "How-" He shook his head. "You know what? I don't care. I'm not gonna ask how he pulled that thing from wherever. I'm not gonna ask why it's so heavy that it's sinking into the floor and will probably break." Courtney gave Abel a dirty look and he hastily picked his weird contraption up. "I'm not going to ask how you're so strong you can pick it up one-handed. And I'm not going to ask how it's bigger on the inside than the outside, and I'm _definitely _not going to ask why you're carrying so many weapons, or for that matter, why you have a _ferret_ in there. I'm done. No more stupid questions! No skepticism from me, I hereby renounce my official position as the 'Meat, Sarcasm and Continued Skepticism Guy' and once again became the 'Meat and Sarcasm Guy'. Have fun killing logic with your crazy, but I am done beating my brain out against it." To settle his point, he went to the weapons Abel provided and selected, among other things, a plasma rifle in perfect condition and fully loaded; Sokka hadn't learned of firearms until he'd left his homeworld, but he'd develouped a tremendous enthusiasm for them. (Much to his sister's distaste. She liked the concept of firearms, actually, but she was wary of what would happen of them in Sokka's hands.)

"Glad to know!" Abel said cheerfully while the employees, Courtney and Calvin crowded around, Scar hanging back and clearly disapproving of Abel's excessive panoply. After the newly armed employees were done and started pestering Morte with an array of questions about his 'lost culture' (which he happily made up bizarre answers to), the question of what to _do _with those employees came up, as neatly summerized by the tentacle girl. "Now what?" She asked cautiously, her many limbs carrying multi-barrelled flamethrowers and repulser beam rifles; she'd picked them on the basis that they would work well to keep the evil things away from her and Morte, and also the others. "Do we just head through the tunnels underground or head up-top?"

"Well," Kim said, glancing at the others. "Staying up top just looks like it's an invitaiton towards being ambushed by Heartless. I say we head underground; at least if we meet Heartless down there, they'll be cornered no matter what way they come at us."

"Okay," the tentacle girl said. With that settled, Kim selected a modified beamsword-laser rifle for herself. (Ron stuck with the Lotus Blade, after Kim convinced him not to go straight for the chainsaw-beam swords. She insisted it would end badly.) She ordinarily was loath to resort to actual weapons, but since lethal force wasn't really avoidable with Heartless (though Aang would probably try anyway), she was willing to make an exception. She immediately started instructing her new escorts on movement strategies and proper formations while Rufus took notes and Ron played games on his communications device.

Aware that it was nearly time to move out, Zim beheld this all and laughed. "I do enjoy it when a plan comes together."

"Try to keep it quiet when you up and admit that you manipulated people," Morte said insistently.

"...Ah, right," Zim said, momentarily startled. Fortunately, none of the employees had heard him. (Well, Courtney did, but she was aware of his 'plan' from the begining.) "I suppose I should have the Keyblade out as well." He raised a hand and frowned in deep concentration, his still newly forged connection to the Keyblade calling to it from wherever it went; light flared around his head, so bright and harsh that space seemed to melt a little bit around it. The light reshaped itself into solid form, and as the puzzling non-Euclidian weirdness melted away, the Keyblade was in Zim's grasp, it's chain wrapped around Zim's arm and slowly coiling and sliding over itself like a living thing.

Zim gave it a weird look. "That's never happened before." He poked the chain. Several loops of chains slid out of the seething mass now covering his entire upper arm and tapped his fingertip, rather like a friendly dog nudging someone. "Huh. Magic is weird."

"...Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, what the frak!" Sammael said from behind Zim's head, peering at the innocent-looking Keyblade. "It's moving on it's _own_. THAT IS NOT NORMAL!"

"Oh, come off it!" Razael said dismissively. "It's done us no harm and it's clearly a supernal artifact of holiness, Light and probably shiny things. Why need we be afraid of it?"

"Because it's clinging to Zim's arm like a snake, with chains that were _not that freaking long the last time I saw it_, look, you can't even see anything between his elbow and shoulder now!"

"It's quite snug!" Zim said. His imaginary friends stared at him.

"What's snug?" Morte said, wandering over.

"This!" Zim waved his arm, the Keyblade's chains writhing happily along it, so extensively wound around Zim that his arm had disappeared from sight.

"...Is it supposed to do that?"

"Eh, guess so." Zim tried to pull the chain off, but it stubbornly held onto him, rattling affectionately. "Hey, it likes me!"

"When they say that you've got a 'clingy weapon', they're supposed to be speaking metaphorically," Morte commented.

"Hey!" Sammael yelled at Zim. "Get back here! I'm not done raving yet!...Dang it, he's not even listening." He hung his head, saddened while everyone tended to their own needs, and got ready to get this battle started. Zim, feeling in a faint way that it was his responsibilty, went over to Morte and his new escorts, intending to lead them down to the tunnels and see them off.

...

And speaking of getting the battle started, the opponent in question had already arrived, but he was in no hurry to begin: at the far end of the plaza from the news studio, Kimblee was thinking his needlessly convoluted and probably messed-up thoughts. At the very least, he had observed that the entire neighborhood and surronding areas had been evacuated with a casual sort of experience, so quickly that they had been gone before he gotten here. He _wanted _to have the silence speak to him of the life of a city itself, diverted and smashed aside as though struck by a mighty boulder, irrevocably changing it's course. He _wanted _to get the impression that there had been lives here, being lived, but then he had come and now scattered like so many little drops of water the same as the rest, in the wake of his doings.

He _wanted _to. But the only thing that kept coming to mind was the idea that he was being a mild annoyance to the city at large. A mild annoyance that had killed many people already and seriously destabilized their sense of security, but still only an annoyance. It rankled him that he hadn't even needed to blast his way here. The only explosions of recent times had been shortly after leaving the Council's strange...'clubhouse'. It was truly odd when a town's public policy was dictated by a group of representatives that chose to spend much of their time in a clubhouse doing little of importance.

This town was very surreal, Kimblee brooded as he walked atop building to building, pacing along rooftops as their walls stretched into the next building like bridges for him to move along. Disturbed and uncomfortable, he focused instead on the Stone's energy, little red flashes of souls fueling his alchemy, seemed like the auras certain mighty warriors something exhibited. He'd never approved of such ostentatious displays, but now he saw the appeal. How could one _not _show off to the world, and your foes, the extent of your world-shaping might?

He smirked at the thought, feeling better already. His shadow, swollen to such impossible size as though cast by a massive titan, covered the buildings and streets behind him. He left things changed in his wake; streaks of rust in metal. Door silently torn from their hinges. Walls now displaying awful murals of nightmare-worlds and hellscapes created by a thousand claw-marks. Water, whether in fountains or containers or unattended beverages, frozen over with a blackened frost. And, if in passing, the sunlight was turned gray and weak and _fighting _his influence.

(Kimblee was reasonably certain that most of those things ran counter to the laws of physics, but he was also pretty certain that he wasn't _quite _up-to-date on scientific knowledge as he should've been. But then the nature of the Heartless was to warp and break things, so almost certainly the same thing applied to their powers.)

There were things in that darkness that now traveled with the Red Lotus Alchemist. Shapeless shadow-things with enough substance to kill but not enough to dare the sunlight unmade all that they could grasp, venting their bottomless fury at this world of light by destroying all of it that they could touch. Kimblee could feel _more _of them, stranger things that even he shuddered to think of, trailing at the corners of his mind while Ghostfreak spread wariness at them and Kevin roared and lashed out like a rabid dog. The fear and anger only seemed to entice them, but how could it now? Such flashes of feeling were like motes of purest light to the things floundering in the darkness, alone and tormented and maddened. Kimblee thought he understood how they felt.

"So," Kimblee said to himself after stopping at what he felt to be the appropiate place upon a building he had no interest in identifying. "Here we are." He looked down the street, peering at the distant and unimportant looking building kitted out to maintain a news station.

He frowned at it, ready to clap his hands and summon enough alchemically-born power to wipe it (and the rest of the neighborhood) off the face of the planet, and heisitated. They had called him out through means that must have been enormously difficult and expensive to obtain; he had to assume that they were _waiting _for him and had plans to prevent such a ignominous demise. Scar was with them, so they had to know how he fought with his alchemy, while he didn't know _who _exactly he was fighting.

He knew (or that he did) that his reluctance to simply wipe them out had nothing to do with the disturbing thoughts drifting from Jarod's unconscious mind, drifting into Kimblee's through their mutal Heartless-forged connection. He closed his eyes, forcing the troubling feelings to just drift away and be replaced with a vauge internal neutrality he was far more used to. The silence felt _wrong_, only for a moment, but still long enough to leave him feeling unsettled.

He dismissed these thoughts and frowned as he looked across the street, past the buildings and to the innocent-looking news station at an intersection at the far side of the street. So unseeming a building to house such madness; his eye twitched a bit at the thought and shuddering, vowing great vengeance on that odd person that had seen fit to ramble on over the phone. It certainly didn't help that Kimblee thought that he heard, however distant, the noise of Kevin's mocking laughter at his expense. He considered killing them all for that insult, and dismissed it. The important thing...yes, the important thing for _him_ was that he honestly needed his enemy to _know _that they had been beaten. He needed to leave them lying in the dirt, their broken bodies slowly inching into death, and he needed to be there to explain to them just how _wrong _they had been, to tell them at length of the foolishness of their beliefs and how his victory here was Fate itself declaring him right with his success. He needed to see the light of despair in their eyes as the life drained out, their pitiful idealism finally fading as they accepted that reality was pain, bile and loss.

Anything else was just vain posturing to make himself feel better.

In the depths of the building he stood upon, in the tunnels just under the street, hidden just past the windows of the evacuated buildings along that street and homing in on him were the Heartless. The horde teemed, silent and hungry, an all-consuming shadow that on it's own would have been a mindless tidal wave that would, in time, drown all the multiverse. His presence gave it a pattern to confirm itself to, a ray of baleful light to cast a direction for their shadow. He gave them _intent_, gave them a shade of a sense of purpose they had all held before their current state, and in some perverse way he supposed the Heartless were gratefulfor it, if they could even understand such a thing anymore. Perhaps that was why they obeyed him at all.

He reached his mind out to them, allowing the part of themself they had connected themselves with to feel the horde, and he was surprised to see that it were smaller than he had expected. The Heartless horde he had summoned into the world was not _quite _as huge as he had hoped, and not all of them had gathered here; the rest were scattered throughout the district, defeated and roaming in small pockets or otherwise engaged in fights. Certainly, the ones here was a huge number; they teemed in the hundreds, so many of them gathered unseen with him, but he had expected them to harvest greater numbers from the soldiers they would have fought, the civilians they should have mowed down. They didn't seem to have swelled their ranks at all, but had actually lost a full third of their numbers.

Traverse Town fighters were better than he had given them credit for. Regardless, it was enough. He smiled, a thrill pounding in his head. "Let's begin," He said.

The Heartless seemed to approve.

...

Under the news studio itself, Zim, seeing Kim, Ron, Morte and the escorts off on their way to safety, had found that there was a secret entrance into the underground tunnels in the basement level. More specifically, it was a large vault door that Kim was able to open after some effort while Zim himself (who _definitely _wasn't maybe a little bit worried about them. Nope. Not at all. Not one little bit), helped shoved the vault door open and had to close his eyes for a moment when the light hit them. He was eventually able to see properly, and gave an interested look to the small chamber beyond with an open tunnel in the floor with a ladder in it. "Is that some manner of maintenance tunnel?"

"Looks like, Boss," Morte agreed. He had been more downcast than usual. His mood had been changing ever since his decision to retreat from the fight owing to his uselessness, and it had gotten so profound that even Zim, who didn't know the skull well, had noticed and been troubled by it.

"Nuh uh," Rufus said, surprising them both. "Go under-top real fast, see?"

"They're just for moving under the surface without hitting traffic," Ron elaborated. "In case you need to get somewhere with the action's going on real quick! I hear they used to be trams underground before any of us showed up here, but if it's true, those people were gone a long time ago. They're useful for important travel, so we kept them on."

"Ah," Zim said. He noticed that the tunnel was lined with so many lights that it was a little painful to look at it. "Brightly lit, I see."

"In case of Heartless attack," Kim said solemnly. "They don't like the light. It doesn't always hurt them, but they stay away from bright light. The weak ones won't even show up in the lit tunnels, and the big ones..." Her mouth quirked in a winning smile. "Well, that's what we're for."

"And us," Zero-Forty-Nine said helpfully.

Morte didn't seem very comforted. "But what if a giant Heartless appears to eat you or something?"

The newsguys winced. "So not going to happen," Kim said; they relaxed, but only a little bit. "Now you guys come on, gotta get moving before the fireworks start."

"Do us a favor and whup 'im before he, I dunno, tries to escape and tries to blow up the guys near Foster's!" Ron said to Zim. "I _hate _fighting crazy guys."

"Interesting, that's what my enemies say to me!" Zim said.

Ron shook his head. "No, I mean _real _crazy. Like, criminally insane. Guys that would blow up the world on a dare!"

Zim considered that. "Ah. And...perhaps, taking vengeance on a rival by flooding the entire planet with a giant water balloon? Or mutating a class pet into a kaiju-class destroyer because it'll kill things good but no one will attack it because it's so cute? Or stealing Christmas with a giant Santa robot that goes crazy because of bad programming and environmental factors?"

"Kind of," Ron said after a moment of thought. Kim shook her head, as if wondering how Zim could think of such absurdities. "Those things sound crazy _and _stupid, don't you think? You know someone like that?"

"...In a manner of speaking, yes," Zim said, neglecting to mention that those were all previous plots of his. Morte snickered knowingly, sufficiently versed in the nature of rational species to know what Zim meant; it lightened Morte's mood, just a little bit. "Good luck and all that."

"We will protect your guide, have no fear!" The newsguys declared, waving their acquired weaponry.

"You do that," Zim said.

Kim lifted her hand to her head and up in a salute. "You can always count on us!" She waved, Ron giving Zim a hopeful thumbs-up, and the two of them walked into the tunnel, the newsguys following behind.

Only Morte was left. He made to float after them and heisitated. "Er," He said. "Uh. Boss?"

"Yes?" Zim said.

Morte looked at him. It was hard to tell emotion on Morte, but he seemed to have no trouble making his intention known at normal times. (At least, Zim thought he did.) And yet, it now seemed that Morte was actively trying to conceal his feelings. He actually seemed _upset_. This puzzled Zim; Morte had been content to stay out of the action thus far, and he himself was quite vocal about how little he could contribute in a fight. Morte didn't say anything for a moment and finally said, "Hey, uh, go tear those guys up. Make 'em sorry they ruined the first day of your adventure and all that."

"'Ruined'?" Zim repeated, a big grin on his face. "Are you serious? An epic threat? An army of monsters? An elite squad that actually _allows _me to give commands? I couldn't have asked for a better begining!"

Morte almost grinned (so to speak) at that. He looked like he wanted to say something more, just for a moment...but the moment in question passed. He floated down a bit; it was a lot like watching someone bow their head in frustration. "Wish I could be more help, Boss," Morte said quietly.

It was a unusually solemn statement from Morte. Unnerved, Zim said, "Yes, me as well."

He meant it as a joke, but Morte visibly floated down some more, his usual bobbing a lot more unsteady than usual. "Try not to die," He said, managing a trace of his usual attitude. He thought for a moment and added, "Hey, uh, show him our way works, Boss. That'll show the bastard."

Without another word, Morte floated into the tunnel after the patiently waiting Kim and Ron (and the less patient Rufus and newguys), leaving Zim to close the door behind them. He waited for them to leave before he closed and sealed it, making sure it was secure before he started up the stairs.

He waited for a moment, but he didn't hear any screams that suggested something awful happening, and reluctantly went on his way up the stairs and to the rooftop where everyone else had gone.

"Hrm," he said quietly to himself, briefly thinking that he might have to rethink his impression of Morte. "'Show him our way works'..." It was an attractive notion, not the least because ruthlessness had lost it's appeal to him a long time ago.

Perhaps the Keyblade resonated with such thoughts. Perhaps it was an as-yet untested ability he didn't know about yet. Perhaps it was his emotions bleeding into the ambient magic the Keyblade produced, and perhaps it was a mixture of all these things or none of them, but before he was aware of it happen a stream of brillaint light flashed up from him, swirling around him andf laring out. It was power in the shape of light and energy, flowing from without and focused within, and suffused into localized reality in a burst of radiant colors like a solar flare in miniature, flashing in all variations of the color spectrum before fading.

Zim blinked. He looked at his hands. "...If I knew how to do that in command, destroying the Heartless would likely be much easier." Slightly cheered by the experience (not the least because of the giddy exhiliaration it had instilled in him), he hurried on his way, going to a small but useful elevator lift that swiftly moved him up to the rooftop.

When it arrived and the doors opened, Zim stepped out into the rooftop, which was fairly wide open with a number of hastily arranged chunks of rock from the ground below meant to serve as cover, and most everybody was standing behind them. Abel and Aang were standing directly in front; Aang because he could see anything coming before anyone else, and Abel because he was so ridiculously confident he could survive nearly anything. "What is the situation?" Zim asked as the others took notice of him. "Are we going to have the oppertunity to die yet?"

"Give it a few minutes, and then probably!" Aang said cheerfully, pointing at the street. Zim thought he understood what Aang meant; the streets in front of them swarmed with shadows. Not tangible forms, not yet, but the shadows cast by the buildings around them bent and writhed in slow, hypnotic patterns, spilling in from windows he was sure hadn't been broken. A thin black mist was rising up from it, odd shapes that hurt his eyes just barely visible in it, and Zim thought that it was like looking into a mirror that was impossibly reflecting someplace..._else_.

Calvin paced nearby, clicking his tongue in tune with the beeping his device was making. "Good news and bad news!" He said loudly. "We won't be waiting much longer, from the readings I'm getting!"

"Readings from what?" Zim looked over. "Oh, it's that...thing you've been mucking about with. Bah, inferior craftsmanship. It's so irregular and scrappy!"

Calvin bristled, a craftsman getting defensive over his craft. "Lay off, I made this thing out of stuff I salvaged! In my sleep!"

"Bah, excuses! So what is it, then?"

Calvin rolled his eyes. He had already explained this to the others, but Zim obviously hadn't been listening then. "It's tracking energy, but I've no idea what kind. But it's the same energy that a sample of Kimblee's blood I bottled contained, and he's gotta be _saturated _with whatever it is. I'm reading a massive source of it way too close for comfort, so fill in the blanks on your own."

The others waited awkwardly, well aware what this meant. Then, Zim said, "You bottled his blood?"

"Yes."

"Hrm. I must approve your intiative then." The others, who didn't seem too pleased with the idea, frowned at Zim for this. "Give the sample to me. I believe a number of my scanning sub-routines may be operative, and I may be familiar with the energy. I don't want more variables!"

"Maybe it's just the power of the Philosopher's Stone?" Zuko suggested, but with a frown; he didn't know if it worked that way or not, and anyway he knew that energy didn't work that way. (He suspected that the laws of physics varied from universe to universe, and he didn't like it much.)

"Is this really the time?" Danny asked dubiously.

"Probably not," Calvin said, and pulled out a small bottle and started to pass it over...

And then there came an enormous flash of red light, smaller than the one that had preceded the destruction of Fosters, flowing into a number of structures along the street and twisting them until they were deformed into wire-shapes of the words '_HI, PREPARE TO DIE_', still glowing with energy and impossible to miss. Zim looked closely, and thought he saw a distant figure on top of a building at the opposite end of the street, waving at them.

It was, of course, Kimblee. And while Zim's group had effectively made a declaration of war against him, Kimblee made the first move of violence and officially started the battle. More red light flashed around Kimbee as a flash of light erupted from Kimblee's position and into the ground (nowhere near them, thankfully, or the escape route the newsguys had taken), blasting an enormous hole into the street and enough dust into the air to dim the light a little bit...

And then, as expected, they appeared: the Heartless, and they rushed in all their monstrously savage ferocity. From out of the hole in the ground and the tunnels they'd been hiding in, from the buildings they'd snuck into, from the myriad shadows they had portaled through. It was so sudden, so drastic a movement, that seemingly an instant later all those Heartless were _there_, covering the streets and the walls and coming right towards them as the light of the Philosopher's Stone faded for the moment, the distant concern of Kimblee's threat fading in favor of this extremely immediate problem.

Calvin stumbled back, putting the bottle back into his pocket. "Oh feth_,_" he swore, clearly thankful that he still had his fire gauntlet still on, and generating a blast from it that Zim eagerly augmented with his own fire power. The blasts streaked down, at the on-coming Heartless, most missing by far too much, and only a few knocking down a Heartless or two. It made no difference; the Heartless flew, ran, jumped and otherwise rampaged straight towards the news studio, smashing or blasting through everything in their path.

For their part, Zim's group was remarkably unworried. "You know, if I didn't know much about the situation, I'd probably think we were doomed," Hobbes remarked.

"Yeah," Zuko agreed.

"Probably," Zim said.

The Heartless rushed on...and were justifiably surprised to have a portion of the street collapse right under them and drop them into a hole lined with explosives Zim had helped prepare. A wave of explosive force blasted up from there, throwing plenty of Heartless up and tripping more as the Heartless behind them crashed right into the ones that had fallen or gotten blown up. Those on the rooftop chose this moment to start firing into the Heartless, cutting through them by the dozens with their concentrated aim. Even so, the Heartless still recovered and went right back to stampeding at them...

And ran right into _another _such trap, this one lined with automated gatling lasers that _did _tear through the Heartless, it's energy-based effect punching big holes in many of them. Undeterred, the Heartless jumped down and tore the guns to bits, several of the Heartless _eating _the guns and assimilating them into their bodies and advancing once more. It didn't help that the people on the rooftop keep firing at them, with gradually greater effect.

Kimblee frowned. "...I suppose I should have expected something like this. And yet it still makes me angry."

Predictably, the Heartless fell into more traps like that. About, oh, four or more times before even the notoriously instinct-driven Heartless got the hints and started moving along the walls, clearly thinking that they had avoided problems like that. Unfortunately for them, the dust from Kimblee's blast started to clear, and the sun shone through, it's light illuminating the street properly again. At once, dozens of the weakest Heartless fled in abject panic, burst into solar fire or condensed themselves to weaker but light-resistant Shadows to protect themselves. The bigger and more powerful ones endured it, their bodies burning and disintegrating but remaining whole anyway, allowing them to keep on soldiering through. Still feeling confident, the heroes readied their attacks, charging up guns, pulling out devices, and doing that general sort of thing as they begun to hope that they might just have an advantage against even these numbers.

(They would have been more worried if they had seen Kimblee smirking just then, having come up with a truly nasty idea.)

Zuko, hands still alight with flame from bent flames, commented with what proved to be remarkably poor timing, "At least we get to fight in the sunlight."

As if Kimblee had heard him, or been waiting for a moment like that, there was a very faint and distant sound like two hands clapping together; red energy flashed from the building he was standing on and over the ground right in front of the news studio. Nothing happened for a moment, so some of them thought that he had done something subtle and horrible to the ground before that was proven wrong by the ground just behind the Heartless (by now pretty close to the news studio, in spite of the traps and constantly being shot at) breaking and surging up like a tidal wave, the Heartless jumping on and clinging to it on the inside while it was growing up into a ludicrously large dome made of stone and metal and asphault and whatever else went into the streets, curving over the news studio and merging with the ground behind it, shutting them all into total darkness.

They blinked, their eyes trying to adjust to the darkness. Cyborg helpfully turned some shoulder-mounted lights on, and Aang did him one better by making an enormous flame in mid-air. Of considerable concern was the sound of the Heartless moving around in the darkness that was their natural element, coming for them with single-minded determination to feast on the light of their souls. (Their 'hearts', in current parlance.) The sound of their movement built into a nearly-defeaning roar. Calvin glared at Zuko. "You had to say it, didn't you, new guy?" Zuko glared at him, his sunfire-yellow eyes glowing faintly in the darkness.

Calvin had even more of a point in being annoyed: the darkness below (and above, and forward, and a bit to the sides) lit up with hundreds, maybe more, of shining eyes. So many eyes, so many things to see with them, that the interior of the hollow shape casting them into shadow was illuminated by them and making it clear that the 'shadows' present were actually a solid layer of an enormous amount of Heartless packed tightly together in a single enormous horde covering every inch of the thing looming over them. With the light Cyborg and Aang provided, it was clear that there were hundreds of Heartless of every type they had seen so far, mutated outside of those castes' restrictions and newer kinds, and more singular horrors that were awful to behold. It was a swarm beyond any of the hordes afflicting the rest of the town, a single massive force so large that, clinging to the walls like they were, the entire interior of it was hidden under their twisted mass.

And every last one of those Heartless was moving straight at them, to kill them if they were lucky and feast upon them if they weren't. Danny started to hyperventilate, green light flashing erratically from him. Hobbes tried to be helpful and pat his back, only to freak out when his hand went right through Danny and came out coated in ice. "Sorry," Danny said.

There was a long, long horrified look. "Huh," Calvin said, with more amiability than the situation warrented. "That's a lot of Heartless."

And like some sort of prey-signal the Heartless were conditioned to respond to (or perhaps it was the sudden swell of fear they reacted to), the horde did what hordes are supposed to do and broke away from itself, the massive group of Heartless coming apart and surging forward as a mass of individual monsters, those in the back smashing into those and front and shoving onwards while those pushed back leaped bounded back and took off at high-speed, the mass of Heartless coming right for them, and those crawling on the walls simply took hold of each other and whipped themselves out, numbering in so many that they fused into a a massive tentacle-like _thing _aimed right at them.

"THIS IS AWESOME!" Zim screamed, in the precise opposite attitude to most sane people, as he summoned the Keyblade. At the infusion of the baleful Light shaped into the Materium and impinging on their senses like a slab of lead dropped onto a rubber sheet, the Heartless froze, just for a moment.

It was long enough. "GO FOR IT!" Hobbes shouted (not one of the better battle-cries of history) and a volley of projectiles burst out of seemingly nowhere from ground level, a wall of blasts that smashed into the Heartless' front lines with a mighty burst that briefly illuminated their awful forms just long enough to stun them and knock them aside, tripping the ones behind them and making a shockwave effect as the ones behind _them _tripped over them, and so on. The big tendril-thing fell apart and Heartless rained down, so Zuko helpfully set them on fire so everyone could see better. Fortunately, none of those Heartless were Red Nocturnes.

"I knew those guys would come in useful," Sokka said proudly as a number of armored figures appeared; two shoved aside cleverly assembled piles of debris that served as camoflauge (and cover), several jumped out through the windows of the news studio ground floor, and another slammed down from atop a nearby building.

The small team, girded in armors forged by their own hands and steeled with zeal where "Darklings that lurk outside time, gnawing on the frayed edges of reality! HEAR US NOW!" Teslaman of the Mall Crawlers said, several crude amplification feeds cutting in and magnifying his voice loudly enough to make Hobbes wince and cover his ears in pain. (Also, it made Teslaman's voice sound _really _deep. And, for some reason, like he had a breathing problem. It was still really badass.) "WE HAVE WORDS FOR YOU AND YOUR MASTER!"

The Heartless paused; it was a gradual process, given that they were still tripping over each other. Zim, watching and wondering when he would start blowing stuff up, didn't know if they were actually listening to him or were simply reacting to the new group standing their ground and were reevaluating the Mall Crawlers from prey to threat/background/thing. The Mall Crawlers politely waited for the moving wall of Heartless to halt. They eventually did, and the Mall Crawlers continued. "We've the knowing that you, the commander of these monsters, has unleashed a horror upon our town!" Shredcord cried. "The devastation of Foster's! The soul-theft of it's keepers! The murder of those slain to create that vile artifact in your posession!"

"And now," Deadshot said. "You are _here,_ pulling down the wretched Heartless themselves from their abyssal realm and unleashing their horror upon our homeland! Have ye no shame! Have ye no mercy? Have ye cast aside all shred of remorse, all your capacity for deceny fed to the altar of your ambitions! Do you even understand what you have done...and the doom you have unleashed upon yourself! Those monsters destroyed all that was dear to us, and if you hold the evil in your heart for them to obey you, and consider you one of their own..._then you ARE OUR FOE!_ _AND WE SHALL SHOW YOU ALL THE MERCY WE WOULD OFFER THEM! __**NONE!**_"

("Geez, they're so melodramatic," Calvin said.

"Hush, I'm trying to listen!" Courtney said, taking notes.)

"We are but the vanguard of Traverse Town's wrath, the knights who carry the will of those who died to carry us here so that we might live in their stead!" Behemoth yelled; his own vocal systems gave his voice a grinding snapping quality, like the echoes of a thousand saurian beasts roaring in a primordial choir. "We stand for them! We stand for the memories of the worlds that have gone! We stand for those that live! We stand for those that have not yet lived, so that the worlds that gave us their ancestors will live forever in their legacies and _never die!_ We stand for the promise of continunity, and one knee bent to the sacred earth and our heads raised to the eternal sky, we become vassels to all those who will stand beside us! We stand for all the town and those who dwell in it, and those with us _will not fail!_"

"Your evil ends here," Adeptus-Indefinitum said calmly, his voice echoing as every single metal surface on the street resonated with his vocal harmonics and amplified everything he said. "You have wounded the world enough; whatever mad ambitions you hold end here. All your plots and desires will be unmade, and in their detritus we shall forge the means of your unmaking. No more death. No more doom. No more suffering. None of that, save for that which falls upon you. Ready yourself, despoiler of today and ravager of souls; your doom is nigh, and it's heralds speak to you."

(On the rooftop, Zim munched on some popcorn. "These guys are pretty good at speeches and stuff."

"Where'd you get the popcorn?" Zuko asked.

Zim paused. "I don't know.")

Tesla Man held up an armored hand. "But we honor the dream of mercy and honorable conduct in true battle! If you surrender now, send away these Heartless, turn in the Philosopher's Stone so that those within it might be freed and freely admit yourself to the authorities, we will deliver you to the constabulary without harming you. What say you?"

The Heartless stared at him with a focus that was unheard among the mecurial darklings, as if directed by an intelligence that was thinking, _Is he serious?_ Eventually, a small composite Heartless that might have once been a Soldier and a Red Nocturne and possibly ruined machinery waddled up; it was a little smaller than Zim, made of writhing semi-solid darkness that slithered out between the pieces of machinery wadded over it's frame and igniting in a strangely cold fire that covered it's body. Tesla Man stared down at it, inviting a response, and the little Heartless complied by digging it's claws into it's chest and ripping apart the front of it's torso, unleashing a massive fireblast that threw Tesla Man into the door of the new studio.

In the time it took for the other Mall Crawlers to see this and looked back at the Heartless with their weapons readied, an even larger fire blast came down from above, a burning tornado of superheated gases and plasma that struck the offending (and surprisingly tough) little Heartless in a mighty explosion that summoned so much primal light that the other Heartless recoiled, opening them up for another wall of projectiles from the Mall Crawlers (who knew an opportunity when they saw one).

When the smoke cleared and the Heartless were still retreating, there was nothing left of the Heartless that had carried out Kimblee's response to Tesla Man's offer. Zim, standing on the rooftop with fire still emanating from his fist, grinning madly. "That counts as a declaration of war, does it not?"

"Yeah," Zuko agreed, the wisps of the internal fire that he had imbued Zim's fireblast with still on his breath. He inhaled deeply, sparks flickering out of the heated air around him. "Still plenty more dark-things to burn."

"Oh, _yes_." Light flashed around Zim, spiraling around him and cascading away in surprisingly dense shapes that cycled through the radiances of the visible spectrum, though maintaining a surprisingly tendency to green. The surface under his feet warped under the touch of that primal Light, twisting slightly and reshaping itself into a translucent metal that shone softly, as though reflecting the slightest traces of the light of a thousand suns. (And also providing sufficient lumination for those on the roof.) "Hey, I have no idea how I did that. Convienient, though."

Every single Heartless there stopped and looked at Zim. Aang frowned thoughtfully. "They don't like light," He said. "And sunlight weakens them."

"We need to crack that blockade upon and bring on the sun!" Danny realized. "Zim, hold on a second, I think we-"

"Yeah, sure, you have fun doing whatever you're doing, I'm bored!" Zim yelled, roughly shoving through everyone. "Enough talk about strategy and such nonsense!"

Hobbes blinked. "Um. They weren't saying anything about strategy, it was just common sense..."

"Yeah, sure, whatever! Point is, there's too much talk and not enough SMITING! I want some smiting! Is that really too much to ask! Huh?" Zim raised the Keyblade up high, and a mighty flash of light chased the darkness away for just long enough for everyone to look at him. "We are the sword that cuts into the abyss! We paint ourself in it's ichors and suffer no corruption! We do not yield to it's temptations, we do not attend it's whispers! We delve into it's stygian depths and destroy all that assails us, banishing them into oblivion, and with our strength of will, we transform the endless darkness into less than Oblivion! That is who we are! That is what we do! AND THAT IS WHAT MUST BE DONE!"

"I'm sorry, what?" Courtney said. "I kinda stopped listening after you started talking, there's a big horde of evil down there that wants to eat me or something. You said something metaphor-ish and there was yelling? Not much sense? Even the Mall Crawler guys are less overdramatic than you."

Zim wasn't listening. "Open up this to the skies once more and let the sun scourge them if you can. I will throw myself into their midst and do battle with them! Let us see which carves a legend into their nightmares first: the nuclear-fueled celestial sphere that will one day scour all life from this world just by being that damn hot...or _ME?_"

The Heartless stirred, and in a clicking, snapping rush, they finally went back into the battle and swarmed, a great teeming mass clearly aimed right at Zim. Zim just grinned. "I thought as much!" With primordial light pulsing all around him, he ran and jumped right off the rooftop and fell right towards the Heartless, laughing crazily as he plunged, a mad and brilliant light in the darkness.

Hobbes watched him fall. "Is he...is he actually _insane_?" He asked Zuko.

Zuko shook his head, a smug little grin on his face. "Some days he is, some days he isn't. Just try and keep up." With that, he jumped off the rooftop too.

Hobbes watched, bemused, and saw Zuko slow his descent his own way, massive flames erupting from his feet and propel him at the enemy, and at the apex of his arc he expelled a massive gout of fire from his mouth to carve a burning path through the Heartless for the Mall Crawlers to eagerly exploit and rush the scattered Heartless. "...I hope craziness isn't infectious." He made sure his hat was tied down lest it be blown away by some stray attack and turned to Calvin. "So how do you wanna do this?"

Calvin, already strapping on his other oversized and somewhat bulky ice-themed device, made a show of concentrating hard. "Well, sniping them from here sounds like fun, but we'd be like a rock on the ocean."

"Maybe we can make some holes in that giant sun-blocker thing our bad guy here summoned up?" Hobbes suggested.

"That's not a bad idea," Aang said. He glanced upward. "Completely smashing that thing sounds like a bad idea right here; we could smash right through the street or hit something! Making some big holes looks managable, though."

"I'm coming with!" Toph said. "No way I'm leaving the Earthbending all up to you."

"Okay," Aang said. Toph threw an arm over his shoulder, clearly unhappy about leaving proper surface even briefly, and a large chunk of the rooftop flipped them upwards with such velocity that they were soon out of sight, and a violent blast of Airbending took them the rest of the way. Distantly, Hobbes saw them impact the ceiling.

"I hope they know something about battlefield engineering," Hobbes said. He looked at Calvin and made a mock salute. "Wish me luck!"

"If you die, I promise I won't do too much surgery on your corpse before I reanimate your corpse for my own purposes," Calvin said. "Maybe a cyborg limb or two at the very most. How do you feel about having your right arm replaced with a chainsaw mounted on a heavy-load grenade launcher?"

"Extremely uncomfortable. Put in a hyperdextrous tendril so I can actually hold stuff and I'll feel okay about it." Hobbes nodded at the other guys and tipped his hat at the ladies, certain they would perform admirably and trusting them to kill as many monsters as they coul, and then he dug his claws into the ground and tore off a large chunk of ground. He hoisted it over his hip, ran, and jumped right over the rooftop like Zim and Zuko, the chunk of rooftop held under him like an oversized surfboard, smashing into the fray of Heartless and plowing through them.

"Hey," Calvin said to Katara. "You control water, right? But you don't create it?"

"Of course not," Katara said, and she couldn't stop glancing at the blue and black device on his arm. "Why?"

Calvin grinned and held up his left arm, a rim of frost on the device and plumes of frigid air drifting in it's wake. "I can help you with that!"

Danny didn't pay much attention to Calvin and Katara's quick and muttered conversation. He exhaled, his breath so cold it almost hurt his throat. He frowned. "Huh," He said, his eyes flickering between blue and green unsteadily. "They're like ghosts. But not like them."

"What is?" Sam said uncertainly.

Danny looked at her for a moment too long to be entirely comfortable. "_Them_." He gestured at the Heartless horde, even now still advancing. "I don't know what they really are. They're dead. But not dead. Like ghosts, but my powers aren't reacting to them. I don't..." He grunted and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Darn it. I'm overthinking this." He took several steadying breathes, his exhalations expelling more and more plumes of frost and his skin turning slightly transparent with each breath until the blood pumping through his veins were faintly visible and his bones stood partly revealing under his skin. Finally he opened his eyes, and they were startled at the change: once more, his eyes were such a vibrant shade of green that they were like pieces of ghost-fire. He smirked, all heisitation was gone from him, the memory of the dead he'd left behind on Earth subsumed into a white-hot determination, and he said, "Let's see if they take an ectoplasmic blast like ghosts!"

"We'll be right behind you!" Tucker promised. Danny and Sam stared at him. "Except that me and Sam will be here. Right on this rooftop. Where it's slightly safer than duking it out one-to-thirty-bazillion on the ground like you are. And we'll be shooting at them while you do whatever. Probably _really _far away from this rooftop because you go all over the place in a fight. Also, most of our shooting-buddies are people that probably want to beat us up for taking over their place and they have more guns than we do and we'll be all alone. Did I miss anything?"

"That you'll be completely overrun by the monsters that eat souls or something if me and the others don't push them back?" Danny suggested. "Or that Courtney girl. I'm not sure which one's scarier."

"Me neither," Tucker agreed. ("Hey!" Courtney said.)

Green fire tinged with white flared out from Danny, welling out from his very cellular structure; the ectoplasmic energies of the Ghost Zone, long since imbued into his body. In less than a moment, bathed in it's energies, the transformation from human to ghostly-powered metahuman was done and the fires vanished, revealing him as Danny Phantom; his black and white outfit, tanned skin, white hair, glowing green eyes and a faint glow around him. "Okay," He said, turning translucent and then totally vanishing from sight. "Here I go!"

Moments later, the front line of the Heartless was punched by a tremendous blast of green energy that came out of nowhere. As the survivors scurried around in confusion, a larger beam came down from above and left nothing behind. The ground split under the Heartless misfortunate enough to be close enough and icicles bigger than trucks sliced right through them, and as the other Heartless panicked and fled, more huge icicles tore out of the ground right after them, like they were chasing them. The Heartless weren't fast enough. "Danny seems like he's feeling better," Tucker said off-handedly as more destruction ensued.

"He always gets in a better mood after he starts whaling on things," Sam said. Both of them nodded at her sage wisdom and started firing at the Heartless in wild frenzied bursts, careful not to hit any of their friends or allies.

"You see that a lot in kids that have to deal with their own little wars," Abel remarked to them, scaring them; they'd had no idea he'd been standing right behind them, as insubstantial as mist. "Pardon me, I must go and assist the ground-floor recruits in the fetching armors before the Heartless get to them and you. Nothing like an old soldier to give the new recruits a hand, you know!"

"You're not so old," Sokka remarked.

Abel smiled gently, like an angel in human flesh that was privy to many ancient and mighty secrets. "I'd be willing to bet good money that I was old before your ancestors were dancing with water spirits when they were nice and hitting them with big pointy things when they weren't."

"How'd you know about the dancing!" Sokka demanded.

"Lucky guess. Tally ho!" Abel walked right off the edge of the building in a way that made him look both totally badass and utterly moronic because he tripped at the last minute. He crashed into the ground with a tremendous impact with no harm, the ground pulverized under him; he climbed out of the resulting crater, whistling cheerily and walking away, walking right into a cluster of dark fire thrown by an errant Red Nocturne that burned half his face off. Another person would have been killed, or at the very least fallen in mid-step. Abel did neither. He just kept walking in the same easy military pace, not even pausing in midstride or reacting in any way to having the entire left side of his face burned away; his face regenerated with some rather sickening crunches when his muscles grew back and his jaw realigned, a disturbing wet noise where freshly grown eyelids slid over his eye, and quite a few of those on the rooftop winced in horror when his skin just swelled out in tight packets of bubbling flesh and burst, splattering all over his face and wriggling into place before evening out, leaving him looking perfectly healed. His only concession to suggesting that he was even aware of any of this was lifting a strand of regrown hair out of his eyes.

He walked up to a Mall Crawler and tapped him on the back. "Pardon me," Abel said. The Mall Crawler, Behemoth, turned around, a puzzled expression under his mask. "I think you could use a touch more assistance here on the ground. Also, behind you?"

Behemoth glanced behind and yelped; a massive and bizarre Heartless, a feral spiked thing that ran on all fours and constantly changing form along the way, pounced at him, dozens of tentacle-like viscera bursting from it's belly and snapping with the mouths that formed in their lengths. "That'd be appreciated!" He said, grapping a handful of those awful tendrils with one massive fist, wincing as they starting chewing into his armored hand. He lifted his foot up, avoiding the mouthy tendrils that tried to stab him there, and stomped hard on them before they could retreat. Behemoth looped those tendrils around it's neck, or at least tried to; it's head kept flowing back into it's main body with it's neck swelling back out as a lump of muscle, fading away entirely and then a massive pair of jaws appearing at the front, and so on. Giving up on that, Behemoth simply looped the tendrils around the front half of it's body, pinning it's many pairs of razor-clawed forelegs to it's body, and pulled. Pneumatic muscles in his armors pumped, various guages whined, and steam hissed out of valves, the man-made mechanical power of terrestial science contesting the seething chaos of this malevolent darkness-

There was a tremendous _snap, _and the Heartless broke in half, ichor spilling out in masses like malformed organs; Behemoth snarled in revulsion, still gripping the tendrils, and spun the pieces overhead like a lasso, flailing it around again and again until the centrifugal force was nearly tearing the Heartless apart on it's own and he finally threw it overhead all the way to the opposite side of the battle. (The two halves, still not quite dead, were nonetheless soon found by a pair of oppertunistic Heartless who greedily tore apart and consumed their crippled kin and swelled up into ever-larger and monstrous forms. And then Zim smashed into them, blew them up with really big blasts of fire, cut them into pieces, burned those pieces, and did a little dance that frightened the other Heartless away.) "I think that you could have done something to help...me..." He trailed off in mid-word, too stunned to finish properly.

"Hrm?" Abel said, glancing up from pulling off the head of a struggling Heartless three times his size, his bare hands burrowed deep into it's false flesh and looking like he had _claws_. The battlefield around him was littered in black ichor, steaming shadow-stuff and so very many mangled Heartless expiring as Behemoth watched, their bodies torn in so many inventive ways it made him feel a little sick. Several other mangled Heartless were fleeing from Abel in terror. "Oh sorry, give me a moment here, this thing's sinew analogues are so tough! It's like I'm pulling steel wires. Heh, I probably am, it looks like it pulled a lot of stray materials around itself...ah!" With a horrible screeching noise and an awful crack, Abel pulled it's head off, broken silvery strands trailing behind it. Abel shoved the head into the ichor-spewing stump and jumped up, a slow and clumsy slap from the Heartless missing him easily. Still in mid-air, Abel gave it a vicious kick that left a deep imprint of his boot in it's back and sent it flying halfway across the battlefield, right through Danny and into a wall. A bit nonplussed, Danny shrugged and blew it up. "Well, I saw you were having your hands full, so I took care of the rest behind you!"

The horde did seem a lot thinner in his area, Behemoth thought. "Ah...thank you..." Behemoth said uncertainly.

"No trouble," Abel said, still smiling in a way reserved for people called 'bright' and 'sunny'. (Neither were concepts traditionally applied to vampires. Except the really weird ones.) "Oh look, there's a lot of Heartless over there. Pardon me, must go kill things." Abel drew his arms back against the crazy cross thing he was carrying, momentarily looking like a potentially blasphemous parody of the Cruxification. (Which would be a really weird thing for him to do, being a devout Catholic priest and all.) It wasn't anything of the sort; the arms of the cross unfolded with a thousand-fold sounds of mechanical noises; spinning gears and flexing pistons and a _clack-chack-chack _sound mixed with humming; those arms became a great mass of flexing parts that came back together around Abel's arms as a pair of massive plasma cannon-guns almost bigger than Abel himself, easily as long as he was tall and quite a big thicker, and mounted on them were all manner of cannons and rapid-fire launchers and lasers and similar armaments, so big it would have taken several strong men just to hold them up, but Abel hefted them like they weighed no more than straw. A set of turbine-like generators hummed at the base, energy crackling around it, and Abel cackled like a mad bomber. "Oh man, stuff like this takes me back to my days in the Royal Air Force! _'Who Dares, Wins'!_ I think that's the right phrase, it was quite a while ago." The guns, all two dozen of them, came to life as the Heartless advanced; flamethrowers spewed streams of fire that melted the metal parts of the Heartless. Grenade launchers spun and shot expertly aimed explosives that hit the centers of Heartless packs, harming no one but the monsters in question. Six different sets of miniguns fired not bullets, but hardened points of holy water that burned the Heartless like acid, loosening their grip in the world and diluting their bodies, weakening enough for the volley of plasma fire that Abel shot out with his gun's main attack forms.

When he was done, the immediate area was clear of Heartless. But there were still many more to go. "Stick with me, young knight, and you and your's will get out of this with life to spare!" Abel boasted, firing more volleys of grenades here and there, and charged into a thick pack of conjoined Heartless in the process of melding into a larger and grotesque tentacled beast, Behemoth following and privately vowing to emulate Abel _and _the Adeptus Astartes.

The building where the shooters like Courtney, Sam and Tucker stood was in no danger of falling to the Heartless horde, for Appa had apparently declared himself their guardian. The great Sky Bison stood his ground against the darkling forces, roaring mightily as gusts of wind pounded the weakest of them into lumps of goo and trampling those who got close enough to pose a threat. A squadron of Red Nocturnes, their bodies now composed of dark flames burning so impossibly dark that it made the surronding shadows seem _bright_, hovered nearby, discordant music following in their wake. (They were called Red _Nocturnes _for a reason.)

Appa ground one of the stone-bodied Heartless to dust under a single foot and took notice of the Nocturnes. His belly still stung with the many wounds inflicted on him last night, and he roared defiantly at the darklings. It was doubtful that they actual understood it, but they seemed to accept the challenge and flew at him, their dark fires combining into a massive blast bigger than Appa himself and throwing itself at him; Appa stood his ground and roared; that blast of fire was snuffed out in a vastly more fierce blast of wind that kept going, tearing up the ground in it's wake. The Heartless tried to flee, but the the wind caught them, smashed them to the ground, tore the fire from them and did worse: their fire was a transitory thing, all hunger without any sense, and this wind was old and so very angry, and this wind had _teeth_. It ground them up, stole the heat from their cores and spat out goo and smoke.

Calvin, observing all this from above, clicked his tongue. "Pretty cool," He admitted. He stood near the edge of the rooftop, surveying the battlefield. "Bet we can do better, y'know?"

Katara, standing next to him, looked at him expectantly. "Are you going to try that thing we talked about?"

Calvin smirked. "Yeah." He held out his left arm, the water-themed Wonder of super-science glowing with blue light as the sound of etheric machinery echoed from it. Frost crackled around it, and several large masses of water appeared, slipping out of thin air, and coiled around his arm, plumes of frost shooting up around Calvin like steam from super-heated water. They tightened like a wound up spring, flakes of ice cracking on their jellid mass...and then they exploded off his arm in several large frozen chunks, each bigger than a man, and as they hit the ground, they struck several large packs of Heartless that had been uncomfortably close to flanking some of his allies, stabbing deeply enough to the ground to anchor themselves and suffused with such elemental cold that a few nearby Heartless had the metal portions of their innate weaponry turn brittle and frosted.

And then Katara stepped onto the edge of the rooftop, drawing her hand away with an sharp movement like a snake striking; one of the big chunks of ice exploded into a large stream of water that flowed over to Katara and hovered around her like a halo, some of it drawn undernearth her and freezing into an ice slide under her as she went down to the ground, jagged icicles firing from the water and impaling flying Heartless with perfect accuracy.

The ice slide struck into the ground with the odd-sounding noise of the moisture in the air freezing on contact with the shards of super-chilled ice that drilled right up through the ground and absorbed the shock, stabbing into any nearby Heartless. Katara didn't miss a moment's oppertunity; the Heartless swarmed towards this newest threat and she spun out of the way of a pouncing catlike thing, a section of ice under her bubbling into water and carrying her out of the way with a spin, droplets of water rocketing from it at such speeds and pressurized so that they punched right through the horde around her. The wounds healed almost instantly, but it did make them pause, perhaps estimating the danger she posed to them and whether or not it would be worth attacking her.

It was a fatal error, pausing in front of a aggressive Southern Waterbender who remembered the horror that was the end of Earth and that the monsters before her were the same kind that had dragged people down in the streets and eaten them alive and twisted their living spirits. A lash of water was pulled from one of the chunks of ice, cutting the Heartless impaled on it into chunks before Katara whipped it around herself and lashed it out at a large Heartless three times her size with no head but a huge gaping mouth in it's belly; the water whip, speed and pressure turning it into a cutting edge that would shame even molecular blades, struck through it's jaws and sliced it off to topple it's upper half onto a number of smaller Heartless behind it. The water whip kept going through the massed Heartless too near Katara, cleaving bodies and severing limbs and breaking them in a single smooth strike. When it rolled back towards her, seperating into several bubbles that froze into spiky shields around her, the ground was littered with bits and pieces and still moving Heartless bodies, a few disembodying right there, most of them simply retreating as their bodies regenerated at once.

Katara frowned. She wasn't about to be having with any of _that _nonsense. She extended her arm out, the ice around her rippling in response and thrust it back in and out again; all the ice liquified instantly and rushed down in a mighty wave that arced over Katara's head and smashed into the healing Heartless with such force that their bodies were pulverized, lumps of foul goo that evaporated from the world and still dripping from the wave as Katara pulled it back around her, whipping it around fast enough to cast off all the remnants of the Heartless' tainted innards until the water was pristine again.

Katara changed her stance and took a half-step back, pulling the water back around her again and again, condensing and concentrating it, and she spun it around herself into a twenty-foot-high pillar of churning water around her, controlled with such precision that she was untouched by so much as a stray drop, and large icicles burst from it to impale Heartless at considerable distances.

A small pack of large Heartless approached, the biggest of them was easily the same size as Appa, an enormous thing like a slug covered in chitinous plates and pulling itself along by gelatinous tendrils the size of a man. Katara let them come at her, smashing a considerable part of her water supply out of the swirling funnel and onto a number of low-flying monsters. The big ones took their chance, falsely believing her to be giving them an opening. They were sadly mistaken, the moments they came into range, Katara moved the water she had thrown right back her way, and it struck the slug-like Heartless so hard that it's shell cracked and it stumbled, falling right on it's cohorts. Katara called the water back to her, and just as the Heartless recovered, she pulled all of it under herself and back up again, carrying herself up into the air. She glared down at them, standing atop a furiously raging tornado made of water, and pushed one hand out in a movement strikingly like an Airbending move; a considerable amount of her water supply burst out in a thick blast of bone-freezing mist and washed over the Heartless pack except for the slug-thing, hardening with a loud crunching noise; she called back the mist, and all that was left of them were a few fading globs of fleshy shadows and strikingly realistic ice sculptures that had froze around their bodies...except with those blades pointing inward, still slick with bloodlike ichor. The slug-like thing finally pulled itself up, curling into a ball and rolling at her with surprising speed and force, cracking the ground as it bounced along, little shockwaves tearing up the street in it's wake...

Until it rode over a part of the street that was still wet from Katara's Waterbending moves. She pulled up and froze that water into incredibly dense spikes, and the slug-thing rode right into them and slipped off-course, not actually hurt but losing all it's traction. Katara called forth a massive tendril of water and slapped it right into the flailing slug-thing without stopping it, instead grasping it tight and partially freezing over it for an assured grip and guding it's path upwards. Katara let it go up as high as she could manage, letting it's momentum spell it's own doom as her entire watery construct stretching to it's limits...and then abruptly bending in such a way that the hapless Heartless was smashed into the ground with a sickening crunch.

"Not bad," Calvin commented, watching Katara slaughter the Heartless with much gusto. "Bet I could do better with the right Wonder, though. Speaking of which..." He started fishing through his belt compartments, finding various things and fitting them together.

"Wonder?" Courtney commented. "Isn't that what mad scientists call the stuff they make?"

"Some, yeah," Calvin said. His hands were well-practiced and amazingly fast; he soon had a bulky bracer-like object, brimming with pistons and shallow grooves and vents and more, resembling the basic design of his pyrokinetic glove-thing. It was an appropiate notion; he was strapping it around his arm and that very glove, seeming to hook the glove into it with a few hissing clicks like they were two parts of the same machine. Probably they were. He fiddled with it a bit more, yellow and red energies flickering on the numerous gauges on the thing, plugging a pair of small tubes filled with a strange fiery fluid (actually phlogiston, a fluid form of heat, and it was anyone's guess how _that _worked) into the appropiate sockets and once they were connected, the device hummed pleasantly for a brief moment. He attached a few other odds and ends, mostly serving to hook the glove into the apparatus now on his arm; a few cables that hooked into concealed ports on the gauntlet, a narrow and sqaut dial and guage that fit over the wrist and covered much of the back of his hand...

Calvin calibrated it, grinding the dial and priming something, and eventually stepped forward, embers crackling around the completed device on his arm. "Okay. _BEHOLD THE POWER OF MY __**SCIENCE!**__"_

Courtney blinked, instinct compelling her to stand well back. "What's he talking abou-"

Calvin twisted the dial further and extended his arm towards the massed Heartless (and aiming away from any of the fighters); a burning shape appeared over his arm, perfectly identical to the device on it but much bigger, growing even larger until it reached optimum mass and fired itself as a spiraling fire-beam at a small group of Heartless with a sound like _zakka!_ and a blast of fire that briefly ignited the entire dome; the Heartless thus struck (the ones that weren't blown to burning chunks of goo, of course) ran around while on fire, so Calvin squeezed his fist in a firm gesture, pulling a thin lever and several prongs sprang out, a golden field shimmering around him for a moment and ramping up the local geomancy's sensitivity to fire; all the fires in the area erupted into extremely brief but destructive infernos, utterly consuming the Heartless he'd struck. "HAH!" Calvin yelled excitedly, firing more lasers. "BOOM! BOOM! _BOOM!_" Each word punctuated another laser-blast and resulting explosion, and while he wasn't making any massive fire-blasts owing to the concentration required to maintain that effect, they were certainly much bigger than any fire-attacks he'd made before. Additionally, either it was a residual effect of his messing with the geomancy or just the activation of the complete flame-making Wonder, but all the fires created on the battlefield were far more intense then they should naturally be.

This was not entirely a good thing. "Uaagh!" Abel screamed as his overclocked flamethrowers exploded, knocking down the Mall Crawlers that had huddled around him and setting the nearby Heartless (and Sokka, who'd been too close) on fire; Abel went rocketing up and back down with a terrific bang, propelled directly into a pack of oppertunistic Heartless. A few seconds later after they ran away because of him walking right up to the meanest-looking one and pulling it's head off without any apparent effort, Abel dusted himself off and feeling grumpy.

Sokka was not doing much better. "I hate magic I hate magic _I HATE MAGIC!_" He screamed, dropping and rolling to extinguish the fire on his clothes and getting scared because nothing he did would make it _stop_. Fortunately, Zuko had the presence of mind to turn his fire-propelled jump (it had been a ordinary fire-shooting kick but Calvin's unwary actions had made it otherwise) into a means of shooting himself in Sokka's direction. He smashed right through a malformed bundle of Shadows (who were surprised but otherwise unharmed when Zuko smashed through them and made a big hole) and flipped in mid-air, kicking off of a Soldier and smashing it's head in, grabbing an Air Soldier by the feet and breathing fire that melted it's wings off so he could grab them and slow his descent just enough to land on Sokka. "Hey!" Sokka said.

"Hang on a minute!" Zuko said, making a quick movement and Firebending the fire right out of existence; it went out as if snuffed by a wind, leaving Sokka's clothes scorched but otherwise unharmed. (In Traverse Town, they made their outfits _tough_.)

"Okay, I still hate magic but Firebending's all right with me," Sokka amended, mollified. He glanced up. "Uh, Zuko?"

"Yeah?" Zuko said.

"Good thing you showed up just now, apart from the 'me on fire' thing. Which, now that I think about it, is weird that that _never _happened when you were still a bad guy-"

"Your point?" The Firebender said gruffly.

Sokka pointed. Zuko turned around and saw that they were completely surronded by Heartless, at least half of them fire-controlling Red Nocturnes. "We're kind of surronded. Espicially by ones that _eat _fire!"

"...Crap," Zuko said as the Red Nocturnes swelled up to three times their original size, now bigger than Zuko and Sokka, and there was a _lot _of them. "Still, I know one thing for sure."

Sokka grinned as he readied his sword. "What's that?"

"We can take them."

"You're on!"

The Heartless attacked, a small pack of Soldiers that had sprouted mouth-studded tentacles flailing furiously at Sokka; he and Zuko seperated, Sokka ducking as Zuko kicked up a blast of fire at the Soldiers, intense enough to knock them over. The Water Tribe warrior was on them in a flash, sword flashing as it cut through a lashing tentacle with only a slight bit of resistance. Sokka grabbed the loose half of it, grasping just above the ichor-spewing stump, and he lashed it at it's former owner, the stolen whip wrapping around the Soldier's throat so hard it almost decapitated it, and the perpetually hungry mouths on it chewed the rest of the way. Sokka cut it's body in half just in case that wasn't enough to kill it and climbed up the rapidly dissolved mass, jumping up with a fierce yell and impaling his sword right in the head of the nearest Soldier. The other two in the pack rushed at Sokka while the one he had impaled thrashed around, wildly trying to hit something with it's tentacles.

Sokka moved his legs out of the way of one such lash and stomped hard on the next one, stumbling away with a grunt and tearing his sword out, nearly bisecting the Soldier. It fell over it's own tentacles, falling right into one of the charging Soldiers, and Sokka kicked a flailing tentacle into the path of the other one. They all stumbled together, and before they could do more than claw at each other in a desperate gambit to get back up, Sokka was upon them, the meteoric iron of Space Sword slicing through them like they were bags of goo. He wiped some splattered black slime and sweat from his face. "Were they this weak last night?" He muttered to himself. "I remember them being tougher." His hand gripped his sword tighter and he glared at the amassed Heartless with renewed venom; oh yes, he remembered _exactly _what they had done.

The entire mass of Heartless surronding him and Zuko attacked at once, rushing over on him like a tidal wave. Sokka was a lot quicker than they expected, ducking claw swings and fire blasts with equally great agility. "This takes me back to my childhood, and not in a good way!" He commented as he narrowly ducked a blast of fire, sidestepping under a large spike-beast and stabbing the Red Nocturne that had tried to blast him, kicking it right behind him and making a sizable explosion when it rammed into the spike-beast that Sokka used to dive under some rubble. The nearby Heartless paused, wondering where he had gone, just as Sokka impaled a Soldier from behind, slicing off it's arm and stabbing it into the face of a Red Nocturne and turning it around so that the resultant blast of blind fire burned the Heartless in it's way badly enough so that Sokka was able to dispatch them (and the Nocturne) with minimal effort. "Aside from a lack of diatribes about elemental superiority and vaguely supremecist talk from the enemy. And our own guys, I guess..."

"I said I was sorry about that!" Zuko said, sweeping a Soldier off it's feet with a kick and grabbing it by the wrist in mid-air, throwing it into the face of a much larger Heartless that looked like it was made of lumps of meat and goo around a humanoid skeleton. Stunning it, Zuko climbed onto one of it's overlong arms while it was distracted, the muscular limb bigger than he was and well-able to support his weight, his every contact with it leaving burning marks. It didn't miss him and tried to pull him off, probably to tear him in two, but Zuko was every bit as agile as the fire he Bended and kicked off in time, grabbing one of the large but blunt spines on it's back and hauling himself up, climbing over it's malformed muscles and breathing clouds of fire on it's neck before he wrapped his strong arms around the thinnest part of it's neck; right below it's doglike head and just wide enough for Zuko to lock his arms around it. Fire screamed up around Zuko like the mantle of a war-emperor, biting into the darkness of the Heartless and consuming it, it's body shrinking slightly as Zuko squeezed and twisted it's neck as hard as he could, muscles standing rigid on his arms. The Heartless panicked and stretched it's arms over it's head, trying with all it's might to wrench Zuko off even as it's head started to turn out of place and it's spine wrench nearer and nearer out of place...but it's muscles were just too big to allow it's arms to reach back that far, it's claws dangling within inches of Zuko. Still the Heartless reached, growing closer and closer to Zuko's head, the Firebender seemingly too focused on his task, and the claws came within touching distance of his face...

Zuko turned his head up with a glare, proving that he was not as distracted as he looked, and even as he kept twisting the monster's neck, he breathed a blast of fire that blasted it's claws out of the way. The Heartless recoiled in pain, it's tense muscles relaxing, a fatal mistake; the only thing preventing Zuko from suceeding was the Heartless' own strength, and Zuko hissed in breath, fire streaming alongside his arms as the Heartless' neck finally gave way with a sickening crack, his burning arms melting right through it's neck and slicing it's head away to land on it's foot. Amazingly still functional, the headless Heartless stumbled over it's own head, lurching towards the ground. Zuko jumped off before it fell, gathering the fire from his arms, breathing greater power into it, and shooting it as a dense arrow directly into the center of the beast, burying deep until it exploded, tearing it apart in a mighty conflagration that Zuko slammed right into, a ring of fire expanding at his impact and striking down some sword-armed Heartless that had been drawing near. That wasn't enough to kill them, so Zuko projecting the fire around him in powerful bolts that melted right through them, and _that _certainly killed them.

Unfortunately, the Red Nocturnes chose this moment to start attacking in earnest, hovering towards him and projecting streams of fire. "I'm starting to remember why nobody likes Firebending anymore!" Zuko said, slapping away embers big enough to be fireballs before he brought his hands together and slammed them into a stream of fire, diverting it past him. He grunted in his dismay; the Red Nocturnes poured on the heat, and were actually pushing him _back_, the fire at his hands piercing through the gaps in his hold. With a indignant snarl, he wrested control of the stream and tore it loose from the Red Nocturnes, knocking them silly from the disorientation of it. Too angry to think straight, Zuko spun it over his head, sprayed it out at his side, and with a open-palmed thrust of his arm, spewed it right back at the closest of the Red Nocturnes, hitting in dead-on. This didn't matter a great deal, as the Red Nocturne just absorbed it, swelling up and up.

"They EAT FIRE, YOU LUNATIC!" Sokka yelled, while giving a helpless wolf-like Heartless a vicious noogie. "STOP FEEDING THEM!"

"What?" Zuko said as, with a spray of embers, the last of the fire disappeared into the great engorged Red Nocturne, now severely bloated and somewhere around the size of a small car and bleeding fire everywhere. On the other hand, it didn't look like it was going to be attacking any time soon; it bobbled up and down almost like it was drunk, weakly trying to force itself back up. "...Huh." Curious, Zuko pointed his finger and shot out a pencil-thin flaming ray to see what would happen. It sizzled right into the overstuffed Red Nocturne, which flailed around with alarm while the other Red Nocturnes fled, and then it exploded in a massive blast that knocked the other Heartless silly (but not Zuko or Sokka; Zuko diverted it with trivial ease, and Sokka was _far _too used to fireblasts to be blind-sided by that).

"...Okay, cool," Sokka said, standing up from the piece of rubble he had dove behind when the Nocturne exploded. "They explode when you feed them too much fire."

"Yes...they _do_..." Zuko agreed thoughtfully. They looked at each other and then grinned at the Red Nocturnes in a way that made the fire-themed Heartless edge away with something almost like alarm.

For those Heartless, the rest of the day was very brief and exceptionally unpleasant.

Elsewhere inside the dome...

"_WHEE!_" Zim shouted as he slammed into the back of an overlarge Air Soldier that, on closer inspection, prove to be several Air Soldier fused into a trembling monstrosity with too many arms, not enough legs and sixteen pairs of wings. Also, tentacles. (For some reason, the mutating Heartless really had a thing for tentacles.) He hoisted the Keyblade up overhead as it generated an enormous amount of light to burn the Heartless on it's own, and he almost fell over when it suddenly grew larger for no apparent reason, forcing Zim to hold a weapon so large that the hilt alone was as long as he was tall. Grunting with the effort of balancing a weapon so big (but not, curiously, with the effort of holding _up _such a weapon) he stepped back, the heaving lumps of flesh under his feet tripping him; much quicker on the take than people gave him credit for, Zim stabbed the Keyblade down into the composite Air Soldier's body, the tightly packed shadow-flesh shuddering like thick liquid as the holy weapon bit deep. There was a glimmer of bright light from the weapon, it's increased mass transforming into pure white radiance that the Heartless started to _melt _around. For a moment, the entire battlefield under Kimblee's reshaped structure was bathed in that light, every single Heartless there falling over in pain for just long enough for the fighters to kill scores of them without interruption...

The light flashed out, exploding in a large blast rippling through the entire chromatic spectrum several times over, instantly disintegrating dozens of the weaker Heartless from the sheer radiance alone and seriously hurting quite a few of the stronger Heartless outright. The rest were still stunned, though many of the least mutated recovered immediately; for some unknown reason, the ones that were closest to their usual shapes were the least harmed, while the more powerful and mutated ones erupted in small pillars of darkness.

Zim did not noticed, because he had the rather more pressing issue of falling to his doom from dozens of feet up. "Perhaps I should have thought this out a bit more," he said, Keyblade in hand and returned to it's original size. "Wait, Firebenders can fly, right? Or at least do that rocket kick thing. I've seen Zuko do it scores of times. Sure it can't be that hard. Also, I should probably stop talking to myself like this in the middle of falling to my death, it can't end well." He grunted, channeling energies to his feet and gasping with the effort of moving and amplifying his innner heat as evenly as possible to the heels of his shoes without burning them or himself...

Fire erupted from his feet, _not _burning him or setting his clothes on fire again. However, due to both Calvin's ill-timed messing around with the local geomancy and his own inexperience with Firebending, the fire _immediately _exploded in a rather spectacular fashion and flung him across the battlefield, the ground getting _real _close _real _fast-

Something black, thick and disturbingly gooey smacked into him. "What the-?" Zim started to say before he saw that it was a Heartless; he couldn't be sure what sort it was, because it's arms, legs and head were gone, severed as if by a blade (with crisped edges on the wounds) and it was already disintegrating. Zim didn't have long before it collapsed into murky goo and he fell right through...and then _another _Heartless smacked into him, briefly halting his fall, though this one looked like it's limbs and head had simply been torn off with tremendous strength. He fell through _that _one, and predictably another one hit him right away, and _this _one had been blasted almost totally apart. "Ow! Who keeps doing that!" Zim yelled as he fell through it.

Right as soon as he realized that perhaps gratitude should be called for since he was falling a lot less quickly now, he became aware that the black specks hurtling towards him at incredible velocity were all similarily maimed and dying Heartless coming right at him. "...What," Zim said flatly. Three struck him at once, and six hit those, and twelve more hit _those_, the numbers rapidly piling up, the constant continual contacts crushing confused Zim and they all fell together...for about sixteen seconds. The moment they hit the ground the Heartless burst apart and Zim rolled to his feet without any fuss, the fall cushioned by all the Heartless bodies. "Ow," Zim said, stumbling around a bit, aching all over. "Yes...I truly should have thought that through...and who did all that!"

"Hi," Hobbes said, sitting atop a pile of twitching Heartless. "You're still alive. My plan worked! Cool."

"That was you!" Zim said, outraged.

"Yes," Hobbes confirmed. "They helped too!" He added, pointing at two nearby allies: Cyborg and Scar.

"Hi," Cyborg said, waving at Zim inbetween scything through a large pack of Shadows, both his forearms transformed into glowing chainsaw blades of energy. Scar grunted in acknowledgement, busily finding new and exciting ways to get a Heartless to kill itself through creative applications of breaking limbs in certain ways.

"You're supposed to be on my side!" Zim yelled at Cyborg.

"I am!" Cyborg assured him. "One second, man, these little fleas are a pain in my gyro-gears." He took a half-step back, neatly allowing a Shadow to misaim it's leap at him, and brought one of his blades around in a blow that sliced it in half, both halves punching into other Shadows on the way, stunning them long enough for Cyborg to deliver an overhead swing with such force upon them that the energy of his weapons dispersed explosively, sending out a wave of energy that fried over a dozen Shadows, and those that remained pulled back in fright, their primeval fear of light overwhelming their hunger.

"Wait a minute, energy doesn't work that way!" Hobbes complained. A mighty Heartless shaped like a bear's skeleton crept up on him, it's claws raised up. Hobbes punched it in the face without turning around and popped it's head off. The Heartless stumbled off, looking for it's head. "...Or _does _it?"

"It does not," Scar said, putting his hands on the ground and transmuting a weapon from the ground; he pulled away a large staff with vicious-looking serrated blades at both edges, whipping it around him and dismembering Heartless with frightening speed and skill.

Cyborg brought his now energy-deficient blades up, now only a oddly shaped assemblege that had been directing the energy for his laser chainsaws, and transformed them back into arms. The Heartless that Hobbes had punched had found it's head and had returned, jaws open wide as it loomed over Cyborg (himself a pretty big guy). Cyborg grabbed it by the jaws, the metal of his hands not even scratched by it's teeth, and with a mighty yell and the grind of hydraulic muscles, he lifted it right over his head, the massive Heartless seeming to float there for a moment, and he pivoted around and swung it right into the Shadow Heartless around him, swinging it around and around, the tiny Shadows smacked flat onto it's back and forced there by gravitational forces, and he kept doing this into the air was clear (and a few random Heartless had been pulverized by their weaponized brethern), and he finally ended the poor beast's torment when he smashed it into the ground with a street-cracking impact, small shockwaves knocking a few people off their feet and quite a few gross noises as the Shadows burst under it. The bestial Heartless seemed to whimper, several nasty chunks of street protruding right through ichor-gushing holes in it's belly. "Open up!" Cyborg joked, firmly grasping it's jaws once more and kneeling as he applied superhuman leverage to it. The Heartless, perhaps sensing what Cyborg had in mind, snapped it's jaws shut with all it's strength, Cyborg's power just barely enough to keep it from chomping his hands and prying them just slightly open.

"Lousy monster that doesn't know when it's beat!" Cyborg snarled, steam hissing from vents in his exoskeletal plating as inner components strained to overheat. Bizarre muscles in the monster's jaws stood rigid with the effort of keeping it's jaws nearly shut, and Cyborg's own mechanisms made a bit of a racket as they whirred and grinded with the effort of augmenting his already impressive strength. But the contest didn't last long; slowly, inexorably, the Heartless' jaws slid open wider...wider...the infernal furnace of it's mysterious internal organs burning with a pestiliential glow becoming all the more apparent...and finally, there was a snapping noise and it's jaws swung open, hanging a little loosely since Cyborg had just broken it's jaw muscles. Grunting with effort, Cyborg slammed a foot into it's lower jaw, freeing one hand that he pulled back and transformed into a large and lethal-looking cannon that he stuck into the creature's throat.

The Heartless' eyes widened, as if it was saying 'eep!'.

Cyborg fired, and the monster's entire body south of it's neck just vaporized in a tremendous blast of sonic energy that shredded it's shadow-flesh to the very last scrap of corrosive goo, tearing it all apart in a cloud of darkness that was _also _vaporized by the sonic blast, the waves of sound crumpling the ground in a straight line for at least half a mile. (Quite a lot of Heartless were taken out in that attack.) "BOOYAH!" Cyborg shouted jubilantly, his cannon transformed back into a hand as he took his foot off the thing's jaw so that he could pick up both halves and lift the head into the air and tear them apart with little effort. "Heh, all that talk about how I've lost my edge working in the lab all the time are _way _off!"

Zim, sitting on a pile of squirming Heartless he had beaten off while Cyborg was being awesome, applauded vigorously. "That was AWESOME!" He said. "Do it again! Only with a bigger Heartless! And smash, like, fifty Heartless with each swing! And use two cannons! No, grow four more limbs and turn _those _into cannons! No! Combine them all into one super-cannon and BLAST DOWN THE WALL!"

"...That does sound like an intriguing idea," Scar said. He didn't look happy that he thought it; it sounded like something _Abel _would say.

"Eh, not with the stuff on me now," Cyborg said, shrugging.

Zim shrugged and Scar looked vaugely saddened. "Eh, worth a shot." He hopped off the pile of Heartless and blasted them with fire blast after fire blast until they exploded; he was a bit disappointed that his blasts were nowhere as effective as Zuko's own seemed to be. (He had been spying on the more experienced Firebender during the battle. He was creepy like that.)

"WHAT?" Hobbes yelled, having been driven temporarily deaf by the sonic cannon's noise, his incredibly acute sense of hearing working _against _him this time. "DID YOU GUYS SAY SOMETHING?"

"Whoops," Cyborg said when Zim wrenched the Keyblade out of the ground where he'd left it and snickered. "Sorry about that man. It'll wear off! Probably."

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Hobbes said again. Scar glared at Cyborg on Hobbes' behalf.

"Well, I should say we're doing quite well," Zim said, sounding pleased. "The overall Heartless numbers have been driven down by a considerable percent, none of us are dead or even seriously injured, and the big villain has yet to make an appearance. Maybe he got scared and gave up or commited ritual suicide with a rubber ducky and a piece of toast. THAT WOULD BE GREAT! And possibly a subject of some interest to the morbid crowd, yes?"

"We should be so lucky," Scar said darkly.

"You're a very weird little guy," Cyborg said to Zim. "Ya know that?"

"Yes," Zim said smugly. "Yes I do."

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Hobbes said. "...OH, ASLAN'S MANE, I'VE BEEN TEMPORARILY DEAFENED, HAVEN'T I? THIS SUCKS."

Zim frowned. "I do wish you would stop yelling like that."

"WHAT?" Hobbes looked slightly smug, this time.

"Okay, now you're doing that on purpose!" Zim paused. "Hey, where did Cyborg go?"

"I do not know," Scar said. "However, a number of Heartless approach."

"Okay," Zim said. "Let's kill them!"

"Very well." Scar and Zim went off to make those Heartless' lives very miserable.

He had, in fact, hidden behind a nearby dumpster shoved aside in the fighting so he could pull in some assistance. "Are you getting this?" He said, speaking into a communicator that had unfolded from his forearm, one of the older sound-limited ones. (He'd been meaning to upgrade to a visual telecommunicator for some time, but he'd been busy.) "Damn, I think there's some interference!"

A girl's voice answered him from the other end, amid a lot of thick static. "..._Winry Rockbell...Hang on, just gotta..._" There was a muffled noise like cannonfire. "_...is that you Cyborg...Heartless are...swarming everywhere, been holding off the place since you left...messing with communications..._"

"Winry!" Cyborg said, relieved to hear the voice of his sometime partner and landlord. "Thought you would have already blasted half of downtown by now!"

"_Give me credit, I'm better than that!_" Winry said, speaking in short clipped sentences so the static didn't hamper communication too much. "_...Okay...so I shoot like Ed a little bit..._"

"Winry, I gotta make this quick!" Cyborg said hurredly. "You remember that broadcast from a little bit ago?"

_"Yeah, why?"_

"I'm kinda sort in the middle of it. Right there, actually."

_"Sorry...gotta be the static but thought...just said that you're right there where the Red Lotus Alchemist is!"_

"Nope. I am. Funny, ain't it?"

Cyborg was glad that the static flared up just then; it cut off what sounded like a lot of well-chosen swear words from Winry. "Probably a good thing I didn't catch all that."

"_...LOST YOUR MIND!_" Winry yelled. _"KIMBLEE IS...COMPLETE SOCIOPATH AND...ACTUAL PSYCHOANALYSIS! HE'S GOT A...PHILOSOPHER'S STONE...ANY IDEA WHAT HE CAN __**DO**__!"_

"Not really!" Cyborg said cheerfully. "But he's a bad guy, doing bad stuff! He killed nearly everyone in Foster's to make that thing, and I hear there's a chance it can be reversed! If there's even the tiniest chance of making that happen, I'm gonna take that guy down myself even if it kills me!"

_"Don't...joke about that, even like...gonna get killed one day, I hear the Truth is a total bastard that way..any ideas for what I do?"_

"Remember that ship we got done double-time?" Cyborg said.

"_The one for the new guy?_"

"That's the one! I think we could use a test run for it!"

"..._actually serious?_"

"Yeah. Work with me on this!"

"..._hang on, be there in a bit...gotta clear out the rest of the trash here!_" There was a sound of increasingly louder blasts, followed by Winry yelling, "_HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT YOU BASTARDS!_"

"Hey!" Cyborg said.

_"Not you, the Heartless!_"

"Oh, I know. Just doesn't seem right, a nice girl like you cussing like that."

_"Geez, loosen up a little. I'll be there as soon as I can!_" Winry said, and the communicator cut off.

"That went better than I thought," Cyborg said. He frowned. "Hey, wait..." He looked up.

"Hi," Zim said, crouching on the lid of the dumpster and staring directly down at him. Scar was standing at Cyborg's side, as equally silent.

"...How much of that did you hear?" Cyborg asked.

Zim grinned. "Enough to get tremendously excited." Cyborg rolled his good eye. (He seemed fated to be surronded by hyper-excitable little green guys.)

"Your buddy's taking a while to get that wall down," Cyborg noted. "Think he's okay?"

"I am certain of it," Zim said confidently. "Well, I suppose something could be _delaying _them..."

"Perhaps," Scar said. He looked longingly at the wall for a moment, where Kimblee waited...and returned his attention to the Heartless.

This didn't escape Zim. "I had a thought," Zim remarked. "Perhaps it would be advisable for you to confront Kimblee here and now, before he can spring whatever ambush once the Heartless have worn us down?"

Scar looked at him with an expression that, on someone less jaded and broken down, might have been hope. "You are serious."

"Yes."

Scar said nothing for a moment, clearly struggling with his duty to his fellow refugees and his long-overdue vengeance. "...You may need my aid. I do not have the right to pursue selfish vengeance. Not _now_."

"Oh, go on and get him!" Zim said impatiently. "Remove his threat now before he pulls some other unexpected trick. That way, no one else will be hurt, and his threat will be removed." Scar still looked doubtful. "At the very least, you could slow him down and see what he wants. If it makes you feel better, you could not kill him right away unless it is unavoidable."

Scar considered it. "Perhaps..." He said heisitantly, clearly trying his hardest not to see this as running away from his duty.

Zim thought it was only appropiate for Scar to fight Kimblee first, if not outright defeat or kill him, and wasn't much concerned on the other technical issues there. "You promised that girl you would bring him down or something similar. At the very least, would it not be the most appropiate thing for _you_, an Ishbalan," (He hoped he pronounced the word right.) "To be the one that brings proper vengeance for what he has inflicted here?"

Scar glanced at Cyborg, clearly desiring another opinion. "Go for it, man," Cyborg said. "If there's anyone here that knows Kimblee and can stop him, it's you."

"He may well be distracted commanding these Heartless," Zim said. "If you face him now, they may lose cohesion and be easier for us to defeat!"

Scar's eyes widened slightly. Clearly, he had not considered that. His face set into a grim expression of resolution. "...Then I go for everyone else's means, and not my own," He said, and sounded satisfied. A measure of burden seemed to fall from him, and he looked at a nearby wall meaningfully. It would be easy enough to break through.

"Eh, don't bother rationalizing it," Zim said sternly. "Just do what you know to be right, and do it!"

"...As you insist," Scar said.

...

As expected, Zim and his allies were not the only ones caught in the turmoil of Kimblee's plotting, either.

All over the First District (and on those bordering it, as the Heartless swarms forced all available fighters to stem the tide), the Heartless were attacking in larger numbers then they ever had before; for every refugee willing to stand and fight, there were ten Heartless ready to tear them apart and feast on them; having grown stronger than usual due to the unprecented process they used to enter the world again stripping them of the usual forms they took on and mutating them into utterly nightmarish forms, the Heartless were more powerful than ever before. They had abandoned the efficiency of their usual varieties for greater swells of the oblivion-touched power that had corrupted or birthed them, and if that wasn't enough, their mere presence did _something _to the dimensional barriers already weakened in the town, and permitting more Heartless to slip into the world in the wake of their mutated brethern and share in their newfound strength, augmented even further by the power loaned to them by Kimblee and the Philosopher's Stone...for the power of that alchemical weapon was so great that it's mere presence was enough to make them strong.

Now, all over the district, these empowered Heartless smashed their way through in a bloody-minded rampage. With the scant warning Zim's ill-considered plan had given to the town, hurried teams of guards had emerged just in time to face down the Heartless and...slow them down. That's all that could be done; these Heartless were utterly unprecedented in the town's history, compelled by both their own destructive compulsions and the orders Kimblee had given them, urging them on to their destination: a small and normally unimportant news studio. The people who tried to fight the Heartless knew that they might well being going to their deaths, and went anyway. It was the proper thing to do, and they did have some sense of confidence; they knew the town's layout far better, they had superior weaponry and defenses, and they knew their foes.

It seemed misplaced confidence; the Heartless tore through everything in their path, assimilating inanimate matter into their own bodies to increase their killing potential and flattening buildings that weren't strong enough to withstand their assaults. When they encountered people fit to oppose them, they charged right through them; these teams were too confused and surprised to put up as much a fight as they could have, but they held their ground regardless. Inevitably, they were only barricades holding back the flood that was the Heartless...but they still held them back as long as they could, and managed to _survive _the experience_,_ and that was admirable enough, and even bought time for reinforcements to arrive there.

Unfortunate, though, that the bulk of the Heartless that hadn't already been slain had simply charged off at their distant objective, leaving only stragglers to be struck down. The flood was coming, aimed straight at that little news studio, and the reinforcements didn't know that _this _was were the Heartless were headed.

Too much was happening, and too quickly. If there was more time to prepare, it would have been a different story, but the confusion of the events prevented an immediate response from almost anyone in a position to do something large-scale. (And that was quite apart from the extremely brief and scattered reports of something blasting it's way from the Council of Insert Nomenclature's base of operations in the First District, but unfortunately _that _particular threat had beem very thorough about eliminating bystanders.)

All in all, it was _not_ a good situation for someone totally unprepared or not in a position of power to deal with it, and Stewie Griffin was was both, espicially since he had gone to Foster's to meet up with his erstwhile warden Jarod, only to find the man missing and the devastation of the place terrible enough to make him envious. (He _was _a supervillain, and not a very moral one either.)

And, just as he hadn't been confused enough and wondering whether this was a good time to finally make his escape (_what if Jarod came BACK, though?_), that unexpected broadcast had played, telling Stewie all he needed to know about the current situation, as well as suggest that those people he had helped find last night were even more insane than they'd seem if they were willing to fight a madman like this Kimblee fellow. Ah, and there had been the sudden outbreak of a veritable onslaught of Heartless that he had been _quite _unequipped to deal with. (At least until he had hit one of his various safehouses hidden throughout the town. And to think that so many of his malicious associates considered them to be a paranoid waste of resources.)

So he'd hit the streets himself, wearing a suit of mechanized armor suitable for his dimensions and preferences, not helping in the fight himself but simply keeping himself alive and trying to determine if Jarod was alive or not; Kimblee's last known location had been Foster's, as Jarod's, and Stewie privately hoped that Jarod had died or least been incapaciated. In the meantime, he was focused on finding information and staying alive, two fairly problematic situations given the Heartless swarming everywhere.

"Be off with you!" He snarled, a fairly ludicrous sight in his fairly squat four-foot-tall powered armor suit made in the Raygun Gothic fashion (a fairly retro aesthetic of mad science in the old pulp fiction sci-fi fashion with a brutalistic twist; smooth curved surfaces dominated by bits of artfully exposed machinery) powered armor, equipped with four overlarge double-jointed limbs with morphing capabilities, transforming into firearms, power claws, electric whips, tendrils and whatever else he deemed useful for the moment. They were heavy enough to have him assume a simian stance to compensate, perhaps the reason he was mainly moving by either the jets on his massive boots or point-blank expulsions of his personal force field. With it's brass-colored metal body, the alien-like shape of the armor and the grim face, it would have looked more intimidating if not for the egg-shaped upper body. He punched an in-coming Soldier in the face, not even remotely hurting it but knocking it off the rooftop they were fighting on and plowing through a score of it's fellows, all falling to the ground.

"Well, come on then!" He challenged to a number of other Heartless of varying types, now hunkering at the edge of the rooftop. "I assure you I can destroy you all with ease!" To prove it, his arms morphed into rocket-propelled grenade launchers that fired scores of ballistics into their teeming ranks and the Heartless were pushed back in clouds of fire.

Unfortunately, it also caved the sight of the (fortunately evacuated) building, and Stewie fired his jetboots and flew off before it could tumble around him. "That was far too close! Blast it all, I specifically designed this contraption to fight monstrous hordes like this, why in all reason is it not mowing them down appropiately!" And, though he loathed to even think of it, the monsters he was battling looked _wrong_. There was far greater individual variance than he was accustomed to seeing in the Heartless, their usual castes degenerating into nightmarish forms. He thought he had even seen some mutating from moment to moment, abandong and adopting shapes like shadows cast by a ever-moving figure, and he shivered, briefly feeling like the child he appeared to be.

A massive burst of flame snapped him out of it from several streets over; a tremendous pyrotechnical roar, arcing high above the buildings as dozens of Heartless were launched up, burning and gone in moments. There was another, so bright it hurt to look at it, and as a massive Heartless that looked to have inhabited a disused truck and rearranged it's form leaped to that street, there was yet another fire blast that struck it in mid-air, and that Heartless fell to earth, burning and quickly disintegrating. It didn't hit the ground; an enormous green laser surged out from that street, vaporizing that Heartless in midair.

"Well now!" Stewie said, pleased and not as well-informed on the local residents as he should have been. "A number of pleasingly puissant personages have taken to the fight? Excellent, I can hide among their number as a simple engineer of tiny stature until I can make a run for it!" Most unfortunately, his airship had been left outside of town, and he was away from the instruments he required to control it remotely as he had the night before. He made a mental note to rectify that as he turned towards the street in question, jets accelerating and finding it in moments.

When he got there, he beheld an unusual sight, and if he had actually been aware of who all of them were he would probably have made smarter choices than he did. The street was running rampant with Heartless; they were coming from the front of the street, they were coming from the back of it, and they were doing the same from all of the alleyways and out of the sky above, melting in the sunlight though they were, so hungry and bloodthirsty that their own impending doom did not concern them a whit. They were even coming from underground, cracking and breaking themselves apart in their frenzy as they shoved themselves through too-small cracks in the ground and reforming in the midst of battle.

And here, on this street that ran so thick with Heartless that he could have ran across their heads and never touched the street itself, there were but five combatants to stem the tide and doing a fine job of it. It was hard to tell, but the ones in charge seemed to be two men in uniforms so tattered from the Heartless' constant barrage of attacks that Stewie couldn't tell what regiment they were, one having torn his sleeves away and his arms swelled into a multitude of miniguns and energy rifles and grenade launchers and more combined into uneven mixtures of every firearm known to mankind across the worlds, each shot taking out scores of the Heartless (not that it mattered much; dozens replaced each fallen monster) and not a single projectile ever missing a Heartless or hitting collateral damage. The other man was a pyrokinetic of enormous power, summoning massive bursts of flame that cut down the darklings with astonishing effectiveness; as Stewie watched, he snapped out his fingers and huge streamers of flame flew through the street ahead of him, neatly avoiding everything except the Heartless and burning their legs away and dropping them face-first in to the fires, killing them instantly. But there were still so _many_ of them..

Scattered throughout the street and totally unharmed by the chaos the first two unleashed were three others: the first of them was a man-thing covered in a shell made of black diamond (or so Stewie assumed) that smashed into his foes with all the ferocity of a monster, tearing off limbs and beating Heartless to death with them before resorting to even more upfront brutality; all their attacks did nothing to him, all their claws and strikes couldn't so much as scratch his armor, all their wall-pulverizing blows couldn't even stun him and all the energy attacks they could muster bounced _off; _he didn't even slow down and tore into the offending targets, an immovable object when still and a unstoppable force when he started moving.

And then there was an even odder pair; a man wearing a full-body red outfit and striking impossibly fast with his paired katanas, slicing Heartless to pieces, wading right into their teeming masses and attacking, bouncing from monster to monster with a single attack each, slaying dozens in his acrobatics. The other was a woman in green, radiating green energies that she cast with reckless abandon, vaporizing the shadow-fiends and lacking the raw power of the pyrokinetic but overcoming him in recklessness. Unlike the others, who fared well enough on their own, these two were fighting side-by-side, or more accurately, back-to-back, keeping their backs to each other as much as they were able, minimizing their weaknesses and dealing violence to every enemy that they saw...and this way, they saw quite a lot.

Stewie was never one to deny a good idea and thought he saw a brilliant plot right here, ready to be used, and allies of convienience to be discarded to the Heartless if need be. He dove down right into the middle of the fight, intending to insinuate him into this band and manipuate them into helping him just long enough; he came down with his force field activated, the egg-shaped frame of his armor turning it into a drill-like form, and the combination of that and his momentum allowed him to crash right through the chest of one of the stone-bodied hulks lumbering over the pyrokinetic, landing with sufficient force to make a small dent in the ground. Dazed, but unharmed, he pulled himself out of the ground with some effort and staggered up, his on-board Head's-Up Display informing him that the others were looking at him; mildly surprised, and in a few cases looking at him with familiarity. Unfortunately, his (very incomplete) on-board database didn't have any information on them, so he was unable to verify if any familiarity with them was good or bad.

He decided it was unimportant. "Yes, yes, can we hold up with the usual familiarities?" Stewie said, trying to sound as heroic as he could. It wasn't very easy, but he enjoyed such roleplaying. (Jarod loved tabletop roleplaying games and made him play some as a empathy exercise; Stewie thought he was a bad influence because it was starting to work.) "We've monsters to slay and such." He turned around, his limbs morphing into an assortment of grenade-launchers, and fired them directly at the stony hulk he had just drilled through; they punched into it's exposing insides and exploded, tearing it's body apart completely. Unable to maintain itself any longer, the Heartless essence animating it drifted away in plumes of blackness that burned away in the sunlight; dead or simply banished, none of them could say. Stewie thought it was a shame; it would be interesting to _use _the Heartless to his own purposes, but the secret to it eluded him.

"Well!" Stewie said, now having a great deal of fun being as hammy as he could. "A touch on the dire side, and a trifle close to the cut, but I think my arrival was most fortituious, yes?"

"Uh..." The pyrokinetic in blue said, frowning at him thoughtfully. "Well, I won't say we weren't having a hard time of it. Way too many of these monsters to fight alone, but you're lucky you caught us after we trimmed their ranks down."

"'Trimmed'?" The woman in green repeated. "Was that before or after they almost tore us apart and ate our bones?" She gestured at the destruction outlying the area. The pyrokinetic glared at her. "Hey, just asking." She stopped, staring at Stewie with a look of intent familiarity. Stewie thought he knew her from somewhere, but couldn't place her. (He knew a lot of green people with superpowers.)

The man she addressed grunted, and then looked down at Stewie, who was a bit discomfited to see that grafted pieces of synthetic skin had peeled away from one side of his face in the heat of battle, revealing a nasty mess of scars around what _looked _like a normal eye but was probably cybernetic with a contact built in. "...Do I know you from somewhere? Your armor looks familiar."

"What? No, of course not!" Stewie was thinking fast though, and he noticed the white gloves and the odd markings on them. "I must say...do _I _know you? I don't believe we've met."

"Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist." The man with the nasty scars - or rather, Roy - stuck a thumb at the others. "Field-Admiral Gibbs, the homunculus Greed and his bodyguards Shego and Deadpool are helping me with the Foster's incident and bringing in the man responsible for it."

"..Ah, I have wound up amongst the authorities," Stewie said, and he was screaming on the inside. It was mostly because of all the people that he, a wanted criminal, could have possibly run into, it had been one of the most powerful people in positions of authority in the entire town. "Then...I suppose you don't need any reinforcements, then..." He carefully began to edge away.

"Are you crazy?" Roy said, snapping his fingers out with a flourish and igniting a flame that rippled through his half of a street in such a way that it disintegrated a score of Heartless, only to be replaced by _twice _that number. "We need all the manpower we can use! Half my men aren't even in town right now, and the other half that isn't already tied up in dealing with incidents are still en route! Most likely they're already curtailing Heartless encursions besides here!"

"Oh. Stupendous." _Calm down now_, Stewie told himself. _This is indeed a bad situation, but consider the positives! They are far too concerned with battle to pay you much attention, and anyway none of them know who you are-_

"Hey! I know you!" Shego yelled, pointing a glowing fist at him. "You're that crazy midget who stiffed me and the Doc when we did a job for you six and a half months ago! You owe me money!"

"Who is he?" Gibbs asked her sharply.

"That midget in the squatty armor, Stewie Griffin. Nearly famous small-time megalomaniac and wannabe supervillain? He had me and the Doc pull off a heist on some off-world company that wouldn't deal him any. 'Thugs-4-Less', I think."

"I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I AM NO 'WANNABE!" Stewie shouted. "I AM A FAR STEP ABOVE THE REST OF THESE MEGALOMANIACAL CROOKS, SWINDLERS AND SMALL-TIMERS!" Everyone stared at him. Even the Heartless. "Erm...that is what I _would _say, if I _were _Stewie Griffin, devilishly handome rogue that he is. But I'm not. Most certainly not!"

"But you're wearing his goofy armor," Shego said. "Sound like him, too."

"Oh? Erm..." _Blast, I knew I should have invested in different models! Why must I always be so fiendishly singular in my appearances! _"That's...because I am, in fact, his armor come to life! Yes, a stray lightning bolt hit me and I acquired sentience. Yes, that's it."

"I can hear someone moving inside you," Roy said.

"...I keep housecats inside myself. It's the humanitarian thing to do, yes?" They stared at him, clearly not buying a word of it. _Drat, I need a distraction! _Stewie pointed wildly and said, "Oh, look at that! The Heartless are swarming en masse!"

"Huh?" Roy looked around, justifiably alarmed to see the Heartless rushing at them, packed so tightly together that they were actually _merging_ together, joining up into a larger thing. (It was really disgusting to see, too.) "Oh, damn."

"Eh?" Stewie said, looking around. "There really _are _more Heartless there? Double drat!"

Fortunately, just then, the top part of the nearby building slid off, as though cut invisibly, and slammed right onto the Heartless mass, crushing it flat and sinking into the street a bit. It wiggled a bit, black tendrils extending out through the cracks, jaws opening every few inches and snapping madly. "Oh, just die already!" A woman's voice yelled, and Stewie looked up just in time to see an amazonian woman jump from the horizontally bisected building, leaping dozens of feet in the air and radiating an intense light before dropping down with such immense speed that an instant later, the weaponized architecture on the ground smashed apart with a mighty flash of light, inducing many to cover their eyes protectively. When they dared to open them again, there was a big dent in the street, pieces of building were lying around everywhere, and standing in the scorched center of it all was the giant Crossguard representative to the Council of Insert Nomenclature, the cleric Angilaka. Stumbling a bit after her feat, she bulldozed through the Heartless in her way and accidentally slipped, nearly running over Roy. As it was, he neatly sidestepped her and glanced down as her considerable bulk smashed into the ground. She grinned sheepishly from the ground and stood up, saying, "Hey. Heard you had some trouble here and thought I'd drop in." She grimaced, rubbing her back. "Didn't think it'd be that _literal_..."

"Hey, reinforcements," Shego said. "Cool."

"Yeah, sure, pretty awesome and stuff, can we focus on _me?_" Greed said, having got a particularly large Soldier into a headlock; it was still doing it's best to chew his head off and just hurting itself. "Help? _NOW?_"

"What are you doing here?" Roy asked Angilaka while Deadpool tended to his boss. "I thought you were working crowd control! I had things here under control here, you know." Angilaka raised an eyebrow at the teeming Heartless. "Okay. Mostly under control. Sort of under control. It was going well...look, it was being contained _very gradually._"

"Uh huh," Angilaka said. "Geez. What's with guys and posturing?"

"It makes us feel like _MEN!_" Deadpool shouted. "_MANLY MEN. _Which is really not easy when we got giant girls like you running around, dwarfing us just by being there and having nice legs bigger than I am and making us feel all small and weak and in desperate need of hooded jackets." She stared at him, nonplussed. "Your hair is shedding _everywhere_. Seriously, it's annoying. Go get a hairnet!"

"If I kicked him into the stratosphere, would that count as a diplomatic incident?" She asked Roy.

"Probably," Roy said. She scuffed the ground with her boot sadly. Roy incinerated a Heartless about to bite his head off without even looking and asked her, "What are you doing here again? Without the upstaging me parts."

"Oh, yeah. I just got a team together when I saw that kickass broadcast; I'd heard you'd come down here to investigate the Foster's incident so I figured you'd wind up being at the epicenter and would need some help, and here you are! Worked out pretty nice, yeah?"

"Yes," Roy said wearily. "But it's worse than you thought. We found Kimblee, the man behind all this insanity, only some lunatics called him out on TV and he's going right to them!"

"Oh, right. Best to get my team down here then." She tilted her head up. "OY, GUYS! GET DOWN HERE AND START DOING SOME AWESOME!" Everyone stared at her. "What? It sounded good when I brought it up at the last tabletop RPG game-night..."

"Wait, that's your battlecry?" Deadpool said. "Seriously? Weak."

Two figures leaped from behind the buildings and slammed into the greatest concentrations of Heartless, scattering them before moving onto the assault. "Face me! Face the wrath of the Crossguard! Bring yourselves, spawn of corruption and despair, and die die DIE!" Yelled the first of them, a man-sized robot named The Most Equitable and Firmest Merciful Resolution (at least until recently, when he got tired of people complaining about his name, so he'd legally changed it to Pants-Man Audrey in the mistaken belief it made him more personable), his metamorphic nano-colony body's current configuration humanoid enough to comfortably wear the vestments of an human initiate of the Crossguard, including a pair of garishly ostentatious pants that were the bastard crossbreed of cargo pants, parachute pants, bell-bottoms, bib overalls and probably a small circus tent. His arms were spread out, and emerging from his billowing sleeves was a startling array of firearms; the long glass-paneled barrels of plasma rifles, a set of flamethrowers to the sides and in the middle of the plasma rifles were rapid-fire rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. (Gibbs felt vaugely ripped-off.) He fired again and again, bolts of green plasma blowing massive holes in the Heartless before him, clawed limbs and killing blade-arms flying into the air and disintegrating in the sunlight.

The flamethrowers ignited, and twin streams of brick-scorching fire melted right through the Heartless, burning them not just with fire but with the solid core of faith that Audrey held in his mechanical heart, a faith that pulled in the Heartless in it's light and turned his weapons into purifying expressions of righteous vengeance. (Also, he had awesome pants.) With those flames, he herded dozens of Heartless into tight packs, forcing them to gather up lest they be incinerated with fire. This was a bad move for them; his next move was to power up the grenade launchers and fire in volleys, one after another, until the time-delayed missles erupted not in explosions but in holy water that splashed onto the Heartless and _melted _them (possibly because he believed it would) and he had aimed them with such perfect skill that not a single bit of shrapnel came even close to hurting anyone else. He appeared to smirk somehow, a sudden wind blowing back his coat...and rustling his pants, which produced a series of cheerful clinging noises thanks to all the bells, zippers, dogtags, collectible antannae ornaments and various tacky stuff he'd put on. "Thus perish the enemies of us all." A pigeon, passing through and perhaps mistaking him for a statue, landed on his head and sat there. "Get off my head!" The pigeon refused to move. He sighed, for though he did not need to breath, all members of the rational species find some point in their lives where they just have to sigh, and having a totally badass moment ruined by random pidgeons is one of them. "At least my pants are unharmed." Another pidgeon sat on his boot and pecked inquiringly at his pants, and found several firearms being pointed at it. "DON'T. TOUCH. THE. PANTS." Wisely, the pidgeon flew away.

"Hooray!" Deadpool said. "Reinforcements and stuff. Which means...THEY'RE STEALING OUR THUNDER! DAMN IT! Well, except her." He pointed at the other figure, who waved sheepishly back: a short sweet-looking young woman with a body type that put one in mind of a healthy pear, her face set in a pleasant expression of persistent good-naturedness, and wore a pair of large glasses, the belted-up longcoat and armored clothing that was the uniform of a knight of the Crossguard, her brown hair done up in a high ponytail. About the only thing about her that looked vaugely threatening was a very large mechanism of uncertain purpose she was wearing on her back and extended onto her arms and legs as a potent exoskeletal rig to enhance her strength. Such rigs were a was a popular means of empowering baseline initiates and reserve fighters in recent times, when not used for construction purposes.

The Heartless stared at her. She looked as meek as a anemic kitten that had overdosed on some sort of mood suppressent, and about as threatening. "Um, hi," She said to Roy and the others. "My name's Beth. I was, um, on TV once?" She turned to the Heartless and added, "Stop looking at me like that! I'm a mighty and fearsome member of the Crossguard! I'm totally a knight and everything! I think, our naming system is so screwed up, I think Abel keeps changing it to annoy people."

"I see," Stewie said, unimpressed. That pack on her back looked familiar, though; he thought he had seen something like that in demonstrations of minturized mini-mecha meant for battlefield deployment on home territory...

"I _am _a knight, I really am!" Beth said fiercely, or at least tried to do so. It just sounded kind of adorable. (Roy had a strange compulsion to pat her on the head and drag her away to attend parties.) The Heartless seemed to agree with the other's unkind assessment, and sprang. Roy moved to blast them away before the girl (whom he didn't recognize, as she had only become involved in the Crossguard recently) could come to harm.

It wound up being totally unneccesary; Beth pressed a button on the straps (which were really a control mechanism) and the pack on her back unfolded and reformed around her in a complicated motion too fast to be registered by the eye; there was a vauge impression of metal parts sliding over her body and joining together, interlocking and rotating outwards until it became a dome that the Heartless ran right into and bounced off of. From the sounds coming from inside, there was still mechanisms working in there. It was more drastic than that, as the dome rolled up into a ball and held still for a moment before transforming further, parts falling inward and other parts rotating, interlocking and generally transforming until the whole thing stood up on a pair of well-stabilized back-bent legs, rising nearly ten feet off the ground, and the sides swung out as some of the top swiveled to the sides, changing into a massive set of shoulders and matching arms (patterned after a ape, it appeared) while the front and back streamlined into a more humanoid shape. A helmet-shaped head, hosting a considerable number of sensory equipment, appeared at the top, and at the 'belly' of the new mini-mecha was Beth, sheltered in a fuselage and connected to the controlling equipment of the mecha and looking triumphant. It slid close and armor clicked into place over it as the hulking blue-and-yellow mini-mecha stood to it's full height of nearly twelve feet, towering over even Angilaka and most of the Heartless there.

"Um, here I go?" Beth said heisitantly, and charged, grabbing a nearby Soldier out of the air as it tried to pounce on Stewie and pulled it apart and dropped the fading pieces, and then raising a massive armored arm to block a cascade of darkness-spawned flame and firing a volley of small missles in retaliation to create a most satisfying blast.

She took a few heavy steps forward; in spite of her armor's bulk, it was a lot faster than it looked, and certainly strong: a single punch from her armor pulverized a barely recognizable Red Nocturne. "Sorry!" She said, not speaking to the Heartless themselves, but to whoever those Heartless had been before. "Sorry!" She crushed another, and another, before firing another volley of missles at the large collections of Heartless scaling the buildings to get an air advantage. One of the hulking stone Heartless smashed into her and tried to pry her armor apart, only to have the surprisingly flexible suit twist around and grab it and bend over backward, applying enormous amounts of force to it's more inflexible body. "Sorry," Beth said once more as the Heartless' body cracked and splintered. "Just pretend this is happening to somebody else..."

There was a ear-splitting noise; the Heartless collapsed, it's body falling apart. Beth dusted the pieces off her armor apologetically. "It's what I always used to do," Beth finished, not seeming to care that the Heartless likely couldn't understand a word she said.. She sighed and resumed the fight with a sad shrug.

As the fighting continued and the faction soldiers (and Stewie) doubled their efforts, Roy took the time to say to Angilaka, "That's your team? Two people plus you?"

Angilaka frowned. "We're short-staffed, okay?"

"Even less than you intended!" Greed remarked. "If I hadn't found you, it would have just been you and Gibbs."

"...Point," Roy admitted. "But why these ones? I know the guy with the pants used to be a combat drone until it got up and demanded recognition as a sentient being and...and...I don't know who the other one is."

Beth started to explain herself in the middle of giving a bunch of chimerically fused Soldiers's a vicious noogie. "Oh, that's just Beth," Angilaka said. "Top-notch research and develoupment girl; that armor she's got is a prototype we've got high hopes for. She used to be one of those kids from that sick reality TV show a few years back; also, she's my sidekick!"

"Yes," Beth confirmed. "Wait, _sidekick!_ I thought I was an understudy...oh well, it can't be as bad as almost dying every day for the viewing public's enjoyment."

"Yep!" Angilaka said. "Now you almost die every day for the greater good! And FOR GREAT JUSTICE." Roy pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering once more why he was doomed to be the only sane man in the world. (Conviently forgetting that he had nearly blasted a kid's head with a powered-up pool ball not too long ago, of course.) Gibbs, being a more proactive man, simply smacked both Angilaka in the back of the head.

"Owie!" Angilaka said. "How the...how'd you even reach me, I'm like twice your size! And what are you doing dope-smacking me? I outrank you!" Gibbs smacked her in the back of the head again, for petty things like ranks, authority and reach limits meant _NOTHING _to Field-Admiral Leeroy Jethro Gibbs. "Ow! Okay, shutting up."

"Can we please focus?" Roy said. "We still have a great deal of Heartless hanging around and an entire horde to exterminate!"

"And they keep nipping at my pants," Pants-Man Audrey remarked. They stared at him. "I'll have you know, I _love _my pants! I named myself after them, regularily consecrate secret missions in their honor when my superiors aren't watching, and I defy dress code to keep them at my side at all times, you know. Sadly, I could not marry them because of foolish laws. HOW DARE THEY DENY OUR LOVE? THOSE HEARTLESS WRETCHES!"

Stewie ignored him, scared almost to the brink of sanity by how _many _of the Heartless there were and something in them reaching past his mind and touching something best left burried, turned and prepared to open fire on what seemed to be likely targets; his arms transformed into all manner of destructive weaponry (and still seemed inferior to Beth's weapons, he seethed), only for the Heartless to abruptly stop in mid-fight.

That was it. They just stopped. There was a very brief moment of them pausing in mid-action (some leaping, some actively fighting, others running or flying and generally doing things, which led to some quietly humorous moments when a lot of them fell flat on their faces), soon turning to a more extended moment of them silently pulling away from the fight, softly lumping up together and staring blankly into the air.

They remained there. Just staring.

A full moment passed. Nothing happened. "That's...odd," Gibbs said, expended clips falling from him in this brief halt.

As one, every single Heartless - Soldiers and Air Soldiers and Shadows and Red Nocturnes and far more powerful Heartless of greater variety and horrid things with hardly any shape and no conceivable name came together - turned their heads (where applicable, anyway, but most of them had faces and in those cases their faces alone turned) into the distance. For a horrible moment, Stewie thought they were looking directly at _him_, until he realized that the glow of their eyes was set on a point over his shoulder. He turned as much as he could without turning his back on the Heartless and saw nothing more ominous then a building, as ordinary as any other. "What are they looking at?"

Roy's face went blank with horror. "Where is the news studio that broadcast came from?" He asked flatly.

"Huh?" Shego said, surprised at the question in the current situation. "It's on the Maineford Duloc plaza, by Donotgonearthesewer Avenue. Why do-" She stopped. "Oh _crap_. That's exactly where they're looking, isn't it?"

"Yep," Beth said gloomily, checking it on her database's maps. (Her's were continually updated, and not by insane thinking engines. She was lucky that way.)

"...They're going to go right there right now, aren't they?" Angilaka asked rhetorically.

The Heartless glanced at her, as if to reply to her in some alien way. They shifted, ready to move...

"Look at the bright side," Deadpool said cheerfully. "It's just a huge horde. It's not like we gotta fight something big! That would be _awesome! _But _nooo_, we gotta fight a plain old horde. Lame, dude."

The Heartless didn't move, though, in spite of their foe's confusion and weakness. Instead, something altogether stranger happened: perhaps it was whatever had bidden them to focus on the distant news studio, maybe it was the presence of the more seriously warped Heartless, and likely it was something altogether more mysterious, but each and every one of the Heartless present (and there was so _many _of them) pushed against each other and simply dissolved, their various corpereal forms collapsing in murky semi-solid liquid and flowing together without any pause, cohesing in thick lumps and unsavory chunks, their still half-solid bodies into each other and _growing_...

Wisely, most present made a tactical retreat. Beth grabbed Pants-Man Audrey flew to a nearby rooftop, jets firing on her armor's back and greaves. Deadpool got Shego and Greed and teleported to the same rooftop. Roy and Gibbs were too badass to have too much concern for something as minor as their physical well-being, and Angilaka was sensible enough to grab them both and take a single powerful leap to the same rooftop the rest had gone to. Only Stewie remained where he was, too terrified to move. And at the same time, utterly entraced by the horror before him, feeling a strange and dissonant fascination at the sight of it.

He felt called to it and heard a distant whispering just below the audible noises of the world, and something pulling at him, pulling something _loose_...and as the darkness grew around him, Stewie stared at his hands. He wondered, vaugely, why the terror of this thing seemed to have left him, as had all other feelings. He just looked at his hands, girded in metal and encased in protective metal that, nonetheless, didn't seem suitable as an expression of power. Just bits of the world, molded into technological power; good enough for these _others_, a contemptuous thought that didn't seem his own remarked, but not enough for what he needed. Nothing would be enough; nothing would be enough...

He remembered his world dying, remembered the screaming and the dying and his own survival, and was, in the gray absence of proper feeling inflicted on him now, disturbed to find that he felt _nothing _about it one way or the other.

And so, as the disembodied Heartless became a single composite entity and the shape of that new creature spilled throughout the streets just below of the rooftops where the others had safely retreated, Stewie didn't move, fight or resist in any way as it rolled right over him. In all the ways that mattered, he had already lost a fight he didn't even know he had been fighting in the first place. There was, for him, enough time to remember Jarod and what that strange man had painstakingly tried to teach him; lessons of Good, Justice, Mercy, Duty, that sort of thing, and as the thought of those things came to him, the Heartless pulled back slightly from him, a brief bubble of hope and survival...

Stewie tried to hold on to it. He truly did. And then, he thought that Jarod's teachings _still _didn't make sense to him or even matter, and in that thoughts place came a feeling of horrible certainty. "I still don't understand," He muttered, a touch of anger there, and the darkness closed back over him. There, the Heartless came for him. Armor and technological power was no help in his state, in his weakness; there were ways that he was akin to the Heartess, and in those ways they slipped past armor, past flesh, past the boundaries of the mind and soul...

There was, for Stewie, a moment of pain. And then, all that he was and could have been was gone.

On the rooftop, where the heroes (and anti-heroes, and whatever Shego and Deadpool were) were, Stewie's absence didn't go unnoticed. "Where'd the little guy go?" Shego said, looking round. "I didn't see him fly up here or anything."

They all looking down at the seething liquid darkness in the street; the sun beat down, frying it, and it reflexively compressed into a more suitable body capable of properly emulating the purely destructive principles it embodied while it's inherently chaotic nature pulled at the seams, pulling it apart: as it struggled, it lost sufficient cohesion to stay in phase with everything around it (a more common concern for those employing the Heartless as weapons, as their otherworldly natures made interaction with the material realms quite tricky) and slipped right through the ground, leaving a tortured and broken street behind that was testimony to the sheer unnaturalness of it's existence, having doing damage simply by _being._

"...Huh," Roy said, grimacing at the sight; the remnants of what little of the street that hadn't been shredded by the thing's mere presence had been distorted at best, and outright melted right through, like a supernaturally potent acid had rained down. "Looks like it's retreated or something. Now, where'd Griffin go-" He stopped, his heart stopping for a moment. On that blackened and twisted street, still standing where it had been taken by the Heartless, was a small familiar suit of powered armor. _Stewie's _powered armor, and now it was totally unmoving and lifeless.

Just over where Stewie's heart should have been, there was a large and blood-streaked hole, metal still fizzing where it had been violated by the touch of primordial darkness.

Once again, and under _his watch_ - Roy Mustang seethed with fury over this failing, this injustice, regardless of who it'd been done to - someone else had died and been consumed by the Heartless.

Even after all the death he had seen, it had never gotten any easier, or less regrettable. Roy's mind went blank for a moment in a blaze of horror soon subsumed into numbing fury - _make the monsters burn,_ he thought as his eyes narrowed to a painfully tight glare, a vein throbbing on his forehead, _make them BURN FOR THIS _- but he couldn't help a slightly clinical observation: even from this distance, he should have seen if there had been a body in there, some bits of gore or a more copious spray of blood...

Well, of course there wasn't a body. Most people the Heartless killed and corrupted didn't leave bodies behind. (It made figuring out which deaths the Heartless caused to be extraordinarily difficult; without direct eye witness reports, it was almost impossible. And the bodies that _were _left behind tended to behave...strangely.)

Gibbs saw the abandoned armor and the bloody evidence of Stewie's demise. "Oh _hell_," He whispered, the still-protruding guns on his body falling apart at once, disassembling into their component parts and fading into steam and dust at his feet. Conviction fueled his abilities, and there wasn't much that wounded his resolve like seeing a senseless and stupid death like this.

"That poor guy...kid...creepy short person..." Angilaka said miserably, trying to give the moment some dignity and failing pretty hard. "What _happened _to him back there?"

"Happened to who now?" Deadpool said, having been hopefully scavaging Gibbs' leavings with intent of getting some cool guns out of it. He looked over. "Oh, yeah. That guy's dead." He paused. "...Who was that again?"

"Eh, better than him than me," Shego said indifferently...or at least tried to _sound _indifferent.

Beth gave her a furious look. "Try to show some _respect;_ somebody just...up and _died!_"

"Well," Greed said quietly. "Kind of guy he was...can't blame Shego here."

Beth gave him a mixed angry-confused look. (Not that he could tell, since she was wearing armor.) Pants-Man Audrey, posessed of a more efficient perspective then her, checked the databases and reported, "Ah, Stewie Griffin has...er, _had, _I apologize, a prime listing in the wanted criminal sections of the Bingo Book. A criminal mastermind, would-be conquerer of worlds and super-scientist of some repute in the worlds at large, believed to be instrumental in a disturbingly large number of wide-scale incidents...there's a fairly comprehensive and, unfortunately, fairly reprehensible collection of his known crimes. As well as ones suspected and attributed to him." He paused. "And yet, the last cases of his actions would indicate that he had at least been _trying, _or been influenced, to improve his behavior." He stared unhappily at the abandoned suit. "...It would appear that his desire to do was insufficient. The Heartless lured him in, as they do with those who share something with them."

"...I see," Roy said, making no assumptions or unwise guesses on what had really transpired here. He grimaced bitter nonetheless, and shook his head. There was work to be done. "We need to eliminate those Heartless and stop Kimblee before _more _people die. I think-"

Whatever he was about to say went left unfinished, since he stopped in mid-word at the sight of the shadows swelling unnaturally and the poor abused street cracking like something _huge _was trying to break through. A massive shape the size of a ship's sail sliced through the ground and their building, barely missing them by a few feet and looking like a crude synthesis of a fin and wing with _eyes _all over it, folding up back underground. Spines and spikes and gnarled tentacles burst up at random spots, clawlike protrusions and small bundles of Heartless-bodies breaking out here and there, an enormous train-sized shape swelling up from underground as if so large it was expanding right out from the tunnels, randomized blasts of corrosive force spilling out from underground and devouring the very air it sliced through, leaving a black and inky residue behind.

"Oh, _hell_," Gibbs murmured, his arms already morphing back into a fearsome array of big guns at the precise moment that Roy screamed something about _shooting that thing down_, but it was still irrelevant. There was not _time _to react to what happened before it had finished.

It is difficult to say whether or not Heartless had a mind; this much, the studies are certain. There is a degree of decision-making involved, but it remained unclear if they were only instinctual creatures compelled by the worst emotional majorities that they sensed where they appeared, utterly corrupted horrors driven solely by destructive compulsions and nothing else, or perhaps even _mimicking _the sentience they'd once possessed...but twisted as they had been, it was only a tool to them and a difficult one to use at that. However it happened, here, a decision was reached at once before Roy Mustang's crew could attack: there was a moment's briefness, just long enough to suggest that a decision had been made, and the shadow under Stewie's abandoned armor grew again as the cracking street roughly fell back to normally levels (except for several chunks that fell in due to the seismac uprising), the various repulsive extensionssliding back underground, and a staggeringly huge Heartless _thing _tore out from under it, barely visible for a moment as it swooped down and funneled itself directly into that small suit of power armor, the mechanical assemblege blowing back as the Heartless stuffed themselves into it without any respect for the laws of mass; there just seemed too _much _of it to work, like a river of horrors flowing into a cup far too small to contain it all.

And then, it was done and the armor stood up on it's own, gauntlets clasped protectively over the hole in it's chest; the lights of whatever power source Stewie had used flickered pitifully and glass cracked, bursts of electricity blasting out just long enough to be engulfed and absorbed by the liquid-like forms streaming out of those broken power-ports, those same forms hardening into a thin protective patina over the armor, shaping into subtly distorted patterns that looked unsettling..._off_. While Roy and most of those with him were usually quick enough to simply attack before things got worse, this happened so fast that they didn't get the opportunity. As soon as they realized it was happening, it had stopped, and they were still processing it all as the last wisps of Heartless faded away and the armor trotted away unsteadily, gazing up at them with a disturbingly blank awareness: it _knew _they were up there, but it's concern for them ended there, and was quickly directed into the distance, aimed past the buildings and over the horizon.

Where, Roy knew, the news studio and the people who had sent that _idiotic _message were waiting to be attacked.

The powered armor suit, moving awkwardly and almost tripping with every other step, retreated several paces and fired a laser blast directly under itself and opened a hole in the ground straight into the underground tunnels that it fell through, vanishing from the sun's weakness-laying light and safe in the darkness, animated by the monstrous essence of hundreds of Heartless.

The ground rumbled a bit in it's passing, and all was still for a time. Cracks in the street got a bit bigger. Some of the dust settled. A mailbox fell over into a pothole (thus causing a chain-letter to be irreversibly lost for all eternity, which no one cared about). Some birds chirped. Shego, mistress of dry statements, said, "...Huh."

Greed was the next to recover. Sort of. "Uh," He said. "Well. Um. What the hell was that?"

"A whole bunch of Heartless melted themselves down or something, commandered a pretty powerful suit of powered armor and ran off on us after killing a random supervillain, and are now probably going straight to that news studio," Deadpool said. "To kill people and things. Along with Kimblee too, I guess."

Greed sighed. "Yes. _That_. Thank you. That's exactly what we needed to hear. A baldfaced iteration of the stupidly obvious."

"That's what you pay me for!" Deadpool said happily. He paused. "No, wait, scratch that, you pay me for killing people and shooting you in the head when it would impress tourists to do your 'Hey, I'm Practically Invincible' shtick. Also, hunting down that Larfleeze guy that you say is totally infringing on your trademark. But mostly the first things that I have now forgotten what they were because I have the attention span of a goldfish." He stared at his hands for a moment and added, "Man, it would be so _awesome _to make a trained commando army of ranger hamsters and put them in powered armor suits."

Roy stood completely still for a moment, in such a way that no one could see his face clearly. He didn't move a single muscle, or demonstrate a single display of frustration, anger, fear or any other emotion that would seem appropiate in the circumstances.

Gibbs gave his superior a sidelong look, knowing full-well what was coming, and carefully edged away. Angilaka, Beth and the robot with the awesome pants were unaware of the worrying signs in Roy, as they were already getting ready to pursue the Heartless to the news studio, and perhaps intercept Kimblee. Pants-Man Audrey did glance at Roy, his instruments detecting some unusual data and looked at his leader; Angilaka shook her head sharply. Beth still looked back and said, "Mr. Mustang? What will you do?"

Roy said nothing, not moving one bit. Except for his hand making a fist so tight that someone with sufficient perceptive powers (such as all the Crossguard present due to Angilaka's divinely-granted enlightenment superpowers common to the mightiest of the Crossguard, Audrey's perceptive instruments and Beth's field sensors) could hear his bones grinding against each other.

"Commander-Admiral Mustang?" Beth said, a touch more sternly. "What are you going to-"

"Flame Alchemist," Roy said quietly, the low and crackling tones cutting through Beth's modulated voice. His free hand grasped the silver pocket watch, squeezing it so tightly that several of his knuckles popped. "Not just Commander-Admiral Mustang. Not here. I'm _the Flame Alchemist._"

He looked at her, his sole remaning organic eye wide and mad and his cybernetic one twitching around furiously in it's socket, and Beth flinched: there was genuine _madness _in those eyes. Not clinical insanity, certainly, not capriciousness, but a madness to be found in other things. Like convictions, for instance, stoked low like a fire for years, kept cared for in inner furnaces for such a long time to weather eras of torment and loss and constant duty worn so hard that it hurt, always kept burning but rarely allowed to blaze properly. But now the furnace had been thrown open, all restraint cast to the wind in this crisis, and the soul of the Flame Alchemist was revealed for the tempered inferno it was. And it was not Roy Mustang who spoke then, not the Commander-Admiral who had fough tooth and nail to preserve their town, but the human weapon: the Flame Alchemist. "I'm going to do my duty," he said simply, and clapped his hands, transmuting a staircase from rooftop to the street, walking down without so much as a backwards glance. Gibbs silently followed, a metallic sheen flashing on his skin. Angilaka, Audrey and Beth didn't follow but went their own way, just jumping straight down to the street without injury. Greed, Deadpool and Shego exchanged glances and followed without any of the usual wisecracks: it was impossible in the wake of the Flame Alchemist and the sheer will burning in him like a flame, drawing even these irrepresibly self-interested rogues into following him for even a short while.

One after another, they descended into the hole left by the Heartless-posessed armor, leaving the destruction behind them.

And in those tunnels, that posessed armor was moving fast. It was guided unerringly, called by the will of one who in many ways was opposite the Flame Alchemist. Where one amplified disparate elements into impossibly bright light and burning flame, the other introduced instability and brought destruction. The armor was still covered in the blood of it's former bearer, and little drops of blood dropped as it moved, making a nice little trail to follow.

The Heartless inhabiting the armor did not care. There was only the hunt, and the unmaking. Even feeding was insubordinate to that all-consuming urge to kill and break everything of these material realms: not all those the Heartless killed were consumed and into one of them, or even most. Of course, the original bearer of the armor was quite present, in a manner of speaking. He was _not _one of those who simply died with mercy.

And indeed, the Heartless in the armor were..._changing_, compelled by forces and events they were not in the habit of noticing or being concerned with. They were changing, combining, fusing, transforming into something far worse than their usual sort, feasting on the residual power of the Philosopher's Stone while they were still flush with the essence of their awful realm of origin. Yes, changing, into something rather bad.

The late Stewie Griffin's armor looked a lot like an egg, and given the grotesque processes going on inside that armor, that resemblence was horrifyingly appropiate.

...

On top of the dome covering the news studio, Aang and Toph's attempts to make some holes in the dome wasn't going well, but they _were _doing an admirable job of cutting down the Heartless population.

"It always comes down to fighting, doesn't it?" Aang complained, backflipping over a charging Soldier and laying a hand on it's back as he landed, gentle as the wind, and a blast of wind roared like echoing thunder and knocked the Soldier so high into the sky that it passed over the buildings. (Landing into the middle of another fight a few streets over and getting clobbered, of course.) The windburst kept going, bowling over the Heartless amassed on top of the wall, sweeping over the entire downward curve and only the Heartless that had the sense to melt into the shadows in the crevices survived. Aang landed neatly on his feet, his face set in a detached expression; though this violence was regrettable, it was unavoidable and he was unafraid to do what he needed to. (The Heartless' unnatural and sickening resonance was probably a factor in the absence of his usual reluctance to fight aggressively.)

"You're a total wuss," Toph said, wrenching a stone-shaped Heartless to the ground and giving it a vicious noogie that shredded large stony flakes on the ground that she periodically flicked at immense speeds into the heads of the other Heartless with all the effect of explosive bullets. (It only slowed them down a bit, but it probably hurt a lot.) Quickly growing bored with tormenting it, Toph worked her strong legs around it's neck and squeezed with all the considerable force that an Earthbender like her could muster and broke off it's head almost immediately. She struck the head with a sharp hit before it could even start falling and straightened it into a spike that impaled a charging pack of Shadows.

The stone-body began to fall. Toph fell underneath it and hit the dome-top with a mighty stomp that sent small but dense clusters of spikes shooting into the stone body of the now deceased Heartless, the spikes seamlessly merging with the assimilated material of that body and stopping it just over her head. She then struck her hands _into _the stone remnants up to her elbows and when she pulled her arms back, they were covered in big chunks of rock that she quickly compressed into a thinner but more managable layer of flexible guantlets over her arms. The stone under her spun her around so that she faced the other Heartless and flipped a big chunk of rock from under her, launching her at the Heartless with a joyous shout.

Aang grimaced as he turned to a Soldier with swords grafted to it's arms and stepped aside, lightly touching it's arm as it swung and redirecting the blow into the path of a strangely large Shadow, the two of them falling over and bowling over the other Heartless in their path. "Mm," He said, still not happy with the extremes they had to go to while defeating these things. It wasn't still killing - he knew it as though the Avatar Spirit whispered it to him, and perhaps it did - but he still disliked it. "I wish we knew what these things actually _are_. Then maybe we could, I don't know, put them to rest or purify them. Something like that!"

"They're soulless things made from pure evil and also dead people," Toph said. She stomped hard on the ground and a large section of the stone under her flipped up under the Heartless, tossed them into the air, and when they crashed back to the ground, the stone smashed back down over them with a gruesome crunch. "Pretty much covers everything."

"That still doesn't say much," Aang said patiently. A bunch of Shadows rose from a patch of darkness made from all the uprooted rocks and such around them, sneaking behind Aang. They prepared to pounce...and without turning around, Aang thrust his palm backwards, shooting a massive jet of a fire that scorched the uprooted bedrock black and blasted the Heartless back. He didn't see the point in killing them as brutally as Toph did, as one benefactor or another had explained to him that the Heartless were effectively immortal. Or more accurately, they had a kind of alien existence where the concept of death didn't apply anymore. "Actually, I've heard that when you, uh, 'kill' these these things, you're really destroying the corporal manifestations they build around themselves when they materialize on our plane of existence."

"...Wow," Toph said. "There was not a single word that that made any sense."

Aang tried again. "They're a little bit like video game avatars that you fight in on-line roleplaying games. Those die all the time, but the player doesn't die too, right?"

"RPGs are for nerds!" Toph said loudly, making a few Heartless flinch; in their past lives, they had been video game designers, and some lingering remnant of professional pride made that comment hurt. "And dorks that spend too much time on the Internet anyway. I don't play video games anyway."

"The Heartless aren't alive to begin with," Aang said, hoping this would work. He grimaced all the same; it sounded a lot like a cheap justification and rang more than a little hollow to him. Just because he was avoiding outright destroying them didn't make him feel any better, espicially since the Heartless he spared could go off and kill someone. He refused to permit them that. "I don't know _what _they are, but...whatever or whoever they used to be, they're not alive anymore."

"Okay, I can work with that," Toph said. Turning the questions to other matters, she said, "Okay, ready to bring this thing down?"

Aang nodded, and the two of them adopted the spread and rooted form of an Earthbending stance: the ground cracked under their feet, large cracks appearing as it all started to rumble. The part of the wall they were standing on started to rise and the entire dome _twisted _slightly-

A massive tendril of pure malevolent darkness rushed out through the cracks and punched into Aang and Toph, not knocking or pushing them down but interrupting them enough to stop them Earthbending the massive dome. It recoiled in the sunlight, seperating from whatever it was rooted to in the shades under the dome and bubbled disgustingly before managing to reshape itself into a man-shaped form covered in glassy plates that would protect it for long enough.

Aang had already recovered and broke off a piece of rock with a stomp, and with a kick launched it at the suddenly charging Heartless, stunning it in it's tracks. Grateful for even this small piece of luck, Aang punched a blast of superheated air at the offending Heartless; the monster took it head-on (not that it had much choice) and exploded messily. Aang winced, even knowing that he wasn't doing anything worse than delaying a quasi-immortal abomination for a while. His pity was forestalled by the sight of the Heartless' pieces not evaporating but dragging themselves back together and Heartless took it head on and exploded, the pieces of it's body flowing back together in big nasty clumps. "Weird. That usually works."

More cracks appeared as shadow-form Heartless oozed through, a dozen of Heartless taking form in short order, not a single one of them recognizable as any Heartless variety; these things just looked like rough amalgations of several vauge archetypes of 'big and scary'. Claws, tentacles and gaping jaws with oversized teeth abounded, while the actual body-types were everything from animalistic (both four-legged and simian) horrors to towering brutes shaped roughly like a man but with considerably more creative license. "Crap," Toph said deadpan as the monsters ran at them powerfully enough for her to register their new shapes, moving in a innate silence so total that even the scrapings of their claws were muffled. (How that worked, Aang couldn't say.) Both Aang and Toph moved into Earthbending stances and a huge Heartless twice the size of a man and tentacle-arms opened it's jaws silently, a ball of energy gathering there...

A small object struck it's shoulder, pushing deep into it's jelly-like flesh. The Heartless paused and looked at itself, it's shoulder peeling back to reveal a small dagger that a ninja might use: a kunai. Several rolls of thin paper had been tied to the hilt, and they were smouldering slight, the kanji on them glowing like burning coals.

It blew apart in a controlled explosion, tearing off the Heartless' arm, the shrapnel masterfully aimed to hit the soft parts of all the nearby Heartless, not a single piece hitting Aang, Toph or anything that wasn't a Heartless. The unlucky Heartless that now lacked an tentacle stumbled back, but not in time to avoid several large clump of sand that rained down from the sky like hail (and unusually hard for sand) and smashed into it, swiftly flowing out over that Heartless, reshaping into dozens of grasping hands and wrapping it before resolidifying, forcing the Heartless over backwards. If it had a spine, it might have broken even before the sand somehow hardened and squeezed with such enormous pressure that the Heartless was effectively liquified, spraying everywhere in a blast of mildly corrosive goo and finally staying dead. (Until that particular Heartless remanifasted or something.)

Aang blinked, gratified and mildly repulsed by the inhuman violence. "Wasn't expecting that," Toph remarked. A Shadow appeared next to her, looking just as perplexed. Toph flicked a pebble at it with her toe and popped it like a balloon filled with grease or liquid evil. (More likely the latter.) The sand dispersed and the Heartless shifted, readying themselves for what this new threat...and nothing happened. They glanced around at each other and then at Aang and Toph in a manner that was almost inquiring. Aang shrugged. Toph killed more of them with precision-aimed pebbles.

And then Aang noticed the shadows; the many, many shadows swiftly growing into view. Not the living shadows the Heartless kept turning into, but actual shadows not powered by evil. Aang glanced up, noticing many orange shapes desecending from above, and just as immediately felt a brief chill and ferociously territorial at the approach of something _evil_, a natural disaster given a name and a face and such impossible _malevolence_-

And it abruptly faded, as though it was being dampened by something truly _good_. At the exact same time, roughly two dozen completely identical blond guys dressed in orange came shooting down from the sky and crashed into the Heartless yelling, "SECRET DESCENDING LEAF SNEAK ATTACK OF DOOM! AND ALSO PAIN! LOTS AND LOTS OF PAIN!" The Heartless didn't have even a moment to react when the orange-clothed guys struck like foxes out of tall grass; three drew more kunai and stabbed a blade-armed Soldier through the neck and shoulders as they fell and pulling it to the ground, their impact forcing it through their blades and cutting it apart. Six of them struck a hulking beast-like one, hitting them in the back with kicks of astonishing force that broke it in half. Another six pulled out a bunch of small bombs from their jackets and threw them into the outlying Heartless, blowing plenty to pieces and scattering the others, where they were quickly dispatched by the falling newcomers. A mighty insectile Heartless stomped up as the rest fell, clearly intending to kill them right away. Unexpectedly, the ones that had already hit the ground jumped up, lining up their sandals, and kicking a team of three to meet those still falling and kick _them _right at the Heartless. Those put their hands close together as they fell, energy gathering between their hands, soon twisting into a burning white sphere (that looked oddly like a weaponized version of Aang's own Air Scooter technique) that spun around and around, the wind bending violently around them. Roaring like animals, they smashed the sphere into the Heartless and it expanded to enormous size with such force that it cracked a nasty dent into the wall and sent large cracks for over six yards around them; the wind blasted away as the sphere kept going, grinding the Heartless with it and soon reducing it to dust, and it kept going, carving a long hole into the ground and smashing right through a good number of other Heartless that hadn't gotten out of the way and kept going on and on until it lost cohesion and dissipated, leaving a trail of destruction in it's wake.

"Woo hoo!" one of the new guys cheered.

"We kick ass!" another cried.

"If I was any more awesome, I would _explode into hellfire made of awesomeness and destroy the universe_," another one said. He paused, looking disturbed. "Wait, that's a bad thing...isn't it?" Another one of the blond guys near him rolled his eyes and smacked him in the back of the head and he exploded in a plume of smoke, leaving nothing behind. Since none of the others seemed upset or at all surprised by this, Aang decided that either that was _supposed _to happen or these were savagely malicious murderous monsters who cared nothing for the deaths of their own. And since someone like that seemed really out of place in this town, Aang concluded that this was the former.

"Uh," Toph said. "Ah." She flung her arms up. "What the hell just happened?"

The blond guys all looked at her in surprise. One of them made a complicated motion with his hands, and all but him disappeared in blasts of smoke. "Don't you know?" he boasted. "A hero always shows up in the nick of time!"

Aang nodded in agreement. "Yep, that's the way to do it!"

"Sounds boring," Toph complained. "It's more awesome to smash in whenever you feel like it and make a mess until there ain't a problem anymore!"

"I agree," a raspy voice said from seemingly everywhere, drifting on the wind. Aang again got that brief feeling of some monstrously _evil _power in his presence (though this one felt different, tasting of blood on the wind and grinding sands), and again, it wasn't for long and felt strangely subdued by someone that _was _at least on the way to becoming good. Or, perhaps, controlled and contained. The rock under them quavered, breaking apart into massive bursts of sand shaped into very thin spikes that impaled the Heartless and kept going, the wind whistling fiercely along their razor-thin lengths. (Aang thought it would look cool.)

The spikes became sand again and gathered together in a miniature tornado of sand that struck ground behind them, dispersing to reveal a red-haired boy wearing a reddish-brown coat. "Show-off," the blonde boy commented.

The redhead frowned at him. "...This, from the one who did _that_?" he said, gesturing at the destruction the blonde had caused.

"Yeah, but at least I just went and did my stuff without a lot of lame special effects," the blonde retorted. The redhead rolled his eyes, which Aang noticed were ringed with completely dark markings like a racoon-dog's, or perhaps a panda.

Toph shifted to a more casual stance, perhaps because the Heartless were retreating back into the cracks, probably to regroup. "Okay, and who are you guys?"

"I'm Naruto, and my buddy's name is Gaara," the blonde boy said. Gaara blinked vaugely at them, looking uncertain and like he would have liked to fight a whole horde of Heartless on his own instead of talk to them. Naruto noticed and gave him a nudge in the side, pointedly standing at his side. "Say hi to the new guys.

"...Hello," Gaara said, nodding his head slightly and looking tremendous uncomfortable, though he looked like he appreciated Naruto's company a great deal.

"Hi," Toph said. Aang waved. Gaara looked very slightly relieved...and glanced at a spot just to the left of Toph's head, a trace of alarm on his strangely neutral expression, and his hand flashed down, pulling a slim and well-honed knife from his coat and blurred in movement. A Shadow Heartless fell over Toph's shoulder, the knife impaling it completely through, and Toph gave it a dismissive kick over to Gaara, who removed his knife from the Heartless and killing it in the process. "Nice shot," Toph remarked. Gaara looked faintly pleased, and Aang found himself wondering how Toph had known about the Heartless.

"Hey, what are you carrying a knife for, anyway?" Naruto asked Gaara suddenly. "You got creepy sand powers. You don't _need _knives!"

"But I like knives."

"Hang on to that thought," Aang said, seeing that liquid darkness was bubbling up from the cracks again, this time in thes hape of huge oily bubbles sliding up like grotesque wombs and the half-visible Heartless inside them their awful progeny. "They're coming back!"

"Okay, no problem!" Naruto assured them, pulling out a small scroll from his pocket and unrolling it; he bit his thumb hard enough to bleed and wiped it across a line on the scroll and slapped his hand on it. There was a puff of smoke, and a massive star-shaped shuriken appeared in his hand, it's blades as long as a man's leg and extending from a metal ring as wide around as his toros.

"We're meeting all kinds of crazy guys today..." Toph muttered. She tilted her head at Gaara, who looked back at her with a cool professional estimation. They regarded each other, a pair of total badasses, and turned their attention to the Heartless.

The bubbles started to steam in the sunlight and the Heartless within wriggled to be out. "We fight," Gaara rasped. "No mercy." The cork in his gourd dissolved into sand, and a flood of it came rushing out, a stream of it shooting at one of the bubbles, hardening in mid-air into a jagged spear that pierced one of the bubbles with a disgusting noise like...well, realistically speaking, there was nothing that noise could be like except a bubble of concentrated evil being torn apart and the spear that did it impaling the Heartless inside and blasting right there and spearing it to the ground while noxious goo went everywhere. And then there was the noise of it burning in the sunlight, but that was more favorable to generalized similies.

The sand flowed out, Gaara's gourd emptying itself; a thick line of sand encircled right around him, a lot of it dispersing into the air, while the rest fanned out towards a patch of hatching bubble-things, unstoppable as a tidal wave. The sand rose up, shaping itself itself into dozens of grasping hands that slid around the bubbles and _squeezed_-

But it was too late. Moments before Gaara made his move, a little under half of the bubbles broke, and over a dozen unique-looking Heartless tore their way out, bodies covered in a chitinous material that smoked under the sunlight but did not burn away, breaking right through the sand; the strength of the sand was only as much as Gaara's will gave it, and their emergence was enough of a surprise to loosen his hold; the sand broke easily, scattering all over, and one of the larger bubbles burst open, revealing a massive humanoid Heartless nearly twice the size of a large man and aspects of it resembling a monstrous rhino, aside from the clawed tentacles drooping down it's back. Half a dozen goblinoid Heartless around Zim's size clung to it and looking like a demonic mixture of birds and goblins, the precise ratio of features dependant on the specific Heartless; one's entire body bristled with feathers that clicked like knives and had a serrated beak twisting out of the top of it's head, while another was a leather-skinned fiend with a set of fleshy wings and only a few mangy feathers to go with it.

Gaara's sand rolled back to them in heavy waves, forming a crude half-circle in front of them. "Hrm," he said. "The situation would appear to be more complex than we thought."

"They can do stuff like that?" Aang said incredulously.

Naruto spread his arms out in consternation. "I've never seen them pull that kind of thing!"

"Yeah, me neither," Toph quipped. No one noticed; Aang was too busy freaking out, Naruto wasn't paying attention and Gaara didn't know she was blind. She grumbled to herself in annoyance.

One of the goblin-birds (Aang nicknamed them 'Flayfeathers', because it helped to give them a name instead of just letting them remain nameless otherworldly _things_) took flight, and several of it's knife-like feather detached from it and fired themselves right at Toph, making little shockwaves in the air as they flew on streamers of darkness, so sharp they cut the very air, twirling around each other like they were outlining an invisible spear and aimed right at her, seemingly too fast for any one to react...

And no one had to: the moment the feathers got too near Gaara's the outline of sand that served as his personal space bubble, the partcles of sand dispersed into the air so widely that they couldn't be easily seen flew together into a thick shield and stopped the feathers dead in their tracks. To the untrained observer, it would have looked like a large chunk of impossibly strong sand had appeared from nowhere and _encased _the feathers in less time than it took to blink, the displaced momentum making more shockwaves enough to make Aang and Naruto, as light-footed as the wind, dance out of the way. Gaara and Toph were too rooted to even notice. A dart of sand formed from what looked like thin air (it was just more of the dispersed sand, actually) and fired at the Flayfeather. The feathers were simply crunched with such force that the metal-hard fragments richocheted back at the Heartless and the dart only narrowly avoided the Flayfeather's head thanks to some quick reactions on the Heartless' part and it retreated back to it's brethern, all of them staring at the mortal fighters with something like wariness.

"Nothing gets past my Sand Shield," Gaara said calmly as the darkness flowed up around it, little tendrils probing warily. A tendril made of sharp-edged sand lashed at it, cutting bits of the shadows _off_ (even Aang thought that was weird) and vile ichor splattered over the ground.

"...I've seen, like, half a hundred things slip past your shield too fast to get stopped by it, and plenty of stuff that can outright _break _it," Naruto observed.

"Quiet, you," Gaara said, without changing expression at all.

The Heartless charged, the big rhino-like one leading the charge, it's child-sized fists swinging back for a devastating strike. "Here they come!" Aang warned them, fanning his arms out and sending a sheet of wind that only slowed the big one down but blew the rest off their feet, though the Flayfeathers clung to their host with such tenacity that they moored themselves. And the rhino-like one kept coming, it's footfalls shaking the ground and getting closer and closer.

Toph grinned. "_Per_-fect." She stomped on the ground, so hard it cracked (and without her Earthbending it); the ground rippled out in a straight line at the rhino-thing, passing under it without appreciable effect. Only a few steps away from the sand shield, it's next footfall crashed right through the ground, shards of rock flying around as it's feet sank nearly to it's knees. It placed it's hands firmly on the ground, intending to lever itself out. Toph wasn't having any of that and melded the rock back together, sealing around the Heartless' legs and trapping it. The Flayfeathers flew off in alarm, flocking overhead while the other Heartless, smaller and less powerful than the rhino-like one, warily circled them, waiting for an opening or a moment of weakness.

There wasn't one to be had. The rhino-like one, so big that the sand shield and the humans behind it were well within it's reach, drew an arm back, semi-organic pistons pumping from the elbow and slamming it's arm forward so hard the air blew back around it. When it struck, the shockwaves once again almost unfloored Aang and Naruto had the former not anchored them both down with Earthbending.

When the dust settled, the Heartless' arms quivered, muscles wriggling like snakes. It's huge first was clenched and bleeding, a floating section of sand partially bent around it, dented and crumbling, but holding fast. Black ichor dripped from the broken skin and into the sand as little tendrils extended from the sand and onto the Heartless' arm.

The Heartless tried to pull back, perhaps sensing that this was an enemy that was unwise to charge. Toph heard the sounds their claws scraped on the stone and the soft sussuration of the darkness trailing in their wake and the awful _deadened _quality of those sounds, and the impact of their hurried steps on the stone rang through that stone and through her feet into her was like a well-detailed map. She rolled back on her heel and struck down, the stone shuddered and six spikes larger than she was burst around the rhino-like Heartless and impaled it in a single move, stabbing through it's shoulders and neck and body, immobilizing it long enough for Gaara to direct his sand at it in a tidal wave of grasping hands and open jaws; it closed around the Heartless in a mighty crash, wrapping around it in a cocoon posessed of a tensile strength greater than most metals. Gaara opened his hand and made a fist, the sand tightening and the Heartless' arm breaking off.

He squeezed his fist, and the sand compressed into a sphere no bigger than a man's head, though this was hardly discernable under the quantities of black goo that spurted out through the crevices in the sandy cocoon. "Nice moves," Toph commented, her experience in Sandbending sufficient to allow her to sense through the sand almost as well as with stable earth. "You hold your ground and use a perfect defense to stop anything that comes your way. You bide your time, wait for the enemy to set themselves up..." she trailed off expectantly.

"And then I _crush _them," Gaara finished.

Toph nodded sagely. "...You'd fit in right where I come in. Best Sandbender I've ever seen that didn't have goofy tattoos or learn from Badger-Moles."

Aang huffed. "My tattoos are not goofy! They're _awesome!_"

"What tattooos?" Naruto asked; Aang's current outfit didn't make his tattoos immediately obvious. Realizing this, Aang lifted his pilot's helmet, revealing the intricate markings that made up his arrow-shaped tattoo on his forehead. "Ooh, nice!"

"Thanks," Aang said, pleased to have met something of a kindred spirit here. "Are those markings on your face tattoos too?"

Naruto absently rubbed the whisker-shaped markings on his cheeks. "Nah. They're more of, uh, curse markings."

"Oh, sorry."

"No big deal. I didn't even know what they meant until I was twelve!"

"Lucky bastard," Gaara muttered under his breath. Toph gave him a look, but he didn't elaborate.

Aang eyed the other Heartless, who now attacked him all at once. He paid them hardly any attention, dodging every attack in such a way that they struck other Heartless. "...I have a plan to help our friends under here."

"What is that?" Gaara asked.

"We're gonna break this wall thing," Aang said, tapping a foot on the ground and ducking over an arm-blade that decapitated the Heartless behind him. "And let the sun rain down on them! It should weaken the Heartless enough to make it easy to take them out, right?"

"True. But why haven't you done this already?"

"It's not as easy as it looks!" Aang said, absently snuffing out a Red Nocturne's fireblast with his bare hands, and accidentally trying too hard and doing the same to the Nocturne. "We have to be really careful moving it, or we could bring the whole thing down on everyone!"

"...Ah," Gaara said slowly. "And...that's bad, right?"

Aang stared at him. Gaara sounded like he honestly didn't know. "Um, yeah."

"Remember, excessive collateral damage is _bad_," Naruto reminded Gaara.

Gaara gave him a fishy look. "This from the man that stole a truckful of dynamite and blew up a building with it on a dare?"

Naruto waved a hand angrily. "Father Nightroad knew darn well what he was getting into when he made that dare!"

"Guys," Toph said. "I like blowing stuff up as much as the next total badass..." She paused. "Okay, I like blowing stuff up as me and that guy with the awesome Sandbending-"

"Hey!" Aang and Naruto complained.

"Airheads," Gaara scoffed.

Toph continued. "But still. Heartless. Big scary monsters. All over the place and keeping us from bringing on the sun. Might wanna think about taking them out, y'know?"

"Okay!" Naruto said agreeingly.

The four of them turned around. The Heartless froze. Toph and Naruto grinned. Gaara frowned menacingly. Aang looked apologetic, which was somehow far worse than all the others put together.

The Heartless would have cowered if they knew how.

...

The underground tunnels that Morte and the people that thought they were protecting him, along with Kim, Ron and Rufus, were fleeing through was a pretty nice looking place, and in ordinary circumstances it would have made a nice place to stroll through. However, it had the downside of having _excellent _acoustics. Every footstep was magnified until it sounded like a ghostly army dogged their footsteps. Every breath echoing into a rasping dry howl. Add this to the general state of nervousness, and the general effect was to drive Morte's already dour mood into a state of constant panic.

And just to make the constant grinding on their nerves even worse, Ron Stoppable was there and feeling bored. "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with 'C'!" he said cheerfully.

"'Corridor'," Morte said, clicking his teeth.

"Ooh, nice one! That's, what, fifteen times in a row for you guys?" Ron didn't wait for a response and went right ahead with the next one. "Okay. I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with...'U'!"

"'Underground corridor'," Kim said, sounding rather tired.

"What she say!" Rufus added snappishly, jerking a thumb-claw at her from Ron's shoulder.

"Aw, and that's _nineteen _for you two! Each!" Many of the employees winced. "I need to try harder. I spy something that begins with 'T'!"

"'Tunnel!" the tentacle-alien lady that had been unfortunate enough to get Kimblee's call said, far more grumpily than usual.

"Okay, sixteen." Ron glanced around. "Okay, I spy with my little eye, something that beings with-"

"Underground corridor, underground tunnel or some other variation of such," a footage editor interrupted.

"Unsanitary Hutt massauge therapists!" Ron exclaimed, and many of them shuddered in horror at _that _mental image. (Except for a Hutt that happened to be a live-in chef that owed Courtney a few favors; he thought he needed such a therapist right now.) "That's _amazing!_ Okay, I spy-"

"Underground accessway," Kim said.

"You're just know me so good you can figure it out by the equidistance of my eyelashes," Ron said quickly. "Okay, I spy-"

"Tunnel!" Rufus barked.

"And you probably just have some empathic link with me or something. I spy-"

_"Subterranean corridor!_" An exasperated camerawoman said.

"Ooh, I can't think of anything that would explain you. Back to the game! I spy-"

"Tunnel, corridor, also corridor, and tunnel for the next three times," Morte said.

"Oh my gosh, you're _amazing!_ I didn't even finish _thinking _it! What are you, psychic?"

"He don't need to be!" The Hutt said. "You've been playing that stupid game since we got down here and _there's nothing else down here!_ What else are you gonna look at!"

"Plenty! There are...uh, little alcove things in the sides. Probably used to be for toll booths or boarding stations. Dunno why."

"You _told _Zim why; it was probably a tram subway abandoned by whoever tried to occupy the town before us," Kim told him.

"Oh, right. Cool! Maybe the tram gods ate them for lack of appropiate sacrifices." Morte shuddered at that, and so did a few of the less certain employees. "Okay, one more time! I spy-"

"Once more for posterity! TUNNEL," Morte said.

"You sure you're not psychic?" Ron asked him suspiciously.

"As a matter of fact," Morte said. "You're going to be picturing me biting your face off."

"What? No way, I'm not-" Ron paused in astonishment. "Holy cheesy poofs! I'm picturing it right now! You're not just a psychic, you're a _future psychic!_"

"...Where'd you ever hear that?" Kim asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

"Something I heard from a bunch of adventurers that stopped here once. Some kind of portal goof-up."

"I think I met those guys too," Morte muttered quietly to himself. "Think the elf smelled the ventral Planes on me...smart girl. Or guy, it was hard to tell. Hope it was a girl, I had fantasies for a bit."

"How do you live with _that_?" Zero-Forty-Nine begged Kim. "It can't be done! You must tell me how! How have you not gone mad by now!"

"Lot of practice, good ol' fashioned experience and living with a manically-depressed mad scientist for a little brother!" Kim said brightly.

"Also, earplugs!" Rufus added, pointing at two little things in his ears.

"Do you have some more of those?" A small armadillo-man said hopefully. Rufus shook his head. "Crap."

Ron continued, to the disappointment of all concerned. "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with-"

"Is it 'B'? For, y'know, 'boring'?" Kim remarked. "Because this place is _so _boring."

"Nah, you're wrong this time. And boring is good! Do you want exciting? Do you want monsters here!" Ron said. "Big ugly scary monsters with big sharp nasty teeth and mean dispositions and claws that snatch and machine guns in their crotches and synchronized watches of DOOM and also a pre-elementary education? Is that what you want? Danger? Impending doom? Because that kind of stuff is _not _boring! It's all kinds of horrible stuff that ends with me screaming like a girl and losing my pants because the universe hates me! Is that what you want? HUH!"

Everyone stared at him.

"Because that would totally suck," Ron finished. "So...yeah."

"Do you hear a rushing sound?" Morte said suddenly. "Like little jets or something."

"What do you mean?" Kim said. "I don't-"

Something small and moving from the distanct curvature of the furthest reaches of the tunnel appeared, vaugely pointed and made of metal and moving fast. "The hell is that?" Some random person asked.

"I don't know," Kim said, peering at it. The metal object speeded up as it caught sight of them, so much that it smashed right into an alcove and bounced off with a nasty grinding noise, hitting the ground at a bad angle, it's neck twisted at an angle sure to snap the pilot's neck. It's jets were still on and drove it almost into them (close enough that it nearly rammed into Morte, and for him to see the blood on the chestplate), narrowly missing them and smashing into a wall, grinding along it for a good distance until it bounced off again and kept flying, still going.

They watched it go. It showed no reaction to them or even acknowledged they were there, and kept flying. "Huh," Ron said. "That was random. And I didn't even get to bring it into the game..."

"Maybe it was a drone? Flying down here to see if any Heartless came down here?" Kim said. "Dad's been talking to Jim about patenting some for the Peace Marines."

"If it was a drone, why would it be person-shaped? Humanoids aren't that aerodynamic," Morte said reasonably. "And I saw bloodstains on it. And they don't look very old."

This was received with due gravity and analyzed. Eventually, Ron asked, "Any bets on if this is gonna suck?"

"I'll take some of that action!" Kim said, raising a hand.

An older man gasped. "You gamble! For shame, young lady! You're supposed to be a role model!"

They stared at him. Morte gave him an eye-rolling look that amounted to a raised eyebrow. "Is this really the time for that?" Kim asked him awkwardly.

"NOW IS ALWAYS THE TIME TO GUARD ONE'S BEHAVIOR!" The old man yelled.

This peculiar moment was stopped short by a rumbling noise coming from the same way the monster had come; a rough and massive vehicle that looked a lot like a minecart with a set of tank-treads instead of wheels came screaming up, a complicated engine spewing fire from behind it and rocketing it through the tunnel, though it sputtered out when the drivers caught sight of them, the treads clanking to a stop a short distance from them. The cart was an odd sight, some of it like stone sculpted into a new shape by rough and crude hands, while the various components (the treads, engine and a big shield on the front with the logo of the Peace Marines on it - a blue and white checkered background, with a firefly over a stylized gear) looked like transmuted bits metal parts.

It was, in fact, fairly obvious that the whole thing had been transmuted, but it was important who was _in _the contraption. "...Commander-Admiral Mustang?" Ron said disbelievingly. "And...that weird friend of Edward's whose always talking to himself. Lin? Greed? Greedlin? Make your mind up, this is confusing."

"Hey!" Lin and Greed said in unison.

"Dad?" Kim said to Gibbs. "And..." She scowled at Shego, who didn't seem particularily pleased to see her either. "What are _you _doing here!"

"Eh," Shego said. "Fighting crazy sociopath that blows stuff up with his hands. You?"

"Same thing here. Well, that was the plan, but I'll probably be fighting him again later anyway. You know how these crazy guys never stop bothering us."

"Yeah, I saw your TV message thing. _Smooth_."

"Hey, it wasn't my idea to bring Kimblee down there..."

Rufus pointed at Deadpool, squeaking furiously. "YOU!"

The occupants stared at Deadpool. He scowled, possibly. "Sheesh, you shoot _one _mini-nuke on a dare, and the little rat thing holds it against you forever." Rufus crossed his arms and glared hatefully. Ron leaned over and waved at Beth, the two of them having dated for a short time a while ago. Audrey waved, because he was friendly like that. Mort just grumbled to himself; no one ever went and greeted _him_.

"Hey, guys, nice to see you and stuff but we're kinda in the middle of somethin'," Angilaka said shortly, looking really uncomfrotable. She was already having a rough time of it, since she was so big she had to sit down and everyone else was sitting on her legs, with amble seating to go around that way. "Hey, wait, you're Gibbs' little girl! One of the ones that sent that crazy message to Kimblee and got him riled up."

Kim blanched. "Yes," Gibbs said evenly, leaning over and frowning at her. "_About _that. Interesting question. Just why _did _you decide to send out that _incredibly ill-advised_ televised taunt to an extremely sociopathic and powerful alchemist armed with the most powerful artifact known to his sciences? When, if going by the warnings all of you gave, you were perfectly aware of _how _dangerous he is. Particularly since you were with _Scar_, whom Roy assures me knows better than anyone how dangerous this Kimblee man is."

"...Um..." Kim said miserably.

"Ooh, you are so busted!" Shego hissed cheerfully from the cart. Kim gave her a hateful look.

Gibbs rolled his eyes. "No, she's not," He said patiently, frowning at Shego (who felt a sudden and brief utter terror). "Though I'd like to know what made her think that would be a good idea." At the look on Kim's face, he added, "_Later, _you know. After this situation is resolved." Kim's expression brightened up, and Gibbs smiled a bit. "...You could have tried something a bit more _subtle_ first," He added.

"Didn't you start the fight with him by shooting a giant sniper-rocket at him?" Deadpool asked.

Kim blinked, and Gibbs grimaced. By way of explanation, Roy briefly said, "We already fought him earlier," Roy said shortly. "Right before your message thing. It...didn't go well. The fight, I mean. Stewie Griffin showed up and, well, it didn't end well."

"What do you-" Kim stopped. She recognized the look on his face. She had met Stewie before, and fought him, and now she remembered the blood on the armor. "No."

"Stewie's _dead_?" Ron said, looking stricken. Rufus shivered. Most of the people present blinked, not knowing who Stewie was.

Morte had only seen the strange madman briefly the night before, and it was still unsettling to know that someone he had known was dead; Stewie had been an arrogant, condescending irritant, but he hadn't deserved _that_. And then he made the obvious connection as well. "Don't suppose you guys recognized a suit of armor going this way?" Morte said grimly. "Real small, not in the best of shape?"

"Stewie's armor?" Beth said. "Before he...um. You know." She bit her lip and changed the subject. "His armor. Yeah; a whole bunch of Heartless did..._something,_ and then they stuffed themselves into it and ran off. We don't know why."

"Huh," Morte said. "'Cause we, y'know, saw it come right by." Roy started. "Didn't do anything, it just flew by us. Which is weird, being that after the message we got out, Kimblee called _us. _Said he was bringing his own 'advance army', or something. Guess that means Heartless. And, ah-"

"He blew up your clubhouse-diner thing too, and he killed your orc friend that works there," Kim said, taking care not to look at Roy or Angilaka. "He told us he was going to do something big."

There was a long _dangerous _pause. "He killed Gorgob," Angilaka said, her voice low and rumbling like the echo of a landslide. "This..._bastard _went to _my _house and killed my _friend_."

"He was my friend too," Roy said quietly. Quiet, like the distant whistling of a hydrogen bomb.

For a moment, Angilaka and Roy processed this, a new and thoroughly unpleasant reality snapping into place for them, a reality that didn't have that old and friendly orc working at their diner, telling them cheerful stories about the reintroduction of his kind into civilized society back home in Middle-Earth and listening to their stories with total interest in everything they said. Never complaining. Never saying a bad word about anyone. Never doing a single thing to earn the reputation his species had. Never doing a single thing to deserve _this_.

Finally, Roy spat, "I am _so damn sick _of that egomaniacal sociopath walking into _my _town and killing _my people_. We've already lost a mansion's worth of people to that monster. And then that crazy Stewie guy; he was a thuggish maniac, but he didn't deserve _that_. Not this too."

"No more," Angilaka said solemnly. "We're stopping it here and now." She looked at them sharply. "Where did that suit go?"

"That way," Morte said, forgetting he was just a head. Ron helpfully pointed behind them. "Leads back to...oh, crap, to the news studio."

"I figured." She glanced at Kim, Ron and the people that were escorting Morte and said, "Audrey. Think you can give these guys a hand?"

"I would love to," Audrey said graciously. Kim and Ron nodded at him, pleased to have another person to help out. (And big-scale fights weren't really their expertise; they were more skilled at _preventing _disasters than averting ones in progress.) "Care to head down to the hospital? I'm sure fine journalists like yourselves would appreciate that. Not to mention fighters to help defend it until this debacle is concluded." They considered that, and shrugged. "Very good! Good luck to you, my superiors!" He paused. "Erm. What _are _you doing down here?"

"We are escorting this fine survivor of an ancient and wise culture, to preserve his life and the knowledge he holds!" Zero-Forty-Nine proclaimed.

"There is nothing in that sentence that is not technically true," Morte said.

Angilaka nodded at Audrey, wisely ignoring Morte's contribution. (And the other news guy's sad looks that no one had asked who they were until just now.) "Good luck then." Audrey coughed. She rolled her eyes. "Good luck to you and your pants, I mean."

"I should hope so," Audrey said gravely. He hopped out of the cart. "Fellows, to me!" The newsguys, Kim, Ron (and Morte) did so: Audrey's hands held his hands out as they gathered around him, pulled his sleeves all the way up to the shoulder...and his arms suddenly expanded several times until they were bigger than he was, becoming slightly concave and scoop-shaped. Without any fuss, he lightly grabbed them all, carefully adjusting himself until he was certain that they were comfortable and safe, and then he activated his jets and flew down the tunnel, his passengers safe and sound. (But he was also rambling on about how nice his pants were and how everyone ought to get a pair like his, so it was a bit of a mixed deal.)

Gibbs watched them go, looking worried. Roy glanced at him as they started up the cart again, sending it through the tunnel at breakneck speeds and taking them farther from Gibbs' daughter, musing that it would be nice to have a family like he did.

...

Back above ground, not quite involved in the battles as yet, Kimblee was contented with merely observing the results of his actions. It was humbling, in his understanding of the term, to see events unfolding around him as the world responded to what he had done, with a minimum of further effort required from him.

He wasn't _watching _it, precisely, not being in a position to do so; the powers of the Stone were beyond measure, but they didn't include giving him the power to see through solid objects such as the dome he had raised to shelter the Heartless from the sunlight. (Well, it _could _have if he modified his eyes the right way, but he didn't know enough about medical alchemy to risk something so frivolous. He might have also adopted the form of an alien with vision powers, but he didn't know any.) _But..._but he _was _the link to this world for these Heartless, the means by which they had been able to appear in far greater strength and variety than before, and not merely in the cast-off shells Wuya's sorcerous channels forced them into. He was the key from their extraplanar origin, and he was _connected _to them, and he was more than aware of how things were going. As a scientist, he believed he was going to find some very interesting data to supply to Wuya's research corps when this was all over. And as an experienced soldier, he estimated that things were going to go badly for the Traverse Town refugees.

He decided to think of it as an experiment: let the refugees fight as many as they wanted, and see how well they did. Eventually, at least one would make a fatal error, a final misstep...and then the Heartless would add another to their ranks. The other refugees would panic, lose their focus, and one by one, they would die.

At least, that was the _plan_. Experience had taught Kimblee to be a little more adaptable than that, and that was why he was now lazily walking down the street, walking right up to the great curvature of the dome from where it had assimilated the street-top and the nearest buildings into itself, leaving twisted and strange-looking deformations on the street, with a nagging feeling that if he didn't insert himself into the fight at a crucial point soon, things would go badly for him. On the other hand, if he appeared too soon, his forces might be too far stretched and his own plans might not work as he'd hoped. Contingency plans, back-up plots, possible routes for retreat and the most effective means of reprisal ran through Kimblee's head, largely because of Ghostfreak, and he finally grunted with disdain at the pretentiousness of itall. "Self-preservation is overrated," he said aloud.

An idea came to him as he looked at the barrier, the refugees inside totally oblivious to his presence. (Or so he believed.) A wicked, wonderful, _exciting _idea.

He brought his hands up, the flesh of his palms rolling like there were things underneath. "The dice fall where they will. Coins fall on side or edge regardless of expectation. Slot games ring up in the house's favor and the gambler loses everything. A lucky shot rings out, and the challenger dies without a scream."

His hands came together. There was a faint sound as transmutation circles met another. "Whether chance or destiny or skill saves anyone, Fate makes them real. Who is real, here? Who will survive this? All or none. I don't know. I do not care. I want to see what will happen. Nothing else matters. Not my death. Not my survival. It's all about _what happens next_."

Kimblee gracefully pulled his hands apart, energies crackling between them. "Show me how real you are," he whispered to the winds. "Show me if _anything _is real." He passed that energy into the air in front of him, twisting it, pushing it far past the boundaries of safety as his alchemy could, the power of the Stone feeding vast amounts into it and amplifying it past all possibility...

Or at least that's what he would have done if he hadn't noticed a human-sized hole in the dome's base, cracked at the edges in a way he immediately associated with a destructive use of transmutation alchemy, and if he hadn't felt a shift in the otherwise still air that signaled the impending approach of a large person.

Kimblee threw himself to the ground and rolled away _just _as a open palm smashed into the ground where he had been standing and tore it apart, light flashing wildly around as dust and stone fragments burst up, a ragged crater swelling out of the street. Windows were broken by the destruction energy, streams of water briefly blasted out from ruptured waterlines (and were immediately and automatically rerouted), and a workshop made from a old tank fell apart, it's very seams unmade.

Kimblee stood up, coughing into his hand. His throat _burned_, and the wetness that passed onto his palm tasted coppery. He pulled the hand from his face, and smiled at the blood even as his body broke in a dozen tiny but dangerous ways. Misfiring nerves that caused him to tastes smells that weren't there, the uncontrollable twitch of a finger, the muscles on the right side of his neck seizing up with such force that they almost _tore_...

Destruction. Brutal, fast, and _angry_. He knew this flavor of alchemy well, alien though it was.

A larger form hurtled at him through the still settling dust, and Kimblee half-stumbled over himself getting out of the way of the figure's hands. The flesh-rending grasp of the right missed him, but a vicious jab from the left's elbow rammed into his side hard enough to make his gorge rise, and Kimblee hit the ground and the world went completely out of focus-

_Pain_. Such awful pain.

From the other, there were no words. Just a quiet and inarticulate snarling breath almost choked by it's impossible rage. Kimblee slapped a hand on the ground as the feetsteps grew too near, and the ground pulled up, doing two things at once; a crude hand pushed him into his feet, and a spinning drill mechanism shot forward at his attack, punched out on a spring-loaded conveyence-

A right hand dissmisively slapped it away, with a flash of light, and the whole thing exploded in chunks of metal and perpetual motion clockwork.

"You've little respect for art," Kimblee said breathlessly. "All blind rage and screaming anger, destroying everything that turns against you and remaking it into _nothing_. Your reality is defined by the destruction of everything that opposes it. How...admirable!"

The scarred Ishbalan warrior-priest who had cast his name aside long ago glared contemputously at Kimblee. "Your approval shames me and mine," Scar said, his tone no less hateful for how quiet it was. He considered Kimblee, his red eyes narrowed in distaste as he turned his attention to the still standing remnants of Kimblee's 'art'. He placed a hand on it, light flashed into it. It didn't explode, it was only destroyed with such throroughness that was hit the ground was the soft dust of it's chemical components. "'Art'," He repeated. "Your 'art' is nothing but hubris mutilating the world."

"You can call it what you want," Kimblee retorted, fascinated by the magnitude of the _loathing _in Scar's eyes. He wondered what it was like to feel things so recklessly. "Hubris is only a word. Like 'good'. Or 'evil'. Or even...'hero'."

Scar glared at him, unfazed. He didn't seem to have many words that he cared to address to Kimblee. There was just vengeance and duty, refined into something akin to purity in it's intensity.

Kimblee waited for an acknowledgement. When none came, he decided to give it himself. "It's been a long time, scarred man."

"So it is," Scar said flatly. Kimblee smiled and shrugged. Scar frowned. "And now, here you are. By the grace of Ishvala, you are finally in my grasp."

"Your zealotry wounds me." Kimblee paused. "Well, not _quite _like when you nailed me to the train with a broken lever through my stomach. You have a certain...knack for irony." Kimblee wanted to go on, but he didn't mention how Scar's brother, whom Kimblee remembered dying under his hands during the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign, had died from a wound to his lower stomach. The irony was compelling, but the last time he had pointed that out was when Scar had tried to do the same thing to _him_. If Kimblee had not blasted his train-car to safety, Scar would have undoubtedly blown him apart then and there.

A moment passed the two, a brief and tiny mirror of the longer time since they had last seen each other. All times had ended in near death for one of them: the first, Scar's family had died and his own severed arm replaced with his brother's, his life bought by his brother's willingly given life. The second, Kimblee had been nailed to a train. And the this third time would certainly be the last. Compelled by this momentous occasion, Kimblee said, "I've found much more interesting work and employers, while you...well, I've _heard _what you've gotten up to. Very much embraced the adventurer's mindeset, I hear." Scar frowned at him. "And left your past behind you. I met a lovely young woman today; she helped give me these again." He demonstrated the tattoos on his palms. "I daresay she'd be...upset to learn about their purpose, but that's not my concern, is it? She seemed decidedly _naive _about your history."

"I _have _no history!" Scar said sudden fierceness. "I have no country! No ancestry! No homeland! No _name_. There is nothing to come back to, nothing to give to others. None of us do; not the Elric brothers, not my fellow Ishbalans and Amestrians, not the Xingians and their boy-emperor, not anyone." His brow furrowed, his expression as foreboding as a god of righteous vengeance. "You and the treacherous homunculi, and their 'Father', saw to _that_."

"What is done cannot be abandoned or forgotten," Kimblee said solemnly. "Lie if it suits you, but I cannot abide the sight of someone lying to _themselves _for their own..._convienience_. Have standards really fallen so far that a so-called 'hero' can dare engage in such childish action?"

"I have abandoned nothing!" Scar said firmly. "The dissolution of Amestris and all our worlds at the darkness that _you _helped invite in is not something that can be taken back! You speak of childishness, and in the same breath you accuse me of casting aside the past like it is something that ought never to be done! I have learned _well _that the evils of the past must be endured. It is no deception to accept mistakes and to move past them."

"And then...to allow the person that you were to wither and die?" Kimblee said slowly, as if tasting the idea. "To abandon everything that you were?"

"That, at least, you appear to understand."

"And this has nothing to do with you not wanting the people of this town to know about your 'crusade'?" Kimblee said, arching an eyebrow. "Or perhaps they're not comfortable with a serial killer in the priesthood."

Scar crossed his arms. He met Kimblee's gaze levelly, without shame or self-doubt or anything except will shaped harder than iron. "Those who have need to know, _know _of what I have done," He said calmly. "Those who do not need to know...still only have to ask. I will not lie of who I have been. Can you say the same? Or do you even know?" His gaze turned contemptous. "Is there anything to you but madness and emptiness?"

"I fail to see importance in those words except as linguistic expressions." Kimblee crossed his arms as well. "...Still, I admit that you have made a life for yourself here in a manner I did not expect, even had I reason to think that you would be here. A man of a local, if deliberately deranged, priesthood society? Hero to the fellow outcasts not good enough for the Heartless' claws? And I never thought that your anger difficulties would ever subside."

He considered Scar for a moment, giving this due thought; the scarred man had always been a whirling storm of untempered and inhuman fury, a man filled to the brim with such apocalyptic anger and despair that it had recast him into an avatar of vengeance; unstoppable, implacable, and utterly indiscriminate. No, better yet, anger and irrational thought bound together into a hateful howling _thing _that was more supernal force than man; that was Scar in essence. And yet, apart from his customary brutal attempts at a final resolution before the enemy even knew what was upon them, this time Scar had taken the time to engage his foe in meaningful debate before resuming battle. (Normally, he did it _while _battling, but everyone did that in Amestris. It was just one of those things; wars happened, industrial diselpunk came into fashion, and people spouted philosophy at each other while fighting to the death.)

Scar's inhuman temper had inexplicably cooled. Perhaps, Kimblee acknowledged, there had been some changes worth consideration. He was more wary of him than before now; Scar's wrath, brutal and indiscriminate though it was, was so fierce that it didn't make him any less weaker or sloppy due to his discipline and focus. It just made him into a killing machine in the shape of a man. If he'd learned to _control _it, to direct it-

Scar punched Kimblee in the nose. It made a very satisfying crack. _Godammit, my nose! _Kevin cried.

_...Hold a moment, _Ghostfreak said, confused. _This body has gotten _far _more serious and insulting injuries than a broken nose. Why are you complaining about that?_

_Because a broken nose hurts like a bastard!_ Kevin said. _...Wait. Since when could I feel pain to my body after Kimblee stole it?_

That was a good question, but Kimblee wasn't listening. "Ow," He said faintly, snapping his nose back into place. "OW. That hurt even more than breaking it to begin with." He frowned at Scar. "What was that for?" Scar raised a eyebrow. "...Besides the flagrantly obvious reasons you'd have for hitting me, I mean."

"Because you were just staring blankly into space. It had gotten disturbing."

"Ah. And you couldn't wait for me to finish thinking?"

"I was waiting here for over _five minutes_."

"...Ah," Kimblee said, feeling a modicum of embarrasment and wondering why Scar hadn't just blown his head open. (Probably because it was unsporting, or because even an avenger like Scar didn't have the heart to kill someone while they were in the middle of an overly long internal monolouge.) "Um. Hrm. What was I talking about when I lost focus?"

"My anger management issues and becoming a local hero, I believe," Scar said. "And in reply to that...serving my community and Ishvala has _always _been my purpose. To serve one is to honor the other. _That _is my purpose, my reason for being. That is the identity I carve out with my life, and that is enough for me."

"An admirable sentiment, if not one I find entirely comprehensible," Kimblee commented.

Scar ignored him. "...I love this town," He said, unexpectedly. Kimblee raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Don't look at me like that. I know this town is an absurd place. It is filled to bursting with chaos. It has no rulers save perhaps a commitee that barely keeps a reign on the borderline anarchy it engenders. There is hardly a trace of sanity or temperance among the populace as a whole, and even the most strong willed survivor that washes on it's shores falls into the madness sooner or later.

"And yet...

"And yet I _love _it all the same. It is not the deserts of my youth. It is not the cities and plains of Amestris. It is not the marshlands of Xing. And yet, my fellow Ishbalans and Amestrians and Xingians and our hundreds of other refugees live and love it as though it _were_ the lands stolen from us. It is the shelter denied to us by the Heartless that slaughtered our people and unmade our worlds. In it's absurdity is room for _any _being through the endless multiverse, of whatever shape, creed or capability! Have you any idea how few other worlds can claim _that?_ And In it's chaos there is still peace untouched by the horrors that claimed our old lives...the same horrors that you have _unleashed _upon this world!"

"You speak so readily in defense of a world and a town that outright _embraces _chaos and dysfunction?" Kimblee said skeptically. "One that hoards madness like a miser's gold? That is plauged by a constant seige of random super-criminals and evil geniuses and mad sorcerors and trashy romance novelists? Not to mention the needlessly gullible townsfolk. This place is _insane_. And you still love it?"

Scar stared levelly at Kimblee like he would at a particularily rude idiot-child. "Yes," He said firmly after a moment. "I do." There was much that went unspoken in that simple sentence, and all of it was a challenge, a declaration of war. _I shall permit you to move no further_.

Kimblee said nothing, for a moment. Then, "...Before you die, satisfy my curiosity," Kimblee said. "Tell me your name. Your _real _name. I have wondered for a long time what it is, and calling you 'Scar' seems...childish. You could consider it a last request?"

Scar gave him a glare that was still rooted in a arcane peace that disturbed Kimblee. "...I need no name. The man that held my name died in Ishbal, under _your _hand. All of his sins, deeds and good works have faded into the sand. Only this wretch is left...and I need no name but what those who count me among them will give me."

"Noble words," Kimblee said disdainfully. "And if they were to know the full magnitude of what you've done...would they still count you among themselves?"

"Perhaps. If not, that is what Ishvala has cast for me, and I shall abide by it. But the chances of them casting me out are still vastly slimmer than, say..." Scar's mouth made an odd contortion that might have been a smirk. "You learning to tell a joke properly."

Kimblee's eye twitched. "...I am going to enjoy killing you all _far _more than is healthy for me."

"Interesting," Scar said. "I used to say the same thing about you State Alchemists." With that, he slammed his right hand to the ground and the street burst apart under his him in a straight line at Kimblee.

In response, the street right around Kimblee flashed red and fountained upward into the shape of a pair of massive blast-shields, the Stone's power allowing Kimblee to transmute them into a alloy of dozens of different nigh-indestructable metals from across twenty-two distinct 'verses, these metals layered over each other in a intricate mesh that would have made a sculptor weep at it's beauty. The line of destruction slammed into it, but because Scar had been specifically targeting the materials the street was made of, it had no effect on the shields' different composition. Kimblee put a hand on the shields and half a dozen ugly gun-barrels twisted out of the front, each one nearly the size of a man. Light flashed inside them, and each spewed forth a barrage of gravel fused into chunks individually larger than a man's head, propelled at enormous speeds with incredible accuracy directly at Scar.

Unworried, Scar put his hands on the ground and a large crater appeared as the street pulled up around him, and much to Kimblee's utter astonishment, the material reshaping itself into an extraordinarily thick shield just as the projectiles struck with an awful grinding noise, ripping a few nasty dents in the shield but not coming close to breaking it. (It was a good thing for Kimblee that Aang, Toph, Naruto and Gaara were preoccupied with their own fights or they surely would have noticed.)

Kimblee heard the distinctive sound of alchemy happening and the telltale flash of light from behind that shield, and when the light faded again, the shield was gone (as was even more of the street), transformed into a plain cannon the size of a small car and nearly hollow with the size of it's barrel. Scar stood atop it, and didn't even flinch as it fired a massive barbed spear with odd blobby protrusions on the side. This spear smashed right through the lowest of Kimblee's guns and splintered it, going further into the base of the weapon and solidly anchoring itself, though still not penetrating the shield. "You've learned _real _alchemy, I see," Kimblee said. "You know how to do more than destroy after all! It's still not enough, and you didn't even _dent _my shield! And...wait, why are those things on that spear lighting up like that?"

"An interesting point," Scar said calmly. "You Amestrian zealots rant and rave about how singleminded my people are about religious studies, and you never even bothered to ask just what those studies consist of. And thus, you don't know that the training of a warrior-priest also includes a very thorough grounding in the study of the natural world given to us all by God...including, for example, chemistry."

The blobby things swelled up, starting to turn black. Kimblee got a weird feeling of _deja vu_. "And on that note," Scar continued. "You of all people ought to know well enough how relatively simple it is to reshape basic metallic compounds and chemicals into explosive matter."

The blobs exploded with the force of a truck going fast enough to smash through a brick wall and, the explosive lumps having been shaped in such a way as to propel the spear forward, firing with sufficient force that while the spear still only managed to indent itself a little into the shield, the part of the _street _that the shield extended out of, being made of lesser stuff, was broken by the force of the impact, and so the shield fell and hit the ground; Kimblee had dodged backwards and out of the way, but only just in time, the edge of his own shield clipping his foot. Grimacing in pain, Kimblee transmuted again, a long thin path in the street parting behind him and a narrow piece of street appearing under him and sliding him through that path and moving away nearly as fast as a moderately powerful car.

Scar was in pursuit almost before Kimblee was even moving, and struck his hands against the first building he passed; a cannon extended from a corner of it and fired a cannonball that almost hit Kimblee, smashing into the ground and missing his legs by a foot, and with the incredible speed Kimblee was moving at, Kimblee tucked his legs in instinctively and paled at the thought of nearly being crippled. Outraged, he transmuted a large section of the ground he passed, twelve cubic feet of it twisting up into incredibly thin sharp pointed lengths that stretched into the air, turned sharply, and went right at Scar while randomly twisting into a staggering amount of absurd angles that should have made it impossible for him to block or break.

Scar died neither. He kept moving and neatly sidestepped the first one as it lanced into the spot he'd been on, lightly put a hand on it and pushed himself into the air, spinning so that three missed him without even nicking his clothes, landed a foot on another and jumped off in time to avoid the next six, spinning and flipping and springing off them as they came, and every single evasive movement planned to keep him moving after Kimblee.

He lightly touched ground just past the ground they had sprouted from, bleeding from a few small cuts he'd been unable to avoid, laying his hands on the pointy thing's base, and four small cannons swelled out from their metal, firing more oversized spear after spear into the street after Kimblee as he was speeded on his way.

Kimblee came to a stop when the crevice he'd made to accomodate his retreat ended standing up as several of the spears going so far over him that he didn't even feel the wind of their passing, though one came so close that it whistled just over his back and pierced the tail of his coat. The rest he didn't even bother to dodge as they came at his head, but simply transmuted a series of thick pillars with grasping hands out of the ground and into the spears, smashing or pulverizing or sending them hopelessly off-course. More gatling guns appeared on their sides and opened fire on Scar, and the nameless warrior-priest didn't even blink. He avoided the volleys of rapid-fire armor-piercing hurt-making projectiles with such speed that he moved like one of the dust devils of the deserts that he'd called home, not even ducking behind cover but moving _through _the bullet fire, so fast that he was only nicked and scratched, more bloody but puny marks accruing without delaying him in the slightest.

Then, he vanished from sight. Kimblee thought he'd disappeared. One moment, he was there, and the next...gone.

One of the pillars above Kimblee shattered, fragments of stone hitting Kimblee between the ices and slicing his ears and nearly cutting his cheek open, and then Scar appeared in the dust, descending on Kimblee like the wrath of angels (the good old fashioned 'impossible biological mishmash' sort), all weathered dark skin and loose clothing and pure elemental _vengeance _in man-form-

A great weight hit Kimblee, knocking the wind and self-assurance from him: it was Scar, his knee's hitting Kimblee in the stomach as an iron-hard hand clamped around his face like a vise around something soft and squishly and almost certainly about to explode. The heat from that hand was painful, the sweat on it making Kimblee itch furiously and the stink of blood curiously arousing.

Kimblee hit the ground and the broken earth dug bloody tracks into his back through his clothes, and him not even aware that he had been sent down by the force of Scar landing upon him, the man trembling with loathing of such intensity that Kimblee was staggered by it, tempered though it was by rigorous discipline. "How did-" Kimblee started to say, but the hand clamped down with a faint crunching noise.

Kimblee felt his jaw fracture. Some of his teeth cracked, his words died unsaid in his throat, and his muscles stressed to near-snapping. The pain nearly made him faint with dizziness, and it was exequsite in it's purity. Scar's voice rang out over the fogginess in Kimblee's head, like a lighthouse horn cutting through stormy winds. "I will give you a moment to pray." Calm for all of the fury in every syllable, so curt and precise that it was like the judgement of some celestial diety. Kimblee was disturbed by the way Scar sounded as though he were making an honorable concession.

Kimblee said the only thing that came to mind, not caring about the strange prickling under his skin as though his bones were turning to crystal. "You're deluded," He said acidly, mildly frustrated with Scar's stubborn belief that so surely should have been stamped out long ago. "There is _nothing _to pray to."

A brief, darkly amused silence. "As last words go," Scar said, like an educated man talking to a deluded zealot. (Kimblee fervently believed it was the other way around.) "Yours are unfortunately ill-timed."

And with that, alchemic energy was siphoned from the breath of the world and flashed around his arm and through his hand - his _right _hand, the right hand of Destruction - and poured into Kimblee's body, the power of it tearing the ground up in a great circular blast as Kimblee grinned fiendishly-

The light faded, a residual arc of energy flashing along bits of metal.

And Kimblee grinned still, unharmed but his skin inhumanly translucent and distorted. Scar stared at him for an instant, his mouth open in a wordless expression of infuriated disbelief and said, "What."

"Ah," Kimblee said brightly as green Omnitrix energy flashed under his skin. "I see. You were deconstructing _human _flesh and bone or trying to make my brain explode or something of that nature. But you were targeting a human body! Which is now longer applicable." Green crystals slid out noiselessly through his skin, and the rest of him silently transmuted into the same greenish diamond-like crystal, his body bulging into the larger configurations of a Petrosapien without totally abandoning his human pattern. "Your powers are no longer applicable, provided you don't know precisely what you're deconstructing."

His arm twisted up, and Scar yelled in pain, rolling away with his hand held to his chest. Kimblee got to his feet, but Scar made it first; when the Ishbalan pulled his hand away, it was streaked with blood, a ragged cut in his chest.

Kimblee raised his right arm, now distended past his knee into a blade-like length of green crystal, almost completely smooth except for the wicked edge along one side and liberally splattered with Scar's blood. The right side of Kimblee's face had shrunken slightly, it's mass redistributed into a more elongated configuration, and something similar had happen to most of the entire right side of his body; it was affecting his balance, making him lean slightly to the right. Kimblee still grinned, with some difficulty, since his jaw had partially been changed into a form totally unsuitable for biological muscle structures, and also because the transformed parts of him didn't feel completely under his control. _Best to keep this controlled and neat, _he thought shortly, wary of whatever influence Kevin might yet have over this body.

Scar stared at him, utterly repelled. "What have you done to yourself?"

Kimblee grinned wider. "Whatever I must to survive."

"Not for much longer," Scar said. A vestige of a reckless melodramatic streak compelled him to add, "Accept your judgement now and die at my hands with no more contention. It would be a kindness for you."

Kimblee scoffed, with difficulty. (His lungs certainly weren't designed for that now, or whatever he had for lungs.) "And how does lying down and letting you kill me qualify as a kindness?"

Scar raised his hand, wet with his own blood. The blood was the same color as his eyes, bitter and angry and exactly as stubbornly faithful as the day Kimblee had slaughtered his family. "Because the alternative is you dying anyway, _piece by piece_."

"You can't deconstruct my body if you don't know what it's made of! I have hundreds of different bodies to adapt-"

"You are mistaken," Scar said quietly. "If you think that I need alchemy to pull the bones from you while you still scream."

"...Ah," Kimblee said faintly. "Brutality. How provincial."

"Elitist bastard," Scar spat.

"Delusional zealot."

"Empty sociopath, knowing nothing, accomplishing nothing, _being _nothing."

Kimblee's eyes flashed, as did a quasi-organic light inside his crystalline structures. "Don't you look down on me, Ishbalan _scum_!"

Scar smirked coldly and he put his hand to the ground. Alchemy happened, and he pulled away a massive meat cleaver half as wide as a man was tall, with an appropiately long and thick hilt to compensate. He tensed, and then with the speed he had nearly made his trademark, was upon Kimblee, who only had time to petulantly say, "How are you even carrying that thing with one hand?" and throw his crystal arm to ward away the oncoming strike. Sparks flew, again and again as Scar furiously swung over and over while green chips overhead, and Kimblee snarled in dismay as the cleaver actually _hurt _his arm, breaking the supposedly diamond-hard crystal. Remembering that most of him was still made of meat he pulled back, madly slashing with his crystal arm and applying all the bloodthirsty violence he had always employed to bombing to melee combat.

The two old enemies resumed a battle long since delayed by circumstances, and other battles raged beyond them.

Kimblee would have better served his time by just blowing up the dome instead of focusing on his vendetta with Scar, but distracting the Red Lotus Alchemist until the Heartless were dealt with was probably Scar's intention.

Or just killing Kimblee in as horrible a way as possible. That was a distinct possibility.

Inside the dome itself though...

For what seemed like the hundredth time in the past five minutes (and never mind how mind-numblingly _fast _that would mean they were spawning), a Heartless pulled itself out from the thick shadows cast by the barrier still around them all, it's body _almost _like a Soldier's before it stood far too tall, body distending to knifelike thinness, bits of stone poking out from it's latticed skin and twisted into nasty sharp pointy things, it's jaws distending completely with drooling threads of sinew sliding from the jagged rims of it's fanged jaws, the unsound of a dead roar rippling in the minds of everyone who beheld it...

Zim, the one fighting it, wasn't particularily bothered by it.

Light flashed and it recoiled, turning around not nearly quick enough to escape the flashing edge of the Keyblade and the red-eyed blur wielding it, slashing through it's leg with a gleam of fire, burning so brightly that it was nearly blue in places, and hurt it badly: light, any light in any form, whether physical or metaphorical, was anathema to the Heartless, and fire was so very much a form of light. There didn't seem to be any real meat or combustibles on this Heartless to burn, but it's frayed epidermis caught fire regardless.

Zim watched it run briefly until he lost patience and pointed the Keyblade at it, a beam of fire lancing at the Heartless' head and tearing it apart in a blast that took out everything from the shoulder's up. "Boom!" Zim said gleefully. "Headshot!" Unfortunately, the Heartless, while certainly decapitated, was still moving and didn't look like it would be stopping any time soon. "I'm on a schedule here! I don't know what it is yet and I haven't calculated what it's for and I have no idea what the overall agenda actually is but it totally counts and you're _ruining _it! That's very thoughtless of you." The Heartless jumped at the first thing that moved; namely, another Heartless, this one a shapeless blob-thing with too many half-calcified tentacles. "Hey, I was totally going after that one next!" Zim complained as the two tore at each other. "Have you no professional decorum!" He advanced forward, Keyblade in hand...

And a much bigger beam of fire than he could summon came from above, vaporizing the Heartless he had been about to take down himself; heat washed over him, blackening his clothes at the edges (even though they were supposed to be fireproof), but that was less irritating than the chunks of dirt blasted loose with sufficient velocity to punch dents in metal. His magically-boosted reflexes ensured that he was barely grazed by most of those projectiles, but this was poor solace, espicially after he overheard what was unmistakbly Calvin's maniacal laughter. (Whether it was at blasting Heartless Zim clearly wanted to take down himself, or just mad glee at blasting stuff, no one but Calvin could say. It was probably a bit of both.)

Zim turned and stared at the news studio in the distance, illuminated by the enormous fires he and Zuko periodically had relit by setting random stuff on fire. (To be fair, it was the _only _building in plain sight; the dome had either absorbed or cut off all other buildings around them.) "You _kill-stealer!_" Zim bellowed, shaking his fist in rage. Distantly, the ground rumbled and Zim, who was used to being around Earthbenders for some time and to subterranean drilling even longer before, didn't pay it much attention, though he _did _notice the shadows around him deepen. The Keyblade's usual rippling lightshow brightened almost to electrical levels and whatever malign power the Heartless cast over this place faded slightly (and the shadows retreated) as a tugging sensation nagged at Zim. He got the distinct impression that he really ought to be paying attention to...something, as well as feeling a lot like someone was calling him an idiot to his face without bothering with words or even a medium he could comprehend. He glanced accusingly at his Keyblade...and stared. The surface of the seemingly stable metal (not that he knew what _kind _of metal it was) had formed bizarre grooves and lines all over, twisting in odd patterns to such an extent that the whole weapon looked like a mosaic designed by someone obsessed with spirals. More disturbingly, they were _moving_, slivers of flowing metal floating off and joining to different parts of the blade like drops of water and seamlessly joining again, bits of multicolored light crackling where the metal was joining together. As Zim watched, the Keyblade shimmered in a spiral pattern from the hilt on up, churning up the metal until it settled down with the patterns gone and the Keyblade looking just like it had before. "...Huh," Zim said.

Another Heartless appeared behind Zim with exceedingly bad timing; he was looking into the Keyblade in such a way that he saw it's reflection well enough. Without thinking about it, he spun and swung; the Keyblade was an arc of silver glowing with arcs of light, smashing into the emaciated creature's midsection and bisecting it with a peculiar grinding noise. Zim glanced at the Keyblade; the side that he favored writhed with edges like the bits of a chainsaw. They faded back into the metal, leaving no sign that they had been there.

Any thoughts on that matter, which might well have led to some serious doubts on the whole thing and perhaps even further delays on his journey until he figured out what he had been cast into, were thankfully put aside as a small part of the rock barrier above them - a part no bigger than a large man's fist - crumbled into sand on the wind from above, and he heard the distant roar of violent air; he'd known Aang long enough to recognize _that _sound, and he smiled. It wasn't a very nice smile.

It had been long enough since there had been illumination under the dome that Zim hadn't help provide that he flinched when proper sunlight came down even though it wasn't much more than a thin ray of sunlight, but it cut through that grayish unreality like fire through fog, and it was still enough real sunlight that the Heartless recoiled from it. It got worse for them when another hole opened in the ceiling a short distance away. And then another, and another, and _another_, tracing a vaugely geometric shape that went all the way to the outer slope of the dome and down to the southern part of the wall _just _above the very ground it had been scooped from, making a very large outline of something that was quite quickly pushed outward by unseen forces. _Bent _outwards, you could say.

_Ah, _Zim thought smugly. _It had taken them long enough._

Sunlight flooded in for just enough of a short instant for all but the strongest Heartless there to scurry away as one, and then (Zim could have sworn he heard a distant grunt of effort in stereo), at long last, the part of the fight in total darkness was brought to a relieved end as the entire outlined chunk of the dome was forced off with a thunderous push, breaking away with a slightly louder crash. (Hobbes winced miserably, even though he was still somewhat deaf.) That chunk floated up a bit, almost timidly, and then sharply moved _up_, getting out of the way...

And things got a whole lot brighter.

The Heartless couldn't talk, or scream, or roar, or make vocalizations of any kind, but Zim was certain that they would have as the sunlight flooded into the chamber and washed over the Heartless over them and burning them; in the darkness, they had no need for unneccesary defenses against the light and were totally unguarded against their most potent weakness. Dozens were burned into even less than ashes; the Heartless that had phased into the ground disintegrated in ugly wisps of smog; those that had assimilated available material just collapsed in sickening bursts of goo and various chunks of metal or stone clattering to the ground; all those that remained fled, running for the safety of the scant shadows but didn't make it before the Sam, Tucker and Courtney took them out and only a few getting through, various others making it to safety. That, however, were only the Heartless that had not adapted in some fashion: there were still a full half of the remaining Heartless remained, apparently unharmed but severely disoriented; curiously, these were the ones that seemed the most like the 'species' of Heartless Zim had almost gotten used to fighting.

Above them, the building-sized chunk of transmogrified stone turned overhead, until it's top pointed at the ground; a bit of it broke off, a quartet of small figures upon it and headed straight at the opening so recently opened while the rest of the broken barrier-bit fell against the barrier's side (presumably because they couldn't think of anything else to do with it that wouldn't cause massive collateral damage). The part of it that had broken away came down through the opening, aimed directly at the remaining Heartless, who had unwisely grouped together. This didn't escape them; they glanced at each other with a look that probably translated as 'oh crap!' and scattered, flying and hopping and leaping away right before the surprisingly big chunk of stone crashed into the ground where they'd been, still flattening a good number of the bigger or slower ones that didn't move fast enough.

The top of the stone broke away from the rest in a moderately large slab and slammed into the ground a short distance from Zim, who wasn't surprised to see Aang and Toph sitting on it, though he _was _surprised to see the two ninjas from last night, Naruto and Gaara, with them; he'd totally forgotten about those two idiots. (Well, he mentally corrected itself, _one _surprisingly savvy idiot and one amazingly creepy-awesome lesser idiot.) "Excellent work," Zim said to Aang. "...Though it took so very long..."

"We were constantly being attacked, we couldn't crack it fast enough," Aang said. "We might have squashed you guys, you know?" Zim inclined his head reluctantly.

Some of the Heartless feebly tried to squirm out from under the stone, and Hobbes wandered over to give them encouraging kicks. Thus chastened, those Heartless admitted defeat and their bodies vanished into the smoke-stuff defeated Heartless normally became while their true negatively-aspected essences returned to...wherever it was they came from.

There were still Heartless around, though. "Darn it, we missed most of them!" Naruto said, and Aang shrugged apologetically. Toph snorted dismissively. Gaara spotted a Heartless out in the open and proceded to kill it in as unneccesarily gruesome and hideous a manner as possible. (Fortunately, Aang wasn't loooking. Otherwise Gaara might have gotten into trouble.)

"HEY, YOU'RE THAT GUY FROM LAST NIGHT!" Hobbes yelled from next to Zim. He had actually recovered from being deaf some time ago, but then Cyborg had fired his sonic cannon too closely again, deafening Hobbes once more.

"Why are you yelling?" Gaara asked him, glancing up from he was while a gaping mouth made of sand had appeared in his clothing (which apparently were also made of sand) messily gnawed on the still animate head of a helpless Soldier-type Heartlesss.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" Hobbes yelled. Gaara and Naruto glanced at each other, clearly deciding that this wasn't worth asking about. "ARE WE GOING TO GET BACK TO BEATING UP HEARTLESS OR WHAT?"

"Ah?" Zim said. "Yes, certainly." He turned around, just in time to see every single remaining Heartless in the area barreling straight for him. "Why are they going for me!"

"You _are _carrying an artifact that is anathema to them," Abel said apologetically, firing into the Heartless mob; he got off five rounds of six grenades per shot before he got empty clicks from his guns. "Checkered-stripes and pounded nails! Of all the times to run out of ammo!" Abel furiously started adjusting his device into a different, hopefully more efficient configuration.

"Allow me, sir!" Tesla Man said, stepping forward and firing extremely fast, though worryingly unstable, blasts of energy from his gauntlets. Bolts of electricity lanced out from capacitators extending from his shoulders, knocking back a Heartless or two and causing a chain-reaction of tripping Heartless, and he finally took a step back, opening his chest plate, and firing an enormous laser from his power source as he had done to Hobbes earlier. The resultant blast caused a small mushroom-cloud effect, and when the dust died down...there were still Heartless running at them, burned and battered but very much unharmed, though they was fewer of them.

"That's it?" Zim said, looking at Tesla Man skeptically. "You require a power source with a higher output. Have you considered doubling the cycling? It would make your armor far more efficient."

Tesla Man gaped. "...You can _do _that?"

"Can you lot hurry up and hit them already?" Abel said, his device now transformed into a power armored suit of his own, wrapping around Abel in a bulky design that looked like a mixture of seventy percent ancient armor and thirty percent high future machinery, with an overall aesthetic in bulky and heavy machinery he held up with no trouble at all, with many visible joinings, bulky sub-systems on the exterior. Mechanisms Zim recognized as being meant to regulate muscle power extended from the shoulders and arms, resembling complicated pressurized mechanisms and rotating devices with pistons here and there. There were no external or obvious weapon systems (at the moment, they could easily be internal), though there were several vents and nozzles set all over the suit, as well as a well-protected fuel tank feeding into his back, filled with an unidentified grey goop tinted a bloody red. A short, face-concealing helmet had extended over Abel's head, and it was clear that the whole suit was expressively designed not expressly to protect Abel, but to conceal him. Exactly why that was, Zim didn't know.

"JUNGLE CAT AWAY!" Hobbes yelled for no apparent reason, leaping overhead and smashing into the Heartless with enough force to send shockwaves through the ground and scatter the Heartless, where the shooters on the news building (and Calvin) were able to shoot the dazed Heartless easily. Lasers, plasma volleys and directed fire rained down, tearing through the Heartless with such great efficiency that the Heartless were killed on the spot or mortally wounded, and Gaara easily resolved that problem by crushing them to pieces.

The remaining Heartless, though there were many, tilted their heads up and slunk away, turning into shadow and sliding into the ground. "...Huh," Zim said, looking around nervously.

A wind blew nearby. He waited patiently.

Nothing happened. No darkling or unnatural horror appeared to kill him.

He waited some more.

Still nothing happen, and he got bored with waiting. "HEY, THE HEARTLESS ARE GONE!" He yelled.

"What, really?" Behemoth of the Mall Crawlers said, trundling over and carrying Sokka on his shoulder for some reason.

"They're gone?" Zuko said. "We beat them?"

"Looks like it," Katara said, walking over to them.

Everyone else came over (aside from the people on the roof, who weren't in a position to get down really quick). "We won?" Abel said, sounding suspicious, in contrast to the gleeful and gratified looks of the others. (The ones that prefered not to fight, that is. The ones that liked fighting, like Zim, Toph, Gaara or a few of the Mall Crawlers, looked disappointed.) "That's...anticlimatic."

There was a long pause as they all mentally adjusted to this develoupment, and then the gust exhaling of their collective sigh of relief. "It lacks drama, me thinks, but it could have been worse for us still," Tesla Man said solemnly, even though in the course of his battles the front of his chest plate had been nearly torn off, several capacitators had overloaded and exploded, and his limbs weren't compeltely moving in sync. Hobbes, while still not really aware of what anyone was saying, was perfectly aware of the armored blowhard's condition and he looked guilty; he hoped he hadn't doomed the arrogant but earnest teen by damaging him so badly during their fight at the mall. "We could all well be dead, and yet we are not!"

"Yeah, that's always something to think about!" Aang said, looking a bit brighter. He paused. "Hey, where'd Danny go?"

"Yo," Danny said, materializing by them, and with him came Calvin, Courtney, Sam and Tucker, all clinging to each other while Appa's surprisingly graceful bulk flew over to them. Presumably, Danny had fetched these guys from the news studio since this part of the battle was done. Courtney was shaking and shivering, Sam and Tucker had adapted to being made intangible a long ago, and Calvin...

Well, he looked to be feeling the same as Courtney, though instead of being upset or frightened he was downright gleeful and fascinated. "That was awesome! It's really kinda cool how it feels like every bit of water in your chemical structure freeze and tries to go somewhere else, isn't it?" He said to Courtney.

Courtney shivered. "Saints save me from mad scientists..." She said quietly.

Calvin snorted. "No luck, we're all over the place, I checked. Now, from a strictly _subjective _point of view, would you say that you felt that you were still on this plane of existence with your body altered in some fashion, or that you were partially shifted into somewhere else?" Courtney groaned.

"Actually," Danny said to him, unaware that it was a bad idea to be feeding a mad scientist experiment fodder. "I got it on good authority that it's a basic reaction that ectoplasmic matter, like what my body's made of in Ghost Mode, has on the material world. Earth-stuff does the same thing in the Ghost Zone."

"'Ghost Zone'?" Calvin said thoughtfully. "Do tell."

"I think not," Zim interrupted. "Partly because _I _could tell you all that if I felt like it, partly because I just noticed that I have not seen Abel's partner Scar anywhere here at all after I got him to face down Kimblee, but mostly because I do not like the idea of you experimenting on my friend to satiate your curiosity."

"Hey, I don't do stuff like that to people!" Calvin said. A surge of honesty made him add, "Anymore, that is. As such. Not so often, anyway. Um...define 'people'." After a moment, Calvin blinked and added, "Uh. What was that you said about the Scar guy?"

"Yeah," Zuko said. "Last time I saw him he was smashing through Heartless like the rest of us."

"Yes," Zim said. "Because I got him to face Kimblee! What is with you guys and not listening."

"And another thing?" Calvin said, showing off his tracking device once more, now beeping furiously. "My readings say that Kimblee is practically right by us, no doubt waiting to pick up where his evil little shadow-things left off?"

There was a long pause.

"The same Kimblee that Scar really really hates?" Calvin prompted. "The same Scar Zim says has gone off to defeat him? And would just love to make his skull go boom and-"

"Okay, we get it!" Zim said. "Now, let's just turn around and join him and...hey, what's that noise over there?" He pointed, and they looked down the side of the street. By some blessed chance (or perhaps certain otherworldly and helpful entities pushing probability here and there), Kimblee and Scar turned the corner, somehow exchanging blows before moving on, oblivious to their audience, and were gone again. "...Ah, there they are."

"WAS THAT THE KIMBLEE GUY WE'RE SUPPOSED TO STOP?" Hobbes yelled, looking around for confirmation. No one answered, as they realized belatedly that while they had heard much of Kimblee's evil, Kimblee's power and Kimblee's general threat level, Scar had neglected to tell them what he _looked _like.

Still, Scar _was _fighting him, and that was good enough for everyone, who had basically defaulted to taking Scar's advice on dealing with Kimblee; at the moment, perhaps realizing that they had escaped, Scar had lured Kimblee back into the street just in front of him, the two alchemists now dueling with swords. Well, Kimblee had a sword (a very nice zweihander with a six foot long blade so wide he had to assume a Tetramand-muscled form just to lift it), Scar had created an equally large (but he was naturally strong enough to carry it with no problems) chainsword, it's overlarge motor roaring slightly louder than Scar's own incoherent bellows of hate. If it hadn't been for Kimblee's sword being made of a synthesized alloy made of six of the most durable substances known to science (and at least two that were not, because Kimblee's evil backers had made them two and a half weeks ago and no decent science would have anything to do with those jerks), Scar's chainsword would have already cut through it.

"Okay, back to setting evil on fire and stuff," Zim said, tiny arcs of miniature lightning arcing off the Keyblade agreeingly; he broke into a run straight at Kimblee...

And didn't get three steps before the ground started shaking ominously, a grinding noise coming from underneath. Zim came to a startled halt, as did the scattered bunch who had been about to follow him. Kimblee took advantage of Scar's brief moment of heisitation to trigger a blast that smashed Scar through into the wall of a successful Altarian fast food franchise and out the other side; Scar's chainsword fell to the ground, motor still grinding away before sputtering out. Kimblee looked down and stepped away carefully, smirking grimly at the crumpled layers of asphault that were quickly giving way to the underground shockwaves that something was making...and paused, looking up a bit and taking notice of Zim and his allies, who were less than thirty feet away from Kimblee. "Ah, there you are," Kimblee said, tipping his hat slightly. He frowned at Zim, and would probably have been offended at the rude Irken gesture Zim made at him had he understood it.

Another shockwave rocked the ground, and the shadows all around them grew to impossible sizes, pooling together in a massive immaterial tide that, for all of it's inability to touch the material things them, did _something _to everyone as they passed through for only an instant, long enough to leave them shivering and stuttering and hearing faint whispers from...something. Those shadows receded, as though only the display of an approaching horror, leaving in their tracks purplish-blue anti-light shimmering in nausea-inducing patterns...

And then at last, before anyone could make a move to put down Kimblee and end this debacle, something broke through the street with such violence that the material the resultant hole had been filled with vaporized, exploding upwards in a dust-cloud while a small yellowish robotic figure flew up on the head of that cloud, soon dispelling it by virtue of the incredibly powerful jet blasts from it's feet...and those jets were the same anti-light as that of the Heartless' energy displays.

It came crashing down into the ground, just in front of Zim: a small yellow suit of powered armor that looked a bit like an egg (and to Calvin and Hobbes and some of the more scholarly present, like an antiquated powered armor of the lost known as the Squats until the ancient Tyranids ate most of them), it's various power cores and capacitors glowing with negative energy and rusting everywhere, blood still dripping from inside it's broken chest plate.

The little armor stood up carefully, gazing at all of them...and then focused it's stare directly on Zim, irrational and impersonal malevolence clear in that inhuman stare. It took a step forward, braided coils studded with spikes sliding out of a crack in it's armor and around it's upraised arm as a repulsor array on it's palm powered up...

Except that Zim had started running at it since he noticed it staring at him, and smashed the Keyblade into it's side; it was even smaller than Zim was (Stewie having been the size of a toddler, for some reason) and not particularly heavy, and was knocked into the air past the lowest rooftops, spiralling completely out of control when it's repulsor array released a black beam with enough force to send it flying over the rooftops while Zim kept running.

"Well, that was a bit of a letdown," Kimblee started to say, only for Zim, still halfway to Kimblee, to raise a fist glowing with heat and punch out a fireball that was more combusted air than flames and struck Kimblee squarely in the stomach, knocking him several dozen astonished paces. Zim kept running, wildly throwing blasts of fire and screaming like a madman.

"Doesn't that idiot have any grasp of combat tactics?" Calvin yelled, running after him; somewhat awkwardly, with the weight of his magitech devices on his arms, the scanner machine he was holding in one hand and the converted radio in the other.

"WHERE ARE YOU TWO GOING!" Hobbes yelled at them. "RUNNING STRAIGHT AT THE CREEPY GUY RIGHT IS STUPID! AND PROBABLY BUSINESS AS USUAL. OH, WHO AM I KIDDING?" He ran right after them, since it was his job to be the one person on the crew with a reasonable modicum of sanity. (Zuko looked like he might hold that role too, given time.)

The others watched them go, too stunned to do anything. "Are they really crazy enough to just charge like that?" Courtney said incredulously. "At a _long-ranged _combat specialist?"

"Yes," Aang said at once; he and the rest of Team Avatar were far too used to Zim's antics to be surprised. Toph looked like she downright approved, Katara seemed like she would have preferred to have Kimblee blow himself up somehow, Sokka was torn between exasperation and geeking out over how cool that that, and Zuko... "Wait. Where's Zuko?"

Just then, the animated armor from before smashed through, flying in mid-air and looking around for Zim before seeing him going after Kimblee. Apparently deciding to weed the competition a little bit, started firing repulsor beams at them, beams that Aang and Toph deflected by pulling up a barrier of stone from some of the dome Kimblee had trapped them in earlier. Once the energy had faded, Toph (after getting quick directions from Aang) broke it off and shoved it at the armor, knocking it back for a moment. Then it smashed through it, diving at them and narrowly missing everyone as they dove for cover. Sokka, though, lunged at it, grabbing it by the leg and clinging on to it for dear life with one hand, his free hand scrabbling for a cable on it's back or something he could unplug.

It flew over head, Sokka passing just inches over Katara's outstreched hand, and smashed into the top floor of a nearby house. There were many smashing, blasting, crashing noises (and the top floor of the place basically imploded) and then the armor smashed through the door, hissing vapor everywhere, then Sokka blasted it from behind, firing blast after blast and knocking the light mech overhead. The other gun-carrying fighters took this as a cue, and then a volley of blaster fire from Courtney, Sam and Tucker, aided by larger Ghost Ray blasts from Danny, ice spikes from Katara, sonic blasts from Cyborg and energy blasts from the ranged weapons of the Mall Crawlers all culmatively knocked it back...for a moment.

It started charging up it's repulsors and fired them, one after another, at Aang, who it accurately measured to be the strongest among them. It was a bad move; Aang spun spun into their path instead of moving away, and with his increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the primal art of Energybending, _caught _the repulsor beams in his bare hands, wincing at the nasty way they felt. It didn't stop him from seamlessly channeling the dark beams as easily as he had learned to do with lightning, redirecting them through his body. He kept moving, catching one of those blasts after another and dancing around in a circular manner to keep the energy circulating inside him, until even the amor, amped up by the Heartless now inhabiting it, wearied itself. No sooner had it done that did Aang released all the stored up energy, channeling it into a massive ball of negative energy that exploded in a mighty laser, tinted a brilliant blue thanks to Aang's pure spiritual power, and struck the armor so hard that it was knocked through _six _buildings, the last one collapsing on it. Aang winced, at that, espicially it didn't seem to do much good. The Heartless armor just got back up, dented but none the worse for the wear, and started advancing again...except that Appa flew from above and smashed into it, Abel cling to one of his legs, and starting pounding on it in a desperate attempt to keep the damned thing pinned.

Oblivious to this new fight going on in the background, Kimblee had recovered and hit the ground with his hands, transmuting and launching a stern-faced bludgeon from the ground that hit Zim a glancing blow, surprising more than hurting him. By this time, Scar had recovered as well, racing past Zim after helpfully dislodging the bludgeon but keeping his distance for some reason. "Aha, now the players have assembled!" Kimblee said. "With less than steller dramatic timing, I'll admit." Calvin clumsily managed a blast of flame that Kimblee easily blocked by transmuting a barrier from the ground (not one of the fancy ones from earlier, he didn't think it was worth the effort), while Hobbes threw a dislodged brick at the barrier it made a dent in the dense mineral. Kimblee smirked, unimpressed, and saw that Scar was still maintaining his difference, looking above Kimblee and still warily backing away a considerable distance with a few skidding jumps. "Where are you going to-"

Kimblee felt brightness and heat, just before a blast of fire exploded right in his face and chest, rocketing him down the street, past two intersections, over a tourist's booth, off a lamp post, and finally skidding across the ground in a smaller circular plaza and smashing into a abstract sculpture covered with spikes and bladed bits all over called _Celebration of All Things Spiky and Stabby._ (A nearby sign read 'Please direct all villains to the sculpture.' Traverse Town largely adhered to the 'hurt bad guys until they stop annoying people' school of crime fighting.) He groaned, thinking vaugely that he'd never known that it was possible to block out pain of a certain intensity when it hurt too much. _I could have told you that, _Kevin said smugly, his 'voice' growing stronger. With a grunt, he used the Stone's power to smother the fires on his clothing before they could spread and do him serious injury.

There was a small noise. Kimblee looked up, still smouldering and smoking, and a hard-faced scarred boy, his flesh glowing slightly reddish like it was feeding on the sun's light, was perched atop the rock. He glared at Kimblee with a hatred that didn't seem human, too elemental and pure to be truly sane. "Are you Solf J. Kimblee, also known as the Red Lotus Alchemist?" the boy asked, his voice cracked (was something wrong with his throat?) and lisping slightly, like the echoes of flames were burning in his guts.

Kimblee blinked. "Yes. I am."

The boy nodded, and in that quick jabbing gesture, Kimblee was reminded strongly - terrifyingly - of that girl Azula. It was the eyes, those inhuman dragon's eyes...and before Kimblee could follow that thought anymore and come to the logical conclusion, Zuko blasted Kimblee in the face with more fire.

"You should have known," Zuko said furiously as Kimblee's flesh reddened and burned and all he could do was _scream_. "You deserve this. You're a murderer and a monster and it's time you paid what you owe." He held up a hand, still burning with the fire he had cast at Kimblee. "Fire cures all moral debts."

"That's _insane_," Kimblee said after a moment, totally bewildered.

"Insane?" Zuko repeated, smirking with all the dragonish and fury-touchedmadness of the imperial line of Sozin. "No. That's just how we do things in the Fire Nation." He inhaled, fire whistling from between his lips-

Kimblee changed, as quickly as he could, and the blast of fire hit him a bare moment after his flesh bunched up into something akin to the flame-like stuff of a Pyronite and it still hurt, still _burned_ (and he wondered how that could be, how could a Pyronite, a being made of fire, be _burned?_) and he grinned at the pain. "Well," He said with a grin as his humanity reasserted itself. "At least I am bored no more!"

"Bored?" Zuko said. "You're pathetic."

Kimblee's expression froze. "Don't," He whispered. "Don't look down on me." He clapped his hands and charged a blast, too fast for retaliation, and Zuko's eyes widened as the ground in front of him _broke_, a large figure bursting out of the ground at him-

Kimblee released the power, and the world went white.

The light faded and Kimblee found himself standing in the middle of a crater carved deep into the street. Rubble formed a crude ring around him, the buildings that had stood around him utterly destroyed. Dust rose and fell on the air, and liquid darkness pooled around his feet and nearly to his knees, writhing like a living thing.

"You survived that, didn't you?" Kimblee said softly, seeing that there were no splatters of blood or chunks of organic material or broken bodies or anything to signify that he'd hit anyone. As if in response to his frustration, at the edges of his mind he heard the call of the Heartless, a smooth suggestion that they could be so much help: a thousand whispers melded together into a single voice that pulled at his mind and asked again and again, the voice something dark and vitrolic and quite inhuman. A need, almost buried under the hunger and pain and fury and need to _destroy_ and _hurt_ and _unmake_. A need for a command, for it's broken mind to be directed...

"That was reckless, boy!" Scar scolded Zuko from behind a nearby piece of rubble, the Firebender still hoisted over his shoulder from the scant moments when Scar had burst from the ground and back under it with Zuko in tow (breaking the ground open with alchemy, of course), and now just outside of the impact Kimblee had made. "You could have died just now."

"Is it a bad thing to die doing the proper thing?" Zuko asked, sliding off Scar's shoulder and onto his feet, looking quite unpeturbed by his narrow escape.

"No," Scar acknowledged. "But it is better to live and serve, your enemies broken behind you and the world made better for their absence."

Zuko inclined his head. "The Fire Sages of my country say much the same thing." He peered around the bit of rubble and saw that Kimblee was standing quite peaceably, right there on what was left of the street. "What's he doing?"

"Waiting for his enemies to reveal themselves," Scar said knowingly. "He is arrogant. He will not fire blindly to hit our allies; it would seem...inelegant."

Zuko's face crinkled in disgust; that sounded far too much like a lot of Fire Nation generals he had known. "If we immobilize him now, we can take him down without any more risk of anyone else dying."

Scar nodded, a short and tacit gesture of approval. Ruthlessness in the service of slaying evil was sometimes required, regretfully enough. "If I can transmute something around him, can your flames kill him then?"

Zuko nodded harshly. "Provided no one interrupts us-"

Something pinwheeled through the sky. It went _bonk_. "Ow!" Kimblee said, rubbing his head and picking his hat off the ground where it had fallen. "What the hells?" The Keyblade gleamed where it hit the ground after bouncing off Kimblee's head, imbedded nearly to it's hilt and the shadows around Kimblee parting around it, as if afraid to even get _near _it. "Who throws a sword...key...thing as an _attack?_"

"It was a surprise attack!" Zim declared, now standing directly behind Kimblee, having been carried there by an unusually strong wind. Coldness gusted out from a space quite near him.

Kimblee stared at him. "...You're standing right there where I can see you. In what way is this a surprise attack?"

"Well, you weren't expecting it, were you?" Zim asked.

Kimblee sputtered, trying to respond; while he was distracted, Zim kicked Kimblee in the shin really hard. "OW!"

"Weren't expecting that, either!" Zim said proudly.

Behind the boulder, Scar stared in astonished horror. "What. The. Hells," He said flatly.

Zuko sighed. "I keep forgetting that the rate of a plan succeeding around Zim is inversely proportionate to his proxmity to the area of it's execution." He paused, and added, "Which actually bodes brightly towards us foiling this monster of yours."

"And if Kimblee is simply rampaging?"

"Then we're probably hosed," Zuko said flatly.

In the meantime, Zim was was doing a slightly sub-par job of avoiding Kimblee's reaction to his 'surprise attack'; a volley of spikes bursting out of the ground under his feet. Zim was fast enough not to get hit directly, but he still wasn't fast enough to completely avoid them. "I don't think -ow!- that you're -ow!- approaching this in -Ow! Ow! OW! - the right frame of -wow, that was real close - mind."

"Indeed," Kimblee remarked, green energy seeping from him alongside the red energies as he continuously transmuted. "The right frame of mind to not take a joke so seriously, you might say."

"What? You're still on about that?" Zim said, grabbing the Keyblade out of the ground and sliding it free as easily as if it weighed nothing at all. He turned, and in a single quick movement chopped a spike in half as it grew at him and struck it, sending it flying at Kimblee, who caught it with one hand and transformed it into a stone cannon that fired a single big bullet right at Zim...

Who noticed something over head and stood his ground, grinning like a maniac, because an instant later a blast of green energy came down from above, shaping itself into a shield that bounced the bullet off harmlessly, dissipating after a moment. Kimblee blinked and that's all he had time for, because a moment later a tremendous blast of wind knocked him off his feet and almost flattened him shortly before the section of the ground directly under him burst open and wrapped around his body to immobilize him, dropping him on the spot and holding him still.

More still of the ground crumbled into six square feet of sand that moved up like grasping arms that seized him so tightly his bones cracked, and yet moved aside for a set of blunt-tipped daggers that struck him at several precisely targeted nerve clusters, causing his muscles to violently and painfully seize up. Icicles larger than a man rained down around him so close he could have been skewered, liquifying and flowing together before freezing again to make a cage around him and locking him down even more, while blue-green beams of pure elemental coldness froze around the rock and sand, hardening them to beyond even the steel-hardness they'd already been.

He blinked, fascinated at the appropiately extensive measures. His body refused to respond, partially paralyzed as it was, and the restraints around him made him unable to escape without breaking his body into pieces; he knew that there were many beings with the ability to grow and smash through restraints like this, but he wasn't one of them. He was less fascinated when he still managed to make a small movement and a ferocious volley of blaster shots, set to 'stun', hit him in the face and snapping his head back with sufficient violence to bruise his neck...and more importantly, making the Philosopher's Stone slip out from between his teeth and clattering to the ground at his feet. "Unfortunate, this," Kimblee remarked, startlingly indifferent.

A duo of figures appeared beforehim that he was unable to place; a blond preteen with a pair of devices on his arms resembling bizarre mixtures of pseudo-science and alchemic artistry, and a tall teenaged tiger-boy with tribalistic markings. Both of them struck without warning or preamble, the restraints around Kimblee moving around to accomodate them; the boy slammed a radio-like assemblege into Kimblee's groin with surprising force while the tiger diffidently swing a fist into Kimblee's stomach with all the force of a jackhammer, with a pair of sickening crunches. Kimblee's chin hit the hardened rock over his chest and he coughed wetly, blood dribbling over his mouth. The tiger stepped back with a carefully passive expression, the boy with a savage and vindictive grin. It was hard to say which was more disconcerting.

Zim got up from where they had watched this happen and walked over, giving Kimblee a friendly punch to the face on principle, as did Scar and Zuko. "Hey, did we win?" Zim heard someone yell; he looked over to the street leading into this plaza and saw everyone else finally caught up to them and spread through it, their various members responsible for restraining Kimblee. Aang was the one who had spoken, riding on Appa's head while the Mall Crawlers. Zim shrugged, and everyone came over to have a closer look.

"Hi," Zuko said to the others. He glared at Zim. "We had a good plan to kill that lunatic before you interrupted it."

"That was rude of you," Kimblee scoled Zim weakly. Scar gave him a good solid haymaker in the stomach. (In the exact spot where Hobbes had hit him, actually.) "Gah, with the internal bleeding!" Scar punched him some more. In the exact same spot.

"Isn't that like police brutality?" Calvin asked Scar with a frown, Hobbes also frowning.

Scar paused, blood on his knuckles. "It may be, but I am not a police officer." He resumed pummeling Kimblee.

"Hi," Abel said to them as he walked over, holding the animated armor in his hands. Strangely, it wasn't struggling at all; it looked like the forces animating it had been 'switched off', for a time. "We managed to get this thing worn down...I guess, but then the others here got Kimblee down and this guy just shut down and-"

"Bored now!" Zim complained, interrupting Abel in mid-sentence. He bent over and picked something up. "Hey, look what I found." He held up the Philosopher's Stone.

They stared intently at it, as did Zim. This little red crystal, the materialized form of over a hundred souls torn from their mortal shells, their very minds frayed and shredded from the dislocation, bound into a form reducing them to little more than metaphysical fuel, dying by inches to feed a madman's lust for destruction...

Zim shook it a bit. "Cool! It's like looking into a lava lamp!"

Calvin went to stop him. "Hey, quit it, that's just not right-" Zim shook it some more. "Hey, it _does _look like a lava lamp! Make the little bubbles move sideways!" Zim did. Both of them giggled madly. "So cool!" Hobbes facepalmed; even if he couldn't hear properly (though his hearing was clearing up) it was pretty obvious what was going on. Zuko scowled harshly. Scar was paying no attention, as he was still trying to beat up Kimblee. (Much to his disappointment, his attempts to blow Kimblee's head apart from the inside-out still had no effect. Then again, he was still targeting _human _components, and this particular body hadn't been strictly human to begin with, as Kevin could have explained.)

"Hey, check this out!" Zim said. "If you look at them like this, the little bubbles look like...um...they look like...yeah, they totally look like faces...does anyone else hear whispers and people talking and stuff?"

The Keyblade glowed, the chain wrapping around Zim's arm and the Stone.

The world shifted-

_Red, everything is red_

_No up, no down, no shape or form or anything sane, and faces everywhere, twisted and long and mad and screaming, screaming..._

_the sound hits him like the screws in fingers, burning oil in bone, and hurts like the echoes of everything wrong; hundreds of voices scream in unison, unknowing and confused and shredded, bit by bit by incautious bit_

_they are melding into each other, arms conjoined to neck and torso growing from misshapen heads and they scream with the pain of it, these soul-shapes that need their bodies back to live, that want so very badly not to die; the pain consumes them, overwhelms them, IS them and all they can do is scream and scream and scream-_

_wait. Not all of them._

_A green figure is moving in this typhoon of souls, a spark of emerald in this red nightmare catlike and quick and efficient, grabbing on limbs and slowly pulling them apart in unshaped masses that aches to look at, hurt and still crying but _apart _from the screaming and flashing GREEN-_

_The cat looks right at Zim (and he KNOWS he's there), a bundle of other green bodies clinging to him and Zim thinks he recognizes Bonnie Rockwaller and a host of others and before he can a word, the cat, Razor, turns back and resumes what he's doing._

_Zim feels _something _unexpected, a certain tension in the atmosphere that he can almost touch, that he can almost grasp, like the feeling of a lock in the process of turning, and he suddenly _knows _that he could push it the rest of the way if only he knew how-_

_He didn't know what to do. The screaming was going to drive him mad-_

Zim dropped the Stone. And Zim stood still, the Keyblade's chain falling away from his arm and the Stone, the latter glinting with the tiniest hint of green in all that baleful red, now very slightly brighter than before; like a beneficient flaw amid the vile redness. (Not that red was always bad.)

"What whispers and stuff?" Calvin said, as if less than seconds had passed. This was probably the case. "Oh, whatever. Hand over the Stone, let me see if I can figure out how to reverse whatever Kimblee did to make it-"

Kimblee suddenly looked straight at the animated armor, which suddenly burst out of Abel's hands, blasting off him in a spray of jet-fire and flying down to Kimblee, raising a hand and blasting Scar with a repulsor beam before he could turn around and flew to Kimblee-

There was a crashing noise and a great deal of dust; Zim fell back, coughing furiously and increasingly bewildered and getting angry because he was bewildered and his bewilderment deciding to bow back because being angry made more sense and so on before the dust cleared and now Kimblee was gone. "Where'd he go?"

A boot lightly kicked him in the back of the head. "Hello," Kimblee said, the robot tightly grabbing him from behind and holding him up so that they hovered in mid-air. They suddenly flipped up side down, so that Kimblee was at face level with Zim (and had to put a hand on his looted hat to keep it falling off.) "Mine," He said, grabbing the Philosopher's Stone out of Zim's hand and flying back out of range, holding the stone between his hands as he clapped and placing a hand on the armor's hands, pumping the Stone's energy directly into the Heartless directly inhabiting it. The metal of the armor twisted, bulged, horribly creaking noises coming from it as the anti-light powering it became almost blindingly bright and they both fell to the ground. Kimblee took several cautious steps back as the armor broke apart, literally coming apart at the seams as something inside it came _bursting _out-

Darkness erupted around them, a teeming writhing mess of dozens, hundreds of Heartless bound together and finally combined into a single amalgam, and it quickly took shape, or rather it took _anti-shape_, an apothesis of sanity-breaking predatory intent just barely defined by the demands of physicality. It could not last and it writhed in furious denial of reality's crushing pressure around it, feasting on the essence of the world around it as it manifested physicality and something _huge _emerged around Kimblee, looming up, up over the buildings, Kimblee standing smugly under it, summoning more of the Philosopher's Stone power to himself and conjuring up a set of large cannons around him that fired massive quantities of dust into the sky, held together by the unusual properties Kimblee had made in them and blocking out the sunlight.

And so, the Heartless manifested in full, an amorphous horror that made Zim suddenly think of half-glimpsed and half-remembered sights glimpsed only in faint memory, of that horrible moment between dying Earth and the relative safety of a random alley in Traverse Town's. For a moment longer it was ephermeral, and then it was a thousand shifting forms made for killing and feeding and enduring, all of them changing and bleeding into the next without pattern or reason. An conspiracy of nightmare forms changing with such speed that it was nearly formlessness, an almost _perfect _arrangement of tentacles and tooth-rimmed orifices and leathery wings and sharp beaks and scything limbs and chitinous plates and more, so many _more_, beyond the apparent limits of the 'normal' Heartless, and shrouded in the substance of the blackest night so that the sun only outlined it's horror for a moment and Zim just _knew _that it was looking right at him with over twenty-six eyes sliding out from places where eyes didn't belong.

"Ooh, a nightmare horror from fearful realms I dare not contemplate!" Calvin said excitedly. Hobbes, his hearing back by now, stared at him in mingled horror and exasperation. "I haven't seen one of those for a while...well, one I didn't summon accidentally-on-purpose, I mean."

The great horror reared back, a massive tooth-studded maw appearing from the murky depths of it's amorphous form. It opened wide, it's jaws elongating into a shape similar to a crocodile's (longer, so much so that if it had a endoskeletal structure under there it should have snapped by the weight of gravity on it's absurd mass) and it's insides boiled, entropic energies crackling and forming into a massive sphere of purple-black power.

The sphere rapidly expanded, bulging slightly outwards as it amassed strength. "They can use energy attacks!" Zim said indignantly. "Why did no one tell me that?"

"...You've _seen _them use energy attacks," Calvin told him while Zuko looked behind them and saw several individuals approaching.

"Well _clearly _I wasn't paying attention!" Zim snapped.

They prepared themselves as the energy sphere exploded outwards in a massive beam of black energy with streamers of red spiralling around it...and fortunately no effort was required on their part, because a massive chunk of the very same dome they had been trapped in earlier was thrown into the side of what could be considered it's face at the moment, hitting it just before it fired and knocking it off-course, and the beam fired harmlessly into the sky. (Disintegrating some of the airbourne nanomachines there, decreasing their overall computing power by a few decimels; nothing was lost, but they sent a message to everyone's various messaging accounts politely asking them to bring some scrap to the appropiate industrial recycling facilities to be remade into more nanomachines.)

While the Heartless was still reeling, and disgorging it's beam attack (as cutting off entirely would could potentially dangerous feedback to itself), a tremendous blast of fire -_ not _from Calvin, Zim, Zuko or Aang - flew overhead, singing a few hairs but otherwise doing no harm, and punched into Kimblee's general area with a impressive explosion, flooding the Heartless with the kind of elemental power it was particularily vulnerable to (any lingering resistence it might have retained from Red Nocturnes having been overwhelmed), still not doing much damage at all. The amalgamated Heartless pulled back nonetheless, confused and wary, and revealed Kimblee held safelty within what could be considered a hand.

A few dozen heads extended from the Heartless' heaving mass, fanged jaws opened wide, and lunged at Zim. There was a snapping sound, and a ring of fire rose up just in front of Zim like a shield, the offending heads ramming right into them and burning away into ashes before having a chance to realize what was happening.

Cyborg looked around to see what the commotion was. His jaw dropped. "You gotta be kidding me," he said, sounding downright awed.

"Huh?" Calvin looked around. "...Oh, it's you guys again."

"Didn't I leave you in abject mind-warped misery?" Kimblee said, blinking. "Or something like that?"

"I got better," said Roy Mustang, followed by Field-Admiral Gibbs, the two of them looking as badass as possible. Angilaka and Beth followed behind, waving at everyone (a few of Zim's older allies waving back uncertainly) while Greed, Shego and Deadpool were keeping a safe distance in case exploding started happening. "It's time you-" He stopped, his usual heroic declaration stopped short by the sight of the bizarre Heartless. Even by his odd standards, this was unusual. "...Huh. What the hell am I looking at?"

"No idea," Angilaka said.

"Never seen anything like it," Greed said.

"I did once," Shego said. "Back when the Doc thought it was a good idea to summon things from weird dimensions and get them to do his bidding with a good game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Not his dumbest move, weirdly enough..."

"Me too!" Deadpool said. "Though I may have been stoned off my gourd; I drank cactus juice on a dare, see?" (In the crowd, Sokka blinked in puzzled commiseration.)

"Not me," Beth said sheepishly. She looked into the crowd and waved at Courtney, who waved back. "What about you guys?"

"I don't know, we were just fighting a weird suit of posessed armor or something and it hatched out of it," Aang said. "...And it only sounds dumb now that I'm saying it, come to think of it."

"I think I saw something like this on my world once," Naruto volunteered. Gaara tilted his head, puzzled. "No, no, wait, that was a ox with octopus tails. Eight of 'em!" On a whim, he pulled out a knife and threw it at the Heartless; it got stuck in it's flesh, or whatever analouge it had, and was sucked in. A moment later, a number of tiny metal trinkets popped out of the same place and were expelled, landing near Naruto. Disturbingly, they looked like Naruto's face, screaming in agony. Carefully, Naruto edged slightly back. (In much the same way that a fox will before going for the throat.)

Just about everyone else said something along the lines of 'I don't know either'. "I don't know either sir," Gibbs said to Roy. "But..." He looked ominously at Kimblee, who had been waiting patiently for them to finish deliberating. (Sure, he'd killed tons of people and commited general acts of rudeness, but there was a thing as being _crass_, after all.) "I'm certain _he _knows. You!" Gibbs said to Kimblee, who perked up at the attention. The giant Heartless seemed slightly pleased that something was happening. "What the...what the hell is that thing?"

"Why should I tell you?" Kimblee said, sounding bored. Gibbes glared at him. Without knowing why, Kimblee started to sweat and he managed to say, "I don't actually know."

Gibbs' tone oozed sarcasm. "Really."

"Yes. I just wanted some Heartless to come down here and provide support, and what they did after that isn't something I had any direct control over. I expect _this_-" and here Kimblee gave a portion of the Heartless' bulk a brief pat. "Is the result of the Heartless' loosened constraints owing to the way I lured them to this plane of existence and their consumption of the residual energies of the Philosopher's Stone. I don't know it what it was doing with the armor, though."

"It killed someone, posessed the armor and used it to...I don't know, incubate itself," Angilaka said. "Just a guess, mind you."

"Ah, it's a Gestalt Heartless!" Zim said brightly.

"...A what?" Kimblee said.

"It is simple, yes? You lot like to give Heartless species...or whatever they are...you like to give them names, and since this one is a combination of many Heartless fused into a single thing, I'm calling it a 'Gestalt'."

"Okay, it's going on the register as that," Beth agreed, and her on-board computer made a system-wide memo to the Scribes on duty back at the Crossguard's base.

Kimblee rolled his eyes. "That's all well and good, but you all are giving a bit of a headache, so...goodbye and such." The Heartless, pleased to at long last fight, extended a series of insectile legs ending in scything claws, it's front transforming into a huge reptilian head. It opened it's jaws, starting to form _another _energy blast...

Shego took careful aim and fired a concussive blast that launched Kimblee directly into the Heartless, punching him through it's body and causing the Gestalt Heartless to peer down in bewilderment. (Danny felt that she was ripping off his 'green power blast' thing.) "Please _shut up_," Roy said, at the brink of exasperating, and snapped his fingers, creating a massive blast of fire that would have incinerated the entire neighborhood block if it hadn't been as specially controlled as only he could make it, focusing it into a narrow blast centered solely on Kimblee and his Heartless, flinging them into the sky and several streets over (and vaporizing the ground under them, but by this point that was rather expected). Appa, wary of fire, backed himself into the air and exhaled a blast of wind that punched kimblee another few dozen feet: getting into the idea, Zim and Zuko fired their own blasts of fire that Calvin and Aang amplified, Beth, Sokka, Courtney, Sam, Tucker and Deadpool fired at the airbourne alchemist (and Heartless) with far too much enthusiasm. Gibbs took carefully aim, generated a rocket launcher, and fired just once. Angilaka summoned up some holy power and fired a laser-like blast of light (while Hobbes watched, intrigued), Shego fired another blast with greater power than before. Toph tore a large chunk of the street off and flung it in the hopes of nailing Kimblee while Katara pulled some of the water she had on hand and fashioned it into blunt ice projectiles that she threw with even greater speed. Scar transmuted a giant siege crossbow from the ground and fired a single massive bolt. Cyborg brought both his arms together, combining them into a single large cannon and fired a blast of hyper-accelerated sonic energy (making sure Hobbes wasn't anywhere near him first). The Mall Crawlers fired their own projectile ones (those that were still functional, anyway). Also, Greed made a rude gesture at Kimblee. And Abel...raised his arms, remembered he didn't have any firearms right then, and slumped over in embarrasment.

Not all of these attacks hit, but enough of them did that Kimblee was hurled a good distance away, and at tremendous force. They waited patiently, and sure enough a painful-sounding crash answered them.

"Do you think that killed him?" Zim said to Roy, who he identified as the leader of the new back-up.

"No," Roy said flatly.

"I thought not. Do you think it _slowed him down_?"

"What do you think?" Roy said dryly.

"I dunno. Let's go see!" Zim said brightly. Roy nodded fiercely. Zim frowned and added, "Also, who are you guys? Rampaging fast food salesman bursting with civic pride?"

Gibbs said, "What."

Angilaka blinked. "Not too clear on the power in structure in town, is he?" she said to Abel.

"With all due respect, m'am," Abel said. "I don't think _we're _clear on the power structure in town."

"Fair enough."

"We're representatives and high-ranked members of the controlling factions of this town," Beth informed Zim. "Mr. Mustang - the guy with the gloves - and Mr. Gibbs, he's the one with the gun powers, are from the Peace Marines. Me, Angilaka, plus Abel and Mr. Scar, are from the Crossguard."

"Oh," Zim said, still not entirely clear on this since he had no idea who most of these people or their factions were, but decided he didn't really care that much. "Shouldn't we have gone to see if he's dead or not, and if he is not, to finish the job?"

"...I knew I was forgetting something," Roy admitted.

"Well, if it helps, that Scar guy has already run off," Calvin said, pointing at the advancing back of Scar in the distance. "Maybe we should catch up to him before he tries to kill Kimblee and does something drastic like, I don't know, transmuting himself into a bomb and blowing himself up to kill Kimblee? On the other hand, that _would _be awesomely ironic..." He paused, noticing that everyone was giving him disgusted looks. "Uh, that's what I would be saying if I really thought that. But I don't. Really!"

The now-larger group charged down the street, making sure they were on the right path by checking Calvin's device that served as a handy Kimblee-Tracking-Thing. "Have there been any casualties for you guys?" Roy said as they moved.

"No," Hobbes said, his hearing fully healed up by this point. (Provided he avoided any bad noises like a sonic cannon or something.) "But it's been close. First he made a giant dome that trapped us with the Heartless, not that it hindered us that much-"

"They are surprisingly flammable," Zim said fondly.

"I've noticed," Roy said dryly.

Hobbes continued. "After that, we managed to hold him down and try to fight him, but he keeps pulling out surprises. Like, uh, the Heartless we've seen today: they're a lot stronger than the ones we saw yesterday and...more distinctive, I guess. The ones that look like the 'species' we've heard about seem like they're constantly evolving, and the rest..I don't know, I think they're losing hold of their shapes, if that makes any sense."

"Soap bubbles," Angilaka said. "They're like bubbles being blown into the firmament of...ah, I'd guess you call it local sub-space strata. Like the background 'here-ness' of our slice of the multiverse. Probably making echoes in conjoined realities, I shouldn't wonder. The pressure of reality is pushing in on them, straining 'em and putting the squeeze on. Too much longer..." She clapped her hands. "Pop!"

"I guess that explains the types we've seen so far," Calvin said. "Simple, deadly forms based around basic themes. I was wondering why eldritch horrors forged from sapient hearts looked like they way these do; you'd expect each Heartless to be totally singular." He frowned. "I'd like to know what _established _those themes, though."

"As would I," Scar said, who had seen them coming and had bowed to the inevitable, waiting patiently for them to catch up. "Be careful! Kimblee is in the area, I'm certain, but he is not in the open."

He pointed as everyone caught up; this was a wide-open area on a bridge set over a small recreational lake that served as an very well maintained swimmin pool and incidentally stood ready as a presentation of Traverse Town's enthusiasm for doing entirely pointless but aesthetically pleasing things (that, scholars were quick to discover, _always _maximized the local geomantic currents even if the architects didn't know about it). The bridge itself (empty of all previous residents thanks to the hurried fears of getting caught up in a fight) hosted a number of small buildings, mostly card shops, meal vending shacks and the similar, though there were a number of depectively ramshackle-looking buildings (quite sturdy, the architects just liked the look); a fortunately disused warehouse had been totally flattened by Kimblee's arrival into the area, and of course Kimblee was nowhere to be seen.

Everyone warily stepped into the area, outside of where they made preparations to fight. "Be cautious," Scar advised them. "I don't think he demonstrated this power to you in his last encounter, but-"

"He's a shapeshifter now," Roy said. "He gets green energy similar to what the Tennyson kid does and partially transforms. There doesn't seem to be any applicable limit to what he can change into; best course of action is to catch him by surprise, or failing that, distract him so that someone else can catch him by surprise." Scar raised his eyebrows. "I told you, fought him earlier. It didn't go well."

"Shapeshifting and green energy, you say?" Calvin repeated, looking at his device with dawning realization. "...Hang on a minute...no way can that be, but...oh _man_, I wish I figured this out earlier..."

No one was listening. "I don't think I like the look of that," Abel said, pointing at the sky. "He's made some kind of dust barrier, blocks out the sunlight. Filthy rot. He thought this through."

Zim looked around warily, half-hoping that Kimblee would be lying on the ground where no one had seen him and tremendously dizzy enough for a quick apprehending with no more fuss; he didn't see anything that nice, of course, though he did notice a large hole in the building just in front of the one where Kimblee had crashed. From the lacerated edges and..._unusual _shape of the hole, he supposed it had been made by that bizarre Heartless Kimblee had made. (He was going to have to ask why no one had told them they could do that. Unless no one had _known _they could do that.)

"We should spread out," He said after a moment. "If we stay too close together, he could kill us all with one hit."

He heard a clapping sound from behind him. "That's right," Kimblee said, his tone flat and cold. The Gestalt Heartless towered over him, a dozen jaws opened in it's body and each one powering up an attack. "I could."

Roy whirled around, fingers already moving. "Oh _sh_-"

This time Kimblee and his Heartless moved faster, and fired their respective explosive and beam attacks before their enemies could stop them, or worse, retaliate in greater measure.

There was a extremely loud noise, and a brilliant light, washed out by a greater darkness; the area basically imploded under the onslaught of life energy-fueled alchemic reactions and the power of hundreds of Heartless fired as individual attacks.

Kimblee waited for the dust to finish falling, and the first thing that happened was an agonizingly loud and slow creaking noise; he turned his head and saw the bridge built over the artificial lake gradually topple, the front part of it shattered into ugly chunks. It held for a moment, and Kimblee gave the architects of the town their due for making suspension that could hold itself against the twin threats of the sqaure-cube law and gravity, not to mention it's own mass. Even the bridge was fairly small, it still made a amazingly loud noise when it inevitably shattered and smashed into the lake below, splintering on impact and bits of metal and stone flying up in a small ground-level cloud, and then down.

If anyone survived this day, Kimblee thought, they were going to dispise the clean-up they were going to deal with. _Unless they liked that sort of thing,_ Kevin said, not sound like he really believed it. Kimblee found it annoying but not really surprising that Kevin found this thought more important than the possibility that the enemy was alive or not.

Kimblee looked over what remained of the area; all but a few buildings had been totally shattered, their component parts scattered over an open place covered in collapsed (and cheap) wooden shacks and simple tents previously belonging to the vendors and shopkeepers that had vacated the area. The remaining buildings were either _mostly _destroyed or only partially wrecked, the hollowed-out image of their ruin pleasing to Kimblee's sense of aesthetics. (There _was _a totally intact watchtower, though. Peturbed at it and feeling it was mocking him, Kimblee blew it up. Fortunately, no one was inside it, but it was still mean of him.) What remained of the charmingly old-fashioned cobblestone ground was shattered into dangerously jagged shards or simple dust totally unrecognizable for what it had been. Secondary shockwaves from the combined attacks had torn large holes open here and there, and a sign post had fallen into one much as the bridge had. He could see no one, and while he didn't see any bodies or gory remnants, it wasn't impossible that the remains were simply buried under the rubble.

The logical conclusion was that they had been totally obliterated. It was so obviously ridiculous that _anyone _could have survived those blasts. So _very _ridiculous, Kimblee thought. So, naturally, he sighed dramatically (unable to repress a grin, though) and said, "Well, come on then. I know you're still there."

The air directly in front of him shimmered strangely. "Hrm?" Kimblee said. The Gestalt Heartless (he resented himself for using that obnoxious alien's name for it, but it had stuck in his mind) leaned forward, several small figures dripping off it's body and reabsorbed into it's main mass. Kimblee peered carefully; he thought the air seemed unusually green-ish.

And then a big blast of green energy exploded at him from mid-air, catching him in the stomach and knocking him off his feet. While he fell, the Gestalt Heartless extruded a large arm with a faint resemblence to humanoid musculature and caught him at Kimblee's mental command (as on it's own, it was unlikely the Heartless would have shown any concern, or even any interest in Kimblee's well-being) and sped away on a pair of enormous wings it grew for this purpose.

The air shimmered some more, and then Zim and his allies faded into view, a good many of them shivering and glistening emerald-colored ectoplasmic energy. Danny was the last to show up, ghostly green energy expanding from him to encompass everyone and flickering out as they rematerialized properly. "It's funny, y'know," He said weakly. "Me and a whole lotta ghosts once phased a freaking _METEOR _through the planet, and yet that was nowhere near as exhausting as phasing you guys through that attack."

"Maybe it's like the difference between having a lot of help to do something, and then having to do this all by yourself," Hobbes said helpfully. Calvin rubbed some of the frost that Danny's high-level uses of power tended to generate off his arms, trying to pin this moment in his mind for a later time when he could analyze it properly.

"What just happened?" Beth squeaked, shivering and shuddering, small icicles hanging off the larger plates on her powered armor.

"He phased all of us so none of us got hit by those blasts!" Sam Manson said proudly. Danny smiled faintly. "Looks like there's some side effects, but you get used to it."

"When!" Courtney, even _more _encrusted with frost (to a larger degree than anyone else besides the Mall Crawlers who had been nearly frozen and had gone unconscious; Zim, Zuko and the rest of Team Avatar were totally unaffected, Calvin and Hobbes looked like they had walked through a fog, Scar was only a bit damp, and everyone else had frosting problems to various lesser degrees). "I'm starting to regret inserting myself into the story like this..."

"Yes, that's very unprofessional for a reporter...anchor...whatever your job is," Zim commented. Courtney grumbled furiously under her breath.

Any further conversation was rightfully halted when Zim (as well as the more astute people there, such as Hobbes or the more long-time residents of Traverse Town) detected movement, and saw the Gestalt Heartless taking flight overhead. They got ready to flee and retaliate once it attacked, but it was unneccesary, as it simply dove down at them, dematerializing upon impact with the ground and leaving Kimblee to nearly slam into a building, transmuting a cushioning balcony from it. Once more he transmuted an explosive blast, but much weaker than before so that it only buffeted and dazed them. This was Kimblee's intention, as he was starting to believe that there were outside forces explicitly preventing him from outright killing them all at once; deciding that it might be safer to simply seperate them and eliminate them one by one, he jumped to the ground and transmuted a number of stony fists from it that knocked just about everyone in different directions and scattering them over the area, with a few exceptions: Hobbes split the fist coming at him with a single blow and dived to the Mall Crawlers, grabbing the unconscious teenagers and hurredly dragging them away before they could be blasted; Gaara's sand shield ground up the bludgeon that came at him; Angilaka was too big to be thrown like the others and was merely knocked head over heels; and finally Aang just dodged it, fast like he was made of air, broke it with a kick and sent it flying at Kimblee, who merely transformed the on-coming projectile into a cloud of dust that he summarily transmuted into a number of projectiles he sent back at Aang. Zim, nearly knocked through a wall, managed a small fireball that knocked Kimblee off-balance, and opened him up to further counterattacks by those still standing.

"This is going less well than I envisioned," Zim said to Calvin, who had landed next to him, as Aang, Gaara, Angilaka and Hobbes pressed their brief advantage against Kimblee. (Unsurprisingly, this involved them harrying him until he tried to blow them up without blowing _himself _up.)

"Would you prefer him still rampaging around town and us not knowing where he is?" Calvin said reasonably.

"No, I think not," Zim said.

"Glad to hear. Think you can get the other guys to distract him? I sort of have a plan."

"Oh? What sort of plan?" Zim asked. Calvin told him. "...Hrm. I suppose it could work."

"Could what work?" Roy yelled, stumbled over to them and transmuting a large barrier out of the ground. It wouldn't last long, but that was still time spent not being killed.

"Can you think of anything that will distract him long enough for me to exploit a potential weakness?" Calvin said.

Roy paused. "I have just an idea."

There was an exploding noise, and Hobbes flew overhead and crashed into a wall, bouncing off with little apparent harm. "Thanks for the love, ladies and gentlebeasts, I'm here till Thursday!" Hobbes said dazedly. "Tip your waitress, they work hard and have pretty hair-decs."

"Just in time, too," Roy said. He leaned over his barrier and yelled, "KIMBLEE! A question, for a moment."

Kimblee, busily trying to blast through Gaara's shield and annoyed that he was having little success (owing to his limited amount of power he could use without potentially getting himself killed) while the red-haired ninja just stood there and waited for that tinest moment of weakness to happen, said, "Yes? Hold on a moment, will you?" He transmuted a cube around Gaara from the ground, severed it at the base (not hurting Gaara) and knocked it away with a contemptuous gesture. "What is it, man?"

"Where's Jarod?" Roy yelled. Zim started at the name. "You abducted him after your fight with us and you don't have him with you, so where is he?"

"Hrm," Kimblee said thoughtfully, ignoring Danny and Shego's attempts to punch through a barrier he had made with their respective energy attacks. "An excellent question. And the answer is...well, I don't have the theoretical knowledge to answer your question properly, but suffice to say that he is alive and whole. Not _safe_, certainly, but presently alive."

"...Okay," Roy said, not sure that answered anything. He looked around and saw that Calvin was gone, but not attacking Kimblee. Trying to buy more time, he said, "Where is that Heartless of yours! How did you make that thing?"

"I didn't, Kimblee said. Appa roared, lunging at him from behind, and Kimblee dismissisvely blasted him into the side of a building. Appa stumbled out, not much hurt, but still weakened. "It chose this form on it's own. Well, not _chose_, I'm not certain that Heartless think like that, but they did seem to follow some sort of basic instinct. Perhaps all Heartless become part of a massive core consciousness in their native realm, and appearing here temporarily divorces them from it?"

"I don't suppose you'd tell us about how you know that? Information about the Heartless, where they come from and such?" Zim said. "A true scientist should share knowledge when asked!"

"I wouldn't call myself a scientist, exactly...not like you would, I should say. But, since you ask, my...'associates' have come to the conclusion that of all the elements and materials and substances in all the worlds, the closest terrestial equivalent to the darkness you see here...such as the darkness that the Heartless embody, or that of the Negative Energy Plane...is _acid_. Vitriolic fluid in general. It makes a great deal of sense if you think about it; it moves and flows, unending and in such great variety! It wears through everything that opposes it, melting all opposition and destroying all that it meets! And what is left of what it attacks...is pure. Strong. The callow exteriors destroyed and made ready for the beginings of perfection."

'Acid?' Zim thought. He frowned, thinking about it.

Patiently ignoring how most of them were either busy just staying conscious from the beating he was dealing out (and in a few cases, hating him so hard they weren't paying attention to a word he was saying), Kimblee continued. "And within the damaged survivors of this glorified refugee camp that you call a town - even though it's _quite _big enough to be a city, you really out to get your nomenclature straightened out - there exist so very many who have been _touched _by the darkness in some fashion or another. Survivors of the Heartless' raids on worlds, the last remnants of some civilization or another, or else simply victims of various atrocities. The nature of this darkness is to eat away at the barriers you have constructed, the scars you've made around these inner wounds..and then eat it's way inside you. And then just melt away and away and away..."

He chuckled. "You all are...so sad. This town is pitable. A great mass of chaos and anarchy and little else. Wounded stragglers and mad-things, lumped together and so obsessively determined to survive, and for what purpose? There is none. Inevitably it will all fall apart, be reduced to nothing, and-"

There was the noise of transmutation, of stone being changed and reshaped, and then the blast of a cannon shell being fired right at Kimblee and hitting him dead-on.

The blast was like a slap to the face for most of them, and so very many of those teetering on the edge of collapse woke up. "Oh, godammit, will you just _SHUT UP ALREADY?_" Calvin yelled, standing behind the overly ornate cannon he had transmuted. He didn't have the hammer from before, and his gauntlets didn't seem to be presently active. But now, around his wrists, were four interlocking bracelet-shaped devices crackling with power, spinning slightly in place and appearing to be more devices he kept in his belt pockets. "You talk and you preach and you never shut up with these stupid talking evil lectures!"

Kimblee, sprawled on the street after bouncing off a few times, got back up, his body deformed and swelled into an armor-plated thing he had transformed into to take the blast. "What-" Another cannon shell fired and hit him in the chest; his armor was thick enough that he wasn't torn into pieces, but the shrapnel cut him up terribly.

"First it was Mr. Lyle and the Rambling All-Knowing Litanity of Ambigiousness," Calvin said. "Now you, with your stupid inability to just _fight _and get beaten without pausing every six and a half seconds to ramble at us like some...idiot evil guy who can't stop talking. Shut up, I can't make good insults at this time of the morning."

"That's-" Kimblee started to say, and this time Calvin shot a blast of fire at him from his fire device.

"I told you to stop talking!" Calvin yelled over Kimblee's screams. "Mr. Lyle, now you, and I bet that giant armor Heartless we fought was probably _thinking _dumb evil lectures at us. What is with bad guys and trying to demoralize the good guys with evil speeches anyway? Do they actually _think _that a few well-chosen lines are going to really change the minds of people crazy enough to charge into evil strongholds for the Greater Good? Don't answer that, I'm sick of you continuing to breath. Also, hold still."

Kimblee noticed that Calvin was now in front of him and holding something, adjusting a few dials or gauges. "What-"

Calvin shoved the device up onto Kimblee's chest and pressed a small button: several large panels opened, several lense-tipped things screwing out and lightly touching Kimblee's flesh. There were a few beeping noises as it powered up, and on the last one the device flashed green, just once, and Kimblee screaming in mingled surprise and pain - another voice screaming in unison, with pain and elation -and a torrent of green energies poured from him, for the briefest of moments an emerald aura that almost totally obscured him from sight before quickly dimming to a translucent banner around Kimblee. Calvin's device continued to exert it's unexpected suctioning effect, the green dimming further into a rather pretty array of green threadlike patterns flowing away from Kimblee and into the device, bright and luminous and beautiful in the staggering complexity of it all; a thousand threads and more, each one the DNA sequences of a different alien race, all coming together as a single flood of energy that the device sucked up and routed into secret neutrality-attuned reservoirs, analyzing each one and compartmentalizing each new source of evolutionary data-

There was a final burst of green; Kimblee's scream wavered to a startled gasp and he slumped over, shivering slightly. The green disappeared into Calvin's device and with an apparent effort Calvin shoved it off Kimblee (and giving him a kick that sent him sprawling on the ground) "Chalk this up as a victory," Calvin said proudly. "A victory...for _Science!_"

"Yay, Science!" Zim yelled. He got a round of weird looks. "What, no one else was inspired?" Zuko clapped very sarcastically; Hobbes did too, but more earnestly so.

Some of the others got into it. "Science!" Beth said, holding her arms up. Her robot suit hopped a little bit.

"Um...yay, science?" Sokka said uncertainly, cautiously raising a fist.

"For science, yo," Abel said, giving Sokka's fist a light tap with his own fist. Sokka looked at him with a weird expression and carefully backed away. "...Shizzel. Yo."

Scar smacked Abel in the back of the head. "If you ever try to talk 'street' again, I will do something unspeakably horrible to you!"

"Like what?" Abel asked. Scar told him. It was so horrible the idea of it erased itself from their minds. (Except Toph, who thought it sounded pretty awesome. Kimblee, for his part thought it too excessive.) "Geez, you have a problem with overreaction."

"What...did you do...?" Kimblee gasped.

"In technical terms? I have absolutely no idea," Calvin said proudly. "Finding out is part of the scientific endeavor. I think I can wager a guess that my little device here has been tracking you all this time by sucking up the latent bits of energy you had in you; it was doing in such small quantities that it was effectively 'tracking' you and pinpointing your location through the highest concentration of that particular energy source, so all I had to do was amp up the 'suction' and rip the energies right out of you!" Calvin smirked. "I have no idea _why _I built a device to do that in my sleep, or how it would wind up being so mind-bogglingly useful in this extremely specific situation, but I'm not gonan complain. Since now, you've been brought down to normal, stripped of all your power!...Except for your undoubtedly formidable alchemic knowledge. And the transmutation circles on your hands. And the Philosopher's Stone. And...okay, you're still kind of a badass, but at least you're not changing shape anymore. That is totally a victory. Even though you're not exactly defeated yet. Yeah."

"You actually did something with your primitive devices that didn't nearly blow us up?" Zim said, astonished. "And seriously hampered our foe? _You're actually halfway competent?_"

"Yep!" Calvin said. He frowne. "Wait, what do you mean 'primitive'? And, uh, competent."

"...Victory?" Kimblee repeated, trying to ignore the frenzied screaming in his head and Kevin's tentative grip over this body fading away. Something in his body's structure snapped back into place, feeling solidly human again. "I think not. You forgot something, you see."

"Yeah, my assistants say that all the time," Calvin remarked.

"In this case," Kimblee continue, ignoring him. "You forgot the Heartless I summoned. And more importantly, you forgot that I very much like having back-up plans."

"How could we forgot? Most of us don't know who you actually are," Zim said reasonably. "And the one guy here who _does _know you doesn't know you personally." Scar nodded in agreement.

"...Oh, just shut up," Kimblee snapped and his shadow (or more accurately, the Gestalt Heartless that had been hiding in his shadow until a moment such as this) surged up and smashed back down in a large blast of dark energy, throwing them head over heels and tossing every last one of them back; by sheer dumb luck, Hobbes managed to catch a lamppost and hang on for dear life, catching Zim's screaming form with one hand and wincing with the effort of catching Calvin when he came flying by. Zuko had the more dubious fortune of being smacked into a rock (and then Beth, Angilaka and some other heavy things crashed into him), but at least he didn't go flying through windows and over buildings and into alleyways and even into a pothole going underground (in Abel's case).

The Gestalt Heartless, fully formed again, moved away from Kimblee, and still the darkness stormed from Kimblee's shadow, now grown impossibly big, as though it was cast by a giant thing. "WHAT'S GOING ON!" Zim yelled incredulously as the incredibly discomfiting sensation of pure negative energy blew through them at such for that had Hobbes let go, they would have smashed into walls; it was like being caught in smog propelled at tornado-force winds.

"I don't know!" Calvin said. He peered, blinking furiously with the grit getting into his eyes. "Wait, I see something there...he's got something in those shadows!"

Kimblee smiled serenely as something stirred around him; something with the feel of general big-ness. "All cards on the table!" He said jovially. "My life against your's! My powers and that of hundreds of stolen lives against the might you can summon! The will of those I serve, set against your resolve to live! See what I have assembled with my power. See...the _Eternal Night_."

He closed his eyes, the Gestalt Heartless looking on, and the darkness flooded from around the area and down to him, condensing around him into shapes that looked almost...mechanical. Thus the winds stopped and Hobbes, Zim and Calvin fell painfully to the ground, right on Hobbes. "Ow," Hobbes said.

"What is with this guy and his surprises?" Calvin said. He took notice of Kimblee now. "Uh. Guys?"

"Yeah?" Zim said.

"Remember when I said I totally had Kimblee figured out?"

"Yes?" Abel said from the hole he had crawled out of.

Calvin pointed. Kimblee's shadow had spread out to the size of something..._big_, bulky and almost humanoid. And something was shaping itself around him, like an unholy engine forcing itself into the world with the power of a thousand madmen's horrors dreaming it into existence. "Well, that? I have _no _idea what he's doing. But I'd probably describe it with unneccesarily florid language."

"Ah," Zuko said flatly as several spine-like forms extended out of the darkness, wrapping around Kimblee like a harness, melting and solidifying into a secure position. They rose him up, and more of that strangely liquid darkness surged up and crystallized around him like a monstrous cocoon; the darkness spread out, and out, and _out_, like the shadow cast by a brutish giant...

Or, Zim thought as he recognized the inhumanly angular, artificial contours of that shadow, a giant _robot_.

Something smashed up from the depths of that darkness, tearing up the ground as it appeared; Zim saw metal gleaming under the living shadows spun everywhere like webs, and two bulky spiked shapes towered up over Kimblee, tentacle-like forms rising up and bigger than some trains Zim had seen...

They rose up, carrying Kimblee up on a chaotic stream that more metal shapes conjealed out of like a crude skeleton. The ground cracked and more metal cut Kimblee from sight momentarily; Zim, too stunned to move, thought that Kimblee had summoned some kind of bizarre shell to protect himself, an armor-body to do his fighting for him...

It rose up - no, Zim realized, it _stood _up, enormous and vaugely saurian legs materializing as a deadly mechanical form assembled itself from shadow and furious red light. Much of that darkness slid away, revealing the awful shape for what it was: a colossal piloted robot, looming over them, it's body composed of ferociously demonic black metal or liquid-form darkness streaming around it like blood from a gaping wound in the fabric of reality itself, and every of it's mechanical portions was jagged or sharp or otherwise shaped in such a way to indicate that it was designed to kill, to _destroy, _to _end_. The bulky shapes Zim had assumed to be shells revealed themselves as enormous shoudlers, and between them was a demonic helmet with a face like a mouthful of fangs (and, oddly, _actual _fangs behind them) and an expression of such rage and savagery that even Scar thought it looked a bit excessively vindictive. Another set of jaws yawned in it's belly in what presumably this magitech monstrosity's cockpit, with Kimblee suspended in it and the Philosopher's Stone hovering tauntingly over his chest, moored by ropy black filaments.

And, his body half-visible in the teeming blackness but otherwise totally visible, was Jarod, unconscious and tendrils winding into his body at uncomfortable angles. "Hey, I think I know what happened to Jarod," Deadpool said unneccesarily. "...Kimblee _cloned _him and is using the clones as big girl-bait batteries!"

"Makes sense to me," Zim agreed. Behind him, Calvin facepalmed; considering that he still had a modified radio, an energy-absorbing device _and _was wearing several clunky wonders of super-science on his arms, it hurt his face a fair bit.

The rest of the thing Kimblee was conjuring up appeared, darkness blasting out of it with such force that a few damaged buildings crumbled, unable to resist the pull of the raw entropy that this thing radiated as it hunched over, still so big that the back-bent knees of it's legs where higher than the rooftops of some of the smaller buildings. It shifted about a few times, as if testing itself for cricks or unexpected problems in it's manufacture and found itself suitable; possibly related to this, a number of weapons slid out from the howling blackness of it's upper torso, all sized for it's gigantic scale: gatling guns, rocket launchers, flamethrows, chainswords, building-sized flamethrowers, explosives-tossing chutes, energy gatling guns and more that Zim missed because he blinked and they were already being switched out for other weapons like it was examining it's options and found them all suitable.

"...Huh," Calvin said with deceptive calm. "That thing looks pretty cool! I cannot _wait _to break that thing and reverse-engineer it! I could go to the store with giant robot legs and not have to wait in line or get any needless excercise."

Hobbes face-palmed. "Well, shoot, I'm the only sane man in a mental asylum!" He paused, horrified. "Or...since I'm totally unlike them...does that make me the _crazy _one!"

The Mall Crawlers finally woke up, their armors repowering up and breaking off the icing from Danny's earlier phasing trick. They looked up, stared in horror, and immediately fainted. "Yo," Deadpool said, wandering over from the building he'd smashed through. "Turns out my teleporting gadget's all busted up and I would have been here sooner but _WHOA, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?_"

"A giant robot made of evil," Hobbes said.

"...Huh. Two giant robot fights in one day. And me without my robot!"

"You mean my robot!" Greed said from in front of Deadpool, staring up at it with horror and quiet resignation.

Everyone else appeared. Normally, this would have been the moment for them to gather together, but they were too stunned by the sudden machine-titan to do that. (And packing together when the enemy could take you all out in a single shot was just _stupid_, as had been pointed out previously.)

"...Well, _crap_," Roy said grumpily. "Is that parts of the Juggernaut in there?"

"There is," Gibbs said. "Wasn't killing it _once _bad enough?"

"That is SO COOL!" Calvin squealed like a fan boy. Gibbs dope-slapped the back of his head. "Also, it's about to kill us. That's bad."

"...I want one of those," Sokka said, after a moment, rounding the corner with the rest of his group behind. "That would be so awesome."

"So awesome," Aang agreed. He frowned and shivered. "That thing doesn't feel right..."

"Eh, I don't see what the big deal is. It's made of metal, it's gonna break," Toph said, though she didn't sound too confident.

"What's with people and giant robots these days?" Katara said faintly. "...Then again, when we get back, we should tell Teo and his dad to make things like that...it might help even out the problems between benders and everyone else."

"That might mesh pretty well with Aang and mine's idea to make an international city," Zuko stated.

Scar stared sullenly at Kimblee and his giant robot. "...What."

"Oh, come on!" Abel said incredulously. "What stupid trick is that hardcase gonna pull next? Summon _another _giant monster, one that eats worlds and spits hellscapes? Chain the three most powerful dead souls of the netherhells to himself and channel their powers? Steal Death's scythe to unmake the concept of his capacity to be defeated? _Get a restraining order?_"

Naruto stared at the robot. "...I thought _we _had the cornerstone on giant monsters made of evil," He said to Gaara off-handedly.

Gaara crossed his arms. "They're in the public domain, it appears."

Danny and his friends stared in horror. "I thought I was _done _with giant robots that defy the laws of physics," Courtney said faintly, self-consciously rubbing her right shoulder; in the rigors of battle, her sleeves had torn away to reveal a tattoo resembling a stylized flaming skull wearing nice sunglasses. It was quite unusual for a girl like her to have such a tattoo

Beth smiled at her. "Things like that keep catching up, don't they?" She said quietly. Courtney nodded solemnly.

"Well, this is gonna suck," Angilaka said flatly.

"No big deal," Cyborg said reassuringly, trying to hide how terrified he was...and how much he was looking forward to a good old-fashioned all-out royal battle with a rampaging machine-monster like this. (And hopefully soon his back-up would show up.)

"Gentlemen! And ladies," Kimblee said dramatically. "BEHOLD! This mighty machine-demon, forged from the broken remnants of a war-machine built to make war and Greed's own war-machine, infused with the power of the emmisaries of Oblivion. It walks now, walks to _END _you-"

"MY ROBOT!" Greed howled.

"...Er, yes, it was made with that robot of your's. Now, where was I...yes, it walks to _END _you and everything around us. It-"

"ROBOT!" Greed screamed.

"Yes, fine, I got it, you want your robot back, I should hope you had it insured for the highly specific and obscure sorts of damages combining mechas no doubt incur. Please let me finish. Now, it-"

"_ROBOT!_" Greed shrieked, and fell to the ground, sobbing inconsolably. "My precious badass mech. Gone forever."

"There there, boss-man," Shego said, awkwardly patting Greed on the shoulder. "There'll be other giant robots."

"But this one was special," Greed said through his sobs. "It looked like me and had all my powers, but in robot form! Even my devillishly good looks. ESPICIALLY my devillish good looks! And now he's stolen it and made an evil robot with it! My favorite giant robot has been used to bolster a evil robot; _that's just wrong!_"

"Erm," Kimblee said awkwardly, starting to wonder when he'd lost control of the situation. (He _was _a mighty alchemist armed with the Philosopher's Stone and currently piloted a giant robot just percolating with the might of Oblivion. People not paying attention to him did not mesh with the basic premise.) "Ah! You see the situation. Greed's unstoppable armored battle machine, combined with the destructive power of the Juggernaut and bringing forth such bloodshed to fill a _GOD _to satisfaction!"

He got a full round of alarmed looks. He smiled cheerfully; he was getting attention now. The only thing odd was a faint itch on his lip. A passing tendril wiped it away, and Kimblee was surprised to see that it was a bright red drop, too clear and gel-like to be blood. Ignoring a faint feeling of trepidation, he dismissed it and continued. "When it walks, the sun dies. Where it's fists fall, the world screams in torment. Where it's weapons fire, _THE UNCOUNTED MANY DIE! _Where it's song is heard, _YOUR MEANINGLESS EXISTENCES WILL JOIN IT'S CHORUS AND FALL DEAD! _In it's shadow, this world will find the essence of destruction made physical, and the day fall away forever! This is the Eternal Night! This is my final chorus! This will be my finest revery of the Symphony of Destruction! It's name is the Eternal Night, is _Umbra Eternis!_

"It's purpose...is to _THROTTLE THE HEAVENS! AND IT WILL END YOU ALL._"

There was a long pause. Kimblee waited expectantly.

"That name sucks," Zim said. "Far too melodramatic."

"I kinda liked it," Hobbes said. "It's catchy."

"I stopped listening a while ago," Calvin admitted. "Did he say anything that could be construed as possible weaknesses?"

"No," Zuko said.

"No great loss, then."

"You need to take lessons in self-narration," Zuko remarked to Kimblee. "You fail at it."

"YOU SUCK!" A chorus of voices sang from the remainder.

"Why do you keep getting the crazy ones?" Abel asked Scar with a remarkable lack of self-awareness.

Scar sighed. "I honestly don't know."

"Well, that's enough pre-battle banter," Kimblee said decisively. "Now FIGHT!"

"That's my line!" Zim said, Keyblade drawn, and showing not a trace of fear. "Not only are you a mass-murdering sociopath with bad taste in jokes...you're a plaguerist!"

Umbra Eternis charged and the Gestalt Heartless proved back-up, weapons unfurling and firing in unison just as the fighters who'd been charging their own attacks fired back.

The resulting explosion wiped out every building (except, fortunately, the news studio because they were too far away from it now) for the next two and a half miles, and the sound could be heard from farther out.

And they _still _didn't get hit by it. Kimblee was annoyed by that, espicially since the Gestalt Heartless was the one that took most of the damage.

...

In one of the busier parts of the district, the Heartless problem was being dealt with, in spite of Kimblee's intention to basically kill everything. In the area just around Cyborg's shop and place of residence, for instance, all but a single woman remained to fight the Heartless, everyone else there either fled, wrapped up in other fights elsewhere, injured, or worse.

But there were no deaths. That single woman was enough to keep those people alive. (Which was delaying Cyborg's called-for back-up, of course.)

"C'MON IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH!" Winry Rockbell screamed from atop a compact bird-like walking mech, twin energy gatling guns over it firing fourteen beams of stone-melting chambered plasma per second. She was a tall and muscular Caucasian woman in her late teens if not old enough to be in college, her long blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail and a tastelessly colorful bandana tied over her forehead; her taste in gaudy colors was thankfully understated in her choice of clothing, all of which suitable for working with machines; a loosely-fitting and cool set of earth-toned mechanic's overalls (protecting her from wayward shocks or flying bits and it was easy to clean too), the bib hanging down and unstrapped, with a matching set of metal-toed boots (it would not do to have something heavy fall on her feet without protection) and heavy gloves (like the above, but more integral to her work) and a short-sleeved light red shirt hanging off her front in loose folds with a small winged crown on the shoulder (because mechanics was _hot work_ and she liked to let her skin breathe). Perhaps not incidentally, given her slightly vain regard of herself, this outfit also showed off her curves, and strong muscles honed from years of intensive work with machinery stood rigid as she squeezed volleys of shots, one after another with only minimal pauses to keep the guns from overheating to dangerous levels; those guns were ridiculously big, and the triggers were nearly as big as her fists. Keeping them pressed down was starting to make her back hurt, but mere bodily complaints were no match to her fierce desire to see Heartless just _die_.

One particularily deft Heartless (not dissimilar from the Flayfeathers Aang had faced, actually) had been watching carefully as Winry had fired, and when the gatling barrels stopped rotating, the person-sized guns cooling down as mysterious mechanical processes occured inside, it dove down, claws spread wide as it gracefully swooped down on Winry's unwary back...

She wasn't as unwary as she looked. She turned, a murderous look in her blue eyes and she punched it so hard her fist broke the surface tension of it's body (the engagement ring she wore under her glove adding a painfully sharp edge to her punch); mildly acidic goo splattered everywhere and the Heartless retreated warily, not actually hurt, while Winry hurredly shook the gunk off when she saw it hit the metal under her and start _sizzling_.

She grabbed the twin multi-purpose control handles extending out of the interface in front of her and squeezed the triggers, and that was all. There was no other input on her part, no further manipulation of mechanical processes, no other interaction that would send commands or otherwise operate the mech, but those controlls were sufficient by themselves. and the mech stepped foward in a deceptively awkward gait, the boxy main body of the mecha bearing the slightly raised cockpit covered by a partly transparent and abstract design that sort of looked like a face on the front. (But only if you looked with your head tilted and eyes squinted.) A set of thick jointless limbs or tendrils extended from the sides of this 'face', their tips capped with a complex arrays of manipulators shaped like the petals of a flower.

One of those tendrils were wrapped protectively around (and safely holding up) several canister-shaped public shelters containing a collectively small group of people that were nonetheless finding it quite crowded, not to mention uncomfortable being jostled around like that. Most of these people were seriously injured in some fashion, a few were hunkered down and whispering hushed apologies to long-dead people, at least one small boy had curled up into a tiny ball and was sobbing inconsolately while black spider-like forms crawled from the edges of the darkness under him whenever he moved only to be squashed underfoot by the terrified others. (The presence of the Heartless did weird stuff, generally speaking.) All of these people were, in one way or another, incapicated and unable to fight effectively, causing the present situation.

"Hang on, you guys!" Winry barked, her voice distorted and tinny through a loudspeaker, and the tendril curled over them while a flamethrower bolted to the side of her mech sprayed liquid fire, pivoted on a revolving joints, the cascade of flame spraying right into the Heartless; a few fell away and on fire, the others retreating to the shadows, dancing and lurking just out of view, waiting for their oppertunity. As soon as they had moved away, though, the cockpit opened while the mech stepped back, stopping just short of Cyborg's shop, and the tendril gingerly deposited the shelters inside the mecha, where they would hopefully be slightly safer.

"Hooray," A satyr rock musician said vaugely. "We're alive?"

"Yes," A hulkish and dragonish humanoid (a Dragonborn, actually) confirmed, wiggling her arms in shellshocked (and not totally enthusiastic) triumph.

"Geez," Winry grumbled. "Dead people show more spirit than you do." (A mummy girl named Aset who had a job doing murals agreed; she was the only one showing real enthusiasm for their neighborly rescuer.) Winry twisted the controls and the machine lurched to the right to take a bolt of fire a few Red Nocturnes spun out of the still-burning fires she'd laid down; the resulting explosion pushed them enough to make the machine lurch, and the unwary passengers wailed, tumbling over the ground. "...Uh, maybe I should have installed some seats."

"Y'think?" A grouchy boggan (a fae being thematically similar to a halfling) yelled. "Why did you just take that blast of fire! It could have melted right through this thing's armor!"

Winry glared at this indictment of her mechanical prowess. "_What."_

"...Er, it could have seriously hurt us, is what I meant. Your machine-thingy would have been perfectly undamaged. Yeah. It's way too tough and awesome and nigh-indestructable and a paragon of industrial might and _for the love of God please stop glaring at me like that!_"

Winry softened, mollified. One of the other passengers whimpered into his knees, "We're all gonna die..."

"No," Winry said, and a stack of rocket-propelled granades slid out from a rack on the side of the machine, blasting into the Heartless and exploding; Heartless scattered, limping and missing pieces and in one memorable case a walking torso dribbling it's dismembered head like a basketball for some reason. Unfortunately, few of them seemed destroyed or even mortally wounded. Winry set the primary guns a'blazing again, following the fleeing Heartless and tricking them into falling back and herding tightly together. "I got things I won't have broken. Oh, and you guys too."

"Gee, _thanks_," The satyr said morosely. He glanced back at the shop Cyborg ran and Winry owned; the facade had been torn away as a weapon not so long ago, more than a few Heartless had crashed through it before being repelled and there were a few other similar indignities commited on it, but it was otherwise in surprisingly good shape; for one thing, it was still standing. "Why are you working so hard to keep that thing standing?"

"Because I have a good investment in it!" Winry said. They stared at her. "What, you've never had a business deal that you didn't want wrecked?" They continued to stare. "Oh, _fine!_ I got something to do after we get rid of the Heartless here, and I have something important there for that particular job."

"Oh, okay then."

"Relax!" Winry said cheerily, now in a better mood because shooting things always cheered her right up. "There's a few things you should know about why we're _not _going to die."

"Eh?"

"First, I'm _really _good at killing things with these wonders of science!" Winry twisted the controls and the machine smartly stepped forward, crushing Heartless underfoot; it rose up on it's four backmost legs, it's body structure reconfiguring slightly, and it scraped the wriggling Heartless off it's foot and threw it into a large lumbering Heartless made from spilled blood thickened into rock-hard lumps around blocks of stone and dozens of kitchen knives sticking up all over, knocking it over and sending it tumbling over the smaller Heartless behind it, splintering most of them and dismembering a few and outright killing one or two.

"Two!" Winry said. "I've loaded this thing with enough weapons to seriously upset a small nation!" Just to prove it, about half of them pulled out of hidden hatches, flamethrowers and smaller gatling guns and plasmacasters and razor-disc shooters and chained blades on revolving joints and missle launchers and pincer claws that looked like wrenches for some reason. They struck, the firearms launching just behind the Heartless in blasts of fire, bullets, plasma bursts and explosions that annhilated the Heartless in the center and blasting away the others that weren't lucky enough to run away, only for _those _ones to be caught by mechanical tendrils that pulled them apart and crushed the pieces or to be struck by wrench-pincers that smashed them to volatile goo.

"Three!" Winry shouted, pulling the machine back. "I'm in a hurry to help a friend of mine, so I'm gonna mow these bastards down so I can go and find him already! And four, I don't actually have a fourth thing to use as an example, so I'm just gonna enforce the first three things until they _die already!_" The primary gatling guns roared energy-based death, spraying laser-volleys so thick they looked like bursts of white-hot light.

The Heartless charged forward in spite of that and Winry eagerly prepared an attack that would surely blast them all to tiny bits...and then a large explosion in the distance nearly knocked her over, and the seismic rumbles certainly knocked a few of the Heartless over. She, her startled passengers and even the Heartless looked and saw a faint dust cloud on the horizon, shaped a bit like a mushroom, and Winry thought that she saw something really big moving amid flashes of light and fire.

"What was that?" Aset (incidentally, was the 'reanimated ever-living sort of mummy, not a 'bandages and moaning' sort) asked, voicing the question on everyone's mind. "And...why did the Heartless stop fighting?"

Indeed, the Heartless had gone completely still, staring off into the distance. (They had done much the same thing earlier, and in fact had stormed into Winry's neighborhood in the process of going there while trying to kill everything in their path, until Winry had forced them to stay and fight through overwhelming firepower.) Winry frowned, thinking that she had seen a faint burst of darkness far off where those Heartless were staring. The Heartless below started to move, a few of them taking a few steps before standing still again. Winry didn't have any intention of letting them go; she readied the guns again...

And before she could fire, all the Heartless there dematerialized, melting into the shadows and swiftly moving through the darkened streets and straight towards the distant fight. "...Huh," the halfling from before said. "Didn't see that coming."

"Oh my Anubus!" Aset said excitedly. "Winry, you're so awesome _your badassery hurts Heartless and it leaked into your machines and it's industrial power freaked them out! _Or something."

"Sure, yeah," Winry said, not wanting to spoil Aset's illusions. (And she half-thought that Aset was right.) She tapped her fingers on the controls thoughtfully; things in this area seemed well in hand. "Hey, can any of you guys drive a context sensitive spiral-based weapons platform like this?"

Aset raised her hand. "Ooh! Ooh! I can! I can...uh, I have a part-time job driving construction mechas that use systems like that!" Everyone else (who was capable of doing so) glanced at each other, considered this and then shrugged amiably enough.

Winry bit her lip, weighed their options, and finally decided that this was the best choice to use. "Okay, sounds good. Head down to that hospital they set up near Foster's, that should get you guys taken care of. And fight through the dozens of Heartless that are no doubt waiting to feast on your souls and drag you to a horrible fate no one even wants to _think _about, while being largely untrained in how to operate this machine." The others gawked at Winry. Winry tried not to look embarrased.

"Okay," said Aset, seeing nothing wrong with that.

"Wait, why can't you do that?" The satyr guy said disbelievingly. "You actually know how to pilot this thing!"

"I have to go help stop the guy who started all this," Winry said simply.

"...Oh. Well. Um. That's a good reason. Yeah."

"Glad to have your approval," Winry said walking through a small opening at the rear of the cockpit and sitting on a seat in the very small chamber (which was actually an escape pod, designed after a long weekend of boredom ultimately resulting in a heated argument about tabletop tennis that had somehow sparked Winry's imagination) beyond, hitting a nearby button and causing an automated process. The escape pod doors closed, and there was a sudden sharp noise that sounded like a pod being rotated very fast and fired out of the machine at incredible speeds. (Smashing through the door of Cyborg's place, incidentally.)

The injured or otherwise non-combat capable people jumped when the robot shook, a result of Aset's overenthusiastic handling of the controls upsetting the mecha's balance and setting into a run out of the neighborhood. "We're so going to die," The boggan said morosely. "Either the Heartless will get us or we'll blow up when this thing trips. Something like that."

"You are _so _negative today," said the satyr, who ran a hobbyshop right next to the halfling's diner and therefore knew him pretty well. "I remember that just yesterday your little mood swing was in the 'optimistic and happy' part, and now you're going grumpy on me. Did you go Unseelie on me or what?"

"What happened! A big Heartless invasion happened!"

"I don't know that the Heartless actually invade," The satyr said thoughtfully. "Mostly they just show up and wreck stuff and-OW!" He fell forward as the mecha almost tripped (it's stabalizers tending to skip every ten steps, something Winry was trying to fix by applying trace amounts of blue eco-treated imitation Raritanium to the mechanisms) balancing tending to stick, banging his head on the floor and chipped one of his magnificently curly horns. "Ouchies."

"Sorry!" Aset said. "This thing does not have the most intuitive handling! Which is really weird, because the controls are expressively designed to transfer intent into operational commands based on contextual situations. I knew I should have signed up for that class in piloting big mecha, but no, I'll just get job experience, said I..."

Her grumbling spiel cut off at a startling grinding noise. It wasn't a particularily loud noise, or even unfamiliar; everyone who lived here long enough had heard it, usually in the context of airbourne vehicles moving in a hurry. The situation, however, made it very unusual. Thus, even though they were out of the neighborhood and en route to Foster's and therefore not in a position to see the area directly behind the Rockbell-owned and Cyborg-operated mechanics place, they still were aware that the rather large hatch in the ground easily big enough for a moderately large spacecraft to fly through (though not a true spaceship; Cyborg dealed with relatively small-scale operations) and the sound of machinery (at least the rather particular sounds of machinery rotating an underground hanger in a certain way) opening that metal door up.

They didn't need to see it happen, and they certainly heard it. Because Aset had turned the mecha around in sheer paranoid surprise, though, they did see a relatively small spacecraft fly out, a toiroidal phase-field coloring the air behind it a faint electric-blue as it moved on towards where all the blasts and stuff had been coming from. (Unfortunately, there were a few troublemakers around taking advantage of the recent strife to advance their plots, so it's arrival was delayed for a while.)

The people in the mecha watched it go. The moment seem to forbid comment, though there were _other _reasons to stare at it. Eventually, the satyr grunted and said, "By the Dreaming, that's an weird ship."

"Yep," was the unofficial agreement of everyone there, before they went back to the business of going to Foster's and the hospital to provide some back-up and get some help, and left Winry to do whatever she deemed it neccesary to do.

Later, they'd probably ask her why she had gone to do it in such a strange-looking ship, though.

...

A/N: As if this writing, the second half of this is nearly finished. So for any concerns of ANOTHER nearly year-long wait, have no fear.

In retrospect, though, I may consider dialing things down a bit in the future, or at least try to speed up pacing.


	16. Lotus Resolution Part 2

The three mysterious beings that had witnessed Wuya's plot and somehow set into motions ways of potentially averting it watched the fight between Kimblee, now assisted with a giant evil robot.

Silently, they communicated in extremely cool and subtle ways the matter: on the side of evil (as defined by the fact that he was a selfish and amoral sociopath and also that he had deliberately allied himself with people who were explicitly aligned with alien entities that wanted to tear the entire multiverse down to make themselves feel better) was Solf J. Kimblee, a powerful alchemist with the power to make air explode with his bare hands, his already formiddable alchemical prowess enhanced by a Philosopher's Stone forged from the souls of over a hundred mortal souls that had been strong enough to escape the Heartless in the first place, and now wielding a giant robot fueled by the Heartless that was covered in nigh-impervious armor and equipped with literally dozens of deadly weapons scaled up to fit on it's body. On the other hand, the people the mysterious three were supporting consisted of the chosen wielder of the Keyblade, that artifact upon which so much of their hopes for the future had been pinned and which they knew to be on par with the divine thunder-hammer Mjolnir in terms of raw power and the Green Lantern rings or Spiral Energy in terms of application, and the strange collection of individuals that were allied with Zim himself: a talented science hero using powerful alchemical wonders to manipulate the elements of fire and ice; a proficient martial artist tiger-man who was a bit in denial at how similar he was to the ancient Space Marines both in ideals and the fact that he was tough enough to take a giant laser point-blank; and most recently, the heroic Firebending scion of the line of Sozin and the first Fire Lord in generations to have channeled the hereditary madness into beneficient channels. As far as crews went their collective benevolent insanity was a pleasant distinction from Kimblee's amoral convictions, and they certainly had the power to take Kimblee on by themselves. It certainly didn't hurt that they had allied with some of the best and brightest of Traverse Town, people who held tremendous power that made this eccentric group the equal of a sizable army.

In the usual course of things, the battle should have already been well in hand. Unfortunately, Kimblee's raw power and the giant robot he was currently protected in made it more difficult. Or, as the lion-man pointed out, "Well, our guys are getting all kinds of crap kicked out of them, aren't they?"

The machine-man seemed reluctant to comment, perhaps because the only thing he could think to say wasn't very positive. "...Yes, yes they are." He turned to the hooded one. "What do you think?"

The hooded one jumped in place, pumping his arms and generally acting like a deranged football fanatic. "C'MON, ROY! KICK HIS ASS! DO SOMETHING AWESOME! SET HIM ON FIRE SOME MORE! MAKE WITH THE SMITING ALREADY!" They stared at him. "...Why are you guys looking at me like that?"

"...You _do _realize that most transcended entities like us are supposed to let go of emotional ties and let them evolve into higher spiritual ideals, right?" The machine-man said.

The hooded one scoffed. "Screw _that _noise! I'm loyal to my friends and family and I stay that way until the day I die!"

"You _were_," The lion-man said. "You _did _die."

"And I'm still loyal. LOVE NEVER DIES, DAMMIT!"

"So, to reiterate, they're not doing so well," The machine-man said dryly, more tolerant of the hooded one's clear fondness of Roy Mustang and doing the polite thing by not drawing attention to it.

The hooded one paused. "Well, yeah. Sort of. I guess. Look, at least none of them are dead yet. What's the chances of some of them dying in the immediate future, anyway?" The machine projected the appropiate percentages into their minds. "...Okay, it _could _be better, but that's just numbers. It's not like mathematics is the secret cheat-code that underlies the existence of reality itself."

"Well, actually-" The lion-man started to say.

"Zip it, you, I'm trying to be optimistic."

"And failing miserably."

"Please stop bickering," The machine-man said calmly. "We can do more to contribute by actively focusing on the battle instead of standing around bickering. Even though bickering is so much fun." They stared at him. "...What? I'm not allowed to have fun arguing either?"

The other two chose to ignore that and focused on the first half of what he had said. "You think altering probability with our divine awesomeness counts as being 'active'?" The lion-man said skeptically. "Weird how that doesn't contravene the Balance; you'd think the fiends would have done something about us being able to influence stuff like that. Sure, it's not as direct as it should be, but still..."

"Oh, they considered that permissible interference," The hooded one said. The lion-man looked skeptical. "It's because of the devils. They drew up the ceasefire agreements; you think they _wouldn't _put in legal loopholes for them to keep messing with people even if it lets us do the same thing, only without the evil? Devils are total control freaks."

"Well, we _are _talking about the same type of philosophical elementals who can't stand the fact that the multiverse is full of people who are listening to music that hasn't been approved by their censor boards," The lion-man said. He looked at their scrying device and winced. "Ow. That looks like it hurt! How can those kids in the armor still be standing after that?"

"They're not, they're now unconscious," THe machine-man reported. "Unsurprising, Kimblee just used them as bowling balls. Curious, I didn't know he had that streak of whimsy."

"Take it from me; when Kimblee decides to have fun, everyone involved is miserable forever," The hooded one said solemnly. "Or until they get some decent therapy. Or eat chocolate. A great stress reliever, chocolate. I miss chocolate."

"...You _do _realize we have rivers of chocolate in this plane? Right next to the Valley of Randomly Exploded Toddlers?" The lion-man pointed out.

"...Since when!"

"We put it in all the adverts! Just find a brochure or something; nothing brings in valuable tourists like rivers of chocolate."

"Amen to that," The hooded one said.

"Gentlemen?" The machine-man said, his patience waning. "Focus now? _Please_?"

"Right." "Sorry." The two and apparently more scatterbrained entities of mysterious but hopefully benign purpose focused on the machine, properly tying their consciousnesses to the superstructure of reality itself and directing it to that one planet and that one battle.

"Look at it this way," The lion-man said as a parting comment, just to get one last bit in. "At least they evacuated before all this stuff went down."

...

"You know," Zim said conversationally to Zuko as the two of them were hurled halfway across the street, though a building and immediately ducked for covered as the building was blasted in half by an errant plasma bolt. "If we hadn't gotten sent that message out and gotten people to evacuate, there'd be a lot more civillian casualties instead of just property damage."

Zuko looked at the neighborhood, which the past five minutes of combat with the Umbra Eternis had reduced to four smashed husks, two totally demolished houses and a hotdog stand that was inexplicably fine despite the rest of the area being on fire until Kimblee blasted it to make things nice and symmetrical. "And yet if we _hadn't _sent that message, we wouldn't be fighting a giant robot and getting the crap kicked out of us."

Zim looked at him, bemused. "And that's...bad, right? Because I'm not certain if you're joking or not." Zuko facepalmed. "Oh, you're doing that thing again when you're mad. What are you mad about? This fight is getting _awesome_!"

Zuko stared at him before he shook it off and the two of them rejoined the fight. He probably had a more accurate estimation of current events, and honestly the fight was...not going very well, thanks to Kimblee's immense firepower (though he seemed largely content to have the beserking robot do the fighting for him), the Umbra Eternis' nigh-invincible armoring, the giant Gestalt Heartless constantly trying to kill them at every turn, and the fact that the Umbra Eternis was a borderline-invulnerable _giant robot._ (Calvin kept calling shennaigans at this. Kimblee kept pointing out that this wasn't very sensible. Calvin kept doing it anyway and privately wanted his own giant robot made of indestructibility.)

Worse, their numbers had been whittled down, but not by any deaths, thankfully; the Mall Crawlers, after waking up in time to do battle, had been the first to get knocked out of the fight again, since even though they had surprisingly powerful armor and fought pretty well, they were just too desperately outmatched and had been smacked away in a suicidal charge directly at Kimblee that had resulted in them going through a building or two and getting knocked out. Sam and Tucker had fared better, but not for long; the Gestalt had fired a blast that destroyed the building they had been in at the time, and they had only just barely managed to escape before Danny had caught them in mid-air and used a variation on his Ghost Ray to create a shield that had successfully blocked a follow-up combined blast from both Kimblee and the Gestalt, draining himself so much that he had blacked out.

If Appa hadn't caught him and his friends in mid-air, he might have died on impact with the ground, and it was still too close when the Gestalt had tried to tear Appa's face open and forcing their heaviest hitters (mainly pretty much everyone on Zim's crew except Hobbes, plus Roy Mustang, Aang, Greed, Toph, Gaara and Angilaka and a few others) to distract their enemies while Hobbes had moved Sam, Tucker and the Mall Crawlers onto Appa and sent the Sky Bison to seek shelter until this was over; for obvious reasons he had been directed to go back to the ruins of Foster's and seek shelter at the mobile hospital, since that had the most security presence at the moment, and had the benefit of providing medical attention.

So, as Zim saw things, it was becoming a battle of attrition. They just had to outlast Kimblee until he grew tired and made at least one fatal mistake that would let them completely turn the course of the battle.

The Umbra Eternis seemed to have enormous energy to spare (espicially after what seemed like all the Heartless that had been active in the town at that point had swarmed in and been assimilated by the machine-titan, invigorating it and giving it even more power), and Kimblee wasn't even winded with the effort of controlling it yet. At that very moment, it was smashing through a head-shaped building and shoving the rubble at it's enemies below, or at least those enemies that weren't occupied fighting the Gestalt elsewhere. Kimblee didn't even flinch as Calvin and Aang combined their abilities to turn the elements in the air into purest explosive flame right in front of the mighty machine-titan with a ear-wounding blast, flinging the red-hot ash into the robot's chest moments before the fire struck it. It was hit hard, and staggered for a moment, the burning elemental nature of the flame damaging something innateto it's nature as a thing of darkness, the Heartless comprising much of it's body writhing and collapsing...and then with a mental push from Kimblee, it smashed _through _the fire, dispelling it through sheer momentum.

It's roar faltered as it's wild and unsteady steps caught several steel cables that were being held at the ends by Hobbes and Cyborg in the hopes of tripping it up. The giant robot's inexorable force carried onward and the cables snapped, flinging the two warriors away. Hobbes bounced off a wall and fled for cover, while Cyborg was caught by the Umbra Eternis and flung over the rooftops in a single move, but Kimblee didn't notice the cannon Calvin transmuted out of the rubble left in it's wake and fire a salvo that hit it directly in the shoulder; while not _quite _as skillfully done as Scar had done earlier in his fight with Kimblee, it did knock Umbra Eternis off-balance and work it's own momentum against it, forcing it to waste precious moments from falling over, spinning around on one leg awkwardly.

It was nearly steady again when Calvin fired the cannon again and again until the ammo he had supplied it with. Each blasting rock shattered off the Umbra Eternis' armor, which was too tough to hurt by them, but it did attract the attention of both giant robot and it's pilot. Slowly and staring directly at Calvin and growling with every step, it advanced on Calvin, the ground cracking and blackening under it's footsteps. It pulled a fist back for a punch, stopping in mid-swing when Calvin pointed the cannon upwards and stuffed _himself _into it and a timed shot fired himself directly over it's shoulder and to relative safety, and then Toph slid out of the ground nearby, riding on top of a thick sheath of compacted stone coming to a point over her that struck the massive arm overhead; it only scraped the robot's metal armor, but it hit with all the strength of a landslide (enough to shatter the stone) and shoved the punch off-course, causing Umbra Eternis to overextend the punch right into the street and bury it's fist into the ground up to the mid-length of it's arm.

Toph wasted no time; Toph pressed a foot down and a section of street shoved her off, rocks flying around her and fusing into an armored suit over her as she rocketed at the huge metal shape she knew to be it's leg - and all that metal practically _sang _every time it took a step, and the monstrous energies infesting that metal made her feel sick - her every being focused on making this thing _budge _and _break_, a Metalbending rocket of a girl-

Kimblee saw her coming, though, and the Umbra Eternis gave her a glancing kick, knocking her away. He looked down to examine where she had hit him, and was interested to see a nearly miniscule small dent where she had his machine-titan; impressive, he thought, considering that it wasn't much of an impact and that until now nothing had even _scratched _it. To her further credit, he thought, she wasn't hurt when she crashed into the ground and simply plowed into the ground and not particularily hard; the ground itself seemed to soften around her, cushioning the blow, and carried her off as her momentum bled away and the rest was funneled into a spiky rock she hurled at Kimblee with good aim considering she wasn't entirely sure where Kimblee was. A cannon appeared from it's chest and vaporized it in a single shot, and the Umbra Eternis charged forward to stomp on her, unaware that Aang, Katara, Sokka and Beth were right behind him and opened fire, delighting him to no end.

While that was happening, Calvin had ducked into an alley, running and cursing as loudly as possible, which was bad since they were trying to hide; as he rounded the corner, Hobbes tripped him to make him stop and not run into anyone. "Ow!" Calvin said.

"You're welcome," Hobbes said. "Guess who I found!" He gestured at Zim and Zuko, standing behind him. Calvin grunted indifferently and stood up, so Hobbes dumped the modified radio that he'd been forced to carry back into Calvin's arms. (The energy-attuned device that had sucked up Kimblee's transformative energy had already been folded back up and stuffed into Calvin's belt, as it was no longer strictly neccesary.)

"So how are we doing?" Zuko asked; the fight had been moving too fast for him and Zim to keep track of, and they'd been waiting for things to cool down a bit before they made another move.

"Oh, just _fine_," Calvin said sarcastically. "The heavy-hitters from this town got carried by that monster Heartless down a while ago, and for all I know they got eaten, and in the meantime your friends and that girl in the armor suit are being tossed around by Kimblee and the giant death-robot that I totally want, except not evil. The throwing thing may be literal, I think I saw that Cyborg guy being thrown over the rooftops."

"You know, that girl's name is Beth," Courtney asked from behind Calvin, hurrying into the alley right behind Calvin without him noticing. "_Please _try and show a little gentlemanliness?"

"Is that even a word?" Zim asked while Hobbes and Zuko looked incredulously at her. Zim blinked and did a double-take. "Wait, what are you doing here?"

"You turned my neighborhood into a warzone, what do you think!" Courtney said indignantly. "A giant robot is wrecking havoc and things blowing up, everyone else is somewhere else or knocked away or trying not to die, I couldn't _find _anyone and I panicked!"

"Oh, you want protection," Zuko said knowingly. He frowned. "I don't know if I should feel happy that you're confident in our skills to keep you alive, or insulted that you only feel that way because you couldn't find anyone else."

"Well, I can't make an educated guess without more information," Courtney said loftily. She glanced at Zuko, looking slightly uncomfortable (even by Traverse Town standards he was horribly scarred) and said, "...You're a lot better than some other people I can think of, though. Like those crazy teenagers in armor that 'guard the mall' and act like those ancient space knights from some old empire and also got to leave on that bison...lucky jerks."

"Wait, why didn't you leave with them?" Hobbes asked.

"...I don't know! And I wish I did, Kimblee could show up here any moment!"

"Psh, yeah right," Zim said dismissively. "I thought he was fighting Aang and the others. He'll be busy for a while yet."

"He so could show up right now!" Courtney insisted.

"Well, we'll deal with it. And maybe steal his robot! That'd be fun. Provided we get rid of those Heartless in it," Zuko said.

"Ooh, we coul replace them with exoskeletal muscle-replicants!" Calvin said excitedly. "In fact, I have plans for a kind of nano-scale clockwork where each gear is so tiny and multifaceted that they all fit together so completely that it looks like a solid piece at the macro level! I think they could handle the job nicely-"

"Focus, guys!" Courtney snapped. "Psychopath with a giant robot, a giant Heartless and a semi-magical semi-science-y stone made from people, remember? That you're supposed to stop? And I'm supposed to...watch you stop, I guess." She frowned, perhaps not very pleased by how passive that made her sound.

Zim frowned. "_You're _in a tetchy mood today."

"To be fair," Hobbes said politely. "We _did _turn her neighborhood into a warzone. Granted, she consented to our plan, but we didn't give her full disclosure first, but...um...uh..." Hobbes had, at this point, looked up and trailed off weakly. Zim looked up to see what he was looking at. and noticed that a shadow had fallen over them.

Above them was the great mechanical bulk of the Umbra Eternis, webbed with wriggling darkness, so close that it eclipsed the alleyway and probably the buildings around them, and Kimblee had seen fit to suspend himself down from them to listen in on their conversation. "Ah," Zim said faintly. "...Hi."

"Hello," Kimblee said. "Having a conversation, I see."

"Yes. I don't suppose you'd give us some time to conclude our conversation, would you? Perhaps a year or two to refine our skills as a conversation point?"

"Of course not," Kimblee said, pulling back into his giant robot and assuming command of it, evidently bored already. Umbra Eternis raised a gauntlet, or so Zim deduced from the way it's shoulder shifted and something _big _loomed over them with a big glowing disc on it. "That would seem a bit of a poor judgement call on my part. Not as much as you standing around just waiting to get hit-"

Hobbes moved and the others ran for cover while blasting fire (and gunfire) at Kimblee and trying not to hit Jarod. In a flash, Hobbes was bounding off the sides of the walls and ascending in less then two mighty jumps each, jumping with such force that he left deep dents where he kicked off, and then he was arcing directly over Kimblee, seemingly floating in mid-air. "I think that's pretty close to what irony actually is!" Hobbes said in mid-flip, a foot over his head in preparation for a devastating roundhouse kick.

Umbra Eternis pulled back with incredible speed, winding Kimblee back before hopping back, it's sheer mass and uneven weight distrubution making it a bit of a chancy move. Hobbes hit a wall and skidded down with his claws, and when he rejoined the others another massive fireball blasted into the back of Umbra Eternis, followed by a wind so powerful that the rooftops of the buildings forming the alley they were in tore apart so violently that it looked like they just disintegrated.

The ground shook as the giant robot staggered back from the force of that brief blast of wind. "RUN RUN RUN!" Zuko said, pushing Calvin, Courtney and Hobbes out of the alley while he and Zim ran out into a upraised concrete hill cut into a spiral for some reason.

"Why?" Courtney said, trying to keep up with them and panting. "Oh, I am _so _out of shape..."

"Because Aang's here, he's going to cut loose and 'moderation' is not something the Avatar Spirit understands!" Zuko said, and caught notice of the questioning look Hobbes gave him as they bounded over the steep inclines and loops of the spiral hill (which, given the intricate detail of the circuit-like patterns carved into it, suggested that it was some sort of controlling mechanism for...something). "Look, just keep running!"

The air went still for a single terrible moment. Just like that pause right before the storm, or tides receding for a tsunami. Zim looked back as they ducked behind a handy overturned bowl-shaped thing that might have been a bus stop, and thought he saw Aang hovering over the Umbra Eternis, doing some kind of pose that he too late remembered was an Airbending move-

_Boom_. The skies fell.

More accurately, a staggeringly powerful blast of focused air, perhaps strong enough to cut a mountain or pulverize a man into pieces, whirled around the Umbra Eternis and hammered down like a falling truck, driving it right through the ground and obliterating the area around it; the streets fountained up as a geyser of dust, the secondary shockwave tearing buildings apart and sending the rubble crashing down and tumbling over itself before being propelled into the ground with a hellish racket. Someone, probably Kimblee, said "Ow."

The various fighters stared in astonishment, horror, and various other appropiate reactions. "...Dear God," Roy finally said from behind a shelter that Aang had thoughtfully ensconced him a few moments before after sealing the Gestalt into a giant rock cube to hold it back for a bit. "...We should adopt him into the Peace Marines."

"That's not a bad idea," Gibbs thoughtfully said from next to him.

"Nuh uh, I saw him first!" Angilaka said. "Besides, I heard he's a monk; my guys totally got dibs!"

Her two associates were with her as well. "Hey, that was pretty cool," Abel said. "What do you think, Scar?" There was no response. "Scar? Hey, buddy!"

Scar still said nothing. He just stared, enraptured at the raw power. "I might well die before the glory," He whispered. "For mine eyes have beheld such might as would flow from Ishbala."

The two ninjas Naruto and Gaara had a less cultish reaction in their spot atop a nearby building where they had retreated to set a trap. "HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME," Naruto said, Aang's power pulling at his own; they were both born to the wind, in the ways of their worlds, and like called to like.

"Is this what it was like to behold the Sage of Six Paths?" Gaara said, sounding a bit like the child he had been, awe stirring from his stunted sense of wonderment.

Naruto blinked in shock; loyal to the virtues of the ninja code of his world, it was a little upsetting to have _anything _flippantly compared to the legendary savior and founder of ninjutsu. "...If he was real, I...I _guess_ the Sage of Six Paths would have done stuff like that." He perked up. "Like making the moon from our world and sealing up a super-monster inside it!"

Gaara scoffed. "That's the most absurd thing I have _ever_ heard from you."

(Both demon-beasts sealed within Naruto and Gaara, being entirely privy to this conversation, wisely chose not to say anything for fear of saying too much and also looking silly.)

A few buildings away (because rooftops are _awesome _for getting a good view of a fight like this) Sokka and Katara had wound up with Beth and watching the fight, waiting for an appropiate moment. Well, Sokka and Katara were, Beth seemed mildly stunned at best. "He...the street!" Beth stammered. "It's gone! Boom! Poof! How did he...that's not...it _can't_...it doesn't make..." Sokka waved a hand impatiently, gesturing 'get on with it'. "He's _just a kid!_" Beth finally said. "How can he do that?"

"He's not _that _young," Katara said sharply. "And anyway, I thought people in this town did stuff like that all the time."

"Not like _that_, exactly," Beth said. "I haven't seen people throw power like that around since-" She stopped. "Um. Never mind..." It was silly to remember _those _guys, she thought; Aang's power wasn't green and didn't make giant robots or drills or stuff like that. Without thinking about it, she absently rubbed an old tattoo on her shoulder; a flaming stylized skull, wearing sunglasses.

Greed, peering through a hole Umbra Eternis had knocked him and his sidekicks through with embarrasingly little effort, stared at the result of Aang's immense power...well, greedily. "I want one!" He declared, pointing at Aang.

"Great," Shego said dryly. "Like we didn't have enough crazy-ass kids with nigh-unfathomable power bugging us all day."

"You're just mad that he has more power than you," Deadpool said. Shego punched him in the face. "Oh God! My glorious pretty looks! MY PRECIOUS MODELING CAREER!" They stared at him. "...I could get a modeling career. I so totally could."

Cyborg, finally stumbling on the scene after being thrown away, stared. "...Damn, I just _know _I missed something totally awesome!" He shrugged and activated his on-board communicator, hailing Winry again. To his relief, his call was switched from her own communicator to the frequency of the ship he had spent all night building, outfitting, programming, debugging and preparing it for a test flight. "Winry! Please please, girl, tell me this is you!"

"_I hear you just fine!" _Winry said. _"I got our shop's neighborhood pacified for the time being, loaded up the new ship for that new guy you seem and I'm coming your way! I've run into a few problems; no big deal, just some jerks taking advantage of the chaos for their own benefit, and roaming packs of Heartless keep popping up wherever I go. I thought we'd seen the last of them when they all went off somewhere, but more keep showing up! It's nothing this ship can't take care of, but it's majorly slowing me down. Where are you guys right now? I'll get there as soon as I can._"

Cyborg sent her the coordinates. "We probably won't stay here too long though, this fight keeps going all over the place. And I'm warning you, be prepared, 'cause Kimblee found himself a giant robot he's powering with Heartless!"

_"...I'm sorry, the speakers must be buggy. I thought I just heard you say that Kimblee has a giant robot powered by Heartless_."

"I did, yeah. And it was made from Greed's defensive mecha and that Juggernaut robot the Council had on their diner."

Winry processed this. "_And he still has a Philosopher's Stone?"_

"Yep."

"_...Well. Crap."_

"Pretty much sums up the whole thing, doesn't it?" Cyborg said.

Winry said, "_No big deal, I'll be there before you know it! I just AUGH!"_

"What was that?"

"_Nothing, some jerk just attacked me! Told you I was getting caught up in fight...I don't know how long it'll be before I make it, just hold on!"_ The communicator switched off amid a chorus of powering hums and distant weapons discharging. Cyborg shook his head, hoping for the best and fearing the worst.

Back to the crew; Hobbes took a single look at the destruction Aang had caused and hopefully said to Zuko, "Do you think that stopped Kimblee?"

"_Nobody _could have possibly survived that," Zuko said, not adding that Aang _always _pulled his punches. "So...yes, of course it didn't. It's _never _that easy."

"Oh, good," Calvin said. They stared at him. "What? I don't want that Jarod guy to get killed!"

"...Oh yeah, I forgot about him," Zim admitted.

"I suppose that's why Aang held back," Zuko said. Zim nodded.

They looked at the two of them in alarm. "Held _back_?" Courtney said disbelievingly.

Further conservation was forestalled: the ground trembled ominously, and Umbra Eternis tore it's way out of the ground, chunks of stone flying away from it as it clawed it's way out, it's roars oscillating disquietingly and black foam drippling from it's mouth. Dirt and concrete and other stuff fell off it's back as it hauled itself onto the streets from the hole it emerged from and stood up, the rubble it dislodged neatly filling the hole up and also totally obstructing the tunnel below. As it stood to it's full height, the dust it's rapid excavation had thrown up fell away, revealing that the damage down to it by Aang's devastating use of the terrifying power of Air unleashed...

Still amounted to little more than some minor denting on the metal above the fuselage where Kimblee controlled it: it's metal body was pitted and dented in places, covered in dust and dirt, and it could have used a bit of a new paint job on the front where Aang's air-blast had hit it, but the machine-titan itself was totally unharmed. It had a look of improbable smugness, and Kimblee's smirk was even more infuriating. Jarod twitched and writhed for some reason, the tendrils the Heartless had extended into him pulsing just as the darkness imbued into the Umbra Eternis flared up for a moment. The Umbra Eternis took a single massive step after another in it's rolling heavy gait, more of the street collapsing behind it. "At last," Kimblee said, the liquified forms of the Heartless collective powering the Umbra Eternis that he had appropiately chosen to call the Umbral Heartless contracting around him as though it was protecting him from further harm, hardening into a slightly crystalline form. "Someone's finally hitting properly. I think I almost felt that one."

"...Oh, _COME ON!_" Aang said incredulously, and he had a lot of credulity to strain.

And lo, there was much exasperated statements of disapproval and frustration. Among the most restrained of them was Calvin (a contrast to his apparent tendency to fly off the handle over nothing) turning to Zim and remarking, "You know, I've known you for less than _twelve damn hours _and we've already fought _two _creepy guys with superpowers that came out of nowhere. And, counting this abomination of engineering, _two _giant robot things made of evil. The first one being the Guard Armor, obviously. Is giant robots and inexplicable villains that know too much going to be a theme with you? It's totally going to be a theme with you, isn't it?"

"Hey, I fight _using _giant robots, I've hardly ever had to fight against them!" Zim snapped. "This is a new thing for me! Almost as new as the contrived pyrokinesis. On that note..." He clapped his hands together, forming a fireball between them. "Do that fire-making-bigger thing you did." Calvin rolled his eyes but obligingly did so, inputting a few commands into a rotary-style keypad near his elbow, and several brass-tipped prongs popped up, projecting a field of energy for about two and a half yards; Zim's fireball abruptly expanded in size, growing nearly as large as Zim was. Grunting with the effort of containing it, Zim tossed it up and kicked it hard, the aggressive intent more than the actual kick rocketing it over the streets and over the devastated rooftops and aimed straight at the Umbra Eternis...

Which turned in response to Aang pulling nearly a third of the street into a compacted bison-shaped projectile and throwing it at him. Zim's fireball exploded harmlessly against a shoulder, leaving a sooty mark. Kimblee didn't appear to have even noticed it and Umbra Eternis summoned four giant plasma cannons onto it's arms, two on each forearm, and opened fire with the spread of plasma smashing the projectile into pieces that nonetheless kept going and three of them hit the giant robot; one in the shoulder, another nicking the mechanisms of it's right leg and the last almost hitting Kimblee; he was narrowly saved by the tendrils holding him tight moving him out of the way and spitting the shrapnel back out.

It did provide a useful distraction, and Kimblee failed to see Roy appearing on the scene, along with Greed's crew, Naruto and Gaara, Abel and Scar and also Angilaka, the lot of them throwing some of the most powerful attacks they could muster: Roy firing off massive blasts of flame, Gibbs with his incredible firepower, Angilaka with spiritually-powered laser beams (which while very effective against it's Heartless portions still failed to hurt the armor any) and Shego with her most powerful blasts. Abel, Scar, Greed and Deadpool had opted to employ some large-scale weapons Gibbs had helpfully provided, Deadpool using a rocket launcher (that would undoubtedly be taken from him _immediately _after the fight) while Greed had allowed Lin to take over and use a laser gatling gun, since Lin had much better aim. Naruto and Gaara, still uncomfortable with firearms, preferred to use throwing kunai with explosive tags wrapped on them, throwing them at the gaps between the armor to hopefully damage vulnerable areas. Abel and Scar were on supress-fire duty, with Scar transmuting blockades in case of return fire and making large gatling cannons that Abel quite handily piloted. As a result of all that, the Umbra Eternis was pushed back, too overwhelmed to strike back, and the prospect of hurting it pushed everyone to rejoin the fight in their own ways; Katara and Toph were working on stopping Umbra Eternis in it's tracks by icing it's feet and covering them with rocks while Sokka and Beth provided cover fire, and Aang just hammered it with blasts of superheated air again and again.

Zim's crew (and Courtney) were doing their part as well; Zim and Zuko were culmatively generating massive quantities of fire equaling the smaller blasts the Flame Alchemist employed, while Calvin alternated between trying to transmute the ground into manacles over the Umbra Eternis' feet and making cannons to try and shoot Kimblee (or, failing that, fire one of them near enough to grab Jarod so they could resume fighting without concern for getting anyone killed). Hobbes, due to his near-perfect aiming skills, was actually the one firing the cannons and alerting Calvin to when they were out of ammo so he could transmute more ammo for them. Courtney...just fired a lot, and wasn't too bad at it.

As they slowly gained ground and kept Kimblee pinned, Jarod stirred, ink-black tendrils forming out of the thick murk around him to lace around his half-submerged face and partially fuse with him by tiny continuations sliding into his ears, his mouth, into even his eyes, tear ducts and facial pores. He twitched and moved, faint echoes of actions commited in whatever half-dream he was having as the elemental darkness embodied in the Heartless tore his mind down to the very core, past the personality-shell that was 'Jarod' and deeper, deeper, to memories too old to belong to any living thing. And there was plenty of darkness there to fuel the Umbra Eternis, enough loss and despair and madness and such rich _torment _to drive a man to madness a thousand times over. And indeed, it _had, _as Jarod's unconscious mind was begining to realize.

He wasn't _physically _hurt like Kimblee, though. The sheer amount of firepower, while not _visibly _damaging the Umbra Eternis, did certainly hurt Kimblee, with the feedback from the powerful hits slamming into him doing him physical harm, with bruises and lacerations spontaneously appeared on him with crunching sensations. He forced more power from Jarod via his link to the Umbrals, ripping ever-deeper through his mind and drawing strength into both himself and his giant robot. Bizarre images and impossibly ancient memories flickered through his mind like half-remembered dreams, too vauge and brief to understand, and they were too strange for Kimblee to grasp anyway. They presented contexts and situations that made him feel more uneasy that he ever had before.

Even so, it was enough to fuel the mechanisms of his giant robot and make the feedback pain dim a little; he raised an arm, the disc on the palm powering up and firing a tremendously powerful beam that could certainly scour the flesh from a man's bones...and went over everyone's heads, down the street, and hit a harmless looking giant rock-cube in the middle of the street. "Hah!" Hobbes said as the cube exploded in a big flashy blast. "You missed!"

Kimblee glanced at them and smiled faintly. "No, I hit precisely what I was aiming for."

Aang froze, the wind whirling around him to keep him hovering. "No way. Isn't that where I locked up that..." On cue, a large energy ball struck his back and knocked him out of the sky. The constant firing stopped and everyone turned in horror to see the Gestalt tearing itself loose from where Aang had Earthbent a prison around it, bits of rubble falling from a body that was still slightly cube-shaped from being contained by a too-small space. It shook itself off before it generated a massive set of many wings and took to the air, jaws opening to spew entropic blasts at them and forced them to scatter, and the ground where they had been standing was shortly torn apart.

Watching this approvingly, Kimblee smirked. "Excellent. Back-up plans always seem profitable, are they not?" With a grunt of effort, he managed to break his robot's foot loose from the ice and rock sealed over it, ignoring the frenzied cannonfire, fireballs, gun fire and other attacks Zim and his crew threw at his heavily armored backside, and the same went for Katara, Sokka and Beth.

Kimblee started advancing. Ignoring this, Zim ran straight for Aang and stood vigil over the dazed Air Nomad right as the towering mass of the Gestalt fluttered down, wings beating up a massive surge of wind. Zim stood his ground still, glaring up at it. Dozens of gaping jaws dominated by gnashing fangs appeared, all aimed directly at Aang and Zim, and the Gestalt threw it's mass of jaws upon the two of them even as Katara raced down on a bridge of ice (made from a ice spear Calvin helpfully threw to her); it's black body curled around them like a massive pool of living pollutants, the edges of the ground near it smouldering and hissing, and there were _crunching _noises...

A series of blasts from both Hobbes and Abel's respective cannons, neither of them deciding to run for it, struck the seething mass of the Gestalt and made it flinch in pain, and then it rippled violently as a bright glow emananted from within, tearing holes in it's body. It curled up defensively, shimmering with dark power and about to deal a single massive blast that would tear the street in half. And before it could finish charging up, a massive tornado of fire tore it's way right through the Gestalt, incinerating nearly half of it's body and almost blasting it apart. The tornado was still burning as the Heartless peeled itself away, folded itself back together (significantly smaller than before) and dematerialized before retreating into the shadows to recuperate. (And possibly brood that it wasn't really contributing to the fight.) The fires died away, revealing Zim and Aang at it's epicenter, the former of the two holding the taller human up; given their height difference, it was awkward for Zim to keep Aang propped up but he still maanged, and the flames both of them had generated in a single intense burst still flashed around them. "Not bad..." Aang wheezed. "For our first real combo move...right?"

"It's like when I made those fire gauntlets..." Zim agreed. "Only with less of me blowing up."

"Marginally," Aang joked. Katara slid over and grabbed Aang by the arm, the younger boy gratefully sliding an arm over the taller girl's shoulder and letting her dangle him slightly above the ground to give him balance.

"Nice work!" Katara said, smiling at Zim. "You're learning pretty quick."

"Eh," Zim said. He looked away and saw Kimblee busily fighting just about everyone else (except Cyborg, who was still trying to get back) with the help of the Gestalt, the smaller fighters avoiding with the attacks through sheer desperation and toughness...but it was only a matter of time before a blast of alchemic power or a Heartless-blast hit someone. "Excuse me, must distract Kimblee now." Ignoring Aang and Katara's infuriated demands to stop and _think _for a second, he ran a safe distance from them (Hobbes, Calvin and Courtney tagging along). Beth, with Sokka in tow, flew to the ground a short distance behind him. Zim cleared his throat and called out, "Hey, you! The maniac with the Stone made of evil and the bad dress sense! Also, the giant robot."

Kimblee paused in his merciless pummeling of Toph's surprisingly durable suit of armor she'd made from a flying car she had crashed through and glanced over, trying to ignore how surprisingly hard Abel's pummeling against the robot's foot hurt. "Yes?"

Zim pointed at Kimblee's robot. "You've absconded with an acquantice of mind who's due to give a friend of mine some much needed psychiatric assitance. Return him now."

"No," Kimblee said.

"Oh. Please?"

"No."

"Eh, it was worth a shot." Zim thought his next response over and said, "Then what do you want him for?"

"Hrm? Oh..well, as I have already informed some of you, I've been asked to retrieve him for reasons that I assume are quite unpleasant." He frowned, dropping Toph and turning more fully towards Zim. "And what do you mean, 'bad dress sense'?"

"I meant precisely what I meant," Zim said proudly. On the ground behind Kimblee, the fighters took advantage of this brief distraction to catch their breath and, possibly, mount another counterattack. "An entirely white suit, with _your _occupation? Surely the blood will get everywhere. Also, your hat clashes with your attire."

"It most certainly does not," Kimblee said loftily. "My hat is a matter of style, not simple color coordination. It offers a welcome focal point from the unerring pristine-ness of my suit, making a excellent contrast to the purity of my look."

"...So you're a assassin _and _a fashion expert?" Zim said.

"I believe a man should expand his horizons whenever possible," Kimblee said primly. "And I am _not _an assassin. Assassins generally have boundaries that I find pointless, if admirable."

"...I'm sorry, were you implying that you have standards of your own?" Zim said, even _more _nonplussed. "I stopped paying attention after you made mouth-noises. Your voice grates on my brain!"

"I don't...what?" Kimblee sputtered for a moment, trying to recollect himself. He glared at Zim. "Your literal-mindedness is going to get you into trouble. It's _extremely _irritating."

"So I've been told. Anyway...erm...what are you doing here?"

"Killing you all. Or I would be, if you would be silent for a moment."

"No, no, I meant what are you doing _here_, specifically. What is your purpose. By all accounts you don't actually live here in town, and it doesn't seem the sort of place you would like to visit for recreational reasons...barring recuperative bouts of mass murder, I suppose...so I presume you have an ulterior motive in your presence here." Zim paused, trying to collect his thoughts. "Because otherwise you'd just be killing and maiming and stuff, which sounds like...exactly something you would do for fun. Hrm. I thought I was onto a revealing thread there."

"No, no," Kimblee said. "You had it right. I am on orders to do my special manner of work here in town. Raising chaos, bringing a little healthy fear of the unknown...that sort of thing."

"Ah." A sudden suspicion seized Zim. "On whose orders?"

Kimblee frowned. "I can't tell you that."

"Your loyalty is commendable, I suppose," Zim said. Kimblee looked like he was going to correct him on some point or another, but Zim continued before he had a chance to. "Such loyalty indeed. You only do this because you are _commanded _to. You destroy everything you touch and ruin everything you come into contact to because it's your _job_."

He took a few steps forward, seemingly unconcerned with the giant unstoppable robot's proximity. "Obey and obey," Zim said musingly, words twisting as a rising fury darkened his tone like his breath was contorted in his throat. "That's all there is for you, is it not? Just breaking and destroying everything that you find, and then you don't even need specific _orders_, just a suggestion and a pointed direction, and perhaps a implication that you should enjoy yourself. Hilarity ensues, as they say." He looked scornfully at Kimblee. "Are you anything more than a _tool _in your employer's hands? Or have you passed the point where you stopped caring about anything except pleasing your superiors?"

Kimblee tilted his head. "I think that you have some manner of point here, but I fail to see it. Consider this while you wind up to it: you misunderstand my intentions here. I obey orders because it is convienient for me, because it is a occupation that gives me much latitude to ply my skills. But I do so only because I _want _to; it remains entirely my own decision."

Zim was silent for a moment. "Ah," He said after a moment. "So. You're _that _sort of villain. Please explode now!" Zim struck the Keyblade into the ground, throwing up sparks, and from where it hit the ground, the air rippled as a large fireball appeared, a bit bigger than Zim, the nascent Firebender (or whatever he was) snarling with the effort of creating it, and gave it a shove that launched it at Kimblee in an low sweep.

It made a nice explosion when it hit the Umbra Eternis (Zim's aim being a bit off) but didn't do more than push his left side slightly off-balance. "That was a pathetic surprise attack," Kimblee said patronizingly. "What was the point of that?"

Several blasts of fire, many magnitudes bigger than Zim's, hit him from behind. "The point was to distract you," Roy Mustang said with Zuko standing near him with his hands on fire, and the two of them combined their powers: Zuko creating the biggest fires he could while Roy amplified and threw them at the machine-titan's back until it glowed red-hot. It was so well-shielded Kimblee didn't even notice the heat, but Roy seemed satisfied. "Now!" He said, gesturing at Calvin, Aang and Katara, who had gathered a considerable amount of water while Kimblee had been distracted, and now they directed it onto the Umbra Eternis' still blazing backside, the Waterbenders freezing it into a solid mass with a sharp gesture and Calvin simply shooting a freeze-beam at it. Kimblee grunted in surprise, his robot's shoulders immobilized, and focused a fraction of the Philosopher's Stone power into the ice, which flashed red and harmlessly shattered into small chunks of ice and water vapor, some of it's back discolored. He flexed the defrozen robot's body, frowning at the unexpected resistence in some of the back plates; they had been designed to flex around the frame's movements to accomodate it, and it felt like a few of them had slid very slightly out of place.

Hobbes, Calvin, Courtney, Sokka and Beth had gathered near Zim. Sokka knew a fair bit about engineering (much of it acquired knowledge since his accidental departure from his home world) and said, "Hey, doesn't bad stuff happen to really hot metal when you freeze it?"

"Yeah," Calvin said. "Even though that wasn't anywhere near it's melting point, it still did something to the armor in the back. And Kimblee's no engineer, I don't think he even realizes the implications!"

Calvin wasn't the only one to acknowledge this. "Excellent," Abel cheered while the others readied their respective means of exploiting this potential weak spot. Kimblee, for his part, was stumbling around, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with his robot's back. "We finally did something!"

"What happened now?" Cyborg said, finally stumbling back into the scene from down the street. "I don't...hey, some of the bits on his back are out of alignment!"

"What did you say?" Kimblee said. "I didn't catch that." He grunted and the Umbra Eternis raised an arm. "Oh, never mind, it's probably not important." The Gestalt rose from his shadow, recovered from the damage Aang and Zim had done to it, and loomed behind the Umbra Eternis as his back-up, both of them charging up attacks.

"Tiger-boy!" Zim said to Hobbes as the people around Roy made their defenses; Aang and Toph raising a large barricade wall from the street and the rubble's stone and metal around them, Katara coating it with steel-hard ice, Angilaka infusing it with divine power, Calvin and Roy transmuting it to have greater density, and so on.

Hobbes growled. "My _name _is Hobbes!"

"Sure, okay. I want you to throw me at the bit where he was weakened." Zim pointed at the back plates that were slipping out of alignment on the Umbra Eternis.

At that moment, the people at Kimblee's front attacked: Shego fired her energy blasts while Deadpool, fired a missle or two, both of them aiming for the Gestalt and punching some holes in it. Cyborg fired both his sonic cannons and a few missiles from hidden launchers in his shoulders, aimed at the giant robot's head and several other spots with structural weaknesses his onboard computers detected. Katara and Toph hurled a huge chunk of stone with big ice spears frozen in all directions and hit the giant robot's left leg, halting it's in place. Abel (still manning the cannon) fired volley after volley until he ran out of ammo and just tore the cannon out of the ground and _threw _it at the Umbra Eternis, while Scar transmuted a weapon from the ground that resembled a two-seater mounted gatling gun that fired exploding spears that both he and Abel piloted. Angilaka, instead of performing some feat of strength, concentrated for a moment before a bright aura appeared around her, reshaping around her hands into several dozen bolts of hard light that burned like fire and fired at Kimblee, lancing into the depths of the machine-titan they opposed and exploding. Gibbs' arms expanded into a impressive set of beam-blasters similar to gatling guns, spinning on and shooting a spiral-shaped beam. Finally, Roy snapped his fingers with a fierce flourish and summoned several train-sized streaming flames that streaked right at Kimblee, consciously avoiding Jarod's submerged form. Aang bounced into the street, layering his feet deeply with stone for the few moments he was there, and leaped high into the air, suffusing the rock-boots with heat drawn from the sun until they glowed red-hot, and then he spun like a top in the air and fired the flaming chunks of rock from his feet, making a spraying effect akin to machine gun fire. If machine guns fired bullets that were on fire.

Hobbes watched all this happen (while Sokka, Calvin, Courtney and Beth joined in on the 'shooting at Kimblee' business), and looked back at Zim, his expression carefully neutral. "You want me to throw you at a giant robot-type enemy. _Again_."

"Yes," Zim said.

"Right through the field of fire so that you can perhaps exploit a weakness in it's armor. And I repeat, _again_."

"Yes!"

"Through the still-ongoing field of big missiles, explosions and general blasting right _at _this very same robot, with a fairly high probability that you'll get hit because our allies won't be able to stop themselves from hitting you."

"I'm not going _into _their line of fire, you're throwing me at it's back," Zim said in a reasonable tone.

Hobbes ignored this, and got to the central point. "And, assuming that you fail to get hit by an improbably high series of margins, you intend to do something to a robot that is, for all practical intents and purposes, invincible. While it's under heavy fire. And will probably be on fire by that point."

"One should hope so."

"One should..." Hobbes facepalmed. "Agh...sure, fine! Can you guys stop shooting, I'm going to do something crazy now." Calvin, Courtney, Beth and Sokka obliged him, and resigning himself for what was probably going to be a theme in their fights now, Hobbes grabbed Zim by the back of his jacket (increasingly frayed thanks to the rigors of this bullet-ridden fight) and hoisted him into the air and spinning a few times to build up momentum, and as soon as he had generated enough force to make minor shockwaves in the air he let go, producing another shockwave when he let Zim go, rocketing towards the Umbra Eternis with a delighted battle cry.

The others (meaning those immediately near Hobbes, Roy's group had no idea of this) watched this happen. "Did you just throw your friend at a giant invincible robot?" Courtney said.

"Apparently so," Calvin said.

"Why?" Beth demanded.

Hobbes protested, "It was his idea!"

"And you listened to him?" Sokka said incredulously. "Buddy, Zim's crazier then a sackful of crazy badgers locked up in an insanity-inducing cell and they graduated with honors on top of their madness squad in the top Boot Camp Of Insanity during national Go Bonkers Week at the peak of the full moon which has a lot to do with 'lunacy' except when my first girlfriend is personally involved and those crazy badgers I was talking about were also infected with crazy-badger rabies which is worse than usual rabies because it makes them go super-crazy instead of just being rabid, because if they bite you, you go crazy too and then it's just a few days before you're babbling about Bloodwraiths and screaming at mice with your shirt off and nibbling at coasters and dancing for old people. Because you're crazy." Everyone stared at him. "Okay, I swear, that made a _lot _more sense in my head..."

Zim crashed into the back of the Umbra Eternis, a few feet from the weak spot he had intended to get to and Kimblee hadn't noticed, aside from wondering what that dinging noise was before dismissing it as a ricocheted bullet. A few solid tendrils extended from the armor, the Umbrals sensing their natural enemy the Key right before them and trying to kill it's wielder before it could get them. "Hey, hey, get off!" Zim snapped, slashing them off at their root and kicking the pieces away before dropping off, extending the spider-legs from his Pak in mid-air so that they struck inches from the loosened back plates, allowing Zim to stand right in front of the weak spot. He raised the Keyblade up high, aimed, and wedged it right into the gap as far as he could. To his delight, the Keyblade flowed right into it like it was made of liquid, it's metal proving surprisingly protean, and he managed to get it nearly halfway through it and scratching the flow of liquified Heartless under the surface. Smog bloomed up from under it, perhaps a by-product of the Umbra Eternis' mysterious internal workings, but it shied away from Zim, as if afraid of the Keybalde. Deciding not to waste any more time, Zim had his spider-leg attachments reorient himself into a better position for maximum leverage and shoved as hard as he could.

There was a faint creaking sound; as could be surmised, while the _armor _of the Umbra Eternis was nigh-invincible, the same could not be said for the mechanisms powering it (what little there that wasn't done by the Umbral Heartless, that is) or even the parts directly under the armor. Consequently, while the loosened backplates were as strong and unmarked as ever, the actual fittings had been damaged by the rapid heating-and-freezing (a tactic beloved by elemental warriors all over the worlds), and thus the backplate Zim had been levering popped right out of place, scattering melting frost all over, and came to a clattering stop right in front of Hobbes.

This didn't go unnoticed. "Hey," Roy said, peering. "Isn't that..."

"The new refugee that was on the report about Kimblee!" Gibbs said.

"What's he doing over there!" Zuko said.

"Looks like...yeah, looks like he just snapped a piece of armor right off Kimblee's robot," Abel said.

"That's my little buddy!" Aang crowed.

"...Please tell me that was his plan all along," Hobbes begged Sokka. "Please tell me he wasn't just planning to get on the invincible death robot and make it up from there!" Sokka shrugged helplessly, and Hobbes sagged in misery, his mind coming up with terrible prophecies for the adventure to come. "He really _is _insane...oh, Aslan show me mercy, _what have I gotten myself into!_"

Courtney took pictures; it would be useful for her later report on this whole thing. Calvin just put on his goggles to analyze the metal's elemental structure so he might be able to transmute it; Beth's sensory array did something similar, since she liked being helpful, though both efforts were fruitless, since the Heartless screwed up their telemetry. Hobbes, after a few moments more lamenting his fate, picked up the fallen bit of armor, which he figured would make a decent fighting shield for himself dispite it being a bit bigger than he was (since he didn't know where his usual one had gotten to; he thought it had been broken or left in their dimensional dufflebag or something), and a fairly intact servo-motor still fused to it made a decent handgrip.

Zim, pleased at a job well done, moved up Kimblee's back to go for Kimblee himself. For his part, this hadn't gone unnoticed by Kimblee; though he didn't know that it was Zim who had done it, or that Zim was on his back, he was aware that something had changed, mostly due to the Umbra Eternis' squawk of discomfort and the information transmitted by it. He couldn't see for himself, since he was locked into the Umbra Eternis' lower torso and the hunchbacked robot couldn't turn around well enough, he simply extended a gauntleted hand around over to his back, the immense appendage missing Zim by a few feet and hovering there, arm straining as Kimblee realized it wouldn't go any farther. He grunted, turned as best he could, and the arm extended slightly...moving just over Zim and lightly touching the empty slot where the armor plate was supposed to be. "My armor!" Kimblee snarled. Attracted by the noise, the Gestalt looked over...and saw Zim clinging onto the back of Umbra Eternis. It expressed an appropiate degree of surprise before forming a number of sharp slashing limbs, diving at him like an ocean intent on stamping out a single ember and not really caring that it's summoner happened to be the terrain that ember was on.

Zim cackled maniacally and jumped off the machine-titan's back and bounced off it's legs to the ground just as the Gestalt smashed into the back of Umbra Eternis, nearly knocking it over. He hurried back to his group and the Umbra Eternis staggered around, almost falling over and flailing it's arms awkwardly. It just barely managed to keep it's balance, and whirled a fist directly into the Gestalt with enough force to smash it through a building. "What are you _DOING!_" Kimblee bellowed, and even though his words were downright civilized compared to the Umbra Eternis' background roar of indignation, he sounded even more angry then the robot. Umbra Eternis raised a hand, anti-tank weapons snapping into position over the Umbra Eternis' arm as various beam weapons powered up; and the Gestalt rose up, tendrils telescoping out from it and contorting into metallic shapes like combinations of drills and saws in varying mixtures...and Zim's allies, deciding that they didn't really want Kimblee to beocme a Heartless, went right back to their strategy of 'shoot the hell out of the bad guys until they explode or something', pounding into the both of them with their various missiles.

"We'll finish this later!" Kimbee snarled, and the Gestalt backed down and obligingly extended a shield of dark energy around the both of them, diminishing the damage a little. Kimblee then considered for a moment how best to resolve the assault on him, and then decided 'screw sublety' and to put some of his machine-titan's weapons to proper use for once, and then the immense metal bulk of the Umbra Eternis leaned in their direction, it's jaws suddenly open and revealing a large cannon extending from it's throat and powering up. The dark portions of it's body shimmered, and a terrifying array of weapons appeared from those shimmers to lock onto ports all over the machine-titan's body: rocket launchers, flamethrowers, gatling guns, flechet sprayers, grenade throwers, beam weapons and more, encrusting it's torso and upper arms to the point that it probably wouldn't be able to move at all if it wanted to. And just to make things _really_ unfair, he drew upon the Stone's power and infused it into the street right in front of them and the outer walls of all the nearby buildings, breaking apart ordinary minerals and reshaping them into _more _guns and cannons and crude gatling guns and spear-throwers and a giant oversized crossbow or two, leaving them faced with a giant robot so literally armed to the teeth that it couldn't move and a horribly large array of transmuted weapons pointing right at them.

"I wish had that much firepower so my enemies could accuse _me _of being cheap," Zim commented. He shook a fist at Kimblee. "Because that is so very cheap!" Gaara stepped forwards as Kimblee's weapons powered up to maximum power and the Gestalt charged up as well, his sand billowing out and sweeping over all of them and pulling them close tough, hardening as it did (causing a few panic attacks among those who knew what Gaara _did _to people with that sand) and Angilaka pushed her hands against the sand with blue-white light shining forth, and finally Calvin clapped his hands and struck them against the sand-

Kimblee barely noticed the large ball of glowing sand busily being transmuted and finally fired his most devastating attack since he had acquired the Umbra Eternis and joined it to his will. All his weapons fired at once at the same time that the Gestalt fired a equally overpowered blast of it's own and the result was an explosion that tore the alley apart, collapsed the buildings on either side of it, smashed down the buildings near _them_ and broke all windows (and similar fragile objects) for the next mile and a half. And because Kimblee really loved overkill, he clapped his hands, drew more power from the Stone, and made an even _bigger _directionalexplosion than the one that had wrecked Foster's Home, utterly _obliterating_ everything in front of him for the next four and a half miles.

When the smoke and noise faded, an enormous long jagged gap had been blasted into the ground, encompassing all that was left of the area they had been in. Streets leaned into that gap, numerous houses and businesses falling in as Kimblee watched with his eyes slightly rolling around. Ash blinded him for a moment, and he briefly entertained the idea that this ash was the mortal remnants of the foes that had finally fallen to his superior power. Then he realized that meant he had their vaporized bits all over him and he started coughing and _that _meant he would have been breathing them too and triggered a truly spectacular coughing fit and he almost voimited.

After a moment, mastering the dry heaves and realizing that the ash didn't taste like vaporized bodies (something he had a good deal of experience in), Kimblee came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way anything could have survived his attack...so he considered that they either _had _found a way to survive it, or contrived a means of simply not being there. (Somehow.)

He smashed the back of the Umbra Eternis into a wall, assimilating it's materials over the hole in his mecha's back and covering it in the strongest alloys he could think of before he glanced up at the amalgated Heartless, which looked rather miffed that it hadn't gotten the chance to kill anything, and the Umbra Eternis made a sweeping gesture. "Find them!" Kimblee said. The Gestalt stared blankly at him. "...So you can eat their hearts, I suppose?" The Gestalt circled away and sped off in the presumable direction of his enemies. "You have to know how to motivate people. Or horrible eldritch horrors from beyond the multiverse." Kimblee said to Ghostfreak and Kevin; the latter said nothing, and the former scoffed at the idea that he didn't already know that.

...

On the other side of the morality scale that Kimblee had the dubious honor of occupying the seedy end of, Winry Rockbell flew a ship intended for other people (or more specifically, a newly formed crew that she wasn't aware even existed; she just knew it had been built for a guy Cyborg had taken a liking to), not so much piloting the ship as powering it, aiming it at the appropiate direction and trying not to hit anything on the way.

The ship moved like a train; because of the ship's particular means of flight, it moved fast, anything that got in it's way was smashed over - requiring that she fly higher over the buildings then usual -but it also _steered _like a train, except that steering was, theoretically, possible, it was just ridiculously hard.

As it was, the ship was faster than she'd hoped, but not as fast as she would have liked, but then it would have been drastically unfeasable for it to be as fast as she wanted it to be and would have just been a teleporter. Protected in the ship's bridge by layers of thick armor, perfectly sealed inside it and safe from harm, she tried to focus on the matter at hand: find Kimblee, provide back-up, and end this nightmare as soon as possible.

Frowning grimly as she checked the radar and scanned through a number of worrying statistics and analyses provided by a computer, Winry absently aimed at and vaporized another pack of Heartless terrorizing a bunch of grocers who were trying to barricade and blow them up as her ship flew overhead. Unaware of their shouts of gratitude at her, she flew on, streaking by the street so fast that it had been a matter of reflex by this point. She had done the same thing dozens of time by now; fly overhead, see Heartless or criminals or a monster of the sort that showed up out of nowhere anyway and stop them on her way to wherever it was that the big fight with Kimblee had gotten to; as she had told Cyborg, it was getting repetitive, and she might have gotten there by now if there hadn't been _so many _fresh incidents to avert.

What, she wondered, was it about big-scale situations like this that caused a number of smaller problems to come crawling out of everywhere and slow people down? It was like there was something in the town that deliberately encouraged things like that to string out fights as long as possible and cause more chaos; if it wasn't for opportunists like that, even the big-scale stuff would probably be stopped much quicker because then the big-hitters could come around and help out instead of getting caught up in all the stuff that was a bit closer to home or at least in the way. That was probably why the rest of the Council hadn't shown up; there were more Heartless popping up all over the place, and destroying them before they killed anyone else was currently the priority. Also, she doubted the other Council members knew where Kimblee was right now.

She suspected that Kimblee had already left the area, or that the fight had gone elsewhere; the area Cyborg had indicated was coming up close, already passing past the edges of the evacuated and distressingly empty part of the district, and the ship she piloted came to a halting and unsteady stop, hovering.

From up here, she could see the area from the coordinates Cyborg had given her, and she bit her lip at the rubble where buildings had stood not even an hour ago, the gaping holes rent into the street, the way some of the neighborhoods were leaning up slightly and slowly begining to collapse into the tunnels below. It felt familiar and raw, like what had remained of the Factory District in the Lowardian invasion, and closer to home came faint but piercingly hard images she associated with the damage done to Resembool by vengeful Ishbalan guerillas in the Ishbalan Extermination campaign, or the remnants of Amestris when the Heartless had been let in and all the blood and screaming around her, memories that she kept so fresh in her mind that they bit and tore and ground deep into her until her mind _bled_ with it and-

She shelved the pain aside, grit her teeth and reminded herself of what was at stake, just as she had forced herself to only contribute passing shots at the enemies she had seen on her search for Kimblee. She couldn't _afford _to stop or get all weepy or anything like that. "You're a big girl now," She told herself, voice cracking a bit. "None of that whiny damsel bullshit." Her mind, seeminglyy eager to bring up things to upset her, reminded her that _Scar _was in the group there, and she grimaced a little, choking down the grudge and focusing on the important things.

(People could change. She knew that. She knew that Scar _had _changed, that he was an entirely different man than the emotionally-crippled instrument of hatred that had murdered her parents in a fit of madness. Hatred was a foriegn thing to her, and she had foudn that she just didn't like him very much. For her parent's memory, at least, that was enough.)

She focused on the issue at hand and put enough power for the ship to warily scoot forward, moving at a gentle pace that wouldn't arouse attention and give her the benefit of surprise. The desolation got worse as she advanced, and she tried to ignore it while looking at the little details to get a better picture of what had happened here (not an easy task to reconcile, and it was bad enough seeing just how much firepower was being thrown around), and her gorge kept rising and she tasted sour sicknesse everything she saw an entire row of uprooted houses that looked like something enormous had just smashed right through them, or potholes in a street where missiles had bounced off something and hit the ground before they exploded...on the other hand, she wasn't seeing any bodies or blood splatters anywhere, which helped her growing queasiness a little bit.

At last she came to where Cyborg had told her to find them, not terribly surprised to find nothing more than a totally destroyed area that looked all too much like a warzone; the whole place scattered with rubble that was on fire in places, half-melted and miserably drooping bits of metal that had been pummeled beyond endurance by pressure and heat, an entire small plaza that looked like a massive bomb had hit it, and then a bigger bomb had it afterwards, and then a kaiju-class monster had come charging through...

Still no bodies. And this was _definitely _where Cyborg had called her to come meet up with them. Winry frowned, tapping a finger on the ship's dashboard (for lack of a better word) and narrowed her eyes at the massive gap in the buildings (well, more massive than general in the fights today) where something huge had smashed through, or perhaps _two _huge somethings, if the unusual impact marks on the building gave any indications and the odd-looking footprints smashed into the surrounding streets seemed to fit that idea.

The ship's audio receptors picked up a series of crashing noises, like something very big smashing through even more buildings. Deploring the thought of futher structure damage to an already battered day, Winry still turned the ship in the direction of those sounds, tilting it upwards so it ascended up out of eyesight of Kimblee; logically, if he was in a giant robot and was looking down to keep track of his enemies, he wouldn't bother to look up.

If there was a rule for tracking Kimblee and he had already abandoned subtlety, it was this: _follow the explosions_. Collapsing buildings seemed close enough, and he _did _have a giant robot. Winry powered the ship up as much as she dared, funneling willpower and resolve into the emotional energies that fueled this ship's bizarre engine - an ancient technology they had found by studying the remnants of technology here - and set off again.

She didn't know when she'd find them, or if it would be too late, but she would make it count all the same.

...

For better or worse (almost certainly worse), not _everyone _in the area had evacuated when Zim had called out Kimblee on live television. True, many of them _had _left in a hurry when the Heartless had started attacking (leaving to rejoin the big population centers for safety in numbers) and more had gone when they saw the message Zim sent out to warn people about Kimblee and call up the rogue alchemist himself for a fight, but plenty remained in scattered pockets in the area where the fight was taking place, too stubborn to leave their homes or firmly believing that they could tough out whatever came this way or just not caring about the current crisis.

Some of them, less thick-headed, had heard the explosions coming from the evacuated part of the district and were growing concerned, trying to get people moving, and the recent explosions and the massive fight that was getting gradually closer to them was helping them convince people that they needed to leave. In a less develouped part of the town than most, the streets wider and the buildings more cluttered together in an arrangement that resembled a squatter's village, several people were arguing the matter. (Because if there was one thing people in Traverse Town liked more than indulging the usual state of chaos, it was arguging for no reason.) "Come on, you guys, we need to _go!_" One of them yelled, gesturing at the dustclouds only a short distance away where the fight had been raging. "Something big is going on down here and I don't want to be caught in the middle of it!"

"Big, yes," conceded one of the 'stay right here' guys, a short cat-person in workman's overalls named Havoc (and unrelated to Alex 'Havoc' Summers, a mutant who worked in the local prizefighting circuits). "Like the dozen or so other things that have happened this month, or every other month!"

"But nobody actually got _killed _during those circumstances. You saw that message; this Kimblee guy is a person of mass destruction wanted for war crimes by a country that commited them on a monthly basis _and _he obliterated Foster's! Turned everyone there into an artifact that makes him even more powerful!"

A small wingless dragon nodded. "Staying here is suicide."

"Running won't do any good," buzzed a hive-mind swarm of clockwork grasshoppers flying slightly over their heads. "We should stay here and use the surrondings against him!"

A person without apparent gender who was probably human before replacing it's body parts with mechanical upgrades gestured towards the low-slung homes aorund then, where the rooftops were buckling against the stress of holding up the homemade cannons placed there. More people, the ones who wanted to stay and fight, were standing there with hoverbikes and more weapons, as lookouts and the first line of defense. "We know the area better than any intruder, and this is our home! I am _tired _of running and joining up with people every time something nasty happens!"

"Hey, would you prefer safety of numbers or dying!" said a humanoid crustacean wearing a translator (since it's mouthparts weren't equipped for articulating the same words as everyone around), and gestured towards a large bus covered with plate armor and rocket boosters, and nearly half of it was full; the friends and family of the people who wanted to evacuate immediately. "We must flee! I've seen the reports of what's left of Foster's and the destruction hitting us since; we don't have the firepower to fight something like this!"

"And so we just run and hide!"

"No, we retreat and regroup with others!" The crustacean pounded a fist into it's pincered hands. "If we stay here, we'll just end up becoming the idiots who get overconfident and wind up killed by the bad guy to show how dangerous he is."

"Aw man, I hate being that kind of guy," Havoc complained. "But if we run, we'll probably end up getting blown up by a random bit of collateral damage anyway because big dramatic fights have collateral damage all over the place."

Everyone nodded; this was a rare thing they could all agree on. "I hate fights like that," the dragon complained. "They think it's cool and all to wreck stuff, and yeah it _looks _cool, but what are we supposed to do with the wreckage until we find some alchemists to put it back! Yeah, it gets fixed up right away as good as new, but my stuff generally gets wrecked. I _like _my stuff!"

"So what are we supposed to do?" A human dressed as a mime for some unfathomable reason said. "If we stay we'll get cut down, if we run we'll be blown up!"

"Unless we leave _right _now," the crustacean said hopefully. "Then we won't get killed?"

There was some discussion from the 'stay and fight' people. "But if we get killed anyway, we'll look like a bunch of cowardly jerks," the androgyne remarked. "If we stay and fight and die anyway, at least we'll look _cool _doing it. Or look like a bunch of punks, but who cares, _I _know I'm not being a punk and that's the only opinion I care about."

"That would explain the modifications you've done to yourself," The crustacean muttered.

"What was that?"

"You're wearing Model twenty-two eco-fired prosthetics and organ-replacing implants from the Gaslamp corporation in the summer time!" The crustacean declared with the fervor of a born fashion obsessive. "Have you any idea how tacky that looks! Martian-style steampunk in a contrasting blend with the Digital Chrome style is the big thing now! Have you know awareness of proper fashionable protocol!"

"Hey, Gaslamp will be back before you know it! My fashions are the fashions that will rise again from the smoldering ashes of retroactive popularity! And then I'll be able to tell people that I was into it before it got _cool!_"

The argument quickly devolved into strictly aesthetic trends, the two bickering and comparing notes on their opinions of the current direction that the standards for mechanical implants, prosthetics, internal devices and other such things were going (there was a general consensus that implanted devices was the _in _thing now, but shoving communicators into your skull was becoming less popular since communication technology changed so fast these days and since big and clunky was the biggest thing now it would probably be uncomfortable to have a phone the size of your fist jammed into the flesh under your ear), and while a few people followed it with interest, others were furious that they weren't taking the problem seriously. "What is _wrong _with you people!" the dragon snarled. "There's explosions happening all over the place! When things like that suddenly stop and no one hears about the fight being over, something _bad _is usually about to happen! Or it wasn't important enough for everyone to hear about, but that probably isn't the case here. We need to _go, _before we all end up dead!"

"Uh, you just pointed out that these things sometimes stop without anyone notifying anyone," Havoc said.

"I think that stopping a _rogue alchemist who blew up Foster's counts as important!_" The dragon bellowed.

"...Oh."

"Come _on, _people!" The dragon puffed up, flames streaming from it's nostrils and magical symbols glowing on his body. "What do you _want _before you see some sense! For, I don't know, proof to suddenly come down from the sky!"

This was discussed. "Yes," Havoc said. "That would probably be fine." As if on cue, a large and smoking stone ball crashed into the ground at the far end of the street, bouncing a few times and glowing with the remnants of a powerful protective spell, scaring the hell out of people and a few nervous gunners shooting into the direction it had come from. "...Huh, that's convienient."

The dragon gaped. "...I was just being sarcastic!"

"And yet it worked," The androgyne said, going over to the stone ball and giving it a few healthy whacks with an oversized power fist for a hand, making a small dent and getting his hand dinged for his trouble. "Ow!"

The dent cracked, something inside the stone ball moving around, and then the whole thing burst apart into a thick cloud of sand that blasted all over the street, blinding people and knocking things over and generally freaking people out. Several people were pushed into one of the various groups in gut reflexe; a few of the people who wanted to run shifted into a more aggressive mode and ran howling at the sand to fight for their lives, while a few of the wannabe-fighters freaked out, their nerves stretched to the limit, and threw down their weapons and ran to the bus, intending on getting out of there.

The sand moved, suddenly enough to startle people into wary stillness, and they saw that the stone ball had been carrying a large group of people inside it, and with their protective shell destroyed, were now lying on the sandy street in a distangled heap. Sitting on top of the pile, Keyblade in hand, was Zim, and he blinked at the bewildered crowd in relieved wonderment. "I can't believe that actually worked," he said.

"_I _can't believe none of us saw that coming," Calvin said.

"And I can't believe that all of you fell on me!" Hobbes said. "MY SPINE HURTS."

"_And _I can't believe that none of us were killed by rocketing around inside a stone ball at insane speeds, never mind with how tightly we were put together," Zuko grumbled.

"And I can't believe that none of these guys has noticed us yet," the dragon said. Havoc nodded.

"Well, I did use divine magic to help protect us," Angilaka said brightly, ignoring the crowd. "Putting divine magic made sure that our shield wouldn't get us killed!"

"Actually, I _did _maintain a layer of sand to cushion our blow and I'm reasonably certain the tattooed monk generated a cushion of air to shield us-" Gaara started to say.

"DIVINE. MAGIC." Angilaka said loudly. Wisely, no one bothered to push the point any more. (Well, Calvin would have liked to argue, and Hobbes would probably like to ask more about the divine magic as it was a bit of an interest of his, but they had more sense than that.) She noticed the crowd staring at them, and also the bus ready to go, and the people on top of the buildings. "Who the heck are these guys? I thought this area was evacuated!"

"We want to stay and fight!" Some of them said.

"No, _we _want to run and get everyone out before we start fighting!"

"You wusses!"

"Incautious dumbasses!"

"_Over_cautious miscreants!"

"Insufficiently sentient mold-spores!"

"All of you shut up!" Zim snapped, shooting a blast of fire overhead. The crowd fell silent as he got off the pile-up, everyone else in Zim's group distangling themselves and standing up. "Are you people _insane _or something! Did you not hear my warning about the insane lunatic with a weapon of mass destruction!"

"There were...complications," the dragon said unhappily.

Hobbes came over. "Really." He didn't sound convinced. "It sounds simple to me. Run as fast as you can or you'll get killed horribly. How is that complicated?"

"...We got distracted with arguing with each other whether it wasn't quite as bad as that so we should stay and fight, or that we should leave as the message said?" The crustacean said sheepishly.

Hobbes facepalmed. "...I hate crowd control. I hate it so much."

"No you don't," Havoc said, just to be contrary and annoying. Hobbes glared at him and he wisely shut up and shuffled behind someone, whistling innocently.

"Listen!" Roy Mustang said, pointing behind them. "We have engaged Solf J. Kimblee directly in a battle and you _need to leave _now before he catches up! He-"

"OH MY GOD, IT'S ROY MUSTANG!" Someone from the roof yelled. "THIS IS AWESOME! IT'S LIKE BEING AT A CONCERT OR SOMETHING!"

"Wait, what?" Roy said. Gibbs blinked. "I don't-"

"AND IT'S DEADPOOL AND MR. GREED AND THAT ONE GREEN LADY THAT ISN'T AS AWESOME AS THEM!" A rhino-girl shouted excitedly, hopping up and down on her roof and making it shake. Then she pointed at Naruto and Gaara. "And also those guys." The two ninjas frowned, not sure if they liked being 'those guys'.

Shego blinked and scowled at her co-worker and employer, both of which were whistling innocently. (Well, Greed was. Deadpool was quietly sneaking through the crowd and trying to steal everything that wasn't nailed down just because he could. Hobbes saw what he was doing, forced him to give everything back, dragged him back to Greed, and also stole Deadpool's wallet when he wasn't looking.) "...Second-billing. _Again_. You guys suck."

"Holy crap, it _is _them!" The hive-mind grasshoppers said. "So many celebrities! Today is awesome, apart from the fear and destruction and death! But _celebrities!_ And some other guys I probably know but can't be focused on because the celebrities are so awesome, and so more other guys I don't know and have never seen before in a day of my life and so are probably totally irrelevant."

Just about every semi-sane person there facepalmed in protest at the stupidity infecting the scene. "What part of 'run or you will die horribly' don't you understand?" Abel said acidly. "I don't think you understand the situation?"

"Well, what is the situation?"

Sick of the delays, Calvin yelled, "Kimblee is coming this way, and he has a giant indestructable robot made from _two _indestructable robots so it's like _super-_indestructable and armed with so many weapons it qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction on it's own and it's also powered by Heartless so it's literally made of evil, and speaking of Heartless Kimblee somehow made a giant _super-_Heartless and it's coming our way _right now _and you don't run you're all going to die!"

A brief pause followed this pronouncement.

"Um." The androgyne raised a hand. "How indestructable are we talking about here?"

"...Nothing all of us put together even fazes it," Gibbs said, gesturing at himself, Roy, Greed, Gaara and the other heavy-hitters that couldn't be bothered to be mentioned right then, and plus Zim and his crew, who were of course among the most powerful in the group even if it wasn't very obvious.

_Boom_. Something immense - and _heavy _- smashed through a house that was in it's way, punctuated by a massive mechanical roar and flashes of darkness. A cloud of dust rose over the rooftops, and a vast winged shape passed under it.

Plenty of people made small noises of utter horror. "...I vote we run for our lives!" The androgyne said.

"Me too!" Havoc said; they ran for the bus, though the people that still remained on the rooftops stood their ground, looking scared out of their minds and like they wanted nothing more than to get on that bus with their friends, but they stayed there just the same.

_Boom._ More buildings suffered. _Boom. Boom._ The line of buildings a few streets over were smashed apart.

"Get ready for it!" Zim said, sounding almost excited. He looked and noticed the people on the rooftops. "Hey, what are you _doing!_ Get down there and _run!_"

"We need to hold off whatever's coming so they can!" The rhino-girl said, pointing at her friends on the bus, which was revving up with the last of it's passengers onboard.

"...You idiots, _that's what we're doing!_" Zuko roared, blasting flame from his mouth. "Get down from there and run before you get killed!"

"...Oh. Right, sorry, forgot about you guys." The rooftop people looked sheepish and started to move...

And then a large building at the front of the street that no one was using after it had fallen out of a freak wormhole in the sky and no one had wanted to see if it was evil or not exploded in a storm of fire and sound and a vast winged shaped flew out of the smoking wreckage and landed on the ground with a ominous crunching noise as the tortured street strugged to take the immense weight. The Keyblade shined fiercely, and the assembled bystanders gasped at the realization of what a terribly deep mess they were in as the giant Heartless perched there, glaring down at them with it's many eyes while it's wings retracted into the substances of it's body.

"...What is that?" The crustacean said from on a seat on the bus. "What is that? _What the hell kind of Heartless is that!_ That's not a Heartless, that's a...a...shoggoth or something!"

"Don't forget the robot," Havoc said. "And to think _you _wanted to stay and fight it."

"That was _you _guys!"

"Oh. Right. Forgot about that."

Umbra Eternis was there of course, but it did not stand beside the Heartless or behind it (which would have been a good way for it to take all the blows first), but it stood _atop _the Heartless, not precisely riding it - though it could be considered to do so - as it had partially _merged _with the Heartless from the waist down, it's upper body standing firm with the arms crossed and Kimblee in an identical pose, a relatively tiny figure in it's stomach, and Jarod lay half-sunk to the neck...the extended tendrils hooked into him were nearly larger than he was, and disturbingly cancerous. And even more ominously, the Umbral Heartless were glowing with faint red light in places, the energy of the Philosopher's Stone absorbed by them in Kimblee's reckless uses of it. If this bothered him, he didn't show it.

"Okay," Sokka said in an aside to Zim. "I'll admit it. Guy comes in piloting a giant super-robot that is riding an even bigger monster. Why does everyone else have the really cool stuff?"

"It's like a law or something," Naruto said. "Bad guys _always _have the awesome stuff. Then again, it's not like they have to go through legal channels to buy that sort of thing."

"It appears your evacuation attempt failed," Kimblee said, looking aside at the bystanders before looking down at his foes with a smug little smirk that indicated he knew _exactly _they knew what he was going to do. The Gestalt stepped back and the Umbra Eternis bent low so that Kimblee was suddenly lowered to the ground, and he put a hand on the ground; red light flashed, and the ground curled up over the bus' tires as it tried to speed away, freezing it in place; the tires spun and smoked, the engine blared but the bus could not move. "Too bad for them." Kimblee was retracted back into the fuselage, neatly avoiding the flurry of projectiles Zim's group and the people on the rooftops fired at him and watching in detached amusement when those projectiles either bounced off his machine-titan's or just exploded without any harm.

"My turn," He said, and raised one of the Umbra Eternis' arms. The laser-disc in the palm powered up, and fired a powerful laser beam directly into the nearest rooftop, hitting the cannon on it dead-on and making a lesser explosion while the roof was torn apart. The rhino-girl leaped for safety before that happened, and found herself with the lesser problem of now falling to her doom. Zim felt something move at his side, and saw Hobbes jumping again, bounding off a wall and catching the rhino-girl (with some difficulty, since she was a lot bigger than him), landing on the Umbra Eternis' shoulder and bounding off again, bouncing from wall to wall until he was at the escape bus and dropped her beside it, and proceeded to start breaking the sheaths holding it down.

Toph rolled her eyes and gave the ground a light kick. The sheaths holding the tires disintegrated and the bus immediately drove away to safety...before coming to a stop, as the people inside realized that there were still people left behind and they didn't want to go until they were all gone.

"If they had just left when they were supposed to this would be a lot easier!" Greed complained. Fully armored up, he gestured at Beth. "You look strong. Throw me at Kimblee."

"What?" She said.

"Just do it!"

"Okay, okay!" Her powered armor grabbed Greed by the arm and spun around and around, building up momentum until she judged it enough and let go, her computers targeting the appropiate impact with utmost precision and Greed flew through the air like a sin-dark missile, smashing into the Umbra Eternis' shoulder and knocking it off-balance, and good job too; Kimblee had been about to fire another blast at another rooftop and the laser went awry, hitting the house through the middle instead. This was still enough to cause fatal structural damage and the whole house folded in half, crumbling inward, and the four occuptants on the rooftop scrabbling for balance and yelling furiously at Kimblee. One of them went for the cannon on their roof and squeezed off a single explosive missile at the side of the Umbra Eternis and hit it, causing Heartless and giant robot alike to stumble away, trying to regain balance.

Zim saw the people fall and ran towards the building dispite not having any idea of what in the world he was supposed to accomplish, and Gaara and Aang followed him as he extended his spider-leg attachments from his Pak and climbed up the crumbling facade and jumped, catching a cat-person who seemed very surprised to be saved by someone so much smaller than himself (and caught so easily) and swinging the Keyblade at an incoming piece of the rooftop that had snapped off and was approaching him far too fast. To Zim's surprise, instead of accomplishing nothing or slicing through it, the Keyblade generated a swirling flare of light in all colors that Zim could process that hit the offending debris, pulverizing with no more harm to them then some dust getting in their faces. The light kept going, somehow solidified and flattening out into a broad shape that caught another two cat-people that were clinging tightly to each other and landed on the light-construct looking totally bewildered.

Zim landed on the ground and put the cat-person down, with no idea of what he had just down or how he was supposed to get those two down now. Unfortunately that broke whatever hold he had and they fell down, screaming again. He stuck out the Keyblade, trying to ignore the cat-person he had saved frantically screaming at him to save those two, and Zim had no idea how he had done that or how to make it happen again, so he just concentrated as hard as he could on the general idea of _don't let those two hit the ground_, channeling that desire through the Keyblade in the way that his growing understanding of his Firebending had slowly and painfully suggested to him, and light flickered around those two. It wasn't another construct, and they didn't stop falling, but they did slow down, slowly drifting to safety. Aang and Gaara caught them, flying down and catching them with hand-shaped sand tendrils, depositing them near the bus before they used those same sand-hands to catch the falling building, stopping it from caving in any further long enough for Aang to get to the guy still at the cannon and shooting as many shots as he could at Kimblee before Aang forcefully grabbed him and flew him over to the awaiting bus.

"...What the hell did I just do!" Zim said.

"I dunno," the cat-person said unhelpfully, running over to the bus to make his escape and probably feeling very stupid right now. Zim shook his head and decided it wasn't important.

The Umbra Eternis staggered up. "Good show!" Kimblee said, pleased with the good fight they were showing, and the Gestalt playfully smashed a massive tendril through across one side of the street, collapsing three entire houses in a single swipe and forcing the scattered six or so people on them to run for their lives on the falling roofs. Toph extended several pillars on the ground for them to land, and when they did, she broke the tops off and levitated the rooftop cannoneers over to the bus, dropping them off. The very instant she had done that, she Earthbent the pillars out of the ground and threw the pieces she had already removed at the Umbra Eternis; the Gestalt caught most of them, and the last was dismissively swatted aside by the giant robot itself with a growling chuckle. Toph then threw the pillars themselves, leeting them shatter on the giant robot's armor and reforming the pieces into solid forms on it's armor, digging deep into the gaps between it's plates and pulling as hard as she could to rip the armor right off.

The Umbra Eternis merely smashed the rocks off itself, patting itself to make sure it's armor was still attached. It was, if looser than before. "No bad, but try harder, this is still fun!" Kimblee chided her. Toph growled and fired rock-spikes out of the ground directly at Kimblee himself. Startled, Kimblee turned his robot aside, so the spikes bounced off it's side. He smirked, red energy swelling up, and a beam of white light struck down and vaporized the ground where she had been standing. Fortunately, she had moved at the last moment, grinding along on a rolling wave of the street itself.

Kimblee was distracted thereafter; Greed had worked his way to the stomach cavity that was the robot's fuselage, having been trying to tear his way into the robot and having no success. He threw himself at Kimblee, screaming, "_MY ROBOT! YOU BASTARD!_" and punched Kimblee in the chest so hard that a few ribs broke. Kimblee stuck a hand against the homunculus' chest before Greed could reach Jarod and pull him out, transmuting Greed's internal organs but stopping halfway through, and Greed froze in mid-action when his insides basically tore themselves apart. Blood streamed from his jaws and he fell off the Umbra Eternis, armor vanishing so that he could regenerate, and right into the waiting jaws of the Gestalt.

"BOSS!" Shego and Deadpool shouted as the Gestalt generated a lamprey-type extension from itself that eagerly slurped up Greed. Deadpool fired at it with the missile launcher he still had, hitting the extension at it's base and causing the Greed-lump sliding down it to respond, pounding furiously at it from the inside. With it sufficiently distracted, Shego powered up a massive eye-hurting flare of greenness and released a laser that sliced it right off, toppling off the Gestalt and bouncing on the ground and rolling near them. It wriggling, bubbling up and forming individual Heartless that had been released from the Umbrals, and Shego furiously blasted them with the biggest burst she could create, disintegrating the Heartless in a heartbeat. (It also toasted Greed, but it was okay, he could heal.)

Greed groaned, trying to hold his insides in while his skin regenerated. "...Ow." Aang, flying over head, pulled the ground Greed was on out into a small disc-shape and moved it safely away from the giant robot and Heartless where he could regenerate in peace. "See, the kid who I don't even pay does better work than you jerks."

"We saved your life!" Shego retorted.

"_He didn't burn me alive!_"

"Oh, come on, you can heal. Don't be a wimp."

"Sometimes I hate you guys so much."

Kimblee held his sides and winced. "That...actually hurt..." He said, trying not to wheeze with his breath. His body was healing slowly - _somehow _- but it was an agonizing process, however it was happening. It got worse for him; it was clear that Kimblee was seriously targeting the people on the rooftop to antagonize his enemies, so Zim and his group began throwing all they had at him again to buy them a little more time (and incidentally channeled the frustration they were feeling at these idiots who didn't have the sense to run when they heard a public announcement telling them about the psychopath with exploding coming their way, but that was also sort of Zim's fault to begin with); missiles and plasma shots and fire blasts and green fire blasts and chunks of earth and and ice spears and chunks of earth that were on fire with ice spears on them and random light blasts that confused Zim and the makeshift armor-shield that dinged the Umbra Eternis in the head before it bounced back to Hobbes and holy light lasers unrelated to Zim's holy light lasers (that he still didn't really get) and cannonfire from the few dudes still on the rooftops who were too caught up in the action to make their way to the bus like their friends were screaming at them to.

The combined assault, even bigger than it had the last time they'd tried thanks to the random people on the rooftop. Kimblee kept the Umbra Eternis' arms raised over himself to protected, and the arms kept being bumped over him; because the shape of the giant robot he was in no danger of being crushed, but the noise was deafening and extremely painful to be bombarded by, and he couldn't retaliate because he couldn't even see what was going on; even the Umbra Eternis' senses, which he shared, couldn't help out before Gibbs was making it his personal mission to destroy it's eyes and it was too busy protecting it's optical sensors to pay any attention to the battle. And he felt every blow the Umbra Eternis took, his mental link to it working both ways, and while he didn't phyiscally suffer it's pains, _psychically _was another story. He clutched the Philosopher's Stone tightly, the pain growing too much for him to tolerate and thought of simpy rendering the apart and wiping this part of this town off the planet-

And Kevin began to sing. Loudly, as off-key as possible, and knowing full-well that it was going to totally destroy Kimblee's concentration. The bit of power he had been acclumating fizzled, and only encouraged Kevin to sing louder, and Kimblee banged his head against the wall in frustration, and immediately regretted it: now he had far too many people shooting at him, a voice singing annoying songs in his brain, and a headache.

A second round hit, and it nearly tore the Umbra Eternis from the Gestalt, which was less encumbered by Kimblee's pain and sloughed it off, tearing itself away from the Umbra Eternis and pouncing; this was, under the circumstances, a pretty bad move, since they were still firing, and the Gestalt wound up taking the full brunt of the attacks. Holes were blasted into it's front and it spun in the air, crashing into the ground, but this still happened to be the part of the ground where most of Zim's group was standing. They scattered, but Zim, Sokka, Cyborg, Calvin and Scar weren't quick enough to flee before it fell on them. It got up, realized that it had fresh beating hearts ripe for the taking underneath it and bent it's entire body on half, snapping itself into two almost-halves rimmed with sudden teeth and extending entrails with snapping jaws lined up all over. It flung itself back down, dripping ichor from it's wounds, and made the double mistake of trying to pin some of the more effective long-range combatants when they had their weapons and exposing it's innards to them. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon at high strength while also firing repulsor blasts from his other wrist, small machine-guns sliding out from hatches on his shoulders and opening fire, and the toothy entrails were pummeled mercilessly while the sonic energy and repulsors made a buffer layer that punched the Gestalt back, and in the moment before it started to fall back down, it seemed to float there.

That was long enough. Sokka and Zim let loose with everything they had while Calvin and Scar rolled away, firing wildly with bursts of flame and plasma, punching deeper and deeper in it's innards, and Zim made it even worse for the Gestalt when he wound his arm back and threw the Keyblade as hard as he could, light flaring from it in elaborate contrails as it rocketed up under it's own power into it's core, energy building up and released in a blast that should have been blinding but was instead invigorating and didn't hurt the eyes. The Gestalt stumbled back on a pair of legs it grew for this purpose, partly shredded from the primordial light, and Calvin revealed what he had been up to; gathering the cannons that had fallen from the rooftops when Kimblee destroyed them and transmuting them into a complication like a gatling gun, only with cannons. Sitting in the gunner seat of his creation and grinning like a maniac, he opened fire and soon exhausted his ammunition but it didn't matter, as a little over twelve explosive shells were emptied into the weakened Gestalt's amorphous flesh and expoded in side it, tearing off a full third of it's body. Scar was up next, and placed his hands on the ground, and the entire part of the street from just in front of where he was standing to the Gestalt cracked and rose up, the entire section churning with frantic energy as it took on a new shape, details emerging and suggesting a large barrel...

And when it stopped, Scar standing atop it, it proved to be a gigantic cannon nearly as big as the Gestalt itself, so large it cast everyone else into it's shadow, starkly free of excessive detail apart from the required mechanisms to ensure that it would only need to fire once. Scar looked passively at the people on the rooftop, who were staring at him in a mixture of awe and terror. "Flee now," he said simply, and then stamped on the button he had made for the cannon.

It fired, with a massive roar that would have deafened Hobbes if he hadn't made preparations earlier (having found earplugs or something like that), the shockwaves from that single shot pounding against nearby building hard enough to crack them and throwing everyone on the ground around, and it belched out not a single huge missile but _dozens _of small cluttered explosive cannonballs, and every single one of them found it's target in the Gestalt's body, shredding the outer layer of it's form before exploding with sufficient force to catapault it across the street and right into the Umbra Eternis, which had finally gotten back up and was about to open fire, and knocked it back down in a hopelessly tangled mess. Kimblee screamed impotently, and Scar smirked coldly.

Zim whistled, impressed. "Why can't you do something like that?" He asked Calvin bitterly.

"But I _can!_" Calvin said indignantly, moodily watching the rooftop people come to their senses and realize that Scar had delayed Kimblee long enough for them to get out of this fight (which had only been kept from escalating to an extent that should have killed them through considerable effort by Zim's group), getting down from the rooftops by climbing down the walls and moving down catwalks and jury-rigged elevators and other normal features of this neighborhood and running down the street to the bus with all speed, a few of them offering quick congratulations for Calvin on the whole 'gatling cannon' thing, which improved his spirits.

The Gestalt started to slide away from the downed Umbra Eternis, which was still quite active, but any of Kimblee's attempts to get back up and add a few kills were in vain; the gunners made it to the bus, running like they would be bodily dragged into Hell if they didn't and a few of them jumped through the windows in their haste to get inside, and the very instant the last of them got in there and were confirmed by a quick rollcall (they _really _didn't want to leave anyone behind), the bus' rocket engines fired up and rocketing it down the street. It was fortunate that it was a main street and would take them a very long way before they had to turn, relatively speaking. Pretty soon it was just an armored blur, and then it was no longer a factor.

Kimblee saw it go, and the Umbra Eternis stormed to it's feet, throwing the Gestalt off itself. Not paying attention to the shapeshifting Heartless reforming itself into a combat body again, Kimblee seethed with fury, now realizing that the fight was not as overwhelmingly one-sided in his favor as he had tried to make it. He didn't say any blithe comments like 'where do they think they're going?' or 'I'll add _them _to my kill tally, don't you worry' since it wasn't really his style and he felt actions spoke louder than words. The Umbra Eternis simply roared like no beast that had ever existed or should have, it's optics fixed firmly on the armored blur speeding off in the distance as it reached out and grabbed the Gestalt, red energy flashing down it's arm as it pumped a minscule amount of it's own considerable power into the Heartless' essence (just to see what happened) and some of the Philosopher's Stone power went with it. "Kill them," Kimblee said lazily, and the Gestalt obediently opened it's maw, and inside it swelled a red-flecked purple energy ball, swiftly growing large enough to crack it's jaws apart and ripple threateningly.

Energy crackled around it. Small beams came untangled from the delicate matrice making it up, burning holes in everything they hit (including people's jackets and clothes even though they dove for cover) and it surged forwards and _doubled _in size, now nearly the size of the Gestalt itself, about to fire any moment.

"Oh come on!" Zim yelled, shaking his fist at Kimblee and summoning the Keyblade; he had forgotten that he had left it inside the Heartless, so it was torn free from inside it as it flew to his hand. Annoyingly, this didn't do more than cause some brief discomfort for the Gestalt. "They're just part of the background scenery! Killing random people in the background to show how evil you are is so _cliche!_"

"It is not!" Kimblee said. "I'm just doing my job!"

"And what's that?"

"I already told you!"

The energy ball, impossibly, doubled in size once more, now bigger than the Umbra Eternis, and was flashing an ominous red color. "_Shoot it_!" Zim yelled. "Shooting energy constructs always works!"

"But that doesn't make sense!" Hobbes and Zuko both yelled, as two lone voices of sanity.

"Yes, but it still works! SHOOT IT!" Roy yelled, making an explosion and transmuting the oxygen quantities such that it turned into an beam of fire that Zuko and Aang pumped up, just as the Heartless fired it's beam attack with such force that the initial shockwaves tore apart what was left of the street, shattering all the remaining houses and burning the air around it. The two attacks met in mid-air and _stopped_, the dark beam pushed back slightly by the flames before gradually pushing forward, surging wildly in an attempt to find the slightest gap to exploit.

Greed, fully regenerated and stumbled back onto the scene with his body freshly armored, said "_What. _I do shit like this every day and I still don't believe what I'm seeing."

"I am certain we are breaking so very many laws of physics, but I'm sure we will be forgiven this tresspass," Gaara said. Naruto stared at him. "What? We've been forgiven far worse tresspasses."

"...Hmm, reality is clearly out to lunch today," Kimblee said, everything he knew about physics weeping at how absurd all this was. "If it even clocked in today."

Emboldened and desperate (and thinking about what would happen if they turned it on Kimblee but not having much choice in spite of their concern for Jarod), everyone there fired everything they had at it, reacting so fast they didn't even perceive the exceedingly short-lived beam war. Their attacks hit it as it was being held back by the flames and forced it back into the diminishing energy ball, overwhelming it. Little by little, bit by bit, it was pressed back, inexorably returning into the sphere of energy that had fired it and finally hit with another round of projectiles that hit too hard for it to deal with, and the blast slammed back into the sphere with all the force expended by it's release.

Unfortunately, the Gestalt couldn't reabsorb the beam and had to literally choke it down with the beam being forced down it's throat and forcibly reintegrated into it's essence, which didn't interact too well with it's somewhat delicate internal balances. The only external evidence of this was that after it swallowed the energy beam, trying with all it's might to absorb it, it trembled furiously and remained perfectly still, extending tendrils of itself into the ground to anchor itself while it's body went through a eye-wateringly fast series of variations in forms, trying to find one that would enable it to properly contain the swirling energies inside. It settled on expanding it's body onto an absurdly cute ball-like form, moving it's mysterious insides around and seperating them from the misplaced beam while creating a shield of the strongest materials it could manifest around those energies, walling it's organs away from the deadly forces inside it.

For a moment, it seemed to work. The Gestalt swelled momentarily, unsightly discolored bubbles extending and bursting with the concretic ripples disturbing the surface of it's shadow-black flesh, and then it stopped. Zim gaped in horror, Calvin took several wary steps back, Zuko swore loudly, and Hobbes held up his new shield over himself in the hope it could protect them. The others in their group had similar reactions of horror and fury. For their enemy's part, Kimblee dared to breath a sigh of relief, the Umbra Eternis wiped some imaginary sweat from it's helmet and even the Gestalt managed to express a modicum of self-satisfied smugness that was very odd in a giant monster with no real face like that.

And then...

More concretic ripples moved throughout it's body. Slowly and with seeming effort, at first, and they quickly picked up the pace, moving faster and faster, occuring with greater speed and violence. The Gestalt trembled again, part of it bubbling and bursting into half-formed Heartless that were apparently so terrrified they wanted to escape before it could happen, and from the places where they seperated from it cracked ripped open, spewing a pestilential red light only slightly dampened by the corrupting influence of the Heartless, looking uncannily like artistic depictions of nuclear radiation. Unpleasant crackling sounds came from the Gestalt, beams of light tearing right through it's body and blasting through everything in their path, and the entire Heartless rippled like gelatin in an earthquake, the cracks not just spreading but ripping all over in a jagged and uncomplicated pattern across it's entire body, and it finally released it's spherical form as the strain was too much for it to take anymore, twisting up into a serpentine shape in a futile attempt to flee it's own treacherous body, and for a moment it looked almost dragonish, nearly reaching an apothesis of form that it didn't even know was there to be had.

"Oh no," Zim said, watching the Gestalt get torn apart from the inside and knowing what that meant after it had forcibly swallowed that massive laser and knowing from first-hand experience what an explosion in slow-motion looked liked right before it went full-blast. Behind him, Courtney and Beth clung to Zuko in the mistaken impression that he would make an adequate human shield (well, Courtney did, Beth probably just got scared and needed someone to hug in her presumed last moments) while Hobbes grabbed Calvin and Zim himself before clinging to Zuko as well for whatever reason. "It's gonna explode-!"

She was right. Red light tinged with black surged out from the middle of the Gestalt's body, bending it's constraints so far that it looked absurdly spherical again for a second or two, pulling it's considerable but still limited quantities of flesh into a ludicrously stretched layer over a contained explosion inside it that had gone from red to a whitish color that looked absurdly pink, and then it finally _snapped _and the whole thing erupted forth in a single massive shockwave that obliterated the Gestalt completely and incinerating all traces of it, banishing it's remaining constituent Heartless to the dark world-realm they originated from. The explosion did much more than that; the Umbra Eternis, which was nearly right in front of it, was hit at point-blank range and hurled right through the street and into the tunnels below, Kimblee surviving thanks to the giant robot's armoring but knocked silly. Zim and his allies were further away from it, far away to not be incinerated by the immediate blast but close enough to blasted right off the ground and all over the area (which was still way better than getting killed outright); some of them were hurled through open windows, into walls and various stationary obstacles, some suffering more than others and most of them crash-landing at least six streets away, away from Kimblee's immediate retaliation and with landings they could at least walk away from thanks to several of them being capable of some form of mid-air movement.

Kimblee got back up, groaning and feeling very unsteady, and saw that the bus had already disappeared, meaning he couldn't blow up those people to make himself feel better. He mentally called out to the Gestalt, not very surprised to get no response. Feeling enormously frustrated, he watched through the Umbra Eternis' optics as a smaller group seperated from the people blasted out of the street by the explosion. He ignored his weariness, readied himself for battle, and chraged off towards the group he was now targeting, and unfortunately for them (and him) it was Zim's crew he was unknowingly after.

(And by sheer bad luck, Winry wound up flying _right by _them; she had seen the explosion and had been following Kimblee's path, but unfortunately no one was in the area. She presumed that it had been a missed attack of some sort, and flew right over.)

The crew (and two tagalongs) in question had an advantage, that because Hobbes had thought quickly and made sure to be holding pretty much the entire crew and two tagalongs, they went flying through the air together and were able to angle themselves away from anything dangerous; admittedly, this meant that they were still aimed directly at a building or the street (which while probably not _fatal, _exactly, for most of them, was still a really bad idea) and Zim tried to do the levitation trick he had done with those cat-people earlier and nearly succeeded; a glow appeared around them and they slowed drastically down before he lost concentration due to not having any idea what he was doing and continued falling. Hobbes placed his shield out and firmly kept his feet on it, angling them so they were all standing on the shield when they crashed into the ground and went _sliding _on it; the shield was, after all, a piece of Kimblee's armor, and if the continued combined efforts of their allies couldn't visibly damage it, this street couldn't.

They skidded down the street, still moving so fast that they were moving at ridiculously speeds, and Courtney needlessly pointed out that they were about to run right into a broken-down garbage truck. "Lean left, LEFT!" Hobbes yelled as the vehicle loomed, and they all did so while trying to stay on the shield, a tricky feat, and the shield veered enough to the left to narrowly skid just to the side of the truck, the edge of the shield still grinding against the truck and slicing a long cut into it, sparks going everywhere from under them until they wound up going through one of the tires and for some reason the tire's air exploded out and knocked them off-course, smashing them right through a mailbox that was there for some reason and also another eight mailboxes before they came to a...not quite gentle stop, but at least coasted at a comfortable speed until they gradually stopped skidding when Zim stabbed the Keyblade into the ground as hard as he could and jerked them all into a violent but welcome stop.

"...Let's do that again!" Zim said. Zuko, Calvin and Hobbes (and also Beth and Courtney) gave him looks. "Ah, later. After the crazy alchemist is defeated."

Hobbes let go and they all got off the shield, brushing themselves off and belatedly noting that they were still on the main street they had been fighting on; if Kimblee came charging down, he would run right into them, or possibly on them. "I've had more exciting landings," Calvin remarked. "Not usually in the middle of a life and death fight, so that's a new one."

"At least we yet live!" Zim said, grinning up at the very slightly taller boy. He then realized that Calvin was, after all, now a very slightly taller boy. "Hey, when did you get taller than me? Did you have a minute growth spurt in the night? Stupid humans-not-from-Earth and their puberty cheats!"

Zuko looked around. He grimaced at the nasty track the Keyblade had left in the ground while Zim extricated the Keyblade itself, the scarred truck and the mailboxes Hobbes had smashed. "I am not looking forward to what people are going to say about us after all this..."

"Those mailboxes had it coming!" Hobbes declared passionately. "Lousy arrogant and smug outmoded despositories of commerce and communication! I hate them so much!" Zuko stared at him. "What? I once had a traumatic experience with a mailbox as a child and it scared me for life." Zuko continued staring at him. "...Okay, I was nine and I walked right into the same mailbox four times a day for eight months by unbelievable coincidence. It has induced hatred for all mailboxes since!" Zuko looked like he wanted to express his contempt for Hobbes' weirdness some more, but he just snorted in disgust and turned away.

"At least we're alive!" Beth said optimistically.

"Well...yeah!" Courtney said, brightening up. "On the other hand, I am in _way _over my head. I so should have gone with those guys on the bus when I had a chance...and there's probably some morality issues with putting myself into the story like this, I can tell you that."

"I wonder where Kimblee is," Zim said, bringing up the thing no one else wanted to think about. "We ought to be more persistent foes than to be blasted away and dismissed. We should find him and defeat him right now!" They stared at him. "Or find the others and _then _defeat him. Whatever makes you more confident. Seriously, we need to find him. Or let him find us, whatever."

"You scare me. Badly," Hobbes said, disgruntled. His ears twitched and he glanced around, and Zim heard an echoing pounding noise (like something very big approaching), a worrying observation coupled with Hobbes' look of dawning horror.

"Kimblee's showing up already, isn't he?" Zuko asked flatly. Hobbes nodded. "Figures."

The stomping intensified. _Boom_-_boom-boom _off in the distance, and they readied themselves. Calvin took the oppertunity to transmute a large section of the ground in the direction he estimated Kimblee to be coming from. There appeared to be no apparent alterations, at least to Zim. By then the rumbling was almost unbearably loud, and the stomping was so close that the ground shook with each ponderous _thudda-THOOM_. "People, can we plan around this first?" Hobbes said. "Just attacking him isn't doing any good and that shouldn't have been our primary plan to begin with!"

"Perhaps you are right," Zim said reluctantly. Beth nodded earnestly. "Well, let us think! He attacks, we blast him with all our might and that ridiculously strong armor of his just _ignores _everything we throw at it!" He frowned. "And even with that hole I managed to make, he's sure to cover it, seal it up with available materials or outright repair it! Or prevent a similar weak spot from being made. Granted, we just blew up his giant Heartless, but that was more of an accident than anything. Still, it's a small victory."

"Ideas, anyone?" Zuko said. "Anyone at all? Before we get back into the fray?"

Beth raised her hand. "What if we put him into a position where all that armor and firepower can't do him any good?"

Calvin thought about it, and then he raised his hand. "Ooh! Ooh! I got a plan for that, Unrelated to my last resort back-up plan!"

"Well, out with it, man!" Zim said. "What do you have in mind?" Calvin explained his plan. "Ah! Count me in!"

"You want us to do _what _now?" Courtney said disbelievingly. "That's crazy."

"You're right, it's utterly mad!" Zim said. "Which is why it must be done. Let's do it!"

"Well...just don't get us killed!" Courtney said, relenting and deciding that doing things logically was less important than staying alive.

"It sounded good to me," Beth said, having heard many far less crazy plans from her friends in the Crossguard. (For example, Abel's plan to create an orbital healing ray by shooting it into space with a giant slingshot and fueling it with the power of fangirl-ism by sponsoring a fanfic shipping contest was taken under serious consideration for a time, and only dismissed because it was deemed too expensive to make a one-use giant slingshot.)

"Okay," Calvin said, powering up his bracelet devices and slamming him hand down on the street; a large portion of it flashed with the light of a alchemical transmutation, and when it was done part of the ground had peeled down from the sidewalk, shrinking slightly and bulging a little bit outwards, as though internal forces were pushing it up. The ground seemed stable enough to stand on, at least for the moment, and Calvin assured them that this was all part of his plan, running them through it once more until they were satisfied with it.

They heard a massive booming noise (not loud enough to hurt Hobbes, thankfully) and they hurried into position at the adjacent street at a nearby intersection. Almost as soon as they were in place, the Umbra Eternis came smashing through a nearby Internet cafe (apparently going through random buildings in an attempt to find someone to kill without any success), winded and dusty and it's operator hurt but still very much active. It's immense weight, combined with Kimblee's exhaustion, was enough to make him stumble when he hit the street, and scrambled to stand up straight so he didn't look undignified. The ground trembled under him right away, and Kimblee gave it a suspicious look before he dismissed it as seismic activity caused by his handiwork.

The Umbra Eternis had already looked away, staring at a more troubling sight. Through it's eyes, Kimblee saw what it was looking at and frowned more deeply when he saw Zim, Calvin, Hobbes and Zuko (and also Beth and Courtney), standing right there a short distance down the street from him and giving him impatient looks. Kimblee glanced from side to side, half-expecting an ambush waiting for him. "So there _were _some survivors after all. Pity I had to run into you first. But then, I don't suppose you know where Scar went?" They stared at him, and he seemed to take this as a request to elaborate. "Only I have a score to settle with him; I looked all over and couldn't find any trace of him, dead or alive, and all I've found is you." They said nothing, continuing to watch him. Like they were waiting for something to happen to him. Intruged dispite his misgivings, Kimblee had his giant robot kneel down so he could see them better and said, ""Why are you just standing there? I could easily destroy you all and you're just..._standing _there. Ah, I apologize for repeating myself, but it's a fairly unusual sight." The Umbra Eternis growled in apparent agreement, but it might have just been parroting Kimblee's opinion.

"Yes," Zim said. "You are a keen master of observing the obvious."

"So he is," Hobbes acknowledged.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow. Courtney snapped a few pictures of him with a small camera she apparently had in her pocket; the Umbra Eternis preened and flexed, apparently a bit of a prima donna. Kimblee waved politely and said, "Yes. Well. _Why_ are you standing there?"

"Because," Zim said.

"Because _why?_" Kimblee nearly snapped, his limited capacity for restraint was being rapidly worn away by just how obnoxiously irritatinghis day had been.

"Because screw you is why!" Calvin said happily. "Seriously, _screw you_. You're unpleasant to be around."

Kimblee's eye twitched. His machine-titan was less retrained and howled like an infernal monster set loose upon a world it had been made to tear to bloody pulp, the darkness inside it swelling out into a massive cold blaze like a black sun. "It was interesting speaking to you, if not enlightening," Kimblee said, and the Umbra Eternis held up a hand, weapons similar to those that it had used to blast them off the first time appearing and locking into place, charging up another onslaught that would surely disintegrate them all. Zim and his allies (and Courtney and Beth) remained still, nevertheless. Kimblee half-smiled, pleased to see what was either acceptance of death without fear or a reckless certainty that they would _absolutely _win (both being traits he found admirable) and the Umbra Eternis took a single step forward to begin their final battle, briefly putting all it's combined weight (probably northward of a few tons, at least) on a very specific area of the street that, he had failed to notice, seemed substantially thinner than the rest of it.

The ground shook. Cracks appeared at once under it's feet, and the Umbra Eternis leaned sharply to the right, the rest of the ground begining to crumble. Kimblee's expression of detached amusement drained away into surprise as the street under him shifted, too quickly for him to do anything about it...

And then the street bent and broke, and the very heavy evil robot tumbled forward as the street gave way right under them in a small but precisely shaped path that left the rest of the street untouched, and the machine-titan had a very short fall into the tunnels below, landing front-end first into the hole, and while the tunnels were big enough to permit it's entry, they were still small enough that the walls pinned it's arms to it's side, preventing it from moving enough to exert it's great strength and free itself. It's back and upper legs were still above ground, dangling uselessly and unable to get purchase on the ground so they just flailed uselessly, the whole thing neatly immobilized. Kimblee groaned, having banged his face right on the floor of the tunnels and was too dazed to comment on how unexpected this was. Jarod, for his part, was still totally unconscious (thankfully for him) but had been shielded by the Umbral Heartless powering the Umbra Eternis, and unfortunately they were very much intact.

Zim and his group waited tensely, expecting the Umbra Eternis to tear itself loose any moment, but it did no such thing, just wiggling it's legs helplessly; it would have been silly if they weren't terribly aware of the damage it could do. The damage it had done, though, instilled a certain grim sense of satisfaction at it's undignified position. "It actually worked!" Courtney said, amazed. "Nice going, guys!"

"Thank you," Hobbes said, scratching the back of his neck and looking as embarrased as any young knight who had earned the favor of a lady. (He apparently thought Courtney counted.)

"He is vulnerable!" Zim said. "And...hey, that weak spot he has tried to cover up with assimilated materials is _quite _exposed." True to form, the damaged part of Kimblee's back was the portion of it's back sticking right out of the ground. Zim grinned evilly at Zuko, who smirked right back. With bloodthirsty battlecries, they lunged forward; Zuko with fire blazing from his very skin, Zim with Keyblade dragging on the street and slicing right through the pavement like it was made of something very weak that was not pavement. , Hobbes, Calvin and Beth (shockingly enough), all inspired by their hot-blooded fervor, chased after them with many cries of shouting and whooping and yelling the whole time. Courtney hung back awkwardly, mostly to provide fire support but also because she _really _didn't want to get caught in the ensuing melee.

And under the street, a great many tons of metal pressing on him while wedged into the stone underways in the dark and liquified Umbral Heartless-stuff surged around him like mildly acidic gelatin, Kimblee came to a conclusion. "This has not been a good day so far."

_No, I shouldn't think so,_ a voice responded.

It wasn't Kevin (who had seemingly sunken into the depths of his own sub-consciousness) nor was it Ghostfreak, who was doing his part in running much of the Umbra Eternis and lending his mind to it's chaotic mental matrices. _This _voice sounded a great deal like that...person...Kimblee had seen in that ancient memory within Jarod's mind, and Kimblee supposed it might have been some aspect of Jarod himself. Kimblee wasn't very surprised; as much as Kimblee was wired into the Umbra Eternis and as deep as the Umbral Heartless were tearing into Jarod's psyche to feast on his anguish (and generate greater power with pure angst), it wasn't hard to suppose that some part of Jarod might well come into contact with Kimblee. "Who are you?" Kimblee said, wary all the same. "What is your name?"

The new intelligence radiated bemusement. (In the proper sense of the word; not amusement, but mild confusion.) _Name_? It said. _I...have no name. I suppose I had one once, but that original incarnation has ceased to affect my fate. His name is not mine._ _Call me...the Nameless-That-Was_? _Yes, that will do._

Kimblee blinked, his head aching fiercely, and not entirely from the bashing impact. "I'm sorry, but could you hurry up and deliver whatever vauge portents you have to say? I'm a bit used to this sort of thing and I expect I'm due to being attacked now."

_...You're used to piloting giant robots fueled by angst and unresolved mental issues while talking with voices from outside yourself_? The voice said, confused.

"Not really, but I should have seen this coming. They actually have to warn about that sort of thing in the job description now. Legal issues." Kimblee flinched then, from sympathy pain as he felt a flash of heat and many shuddering impacts on the broken part of the back of Umbra Eternis, the materials he had placed over it shattering. The Umbrals tensed, condensing around him like a shield, and a number of similarily muted echoes and yells and impacts reached him. The Umbra Eternis shifted slightly, moved by some tremendous impact. "What was that?"

_You being attacked, I should think,_ Ghostfreak said.

_Quite so,_ the new voice agreed.

_I said that already_, Ghostfreak grumbled. It paused. _Who are _you_?_

_An inexplicable voice from within Jarod's deepest soul-memories_, The Nameless-That-Was explained.

_...Ah. What are you doing in Kimblee's head, then?_

_Mind your own business! _The Nameless-That-Was snapped with unexpected fierceness.

Kimblee was about to say something when something - _the Key _- struck the piece of metal fastened over the simplified (at the price of reducing mobility) left knee joint. It was a small strike. Clumsy and unfocused, that strike, and the machine-titan's frame hardly even registered it. But again, as he had felt during the entire fight, the Umbra Heartless, being semi-sentient forces that had forsaken material form and all the benefits thereof in order to replace all the internal systems that Kimblee hadn't required anymore (thus freeing up precious materials that he fused into the armor) _did _feel it. They were, in fact, far more vulnerable to the Key now then they had been when they were still materialized, without even the benefit of the crude bodies their passage forced them into, and now the light of the Key could _unmake _them.

That was the best word for it. Kimblee felt the forces tying them to this world, powerful though they were and leading to a dark place that was more of a prison than anything else, unravel before it like string set on fire and the Heartless themselves being...not _killed _exactly, as the Heartless' weren't exactly alive to begin with, but the Key changed them in some fashion, set them free from their current forms and a portion of the corrosive darkness within them excised from their quintessence. It was worse than killing them, at least to Kimblee, because that implied terrifying forces at work here, forces mightier than the things that had claimed the Heartless and that could mean, it might mean...

He didn't know, and that was the most terrifying thing of all. Something stirred in Kimblee. Something deeper than fear, almost alien to him. He wondered what it must be like for the Heartless, to know of something that could utterly destroy them. _Do you know what it must be like to feel so small? _The Nameless-That-Was asked suddenly. _To be helpless? To disappear like snowflakes under a summer sun? To die and be forgetten? Now consider the people you have killed and maimed - such as those you have done so today - and imagine how they must feel to _know _such a thing. Because of you._

Kimblee paused. It was a moment's heisitation, not even noticed by those fighting him, and yet in that moment, strange and alien and heretofore unconsidered thoughts passed through. They were as exhilarating as they were frightening to Kimblee, and alien as well.

He thought of Kevin for a moment, a prisoner in his own body, and then pain struck him like a hammer to the gut. He trembled, his lips peeling over his teeth like a startled horse, and red fluid too thick and viscous to be blood (or even be mistaken for the liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone) dripped syrup-like over his lips. He coughed like his throat burned, coughed wetly and noisily, and a few more thick drops of the strange fluid came, aching enormously the entire time. His ears burned, his throat _hurt_, all of him felt wrong and worse, all the soft and vulnerable tissues of his body _hurt_ and dripped faint amounts of that same stuff for a moment, just enough to make him do the unthinkable and for a brief moment wish for death, release from a body that held him prisoner to it's torment-

Mercifully, the fit passed and the pain ceased, as suddenly as it had begun. Kimblee thought he heard a dim echo of Kevin's amusement at his misfortunate and most of all, he thought that the fluid dripping from his new body all-too-much like blood looked exactly like the stuff his consciousness had previously been preserved in. His skin, he was alarmed to see, was significantly paler in some places; closer to Kevin' skin tone than Kimblee's own. Those parts of him didn't feel like they were _his _anymore.

_Your usurption is backfiring on you, _the mysterious voice told him. _You stole this body after forsaken your own body for this crude immortality. And you knew nothing of Kevin's true nature, what his father was and how that made him different from a true human or what the energies coursing inside him were. Or how they would interact with you possessing him. You willingly gave part of your mind to the creatures of darkness for the opportunity to kill things and never thought that you might suffer for it._

_Did you really think that there would be no consequences to what you've done? _

"No," Kimblee admitted, determining what the tunnels were made up so he could transmute them. "I still don't. And I still don't _care_."

In the meantime, those attacking Kimblee were totally unaware of his torments. They thought, erroneously, that the Umbra Eternis remained as invulnerable as ever. "WHAT IS THIS THING MADE OF!" Zim screamed, hammering blow after blow on the alloy sealed flawlessly over the hole in Kimblee's armor.

"Maybe you could ask Kimblee," Hobbes joked, standing on one side of a joint on the right leg and studying it carefully. After a moment, he raised his palm back, concentrated, and thrust it forward with a shout, translucent spiritual flames glowing around his hand and striking with a mighty blow, the strange metals conducting the force of his attack and pushing it back. As a result, the ground under them exploded into a cloud of stinging dust and Hobbes fell back, shaking his aching arm. "Ow, ow ow ow!" He stood up and saw that it _still _wasn't harmed. "Oh, come on!"

Blasts of fire and volleys of small explosives rained down from a upturned chunk of debris Kimblee had cast away in his fall, striking the back of the fallen machine-titan. The dust and ash they cast faded away to reveal _still _no real damage. Zuko, standing there with Beth, Calvin and Courtney, made an inarticulate growl more suitable for a dragon then a person. "We're not even _denting _it!" Beth cried out. "At this rate, we're just gonna exhaust ourselves and it'll kill us without breaking a sweat! And it's a robot, they don't even _have _sweat!" Zuko kept blasting out fire, now compounding his problems by calming her down.

All of that came to a halt when the red light flashed out from from under the downed giant robot, flaring up over the hole. Zim wisely created a blast of fire from underfoot to get himself out of the way, hitting Zuko on the way so that both of them were well away from the downed machine-titan when the ground that had fallen over Kimblee flattened down and slid up, and then the underground tunnel (and the Umbra Eternis) was pushed _up_ on a stony pillar, displacing nearly half the street around it when it was level with them and crumbling under it's own weight once the Umbra Eternis stood up and cracked it in half with a single massive step, landing on the street in a bestial crouch. And anxiously watching it's steps in case there were _more _traps like the one that had gotten it stuck under the street. Unfortunately, Calvin had neglected to make any.

(And most unfortunately for Kimblee, a certain ship that had been circling the area looking for signs of her friends saw that red light, and it's pilot definitely recognized what the light of a Philosopher's Stone looked like, and flew towards it without delay.)

"I congratulate you on your quick wits and battlefield acumen," Kimblee said as he emerged from the ooze-like substance of Umbral Heartless squirming around with a measure of renewed vigor., peering out at them with good humor inspite of his aching nose. "I-"

"But those two are women, not men," Zim said, pointing at Courtney and Beth. They blinked. "And what does acupuncture have to do with anything?"

"...What?" Kimblee said. "I don't...what are you _talking_ about?"

"I dunno." Zim shrugged. "And you're the one that started talking about acupuncture men, not me."

Kimblee stared for a moment, and then he realized what Zim meant; he facepalmed, and due to his synchronized connection to the Umbra Eternis, so did the machine-titan. (An interesting thing to see in a giant robot.) "...He said _acumen_, not...whatever you thought he said," Hobbes informed Zim. "Acumen is, like, battlefield know-how."

"Ah," Zim said. He looked at Kimblee again, the rogue alchemist's patience about to break with homicidal results, looking ever-more furious that Zim was looking at something _behind _him and not doing him the service of paying attention to him.

"What are you looking at?" Kimblee snapped.

"The ship coming up behind you."

Kimblee rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on. Do you really think I'm so stupid to fall for-" And just in time to interrupt him and hurt his ego, at long last a small spaceship accelerated over the rooftops from behind him and let loose a barrage of the weaponry attached to it's exterior, hitting the Umbra Eternis' point-blank and knocking it silly; it stumbled back, and once more Kimblee seriously regretted giving it the body shape he had and made it's sense of balance so badly oriented, and then it overbalanced again and fell back into the hole, roaring the whole way. The ship, in the meantime, came to a harsh stop in the air with what appeared to be considerable difficulty, pushing against it's momentum with as much ease as a train moving backward, with the effect that it could only float downwards to them in a tremendously awkward way.

"Finally!" Calvin cheered. "More backup that's actually competent! It came out of nowhere, but still! Competence!"

"You must really enjoy having that around," Courtney said. "It's a real change of pace for you."

"Yeah! ...Hey, wait a minute!"

If there was time to react properly to the ship, they would have probably commented on it's appearance; the ship that had set off to save them what seemed like a while ago (but was really less than twenty-five minutes) was fairly small for a spaceship, likely able to transport around ten people if they didn't mind slightly cramped conditions. It also looked a bit like the ship version of the kind of vehicle that used car salesman liked to pass off as having 'a lot of personality'; instead of the 'flying brick' fashion that was the 'in' thing right now across the more well-known parts of the known multiverse, _this _particular spacecraft had evidentally started life as six different ships mashed together into a charmingly squat form wider at the front than back, it's various weapons extending out of hatches on the front just ahead of a slightly raised part of the ship probably containing the ship's bridge; there weren't any windows, though there were a lot of small wide-area cameras all over. While the upper half wasn't particularily fashionable looking, the lower half was a much more box-like design that had been in fashion more than fifty years ago and probably salvaged from a cargo ship. It was slightly larger than the rest of it and extremely well-armored, and probably contained the living quarters. At the junction between it and the middle half was a cargo bay with a wide door at the front.

The whole thing was painted in garish colors, probably because it had been slapped together from several other ships and hadn't been repainted yet, clashing horribly with each other, reds and yellows and metallic purple splattered against each other on the large and weathered plates of interlocked armoring that made the ship look bigger than it actually was, safely sealing it and providing additional protection and looking like some portions of the ship could shift around if they needed to. While it _did _have a set of engine near the back, they weren't in use, and appeared to be using a number of glowing discs the size of hubcaps and positioned all over the ship, collectively generating a field of faintly greenish energy around the ship and moving it around. All in all, the whole thing wasn't terribly unusual as ships went, it just had the misfortune to look a lot a combination of a flying submarine made out of stuff that had been cluttering a rustbucket refuge depot. And then painted by a colorblind idiot with delusions of mad artistry.

Zim had little time to appreciate (or criticize) the ship's appearance; the ship hovered down to the street, almost touching down, and a woman's voice crackled from an unnoticed external speaker. "Quick, get in!" she said, the cargo bay doors grinding open. Not needing to take a hint, Zim and the others ran inside, entering a fairly low but wide room that might serve as a rough cargohold, lined by numerous catwalks leading into the ship's upper levels and the chamberss beyond; at a glance, Zim observed that the floor showed the signs of having been recently bolted and riveted together (but professionally so) and there were a number of pipes extending from the ceiling and into the walls, perhaps some manner of circuitry or ferrying coolant into the ship's systems. They didn't have any time to look around properly; the floor gave a mighty lurch as the ship took off again, the air violently whipping through the room, and Calvin almost fell back through the open door because of it. Outside, the head of the Umbra Eternis saw the ship fly away, growling as it furiously began to dig itself out. _Again_.

Before Calvin could be thrown out through the door, Zim impulsively grabbed him by the arm and pulled him onto his feet, dragging him forward while everyone else pulled back, helping each other from falling out like Calvin almost did. Fortunately, the door slid close and as the air returned to optimal levels, Calvin gave Zim a surprised look of gratitude.

The woman's voice came out again. "Guys, uh, whatever your names are! Hurry up to the bridge, I'm getting us out of here before he gets out of there and kills us!"

"Okay, cool, so where's the bridge?" Calvin said, trying to keep his balance while the ship unsteadily rose to a proper ascent.

"...Follow the signs, duh," the voice said. Zim looked and noticed that the walls were lined with helpful signs pointing towards the various rooms and indicating what they were for (though most of them had blank spaces for names, indicating that they hadn't been identified yet), and quickly located one pointing up, so he hurried up the catwalk's upper level and found another sign that simply said 'Bridge', pointing at a airlock-style door. Not needing more more of a hint, he hurried over to it, and the others followed him; Calvin needing to be dragged away by Hobbes from oo'ing and aw'ing over the ship, Zuko trying to hurry everyone along, and Courtney and Beth aware that they were getting in over their heads.

The door opened automatically, and Zim ran through it to find that the bridge, while a bit small and cluttered, was a fairly nice example of such a room given what they had to work with. They didn't have time to admire it, so Zim ran over to the front of the room, his boots clicking loudly on a floor made of the same metal as the catwalk and a complex assortment of wires and cords underneath protected by a thin translucent sheath, running past the wide booths set into the walls for passengers and non-vital crew members to sit on (and with safety harnesses to put on since belts wouldn't be as reliable), pausing briefly to take note of the array of information processing engines at the front of the room as he stepped onto a slightly raised area over a terminal of uncertain purpose and panels in it glowing with a comforting green energy under the floor, all the cables and wires running into it and the machines in the bridge.

Over this terminal, at the very front of the room and before a staggering array of screens that spread throughout the bridge so that other members of the crew could get a good look instead of making the pilot keep an eye on it all the screen's displays of ship-board information and the outside-view camera displays (the only way to see, since windows were a bad idea) and camera-views showing individual rooms of the ship (mostly empty and waiting to be customized and outfitted, and Zim got ideas just looking at some of them, deciding which room would make ideal bunks or an laboratory and so on) were two seats, and in the right seat was a blonde woman perhaps several years older than Hobbes or Zuko. "What's the situation?" He said to her, noticing that a screen showed Kimblee's robot digging itself free, and it's expression somehow conveyed enormous frustration. "Also, who are you?"

"I'm Winry Rockbell, and I think I'm the girl who just saved your butts," she said, turning in her seat to greet them while still focusing on the task at hand: getting them out of there before Kimblee could attack them again. Zim noticed that she was in a most unusual interface; while there were complex assortments of keyboards, buttons, touchpads, dials and gauages and all manner of similar things set right under the screens (mainly the ones that displayed ship-related information, such as vital alerts and interior cameras and also an Internet browser) and a complex array of other such interfaces that looked like whatever had been lying around had been shoved in to look cool and made the interface for the ship look like a huge and stupidly complex dashboard, Winry's hands were clamped firmly on a pair of what looked weirdly like handle-grips attached to either side of her seat, with pathways built into them, funneling straight down into the terminal below them and glowing with the same green energy.

"Yeah, thanks for that," Zuko said.

"You have _no _idea how good your timing way," Courtney said, looking very tired now. "I'm...I'm a-going to lie down now, 'kay?" She sat down heavily on one of the available seats, which were fortunately cushioned and could be adjusted to make emergency beds.

"I like your set-up," Calvin said, looking around at all of it. "Very neo-modernized super-mechanistic post-utilitarinism! And I can see a strong hint of Brutalistic mad science design theory in here...unless that's just you using what's available."

"In which case it would fall under Trash Praxis," Winry agreed. She raised an eyebrow. "You know super-science aesthetics?"

"Are you kidding? I wrote a book on it!" Calvin bragged. "You're talking to the guy who created the Comic Kingdom's (or Brighthammer Kingdom, I'm not sure what our name's supposed to be) technological ideal by blending elements of the cyberpunk stylings of Digital Chrome and it's stylings of flesh-mounted bolts, stylishly bulky devices and cybernetics all into a primary aesthetic of Extropic that embodies the positive future we ought to have _now_, utilizing the best of transhumanism, digital consciousness and nanotechnology in the service of a design that is unobstrusively functional! I call it Noblebright Future. Even though it's based in the present. I got an award for it from Alloy Blend, _THE _number one cross-dimensional magazine for super-science fashion, a lifetime subscription for the same, and it was so successful that now the whole kingdom and it's allies employ it in all our designs!"

"Awesome," said Winry, and they both high-fived.

Zim wasn't listening, having noticed that she wasn't pressing any buttons or directing the ship in any obvious way, but it was clearly moving and not using an autopilot; he immediately suspected those handlegrips were a medium for a mental interface, and saw what, based on how prominently it was displayed at the constant flux it was in, was the ship's on-board power display: a circular screen in front of Winry with a ever-spinning and bright green spiral gauge on it, continually receding and increasing so it was more or less balanced. The same green, he noticed, as the energy in the conduits he'd seen throughout the room and in the terminal below.

"Can we focus?" Zuko said before further aesthetic-related conversing could derail them. "We're still in the middle of a battle here."

"Right," Winry said. The ship bumped a little bit, ascending over the buildings and kicking off at high speed. Behind it, the Umbra Eternis ripped it's way free, shaking loose debris off itself, and Kimblee kept his gaze fixed firmly on the ship that had completely caught him off-guard. Without any more delays, he commanded the Umbra Eternis to follow after the ship, smashing through everything in it's path once more. But, he cautioned him, to act with wariness; that ship had some considerable firepower.

Back in the ship, as they relaxed a few fractions, Calvin sat down on one of the booth-seats and said, "Have you heard from any of those other guys? Cyborg? Your Roy Mustang guy? Or that grumpy Scar guy? We could use the back-up."

Winry's previously bright expression darkened a bit at Scar's name, her lip curling into a uncharacteristic scowl. It passed, but not quickly enough, and she said, "Don't worry, I got word from them not too ago." She flipped a switch on, and a nearby speaker crackled at once.

"_Winry!" _Cyborg's voice boomed at once. Hobbes winced and covered his ears, once more incurring pain at Cyborg's unintended loudness. "_Is that you? I swear, I thought you got shot down before you ever got to us!"_

"It's okay!" Winry said. "I found Kimblee and some of the guys you were with! They're right here!"

"_...Really?_"

"Yes," Zim said. Zuko, Hobbes and Calvin added their own affirmations.

"_Hey, is that you, little guy?_" Cyborg sounded tremendously relieved. "_What do you think of the ship, huh? Worked all night on it! Most of the morning, too!_"

"This ship? Ah, yes, it has a most eccentric design scheme but I quite like it and besides it is-" Zim stopped. He grinned. "Ah, I see! _This _is the ship you built for me!"

"_Yep!_" Cyborg's voice practically radiated pride. "_I used what I could of your crew's old ship, but basically that amounted to the internal systems. I put together some old experimental ships I restored, put the salvaged systems into them, added a bunch of stuff I've been itching to get working, and you're flying in the results!_"

"In other words," Winry said dryly. "He salvaged what he could, rigged a bunch of old ships together, crammed the systems in there and put guns on the whole thing."

"_Shh, you don't have to say it like _that_!_" Cyborg said scoldingly. Winry rolled her eyes. "_Getting back on topic. Where are you guys? I've been running crazy getting everyone that big blast scattered back together, and we couldn't find Zim or his friends anywhere!_"

"Actually, besides Zuko, they're not really my-" Zim started to say, but another voice somehow got onto Cyborg's communicator (ignoring his cries of startled protest).

"_ZIM!_" Aang howled. "_Little buddy! I thought you'd been blown out of the city or DIED or something! Where have you been? We couldn't find you anywhere!_"

"Me, the boy, the tiger-person, Zuko, and those two girls have been busily fighting Kimblee and his robot!" Zim said confidently. "We are doing _awesomely_."

The others looked less impressed at his statement. "Learn to say our names already, geez," Calvin grumbled.

"'Those two girls'?" Courtney repeated indignantly. "Is that all we are to you? Just two random people tagging along and you can't even be bothered to learn our names?"

"Hey, we're on his _crew _and he still hasn't learned our names," Hobbes assured them. "Don't feel bad."

"I'm glad I don't have _him _as a leader," Beth said.

"No, you just have to deal with people like that very large woman with the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old on a permanent sugar high and Abel Nightroad," Zuko told her. Beth frowned.

"_Good_..." Aang sounded tremendously relieved and also ignoring the commentary from everyone. "_That's everyone we haven't found yet..._"

"_Can I have my arm back now?_" Cyborg said, and made another strangling noise. "_OW!_"

"_BETH!_" Angilaka cried. "_My little buddy! I thought you were dead, or eaten by a grue, or taken captive by Kimblee and brainwashed into his sidekick or something! And in less than five minutes too, it'd be some kind of record._ _I totally freaked out._"

"_She totally did_," Abel chimed in, and Cyborg yelled again, that someone _else _was wrenching his poor arm around. "_It was kind of creepy. And hey, how am I worse than Angilaka and her childishnes?_"

"_Guys!" _Cyborg yelled. "_LET GO!_" There was a brief scuffle, and Roy's voice spoke up. "_Zim, Winry, you other guys, we don't have a lot of time! We need to finish this NOW! Where is Kimblee?_"

"Um..." Calvin looked at a visual panel that showed what was happening behind them. "Uh...you're probably not going to like this..."

"_Yes?_"

"Kimblee's right behind us," Calvin said as everyone else looked at the panel in horror. Even Winry, which was very poor piloting etiquette, and she only just realized this before they crashed into another poor buiding. Zim blanched at the screen Calvin had indicated; it displayed Kimblee and the Umbra Eternis smashing through a building on the other side of the street, moving too fast too slow down in time and going off a bridge between a gap on the other side of the street. It came right back up onto the street, tearing it up as it charged at them, weapons already loading out onto it's body and red energy powering around Kimblee.

"_He's WHAT?_" Cyborg yelled. "_Oh shit, get OUT of there before he-_"

A red flare. A blast of sound, so loud that the audio receptors filtered it out and still knocked a few cameras out from overload. On the screens, the line of buildings immediately to their left became a massive cloud of dust and debris and other things in a flash of violent light, and the impact of the missed explosion knocked them off-course again, spiraling around and going through a rooftop, falling downwards and knocking them all silly. Winry grit her teeth and the spiral gauge osscilated outwards; the terminal below glowed brighter in the outrush of power it suddenly received, funneling that power into the propulsion discs, and the field spread out around the ship to bounce it back into the air and rocket over the street before he could start firing again.

"Too close!" Courtney said. "Too close, too close, too close!"

"Yeah, it was too close, we got it," Calvin said, cradling his radio thing; not to protect it, Zim noticed, but grimly keeping the switches on it from being pressed and activating something. "Try saying something helpful!"

"Well, I'm _sorry _I'm having a panic attack right now!" Courtney snapped.

"Now's not the time to succumb to weakness," Zuko said coldly. "You should focus on doing something _productive!_"

"_What happened just then?_" Cyborg demanded.

"Kimblee's on our tail and he almost caught us with a blast!" Zim reported. "Where are you? Maybe we can lure Kimblee into a trap?"

"And I thought you had a back-up plan!" Zuko yelled at Calvin, eager to yell someone else into action.

"I do!" Calvin said. "I can't do it until Kimblee's hostage-prisoner is out of that giant robot! _So make something happen where he's out of that giant robot!"_

Cyborg didn't answer right away; there was a flurry of debates and arguments and similar discussion from his end, but didn't take long. "_We got a plan. Head on over to us and lure Kimblee after you! We can prepare a trap pretty quick with our alchemists and once we've got him trapped, we can get Jarod out and finish Kimblee! And finally end this stupid fight! Feels like it's gone on forever."_

"You want us to lure the all-powerful psychopath into a trap? That seems unneccesarily suicidal...but okay," Courtney said, galvanized by a need to shove her willingness to action into Zuko's face.

"I'm for it," Beth said.

"We've managed to wear him down, and however he's controlling that machine of his, it's taking a toll on him," Zuko reported, giving Courtney a glance. "I say go for it." Calvin nodded in agreement.

"It's as good a plan of action as anything else we've done on our own," Zim said.

"_Good! I'll be sending you guys our position! Good luck, and PLEASE try not to die!_"

"Okay," Winry said. Cyborg uploaded the coordinates to their end, helpfully being displayed on a previous inactive screen (where had all those screens came from, Zim wondered). "Any thoughts, guys?"

"Yes," Hobbes said. "I predict that something we don't know about will cause the plan to end horribly. Like, maybe he's listening in on our communications."

"_Buddy, this is a one-way channel particular to me and the stuff I've built_," Cyborg pointed out. "_And Kimblee didn't use any of my tech to make that monstrosity of his."_

"Trust me, it'll go badly," Hobbes said stubbornly. "I've been through things like this a _lot_! Something screwy _always _happens!"

Zuko nodded grimly. "He does have a point."

Zim rolled his eyes. "The two of you are so needlessly negative! Now where are we aiming Kimblee at?" In response, Winry had the ship lower a small projector in front of Zim, displaying a holographic map of the part of the First District they were in, detailing the various building and street layout in simplistic but clear detail (it looked a bit like the graphics the Hitchhiker's Guide sometimes displayed, actually) and a decent but annoyingly complex distance away, fairly close to when they had become seperated from the others, cartoony images of the heads of their absent allies appeared to indicate their positions, at least they did for the people who were established in town: there were plenty of blank faces with question marks on them. To Zim's annoyance, their ship's current location was marked with a garbage pile.

"That's a lot of buildings to navigate through," Calvin said, troubled.

"We will manage, I'm sure," Zim said.

"That's the spirit!" Winry said cheerfully.

_"You guys got it sorted out?_" Cyborg said. 'More or less' was the gist of their response. "_Right, get going!"_

Their ship came to a stop, waiting for Kimblee to confirm their position, and the Umbra Eternis soon caught up to them, trying to climb over a hobbyshop that had been in it's way and collapsing through it and onto the street because it was just too heavy. The machine-titan stood up, catching sight of them. Kimblee readied a set of missiles, but the ship struck first, cannons charging up and releasing a blast at the Umbra Eternis' head and the Umbra Eternis staggered back, one hand gingerly covering an eye that had been sorely damaged. Enraged, it primed a missile, and the ship wisely flew off like an airbourne train when the missile fired, and of all things the ship flew _backwards_, shooting a single well-aimed laser and destroying the missile. The Umbra Eternis hurried after it, and Kimblee wondered who the ship's pilot was, and more importantly what they were up to. One of the Umbra Eternis' arms raised up, it's laser-palm bulding up power, but after a moments thought Kimblee had it dispell the power and lower itself; instead of attacking right away, the Umbra Eternis followed after the ship at a safe distance, banishing it's current outload of weapons to make itself marginally lighter.

_Now hold a moment,_ Ghostfreak said as they advanced across a moat someone had put in the street for some reason, moving over it in an ungainly leap. The giant robot's left foot slipped at the last moment, and they struggled for a moment to stop from falling in and losing the ship. _Aren't you going to just kill them and remove their threat?_

"I was," Kimblee said, unperturbed and letting the Umbra Eternis haul itself to the ground, howl like a maniac and smash through the nearest building for the visceral joy of breaking something. "And I will. But this new occurance and arrival to immediate events interests me. I don't wish to play right into whatever they have in mind for me."

_And you're going to do that by blindly rushing into whatever trap they have for you?_ The Nameless-That-Was said. There was the mental equvilant of a long stare at him. _What? I'm not trying to be helpful, I'm just pointing out your stupidity._

"Did you hear any mysterious voices that have no right being in my head and somehow being more annyoing than the mysterious voices that _do _have a right being in my head?" Kimblee said as the Umbra Eternis climbed up a warehouse to get a better sight on the ship and managing to balance itself on the rooftop before it predicatably collapsed, begining a game of hopping on the next rooftop and bouncing off when it collapsed, and pouncing onto the next rooftop when that collapsed, and jumping across the street to another rooftop and moving to another one when _those _collapsed, and so on.

_I don't, _Ghostfreak said, deeply unnerved by the Nameless-That-Was.

_I do, _The Nameless-That-Was said. _I recognize my own existence. That totally counts! ...Or DOES it?_

_And I heard him too, _Kevin chimed in.

"That settles it, no one heard anything," Kimblee said.

_But- _Kevin started to say.

"No one. Heard. Anything," Kimblee said sternly. The Umbra Eternis, distracted by it's operator's lack of focus, ran right into a buildind and hung halfway out of it for an embarassingly long moment before gravity and weight made it fall over and have the entire building collapse on it. It staggered out, looking humiliated, and raised a fist at the nearby floating ship, apparently insulted that Zim and his crew saw fit to wait for Kimblee to catch up. It charged off heedlessly after them, periodically tripping when the ship opened fire and narrowly missed hitting it's feet.

So for about five minutes or so (which was a long time to either be chased by a giant robot and a powerful alchemist or to be constructing a trap), the Umbra Eternis chased Zim's crew around. It was a display of constantly being shot at, shooting back, being surprised when the other came out of nowhere, being less surprised when that kept happening, freaking out when they ran into a populated area and herding Kimblee back and then being relieved that they had doubled back into the evacuated zone and various other tricks. Kimblee, for his part, was too busy yelling with the voices in his head and keeping the unruly giant robot in his control focused to realize that he was obviously being herded into a trap, and even if he did, he would probably have let it go all the way just to see what happened. He was therefore reacting instead of planning on the fly when the ship he was chasing flew into a circular plaza located between two administrative buildings taler than the Umbra Eternis, a large artificial pool at the very center of the place (normally host to any number of swimmers, aquatic sentients and bored townschildren, all of whom had evacuated with the other people with common sense), a few old and beaten vehicles left on the sidewalk as sad attempts at modern art, and nothing much else of note. Nor was there anyone apparently in sight. (The key word being _apparently_.)

Kimblee stopped the Umbra Eternis, finding it very suspicious that the ship had come to a stop over the pool in the middle of the area. Kimblee kept going, the Umbra Eternis' footfalls carving up the street...and then he stopped, finally realizing that he had been herded into this place like nothing more than a clever but easily tricked animal. "Well played, ladies and gentlemen," Kimblee said, clapping his hands and not activating the transmutation circles on his palms. He looked around and sniffed disdainfully. "An ill-suiting place for the archetypal final battle, don't you think? A random plaza in the middle of the district. Not a smaller place where it would be harder to manuever my robot, or a more defensible location where you would hold all the advantages, or even so much as the place where all this began. At least _that _would have some suitable value for both our sides."

He raised his hands, as if questioning. "And this is just an area of no consequence. Is it desperation that drove you here...or I am obviously in an exceedingly amateur trap."

He got no response from the ship. In the circumstances, he considered that to be playing poker with someone whose face had suddenly frozen up after getting a bad hand.

Kimblee smirked, looking around for details that looked off, and the Umbra Eternis' optics directed his attention towards a thin crack in the ground in front of him, and a large square-shaped part of the street in front of it slightly recessed into the ground. He raised an eyebrow very slightly. "Ah, you - or more likely, one of your allies that was scattered in that misfortunate backfiring blast - _did _set traps for me. A pity that they are so..._uninspired_."

The ship lowered and rose very quickly. It looked a lot like an awkward shrug, and he half-expected them to say 'oops?'.

He gave them a moment of dignity for at least admitting their error, in a way. He was still pretty annoyed that they were using such a cliche trick, though, and it wasn't like they didn't know how pointless a hole in the ground would be at stopping him. "Did you really think I would fall for the 'hidden hole in the ground' trick? _Again?_ The last time you tried it, it wasn't even obvious, and I can tell you, falling into a hole twice was quite bad enough for one day. I'll not make it three times."

Again, the ship shrugged, and Kimblee found himself thinking again what an odd day it was. "I _really _don't have time for this," He said, and the Umbra Eternis took a flying leap over the hole (more impressive than it sounded, with the persistent weight distribution problems) and landed right in front of it, causing the hole to shake a bit but not fall in. It _was _a pretty well-made hole, probably constructed with alchemy, and looked a bit wet at the edges for some reason. Suspicious, he thought, glancing at the ship and wondering what they might be up to. His mecha took a few steps forward, making the ground rattle as he neared two lamp posts facing each other accross the street...and paused in mid-step, noticing the thick cables strung between them at exactly the right height to ensnare Umbra Eternis' legs and trip them. "You didn't even _try _to hide that one!" Kimblee yelled at whoever was waiting for him - for he was certain that he had been led into a poorly thought-out trap - and carefully walked around the lamp posts, not certain that they weren't still trapped in some other way. He looked down at the next trap and grimaced at how lazy this last one was. "Oh look," He said flatly. "A big oil slick on the streets, transmuted from minerals into a liquid substance that's nearly impossible to see and thick enough to trip me up if _only _I hadn't seen it." He activated a rudimentary set of jets that enabled considerable leaps (if not true flight) and bounded over the oil slick, landing on the ground with a big _thump_. "Is that _it?_ Is that all you can think of? I am _very _disappointed in you all." He took several more steps, looking for more traps at every one...

And stepped onto a part of the street was slid down with a faint click, and two large fist-shaped pillars burst out of the ground where they had been concealed in camoflaged hatches and slammed into the sides of Umbra Eternis, pinning it's arms at the sides and immobilizing it. "Well, good effort, for what it's worth," Kimblee remarked, still sounding bored. "However, you may notice that that is a useless gesture because I'm _not _stuck. It'll be the work of a few moments to destroy these pillars with alchemy and free myself!" Red light flashed around him, infusing into the pillars, and they crumbled away in flashy blasts. "You see? I am _really _starting to lose my patience here and..." He faltered in mid-word, noticing a vaugely familiar figure standing on the roof of the building at the end of the street. The figure changed, becoming significantly more blocky and even a bit gun-like. His chest started to ache from earlier injuries, and he got a gloomy feeling of _deja vu_. "Oh no. Not you again," Kimblee said to the distant figure of Field Admiral Leeroy Jethro Gibbs. He raised his arm, and the Umbra Eternis did the same, intending to blast Gibbs before he could shoot him with an insanely overpowered shot like he had done earlier.

At least, Kimblee _tried _to. He probably wouldn't have done it in time anyway, but his right arm, now almost completely reverted to Kevin Levin's original skin color, moved on it's own volition, suddenly outside of Kimblee's control, and punched him in the face. It wasn't much of a punch; he was losing body strength from the toll of the long fight and his own rigors, and it hadn't been at the right angle for proper punching leverage, but it did the job of distracting him long enough for Gibbs to fire a single missile that streaked across the street, homing right towards the Umbra Eternis.

Kimblee saw it coming, but not in time to destroy it from far away, and it was nearly upon him when he raised the giant robot's arms over the fuselage cavity containing him and Jarod, more to protect himself than his captive, and realized too late that missile hadn't been aimed at _him _but at a higher target; namely the Umbra Eternis' head.

"...Oh bollocks," Kimblee mumbled as he saw through the Umbra Eternis' eyes and had the unpleasant sight of, from the shared perspective, a missile coming right at his face.

_The hell is a bollocks?_ Kevin thought.

_Oh, that's easy, _the Nameless-That-Was said. _It's slang both from the British and which I've heard in the Sigilian cant and either way it means...uh, I don't know, actually. Sorry._

The resulting blast to the machine-titan's face, while big, blasted it back and twisted it's face up, half the machinery inside it's head pushed out in a crackling mess and one of it's eyes dangling out. Face still smoking, the giant robot hurtled back the way it came and slid right onto the oil slick Kimblee had thought he'd avoided. He slipped, the Umbra Eternis overbalanced, and together they continued falling backwards, and flipped when it hit the calbes between the lampposts and landing on it's back right onto the disguised hole Kimblee had dismissed earlier. The hole's cover held for a moment, and then it fell and took Kimblee with it. The Umbra Eternis splashed down into a surprising quantity of water that filled in a portion of the underground tunnels they had walled off to make a hole big enough for the Umbra Eternis to fall into. "_HOLES,_" Kimblee yelled, pulling at his hair in frustration before punching at the arm that had hit him. Kevin snickered cruelly.

And, at last, Jarod blinked and opened his eyes. He grimaced dully, his head aching furiously, and his analytically-inclined brain took stock of the situation in moments and he was understandably displeased to find thick tendrils invading a few of his orifices and apparently colonizing his body (but then it wasn't like the first time it had happened to him since leaving his home world), and mustered enough self-control to pretend to still be unconscious so Kimblee didn't notice.

Back on the ship, Zim gave a polite round of applause. "Ah," He said. "It was never important if Kimblee saw the traps or not."

"_Yeah, we were sort of counting on that,_" Cyborg said through the radio.

"Of course," Zim agreed. Not being totally privy to the plan, he thought for a moment and added, "For what?"

His question was answered immediately when he saw Roy Mustang, Aang and Toph run out from the buildings beside where Kimblee had been trapped now; the Flame Alchemist and Toph stopped just in front of the immobilized giant robot, Toph pulling a large quantity of earth from the street and pushing it into a barricade around Kimblee, fusing it into a single spire-like hollowed shape that was just tall enough to cover the Umbra Eternis as it presently was. The Flame Alchemist did his part next, clapping his hands and putting them on the ground to produce a stream of blue alchemical light that flashed through the barrier and into the water the Umbra Eternis was presently lying in, transmuting it into gas. Zim wasn't sure what the point was, but the instruments informed him that the amount of flammable hydrogen had risen to incredibly dangerous levels in that very small area.

If he knew that Roy Mustang's means of creating explosive blasts of flame involved transmuting hydrogen, he _would _have seen the point.

The Umbra Eternis sat up and banged it's head against the barricade, dislodging part of it and screeching with one of it's hands up to the mutilated side of it's face. There was a clicking sound there, suggesting that it's throat-mounted primary cannon had been destroyed in the blast. A few cursory sparks flared out from it's throat, corroding components and doing more damage, focing it to stop supplying power there and the flowing shadows around that area vanished, leaving twisted and useless metal there, and a jaw hanging open with a busted-up cannon poking out like a overlarge tongue. "Clever move, Mustang! Very clever! A trap that you didn't need me to fall for was a _very clever _idea! And I know that you have something else planned; you know this barricade can't hold me or you would have already done it!"

Toph bared her teeth. "I say we crush him right here and pull that Jarod guy out from the dust!"

Mustang held a hand out in a military gesture. "Wait." Toph frowned at him, but reluctantly complied; she knew the plan, after all.

The Umbra Eternis tried to stand up; the hole was designed allow it in but was too cramped to permit the giant robot to move, forcing the Umbra Eternis into a rough sitting position. Too impatient to use it's weapons, the machine-titan smashed it's fists against the barricade, crumbling the rock and leaving massive indents, dust streaming down and cracks appearing in it. "_Show me your resolve, Mustang!_" Kimblee declared. "_What are you planning? Show me, SHOW ME! SHOW ME SHOW ME SHOW ME!_" He started to yell more, but there was too much gas there and he breathed in enough to send him into a coughing fit.

"Oh, I'll _show you_ all right," Roy growled. He raised his hand, the fabric rubbing slightly. "And you don't have the right to use my name like that. I'm just the Flame Alchemist." He smirked. "And Kimblee. Aren't Heartless vulnerable to things like...I don't know, heat and light? Things like _fire_?"

He snapped his fingers, and there was a short snapping sound before the sparks came from his glove.

Contrary to popular belief, the snapping sound the Flame Alchemist made when he used his powers wasn't his fingers snapping, or the sound his ignition cloth made; it was actually the sound of the moisture in the air seperating into oxygen and hydrogen which he then used to amplify his flames. And he was so skilled at it that he could create whatever intensity or pattern he wanted, avoiding civilians or precisely targeting enemies in surprisingly non-lethal ways. (If nothing else, he was considered a hero for being one of the few people to employ massive fire-blasting power in ways that merely produced non-fatalities.) And in this case, there was already an ample supply of hydrogen from the transmuted water the Umbra Eternis had been lying in; a supply of very flammable hydrogen, more over, that was thick around the Umbra Eternis and waiting for an errant spark to blow it all up.

This went through the minds of both Jarod and Kimblee. Kimblee merely mouthed wordlessly. Jarod smirked.

The hydrogen exploded, shaped into a path Roy made with unerring precision. For just about everyone else there, it just looked like a gigantic pillar of fire that arced straight upwards in a single flash of light. Toph's barricade ensured that no one was hurt by the blast, and pointed up so the fire had nowhere else to go but the heavens, so that Roy put all his concentration into preventing Jarod from coming to harm.

He did so splendidly; in spite of Jarod's mild concerns, the heat and flames didn't come anywhere near him, nearly staying away from the fuselage so they didn't burn or were cooked to death inside superheated metal. Indeed, Roy directed the flames squarely at the Heartless infused into the giant robot itself, burning light piercing the darkness and snuffing it out wherever it could, twisting into every crevice and gap and bit it could find and blazing white-hot.

The flame attack took only seconds to do, and when it was done, smoke was rising up from behind the barricade, and the squealing-grinding noise as the Umbra Eternis forced itself to it's knees and frantically started battering at the barricade, it's Heartless components burning away and draining it of life bit by bit, and the sensation of it dying by inches invoked a primitive fear in it's maddened instincts, and it had gotten it's claws into a likely part of the wall when Roy cried, "NOW! FREEZE HIM!"

The Umbra Eternis paused, processing that, and it was a mistake; Aang and Katara appeared on a sliding pillar of rock from the concealed hole they had been hiding out in near the pool, and the rock tore itself from the ground and flew into the air with them on it, and a large amount of water from the pool went with it, a slightly flattened globe water they Waterbent to them. In short order, they were in position directly over the barricade, and they bent and spun, and the water flooded down inside the barricade and onto the super-heated metal of the Umbra Eternis' exterior; Aang and Katara instilled a measure of the same coldness of the polar ice caps that her tribe called home and that his people called neighbor, and instead of flashing into steam the water _froze _around the giant robot into a solid mass of such coldness that the air steamed wetly around it.

The Umbra Eternis was totally immobilized for a moment, mechanisms frozen solid. Kimblee transmuted the ice into water with a gesture, and the Umbra Eternis came roaring to it's feet in an awkward series of scrabbling brutish jerks, it's armored portions warped and twisting. But they weren't done yet; Aang and Katara hovered back to relative safety and Roy went back on the offense launched blast after blast with all, again and again, the continual flames tearing up from the barricade and blackening it, cracking bits of it at a time through the unimaginable heat and force, pieces of the barricade torn free and turning into sharpnel-deadly projectiles from their speed. Toph dug her feet into the ground, small rocks growing onto her ankles and anchoring her to the earth, and she used that connection to strengthen her Earthbending, the pulse of the planet pounding inexorably up her legs and roaring in her bones, and that strength was enough for her to feel the metal of the Umbra Eternis, corroded and warped though it was, and pulled on it with all her might. It wasn't enough to pull it off, not at this distance, but it was more than strong enough to pull it off it's feet, just for a second, and smash it into the walls of the barricade around it, knocking it's pilot silly.

The barricade held. Aang and Katara swooped over the pool, bringing yet more water and flying overhead, grimly amused at the Umbra Eternis' struggles against the wall, it's smoldering metal glinting in the poor like in ways that made it look like there were _faces _in there, and they seperated the water into several self-contained sections around them, and froze them into giant ice spears that they then sent down, striking down around the Umbra Eternis and holding it there before they liquified the spears, rejoining the water into a large mass that they then wrapped around the Umbra Eternis and froze it again, bringing the incredibly hot metals to near-freezing tempatures again so fast that even this incredibly strong armor was cracked and made brittle by it. They moved away, a machine-gun appearing on the back of it's head and feebly shooting at them, and were gone before the bullets could start firing. Roy resumed his part of the attack, blasting out waves of fireblasting, generating more and more blasts of flame with greater violence than before, and short-lived flaming streams flickering out through random spots in the gradually widening cracks. Those cracks were still very small, but there was so much fire that even a little space of it could burn a hole right through a man with only a moment's impediment. Roy's eyes were wide with an emotion somewhere between hatred and grim resolution, his mouth tightly closed in a faint snarl while sweat ran down his face (it had nothing to do with the heat, and everything to do with his own state of mind).

The whole time he was completely silent; he made no battle cries or vindictive declarations of Kimblee's doom, he just continued doing his hardest to incinerate the Heartless that had enabled Kimblee, prevent Jarod from being hurt by their assault, and just maybe burn Kimblee alive in his own mech. And with each successful volley, Aang and Katara would launch freezing water over the Umbra Eternis, repeating the combination over and over again, using the same trick they had used earlier to loosen it's armor but at a much bigger scale. And the Umbra Eternis couldn't even try to break through the barricade and stomp on them or shoot them or let Kimblee blast them, because Toph was using her Metalbending to bind it tight and hold it down, a feat that was obviously driving her closer and closer to the brink from the effort of Bending metal so intimately touched with a darkness that making contact with made her spiritual powers recoil, but she did it nonetheless.

Zim watched the unfurling explosions, feeling jealous. "Why can't I make blasts like that?" He complained. "Or as often? Or in such quick succession?"

"I think you repeated yourself," Calvin said, leaning over Zim's chair to get a better view of the action. "And I think it's because he uses a totally different way of fire generation that you do."

"Fine, then give me yours! I'll outdo him so much the explosions will carve my name into the _MOON!_"

Calvin hugged his gauntlet protectively. "No way! I'm not letting you get your hand on this, and I'll graft this thing to my arm if that what it takes to keep it away from you!" Explosions continued to erupt thanks to the Flame Alchemist, still keeping Kimblee down.

"Hmph. You're just being selfish."

"You already became a - what did your friend call it - a Firebender for no reason," Hobbes said. "Isn't that enough destructive power for you?"

Zim looked at him like he was crazy. "Ah..._no_."

On the ground, the Umbra Eternis faltered back and stood still, pieces of it's armor peeling off and most of it distended, out of place or otherwise irrepairably damaged from the superheating/freezing combo. The giant robot itself was feeling the damage from the brutal counterattack from their enemies, now too overwhelmed to fight back with the usual ferocity it had exibited, and a faintly existential despair in it's posture suggested that it might have been thinking something along the lines of 'this isn't how it's supposed to go'. Kimblee, less interested in actually winning as he was in seeing who was worthy to survive this fight, noticing that the robot was standing in the acclumated water Aang and Katara had sent at them, and there was so much of it that it was waist-high for the Umbra Eternis.

Above ground, Roy glanced at Aang and Katara. They gave the thumb's-up, indicating that there was enough water for their purposes. He nodded, clapped his hands, and slammed them on the ground. And around Kimblee, the water flashed, and diffused into hydrogen. Kimblee heard another spark from outside. He laughed. "Well played," he said again. Jarod rolled his eyes.

Roy made one last flame attack. Combined with the hydrogen there, it produced a final tremendous blast of fire, ripping up from where Kimblee patiently awaited and then high into the sky, a tremendous blaze of white-hot flame burning in place with such ferocity that the barricade Toph had made was seared black by the heat of it and crumbling. Smoke whirled away and pushed into the air, of a different character than the smog Kimblee had made earlier and burning right through it. The flame gave one last savage burst of light and went out in a mighty flash, blowing the barricade apart and leaving smoldering lumps there. In spite of the flame's power, the area right outside that barricade was virtually untouched, even though the barricade itself crumbled to dust in front of them, and the ground around it collapsed into the hole and filled it up; it shook a little, but nothing else happened.

They didn't seem to think this meant Kimblee was defeated, though. "Okay, that's the first part done!" Roy yelled to Toph while, underneath them, the ground shook and twisted, little bits of rock moving out of place like something big was tearing it's way loose. "Get us out of here and let Scar and your friend Sokka handle the next part!"

"Got it!" Toph said, pushing against the ground and breaking off large chunks directly under herself and Roy that rose up, a large section looping between their two rock-platform and connection so that it looked like a V. It rose up higher as the ground continued to crack and break, and Toph pushed it, propelling the chunk onwards and carrying Roy and herself down the street while, as everyone had expected, the ground Kimblee had been buried under burst apart, and the Umbra Eternis tore it's way up and pulling itself onto the street where it fell to it's knees, coughing out a warbling and weak growl cut through with a crackling static nosie, sounding rather like a wounded creature coughing in the middle of a battlecry, and it's armor was even more badly beaten than before. Right in front of them, several of it's pieces fell off, mostly around the already weakened back, and large patches of armor were already missing, left in in the ground. Alarmingly, most of the armor didn't seem particularily _damaged,_ just bent out of position on their fixutes and coming loose.

Kimblee himself was still alive and conscious...but even that seemed only a matter of time before he collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Most of his exposed skin was an angry shade of red from second-degree burns, a few more serious welts here and there on his face. A few of them seemed self-inflicted, as though his hand had tried to gouge his eyes out on it's own. (Kevin had been feeling ambitious.) His clothing hadn't faired much better, mostly singed to remnants that stayed in the boundaries of decency, and he seemed in too much pain to even notice that all the hair on the left side of his head had burned away except for a few sickly clumps. Below him Jarod hung by the stubborn tendrils of the Umbral Heartless, though they looked much smaller than before. He glared at the Flame Alchemist, a single look thick with so much raw hate, and then the Umbra Eternis' usual aura of darkness sputtered up again...though it was considerably diminished from before, a weak and flickering remnant of the all-enshrouding banner it had been not so long ago, mostly concentrated in the superstructure of the giant robot it kept animated, with a violently but dimmed flare around the robot's demonic exterior. And through that flare, they could see that the internals of the robot were seriously damaged, a copious amount of smoke and sparks coming from the interior mechanisms, and several visible components looked _fused _together.

Kimblee convulsed for a moment, red fluid dripping off him in copious amount, his body shrinking slightly and losing some of the definition appropiate to a man his age. "Very well played indeed," he managed to say before breaking off into a horrible coughing fit, shaking violently as the pain of his nasty burns slid past even his formiddable inner focus. "But this...this has gone far...yes, gone quite far enough."

He shakily raised a hand, purplish-blue mist clinging to in and forming madly screaming faces for a moment before the steadily increasing sunlight burned them away, and the Umbra Eternis raised a hand as well, railguns the size of seige weapons sliding into place on the machine-titan's hand and it extended out as far as it could go, staying remarkably still for all the damage it had taken and powering up, preparing to launch a metal slug the size of a car through electromagnets to propell at such speeds that it would effectively vaporize whatever it hit.

Zim would be having none of that, and neither did Winry; she fired all their ship's cannons at once, smashing into the side of the giant arm and disrupting the delicate mechanisms in the weapon, forcing it to power down before it could harm itself or it's pilot and thus rendering it completely pointless and doing a nice job of distracting him for a bit. The arm fell harmlessly to the side of Umbra Eternis as Kimblee snarled in disbelief, only to hear two matching noises coming from the buildings on his side.

He looked aside and saw two matching machines now extending from transmuted turn-tracks made into the buildings and positioned so that they were level with his shoulders, hidden in such a way until now that he couldn't have seen them. Both machines resembled the rock-shooting cannons Scar had repeatedly transmuted during his earlier battle, with a crucial difference: a large metal barb sticking out of the barrels, their hollow ends containing a ball of gray-blue gel (which was an incredibly strong adhesive and crowd suppresent, normally used as restraints in crowd control situations, and strong enough to withstand epically strong combatants) and at the rear of the machines, large industrialized spools containing a large amount of extremely thick cable. Positioned in a gunner's seat between those two portions of the machines was the operator of the weapon, Scar in the left machine and Sokka on the right one.

They calibrated with precise timing, giving him just enough time for him to realize what was going on, and not nearly enough to stop them, and Scar fired first, being the one operating the machine that was closest to the railgun-armed limb. His harpoon - it wasn't actually a harpoon, being too short to be considered one, but it was close enough - pierced the side of the railgun, punching through a delicate spot behind the electromagnets and securing a stable hold on it, and by extension the arm it was attached to. Given enough time, Kimblee would realize he could simply detach the railgun, and so the adhesive goop at the end of the barbed attachment burst and covered enough of the giant robot's forearm to get a more assured grip. It helped that it then hardened to the density of steel. Scar reeled it in, the machine pulling with surprising force, dragging the arm with it and actually pulling Kimblee slightly off-balance, and Sokka fired his while Kimblee was still realizing that he'd been snared and tried to recalculate; that barb neatly struck under a bent join on the upper bits of armor on the other gauntlet, too large to penetrate it but the gel burst and hardened, holding the harpoon steady and reeling back, pulling Kimblee the other way, and with Scar's harpoon holding steady, Kimblee was begining to be strung between them. Sokka reeled his back with full force and the Umbra Eternis nearly fell over, arms bound and pulled both ways and it dangled in the air for a moment before stomping down again, trying to get enough of a proper stance again so it could tear itself free but held too well to exert it's strength.

"It's holding, _it's holding!_" Sokka yelled, a fairly optimistic notion given how his machine's tether-cord was twisting and straining, and the machine itself was being pulling slightly away from the ground it had been transmuted from.

Kimblee thrashed and pulled, the Heartless coiling around him in restraining patterns in order to give him an idea of the forces constricting the Umbra Eternis and help him react accordingly; it wasn't really that helpful, though. "Everyone, _now!_" Scar shouted, hand hovering over a small lever that would pull the cords in at maximum strength, at sufficient speeds to tear itself out of the floor and probably smash into the Umbra Eternis. As if to give his statement greater impact, the Umbra Eternis' left foot managed to scrape the ground and forced itself into a realignment of it's joints in a shrieking, clenching series of readjustments that had to hurt itself, but it did manage to get a foothold on the ground and push away mightily. It didn't have the strength to pull itself free yet, but it was still strong enough to drag the machines almost out of the ground and shake the buildings ominously.

It would have pushed harder, if it hadn't been interrupted. Having kept a close eye on where precisely Winry had interacted with the interface and activated the weapon systems on his new ship, Zim hit a button that looked like a bullseye and a screen directly over his seat displayed a targeting screen: a camera-view of everything right in front of him, several red circles appearing on-screen as the systems calibrated, eventually lining up over the Umbra Eternis and making the symbol of a bullseye over several promising targets, outlining them in eye-catching red on the screen. Several buttons were positioned in a panel just below that screen along with a spiral gauge that measured the output for the weapons system (too low for Zim's liking and he vowed to tinker with it when he had the time), and the buttons appeared to indicate levels of weapon strength: Zim reached out to press one and his hand hovered for a moment between 'Smite', 'Smite Harder', 'Why Did I Even Install This One?' and 'Mildly Ticklish Irritation' before settling on 'Smite' and literally punching the button.

A smaller screen said, 'Please don't abuse the dashboard'. The weapons mounted on his ship's front powered up, cycling into the most energy-efficient formats possible until the computer was satisfied with the projected results (calculated in less time than it took for the brain to even notice the extremely brief pause) and fired half a dozen beams of green concussive energy, a few managing to strike the front of the Umbra Eternis and knocking it off it's foot again, rendering it's attempts at escape and further rampaging meaningless. "HAH!" Zim said.

"...Nice shot," Winry admitted.

"I know," Zim said smugly. "Totally hypothetical and non-suspicious question. Is there an ejection sequence intiator here?"

"Right there," Winry said, pointing to the dashboard directly in front of her, picking out a button that looked like a chair with an upwards-pointing-arrow on it. "Not really a sequence, though, it just shoots you out from the ship."

"Good enough!" Zim said. "On that note, my legs are tired. I MUST SIT." He bounced over and landed himself into the other seat; rather hard, actually, and he quickly found that it was much too big for him. It was sized for humanoids in the same size range as the average human, and not only was Zim small for his kind, he also wasn't much taller than a short tween. He repressed his indignation and fury that Cyborg had forgotten that these seats were far too large for him, or that he would require something to boost him up. Then again, he could just do some tinkering and replace the seat with a more appropiately sized one. (And it seemed that Zuko and Hobbes would be doing the piloting.) Focusing on the matter at hand, Zim reached for the controls and grabbed them with a little difficulty. "What are these things for?"

"They supply the power and the primary control mechanism," Winry explained. "You just sort of...think all determined and heroic and the ship gets fueled from your spiritual energy. Something like that; the technical details are more Cyborg's thing, I just solve problems with engineering."

"And to control the ship?" Zim pressed, not sparing much thought on how flagrantly bizarre what she had just said sounded; apparently, his ship was fueled with psychic energy. That was pretty cool, he supposed, and it wasn't like they'd have trouble refueling. They would have to do something about getting him a better chair, though...

"You just think what you want it to do. The ship translates your mental commands into the ship's processes, and it just happens. At least that's the theory; me and Cyborg know how to drive ships and stuff with that kind of technology, but anything more complicated that that is so much of a pain that we haven't translated everything to the control handles."

"Wait, wait!" Zuko said, leaning over behind Zim's seat and frowning down at the small Irken. Zim tried to look innocent. "Don't give me that look, I _know _that look. You only give that look when you're planning something that usually ends up with stuff exploding and yelling and me almost getting eaten by the monster or kidnapped by the lady villain."

"Yes?" Zim said.

"So. _Why are you talking about ejecting?_"

"...No reason," Zim lied, badly. "It was only curiosity. I want to know how this ship works! It will be no good shipping out in a ship I know nothing about! Learning about the schematics and technical details will be very important!"

Zuko scowled, utterly unconvinced. "Stay away from the crazy little guy," Beth whispered to Courtney. "We'll get sucked into his crazy plan!" Courtney nodded back. Both of them took several steps away from Zim, just in case.

"...You know, it would be _super-cool _if everyone left Kimblee strung up there and left the area so I could pull a totally awesome fool-proof plan that would defeat Kimblee right here and now," Calvin said. No one listened to him. "Hey, the last plan I made worked wonders! And by that I mean we delayed him a bit and really ticked him off. It still worked, though." He thought about it and added, "Wait, we need to get Jarod out and take away the Philosopher's Stone. Never mind, pretend I didn't say anything. Which you're doing anyway. Carry on!"

Hobbes glanced at Zuko, and deciding he had a point, said, "Why even _have _ejector seats or whatever, though? It just seems like an accident waiting to happen."

"But you _gotta _have ejector seats!" Calvin said. Zim and Winry nodded fervently. "It's like a law of shipbuilding!"

"Ah, yes," Hobbes replied, an ear twitching briefly. "Silly me."

"It's cool that you can admit your ignorance of proper shipbuilding protocol," Calvin said. Hobbes rolled his eyes, and noticed a change in the screens depicting the events going on in the street. Noticing it as well, Calvin said, "Hey, what are those guys doing down there?"

"It looks like they're commencing the attack on Kimblee and doing our work for us," Zim said. "...Those glory thieves!"

Winry hit the communicator button, broadcasting their signals to everything in range. "Hey, guys! One of the guys up here has a plan that he says will completely wipe Kimblee out, but he needs the hostage and the Stone taken away from the guy first!"

"_Gotcha!_" Cyborg said. "_We're sending Abel, Greed and the ninja kids out on the frontline assault; give 'em supporting fire if you can! Over and out!_"

Calvin blinked. "Wow, she actually _listened _to me? I'm...I'm feeling a strange and unfamiliar feeling. Is this what respect feels like?"

"No, that's probably just hunger," Zuko said. "We've been very active. Respect is much more fleeting and hard to find."

"...Yes," Hobbes agreed. "Yes it is." An unspoken sentiment of empathy spread through Zim's crew; one way or another, all of them had little respect given to them.

On the street below, Abel and Greed ran onto the street; Abel was still wearing his strange (and seemingly useless) armor, while Greed had enough sense to retain his Ultimate Shield of an organic armored form. Naruto and Gaara were moving on the rooftops where they had been waiting to provide background fire if neccesary, now called into action to do the same for Greed and Abel.

"You guys get that Jarod guy! Take the Stone if you can!" Angilaka yelled from a rooftop overlooking the street near them, and from the opposite rooftop Shego waited as well; the two women had a very good view of the street, and perfect shots at Kimblee if they needed to take them. "We'll cover you! And Abel! _Use everything you have! We are way past the point where we can afford to let anyone hold back!_"

"Hurry up and get him so we can blast the lunatic already!" Shego shouted, having long lost her patience for having to hold back for fear of harming Jarod.

"Hey hey hey!" Greed yelled back playfully at his bodyguard, running ahead with astounding speed for the increased weight his armor induced. "Since when do you give the orders, green girl?" He did so nonetheless.

Abel ran as well, but glanced up at his superior with a feeling of utter dread; it was long since past time that they employed his..._secret _asset, though even the great danger Kimblee presented wasn't worth the risk if he lost control. "M'am!" Abel said. "Are you certain?"

"Abel!" Angilaka declared, a bit apologetic but stern. "I'm authorizing you as your duly appointed superior to make a controlled release of your Crusnik state _immediately! _Do not engage Kimblee right now, just remove Jarod from harm's way and endeavor to eliminate any obstacles preventing you from achieving that goal! _Cut loose and do the job!_"

To his credit, Abel responded to this command with only a brief heisitation, in spite of his discomfort with said command. "Yes, m'am!" He said, briefly glad he had the foresight to manifest this armor to protect him from sunlight (even if the opportunity to employ it as such hadn't come up).

The Umbra Eternis fought against it's restraints, struggling and twisting as best it's could. The sight was unnerving; while an ordinary giant robot was either suitably humanlike in an acceptable range or had an nonhuman range of motion appropiate to it's body type, Kimblee had made his Umbra Eternis to move more like a human, being rather ignorant of engineering skills and just doing what he thought made sense. (And because he didn't know how these things were actually supposed to work, didn't do that great a job of it.) The wounded, inhuman and demonic horror twisting and flailing around like it was trying to be a human was disquieting in much the same way that it's appearance was supposed to rouse terror. The mechanisms inside pounded and vented, servo-muscles whirred madly in it's arms and all manner of short-range weapons appeared from it and fired all over the place, but it was all in vain; the arms were stretched to their limit and couldn't move properly rendering it's strength useless. The weapons couldn't be aimed properly, since Scar and Sokka were just outside of it's field of view; Kimblee was housed in it's stomach and the fuselage's front blocked his view, and the robot's head was shaped in such a way that it couldn't turn it's head.

It roared in impotent fury, warbling at the last moment and going into a coughing fit that was mirrored by Kimblee. In Kimblee's case, his own body failing on him had nothing to do with the giant robot's state but was a consequence of his fusion with Kevin, and if Wuya had anticipated this, he and Kimblee's other superiors didn't deem him important enough to warn him about it. _Fair enough_, Kimblee thought, and didn't really care about it: carrying out their orders was his job as long as he was their employee or until a better offer came along, and he didn't care about much else. At the very least, it ensured that he had a 'beat the clock' element to the fight, though at his present rate of degeneration, he doubted he would live to see the end of the day.

But, he thought with a smirk, a bittersweet victory was still a victory. He forced the Umbra Eternis to hold still, and summoned a set of weapons that would work in this situation and perhaps even turn the battle around for him: he concentrated, calling out to the darkess living around him and anchoring him to the giant robot, and it rippled around it's shoulders, the shadow aura growing larger there for a moment as if swelling into a portal to a place that was dark and hollow and anathema to all things and echoed not with music but with a horribly empty _nothingness_, a dead and bleak absence of sound and life... The portal, much like those that the Heartless moved through, closed after summoning a paired set of box-shaped missile launchers a little too small for the machine-titan and desposited them onto it's shoulders, and they attached automatically, still streaming with darkness.

The launchers slid back and fired it's entire payload all at once, doing it so forcefully the launchers were torn apart by the stress (or maybe that was the corrosive nature of darkness at work) and fell off. The missiles streaked away, aimed not at Greed and Abel and the two ninjas en route to Kimblee, any of the surronding fighters, Scar and Sokka or even Zim's ship, but they went straight up into the sky, spiraling upwards arounds each other. Kimblee smirked in satisfacation and sat back, blissfully unaware of Jarod looking silently at him, haggard and angry, too exhausted from his ordeal to act on his compulsion to bring the rogue alchemist down.

"Why'd he just do that?" Zuko, who didn't know much about artillery weapons of that magnitude, said suspiciously.

"I don't know," Courtney said, trying not to shake a little with thoughts of even one of those missiles coming right for her. (Technically, they would be going for the _ship, _but that wasn't really the point.) She looked at Beth, and the shorter power-armored girl shrugged nervously; she just wore the armor and hit the bad guys, she wasn't a technician or anything like that.

"Perhaps he's just trying to shoot the moon down," Zim said in a reasonable tone. He noticed Winry and Calvin giving him strange looks. "What? That's what I'd do if I had that kind of firepower and was bored and evil."

"I don't think he's _that _much of a ditz," Calvin said. "Insane and evil, yes, but I wouldn't call him capricious or whimsical or anything fun like that. Any ideas, big buddy?" This last was directed at Hobbse.

The tiger-boy in question had been watching the missiles, noticing something faintly familiar about them. He knew a great deal about powerful artillery technology (and many other types of weapons technology) owing to some time spent as a lost technology scavenger during his youth on the planet Cadia and part of his duties as a jack-of-all-trades as far as his hyperactive military career was concerned. "I know those kinds of missiles!" He said, pointing. "Not quite the same make as our's, but...look at them, they're arcing! Once they hit a certain height, they'll fire up and home in on their targets!"

"...Should we panic?" Zim asked as the missiles reached the apex of their arc some thirty feet overhead and locked onto several appropiate targets, breaking out of formation and flying wildly all over before streaking down at their targets at high speed in bizarre patterns that were hard to predict or track; just watching them could give you a headache. "I think this may be a moment to panic. On that note, how _do _I go about shooting them down?"

"Hit the buttons and hope for the best," Winry said, doing just that and firing a full round of energy-based cannonfire from the ship's main guns. The missiles were spaced together tightly enough that she couldn't hope to just shoot down all the missiles without some creative aiming skills she didn't have the time for or have the computers target them (since she didn't feel they had the power to spare for that), but she didn't need to; a single lucky blast struck the rear end of a missile that was coming from behind them and en route to Roy's general area and damaged it enough that it spun out of control, spinning right into the path of another missile and the two exploded with a shockwave that made a few walls shake a bit, knocked Kimblee silly (but the Umbra Eternis stayed held back), and knocked Zim's ship around and nearly into a building before Winry managed to flip it around, just barely avoiding hitting something. It was only a short time out of battle, but that was enough of a halt to keep them from shooting the other missiles down and potentially preventing very bad things from happening.

Fortunately, their other allies were sufficiently on top of things to ensure that they didn't needto. Roy, operating on the general principle that great big blasts of fire always seemed to work, raised both his hands, and with one hand, he directed the few residual fires left over from earlier at four of the missiles in condensed bursts and detonating those missiles in mid-air, and with his other hand he created a powerful blast that snuffed those missile's explosions out without doing any more harm, and he repeated the combo again and again as the others took down the missiles in their own ways. Toph tore chunks of the ground up and condensed them into extraordinarily hard projectiles before firing them after a few hurried calculations to figure out their positions based on the vibrations their movements made. Even so, her precision at airborne objects left something to be desired, though she did knock them out of their targeted pattern and send them into the sky. Aang was luckier, using a similar Earthbending technique (though he had the advantage of more raw power and also setting them on fire), waiting for Katara to set them up by turning only a palm's-worth of water into small needles that she condensed as much as she could before she froze them and threw them at the missile's and broke their flying systems, allowing Aang to fling his flaming boulders and blow them up.

The gun-slinging fighters like Deadpool and Gibbs used one-person artillery weapons Gibbs had handed on for this situation (once more, _extremely _reluctantly in Deadpool's case, but since he lost his original launcher in the big explosion earlier he didn't have much choice) and fired off a multitude of heavy-impact explosives suitable for the occasion: like rocket-propelled bunker-busting grenades and missiles of their own, and destroyed quite a few missiles through sheer firepower alone. (And then Gibbs confiscated the missile launcher from Deadpool for the greater good.) Ordinarily Sokka and Scar would have been in the 'using guns and stuff' group too, but they were occupied keep the Umbra Eternis from freeing itself.

On the rooftops, Angilaka growled with effort, summoning up a swirling ring of light from herself and seperated it into dozens of smaller dagger-shaped bursts that she fired at the incoming missiles. They were far stronger than they looked, and she fired at least five to each missile she targeted, and detonated a fair number. Shego did much the same with her self-generated lasers, actually slicing a few missiles in half and dropping them onto their low-flying brethern with an impressive blasts (that Roy helpfully defused; the poor man was running himself ragged). Naruto took a few kunai with exploding notes tied around them and duplicated them while Gaara wrapped them in sand and, using his geokinetic abilities, launched them at near sub-sonic speeds into as many of the offending projectiles as he had kunai to use. Greed, using a plasma rifle he had been loaned, fired at the missiles in his continued dash towards Kimblee, trying to hit them so that they would fly back and hit Kimblee; he had no idea how to do that and it didn't work anyway, but he still tried. Abel...did nothing for the moment, apparently in deep concentration and muttering what sounded like an activation code to himself.

The result of all of this was a enormous blast, too high above the rooftops thanks to their quick reactions and Roy's good timing with his own explosions, that was incredibly pretty to look at and had the nice side-effect of starting to clear up the surronding air that Kimblee had infested with smoke to shield the Heartless, bringing down sunlight into the area again. The blast, incidentally, also helped right Zim's wayward craft, which didn't do much for Kimblee's apparent position as a skilled assassin. On the other hand, there was still exactly _one _missile left, having escaped destruction through some no doubt convoluted coincidence (unrelated to the coincidences that had helped them so far) and by further coincidence, was aimed directly at Abel.

Zim and his crew were still trying to get themselves repositioned and ready to fight, so they couldn't help. All the townies who _knew _Abel and were aware of what he was up to stood their ground, aware that he had the situation under control. The rest _would _have stopped the missile, and probably splendidly at that, if not for the interruption to follow.

Abel finished the command phrase he had been saying. "Crusnik Oh-Two. Active to forty percent; hold release until situation is resolved or reserves are exhausted." The immediate response within his body occured at the microscopic level, and would have gone unnoticed among most other people, though those with the appropiate instruments to detect it (such as Zim's new ship, or Beth's power armor) witnessed a massive surge of..._some _sort of energy with strange similarities to a morphological field emanating from Abel for the space of exactly one heartbeat.

The more obvious changes occured in the span of that heartbeat, his entire body shifting with almost violent suddenness though this went largely unseen due to his armor; he seemed to grow slightly larger, his bones swelling and thickening, his muscles tearing and reforming into inhumanly bizarre configurations with strength amplified by inhuman power sources though it wasn't enough to significantly alter his height or girth. The armor covered him adjusted itself automatically to compensate for the changes and his gauntlets shifted around his hands to fit around the massive black claws his fingers twisted into, sliding around and accomodating their edges.

Eyes that had been blue were now a fierce red, glowing moodily in the darkness of his helmet, flinching away from the diluted sunlight. He looked at Kimblee, uncaring of the missile coming his way, and uttered a hideously half-growl half-roar booming challenge that would have sounded more appropiate coming from a demon, shrieking and distorted in the confine's of it's armor. The shadows around him writhed like serpents and bolts of lightning crackled around him, small displays of power far more potent than anything he had yet displayed; a very different Abel had taken the battlefield, willingly sublimiting his personality into a a controlled descent into the inhuman fury more than a thousand years old and always lurking under the surface, now come to the fore and twisting his body into something that transcended his human frailties, and was perhaps was more of a monster than the Umbra Eternis could ever hope to be.

The missile came down and Abel raised his hand faster than the human eye could follow, and just before the missile would have passed down past the rooftops and maybe blown them all up, Abel released a massive surge of electrical energies, converting the energies to magnetic force that he directed at the missile, smashing into it without setting it off and catching hold of it, pointing it straight up as it continued to expel propellant and holding it firmly. Abel budged a little bit forward as the missile's forces inexorcibly pushed him out of place, growling with the strain and air rippling with the power he was exerting, his eyes narrowing as he made an inhuman snarl. He gestured and the missile's propellent chambers sealed themselves, the metal grinding together and crushed into together so that it snuffed out the missile's ability to fly. He grunted again as he extended his magnetic talents further, finding certain vital components within the missile and disabling them in bursts of electromagnetic energy. A small light on the side of the missile that indicated whether it was primed blinked out into the 'inactive' setting.

Satisfied, Abellet the now-harmless missile drop onto the ground with a heavy clonking noise, wondered briefly if 'clonking' was a word and decided it wasn't that important right now, and looked up at Kimblee with an uncharacteristically savage expression of glee behind his helmet. If Kimblee could have seen the way the face of the childlike and friendly warrior-priest had been warped into a monstrous horror of itself, he might have probably been justifiably creeped out or even more justifiably, have run screaming for the hills to find a nice little hole and crawl in and _never ever leave_ and remember the monster for the rest of his life whenever he heard something move behind him. As it was, the arcs of electricity crackling around him as he moved and tested his altered body (having not done this transformation in a while), his eye lenses lit up by the faint red light his eyes were glowing with, and the way his shadow was moving around like it was _alive _was probably a clue that something very worrisome had happened even for Kimblee. "Try..._harder_," Abel growled, like talking was a bit of an effort.

"...Seriously?" Kimblee said. "Now they're throwing, what, magnet monsters at me?"

"No. Magnet vampire," Abel corrected. "...Close enough."

"Yes, thank you." Kimblee paused. "You're really a vampire?"

"Yes." Behind his helmet, Abel grinned like the monster he had become. The sound his teeth made when they grated against each other was like blades scraping edge-to-edge. "Can't...you..._tell?_" He broke off into sudden maddened laughter, grinning and staring the whole while, and suddenly stopped for no reason. He still stared at Kimblee, and the shadow under him grew, slowly growing into a tangible shape very unlike the Heartless, and still similar enough to frighten people.

Sokka shuddered in his seat. Scar gave Abel a long and measured look. _May he stay in control, _he thought and prayed. Abel was no danger to _them_, not at this lower level of power and certainly never a danger to anyone but an enemy, but he did tend to become...indiscriminate.

Aang, Toph and Katara gathered near Roy, who was regarding Abel with a mixture of discomfort and satisfication. "What _is _he?" Aang asked Abel quietly, voice worried. "I thought he was, y'know, human?"

Roy scratched his hair. "Human's a bit of a relative term. Espicially in this town." He gave them a careful look. "Don't you forget that. Right now, Abel's one of our heaviest hitters, if not the biggest one we have on hand. Don't worry; he's not exactly himself, but he's no danger to us...I think." This didn't exactly reassure Katara and Toph. Aang, though, knew what it was like to have a superpowered side you couldn't exactly control and reserved judgement.

Greed kept advancing. "You stay on target!" He called to Shego. "Don't loose your grip now!"

"Right, boss!" Shego said, saluting him and trying not to stare at Abel. She thought for a moment that the Stoppables had been slaughtered by a monster very much like the one Abel had become: while she was hardly close to the goofy hero, the thought of the..._remnants _their murder had left behind made her very leery of being anywhere near Abel in his current state.

Angilaka crossed her arms. "C'mon, Abel, you can do it..." She muttered.

"You sure about that?" Deadpool asked. "Keeping a guy with a superpowered crazy side seems like a bad business choice."

"Why not?" Shego called out. "The boss keeps _you _around. You're all crazy side!"

"I told you, woman!" Deadpool yelled. "_ANTI-PSYCHOTICS ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO CHEW WITH THEIR SPORKS INSIDE-OUT! AND CRAZY PEOPLE!_"

"Abel's _not _crazy, he just has...issues. Bad issues. Super crazy-making sobbing-until-your-face hurts and never-letting-go-of-your-pain issues." She paused. "The hell are you doing up here? Get back to your post!"

"Vamoose! As opposed to va-elk, which is how they do it in Europe," Deadpool said, and jumped off the building, landed on a lamppost crotch first and craweled back to his post by Gibbs, whimpering in male pain.

Gaara and Naruto watched silently on the rooftop they had picked out. "We should totally make a 'superpowered crazy side' club," Naruto decided. "We can spread awareness of our problems and ingratiate ourselves into the community and do some much-needed therapy and maybe get it done as a tax write-off." Gaara stared at him, clearly finding it all worthy except for that last part. "What? That stuff's important. My mentor told me so!"

"Isn't your mentor a perverted overactor that writes pornography?" Gaara said.

"A _legendary ninja-hero _who's a perverted overactor that writes pornography!" Naruto corrected. "And sometimes I ghost-write."

Gibbs tilted his head at Abel. "...Everyone I know has problems," he said. He wondered vaugely if Abel knew a young lady he worked with that Gibbs treated as a daughter; he suspected they'd get along famously.

On the ship, Zim said (while everyone else crowded around the monitors in disbelief or interest, depending on their opinion of the transformation), "Oh, he's one of _those _kinds of vampires."

"Which kind?" Hobbes asked.

"The nice ones that controll their darker impulses until they go all out and turn into unstoppable killing machines. Also, he appears to be a bit of a humanoid abomination."

"Like a proper vampire, you mean," Calvin said.

"That's horribly bigoted and prejudiced!" Beth said, angered. "There's _lot _of vampires who aren't rampaging monsters (or sometimes have to be rampaging monsters) who provide for the community just fine and co-exist with beings of all kinds without being dangerous just because of what they are and it's really just _awful _of you to say that they should act like monsters because this manifestion of Abel's unresolved rage problems at evil happens to conform to your opinion of vampire fiction and-"

"Okay, okay, shut up already, I get it!" Calvin snapped. Beth glared at him, and went 'hmph!'. Courtney took a few pictures.

"Abel told me he was a kind of vampire called a 'Crusnik'," Zim said. "He...ah, he didn't elaborate on what that meant."

"Gee, I wonder why," Winry said dryly.

Back on the ground, Kimblee was trying to process this new event, and was so distracted by it he had forgotten to keep trying to escape. "How could I tell if you're a vampire or not that simply?" Kimblee said, trying to ignore the pounding in his head and how badly his body hurt. And how..._wrong _it all felt. "You're covered in powered armor, I have no idea what you look like right now." He paused. "Which would account for _why _you're wearing armor if you're a vampire, so you don't get burned by the sunlight as you are...wait, why didn't you get burned before? Or do you just-"

"_Say anything about sparkling and I will END YOU_," Abel said, and lightning crashed around him. Kimblee flinched, more because of the noise than the threat, and it was enough of an opening for Abel and also Greed to nearly complete their charge at Kimblee, moving with astonishing speed (espicially Abel, who looked almost like he was about to fly) and Kimblee reacted fast, taking advantage of their momentary loss of concentration and pulled on one of the Umbra Eternis' arm with all the power the machine-titan held in it's frame, and fed some of the Philosopher's Stone energy into it, giving it enough of a boost to make a single feat of strength; it pulled with that one arm and Sokka's harpoon-machine shuddered and bent, Sokka yelling furiously as he put the reel into overdrive and pulled Kimblee's arm back, Scar doing the same to counteract the hated alchemist. Kimblee responded by pulling even harder, the Umbra Eternis exerting itself in a show of strength that was greater than anything those machines could manage and, to the horror of those watching, Sokka's machine was torn straight off the building he was in and smashed into the open, the harpoon still holding strong. The Umbra Eternis's feet smashed into the ground with a joyous realization that it was _free_, at least a little bit, and could get back on with the killing.

Except for the thing stuck to it's arm, wihch it shook furiously. The harpoon and the glue-like substance on it stayed stubbornly strong, and Sokka almost fell out of his machine but clung to the seat with all the stubbornness he could manage (and that was quite a lot), now dangling for his life from a now partially freed giant robot that probably wanted to kill him. "Why is it always me!" Sokka cried.

"Does no one in this town ever _die?_" Kimblee said, honestly curious, wincing when Zim's ship furiously fired at him over and over again, it's energy drained enough that the blasts weren't as power as they had been before but still very disruptive. "Knock that off, I'm in the middle of something."

"No!" Abel roared, at Kimblee being freed but mostly at a refugee being endangered like that, and he grabbed Greed by the arm. "You! Fastball special."

Greed looked at him, confused. "The hell is a fastball spe_AUUUGH!" _Abel grabbed him by the wrist and whirled around with all his considerable strength, his claws scraping against Greed's black armor with a sparking spray, building up momentum and stirring up a small localized whirlwind and then he realeased Greed at the apex of the swings, throwing him so hard that it made a small shockwave, cracking the pavement, and the ground was flattened under Greed's flight path. He swung up at Kimblee, hurtling towards him like a human bullet and going through the harpoon-cord from Sokka's now-useless machine, dropping the unfortunate Water Tribe teenager onto the ground where he fled after giving a last parting shot to it's exposed innards. Green continued shooting up, yelling extremely inventive vitriol at Abel (insinuating that he was, among other things, the product of a drunken union between a mentally deficient film producer and a farm animal, the most explicit failure of sentience in the history of existence, used a cheesegrater to scrape off excess thought, and had very tacky dress sense), and Jarod took this as an opportunity to trudge his way through the liquid Heartless soup towards Kimblee, his hands curled into fists.

Kimblee, dividing his attention between trying to rip Scar loose as well, trying to reach Sokka and crush him to pulp, trying to remember what weapons he had in his robot, _and _ignoring the arguing voices in his head, all at the same time, was having a hard time settling on just one thing to do. "Oh forget it, I've been relying too much on this giant armor anyway," he said, not unwary of Jarod moving behind him; he reached for the Philosopher's Stone, anchored in place in front of him, his fingers brushing it, and then Jarod's hand anchored around his wrist hard enough to bruise and drop the Stone. "The hell! What are you doing being conscious?"

"Please, _please _just shut up," Jarod said flatly. His voice was so tired, aching with the effort alone it took to speak and wavering on every syllable, the man himself keeping himself steady with the same grip he was holding onto Kimblee with and still too maddeningly stubborn to quit when there was even the slightest chance of victory. (And even if there hadn't, he would have tried anyway.) He then proceeded to punch Kimblee in the nose, over and over and over again, expending his fury at spending a _very _long time of being imprisoned and psychically violated by Kimblee's Heartless.

This provided enough distraction from the situation at hand for Kimblee that made him forget what was happening around him, and Greed smashed right into the front of the Umbra Eternis' face, caving in the broken half of it's face completely (leaving the armor untoched, of course; it was a pretty impressive sight), his claws scrabbling for balance on the smooth metal and wedging into a crevice between the eye and jaws. He hauled himself up, in it's reflection he saw the Umbra Eternis raising a clawed fist to it's face and telegraph a mighty punch, so Greed let go. He fell and landed right on top of the rising fist as it came up, bounding up with it's movement while the robot's head snapped back from the impact, eye rolling, and Greed took that as inspiration, landing on it's forehead and climbing into the jagged socket of it's remaining eye and reaching in to wrap his claws around the fiercely glowing optic, digging into the glass-and-plastic casing and pulling with all his might. It resisted, for a moment, and a brief jerk helped him, and he fell out and the eye came with him, ripping straight out out of it's socket and trailing a sparking nerve of fibers and wires. "If this wasn't just a machine, I'd look like an absolute sadist, wouldn't I?" Greed remarked.

"You call that...a reason! Some of my closest friends are machines!" Abel roared. Greed ignored him.

The Umbra Eternis fell back with it's hand on it's face, it's other arm pulling so hard that Scar's restraining machine was torn loose. Scar was a practical sort and jumped clear as it fell, giving it a powerful kick that sent it wrapping around it's arm and sticking there. The Umbra Eternis hardly noticed in it's pain, screaming an agonized wail interspersed with clicks and Kimblee clapped his hand to his own face doing much the same. Jarod didn't want to be useless anymore and, moving as best as he could with Heartless tendrils literally wound into him, flung himself at Kimblee and grabbed him in a bear-hug, squeezing with all the strength he had left in his body, and while that wasn't very much at all, he was still in vastly better shape then Kimblee's current body and held multiple degrees in the medical sciences and was a master of martial arts that focused on mucking about with the body's internal workings, and he opted to do the most brutal thing he could think of by squeezing Kimblee's ribs powerfully enough to constrict the lungs while he slammed his knee into Kimblee's spine as hard as possible, bending his body in two directions. "I got him!" Jarod yelled. "_I got him!_"

"Keep him there!" Greed yelled, hands over feet and he was rolling out of the way of the Umbra Eternis to avoid it's furiously scrabbling hands. It was blind, so now it was reduced to looking through Kimblee's eyes (a futile prospect, since he was occupied) and feeling around for the hateful fleshling that had blinded it. He climbed onto the side of it's humped back and dragged himself up, tossing himself to the side when a hand loomed overhead and crashed into where he had just been and tearing all the way to the top of it's back, where he was safe. It's claws reached for him, angrily banging on the curve of it's hump, but it's arms were too short and it's body too awkwardly shaped to get anywhere near Greed as long as he stayed on top of it. Intent on helping out, everyone who could opened fire on the Umbra Eternis, concentrating on the exposed spaces on it's bending armor; it howled and screamed and stepped back at the puny but powerful barrage, it's mighty defenses broken through piece by tiny piece. In a way, it seemed horrified at the perceived unfairness of this.

Kimblee didn't scream at his own horrible pains, because while he tried to, he lost wind halfway through and had to make do with a rather disappointing wheeze. In spite of all, Kimblee was grinning like he was having the time of his life. "No you don't," He said weakly, and powered through the pain to slam the back of his head into Jarod's face dispite how stupid that was to do in a real fight, cracking the poor man's noise and giving his own skull a nasty ding. Kimblee grinned as the pressure loosened slightly.

And then it got a whole lot tighter. Jarod renewed his assault, hacking and coughing and growling incoherently and flailing around to pull at the tendrils going into him, tearing and distending them. Kimblee tried to move, but Jarod gave a savage twist to his arm, stilling him. Still snorting like an enraged bull (and clearing out the bloodied and evil stuff the Heartless were lodging up there), Jarod reared his head back, snapping off the tendrils going into his nose and mouth with a triumphant yell and an angry recoiling from the Heartless muck around them, and headbutted Kimblee in the back of the head as hard as he could. "Yeah, still got him," Jarod said, wincing at how dumb that was.

Dumb though it was, it had done the job; Kimblee had been slowed down, and Abel made his move. Gesturing at Toph to help out and do her Metalbending restraint thing, he stood his ground and exercised a safe portion of his available power (using too much would pose a danger to him, even with all the preparations), joining his power with Toph and trying to take hold of the metal that it's mechanical was made of and pull it apart, or failing that, make it hold still long enough to extricate Jarod. It wasn't as easy as that, though; he was finding it ridiculously hard just to 'grab' with his magnetic powers, and suspected that the negative energies it was satuarated with didn't react well with his abilities. Toph had an easier time of it, perhaps because she was directly manipulating the metal while he used a less efficient method. The Umbra Eternis rumbled, it's metal components shuddering and twitching every other way, and Toph thought this counted as more ground being gained. And more impressively, the shadow aura was getting smaller and fainter, and the liquid darkness coursing through it's body like blood was draining away into nothingness. "Hang on and keep hammering away at it! No matter how tough it thinks it is, the Heartless things he's powering it with are dying!"

"If we take those down, the robot will power down!" Abel theorized.

"Wait, _what?_" Kimblee said, snapping out of his daze. "That's how this thing works?"

Zim's voice came over the loudspeaker again. "You mean you don't know?"

"...If I say no, it would probably lower your opinion of me quite a bit, wouldn't it?" Kimblee asked rhetorically.

Zim shook his head. "We've been tossed up and down by an idiot who doesn't even know what he's doing."

"So now you know what it's like to be one of your regular foes," Hobbes said.

"...Hey!"

The Umbra Eternis was held back enough for Greed to jump down from it's back, running along it's head and hopping off. He let himself fall down until he passed it's chest and dug his claws into it's front, sliding down with a horrible ear-grating noise until he was just above the fuselage, where he let go and flung himself into it. "Yo," he said, aiming himself so he landed right on Kimblee with a mighty cracking noise under him. It was hard enough to nearly rip Kimblee loose from the Heartless. Jarod wisely backed away before Greed landed, and avoided sharing the pain. Gree took the opportunity to grab Kimblee by his head and slam him into the fuselage over and over again until he was satisfied that he had been knocked silly and dropped him to the side before reaching for Jarod and stopping in his tracks; the Umbral Heartless recoiled at him and then they surged forwards, changing shape and arranging themselves to a nightmarish mess of scything claws and knivish teeth and snapping jaws and whirling tentacles, rather like a minature version of the Gestalt, furious at the presence of the intruder and his effortless attack on their master. (If Kimblee really was their master, this is.) They raised up like a small tidal wave with homicidal intentions and washed over Greed, snapping and slicing and biting with all their fury, and it had absolutely no effect on him. They struck, and it was a completely pointless gesture, since they just bounced off Greed's armor (well-earning it's name as the Ultimate Shield) with absolutely no effect on him besides seriously creeping him out. "Off off _off!_" He roared, smashing at them with an almost phobic reaction. He shuddered and waded into their mass, stretching a hand out to Jarodreaching for Jarod. "Come on, let's _go _already!"

Jarod reached for Greed. "Alright, alright already!" He gave Kimblee a quick sorrowful and furious glance, as if considering taking him out while he was weak, and thought better of it. Jarod instead focused on Greed and raised his hand out, reaching for Greed, fingers within inches of securing his rescue...

And the Umbral Heartless thought better of attacking Greed and focused on Jarod instead, turning their horrible extrusions upon him and wrapping him up like a grotsque cocoon and dragging him backwards. "Not again!" Jarod screamed, more frustrated than afraid, scrabbling madly around them and forcing himself through the gaps in their wrappings and reaching wildly for Greed. (To be fair, it had all been so emotionally exhausting that there wasn't much room for the proper sense of terror.) Greed waded in, his armored body invulnerable when it came to these monsters, and his approach disturbed the Heartless and made them pause, and Jarod took the moment to tear at the tendrils still extended into him and leeching some vital element from him, foregoing any measure of safety and just ripping them right off him and ignoring the wounds as they left his body scarred and bloody. He fought and raged, tearing at himself with a strength born of desperation, and little by little the Heartless grew weaker, unable to replenish themselves by feeding on Jarod's own inner darkness, until they were cut off from him completely when he tore the last of a mess of wiggling tubes out from a tearduct in his eye with a horrible squealching noise.

"Holy _crap _this is disgusting," Greed said, speaking very fast. Jarod made a lunge forward, with the Heartless disoriented from their disconnection from their prisoner (and all the attacks still pummeling the Umbra Eternis) and the Heartless extended a clawed limb that could conceivably be considered an arm under certain easy-going standards, claws nicking Jarod and firmly grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back; Greed leaped forward and smashed into it, flattened the arm and tearing Jarod loose, his own claws nicking Jarod's arm. "Whoops," he said, blood dripping from Jarod's arm; it landed on the ever-shifting mess of Umbral Heartless around them, sucked up in moments, apparently exciting the Heartless.

"Bigger concerns right now!" Jarod said, looking pale and sick. A wave of Heartless-biomass swelled up, shaping itself into thick greasy tentacles and looped around his arm, tightening so hard they could hear his bones start bending, and from it's sides came dozens of tiny little questing mini-tentacles, going straight for the cuts on Jarod's arm. "No no no _NO!_" Jarod screamed, clawing madly at his arm as the mini-tentacles reached his cuts and flowed into them. probing his lacerated skin and spreading inside him. Nothing came of it, though; Greed grabbed him by the arm and pulled so hard he was torn loose of the nasty little things, and the bits that were inside him died as soon as they were seperated from the rest.

"Come on," Greed said. "Just a litte more, we're almost out of it!" he said, pulling with all his might to get Jarod out of the quagmire of the Heartless muck. He felt him give, heard a disgustingly slimy noise as the Heartless tried to gain purchase on Jarod's clothing and failed. He kept pulling while the Umbral Heartless took on a more liquid shape, clamping around Jarod's feet only for Greed to keep on pulling like their claim on Jarod was a personal offense. He still pulled, now climbing up onto the outer rim of the fuselage and halfway off it, so intent on retrieving at least this one person that he failed to notice. He howled, "Not anyone else! No one else, damn it, not today! I have had it with people dying today!" Jarod pulled his other arm loose, and grabbed Greed's hands, a triumphant gleam in his eyes. He said nothing, perhaps not having the strength to spare, but simply kicked furiously at the Heartless even though he could barely move his feet, and together they slowly moved out of the Heartless' grip, reaching freedom by bits and inches.

Abel and Toph pulled with all their might, and it was hard work; the Umbra Eternis was still steeped in an elemental darkness that their powers didn't could interface with correctly. Toph had to anchor her legs in stone all the way up to her knees to keep herself from being pulled away from her spot and loose her grip on it; Earthbending was the divine gift of being an immovable object that moved the element of earth around by being the force that broke _other _immovable objects by just being that much more determined and stubborn than them, and the drawback of that trait was that an insufficient degree of endurance pushed one back with all expended force. Toph was the strongest Earthbender present (according to her the strongest Earthbender _ever_, but considering her competition was the Avatar himself and the king of the city where Earthbending supposedly began, her word wasn't exactly infallible) and even so it was harder than almost any rock she had bent before, mostly because of how irritatingly stubborn it's armor was, and the Umbral Heartless' essence pervading the whole thing certainly wasn't helping much.

Abel, on the other hand, was being pulled towards it due to the way his magnetic powers worked, so while he was trying to freeze it in place, that was even harder than Toph's method, and he worried that expending too much raw power on it might well release a burst of energy that could kill the people around him, to say nothing of it's effect on himself, and his big suit of armor was being steadily magnetized by his own power, and he had to dig his feet into the ground to keep it from flying straight to the biggest source of similarity magnetized metal in the area: the Umbra Eternis. Neither had been fully magnetized yet, but given a few more moments both might hit that particular peak. "Hurry!" He roared. "We can't hold it much longer!"

"Speak for yourself!" Toph retorted...even though her rock leggings were starting to crack and her arms shake. She and Abel grit their teeth, producing a shower of sparks raining down from his helmet in Abel's case, and gave the single biggest push they could manage, Abel's wave of magnetic energy attuned to the Umbra Eternis' specific blend of metals combined with Toph's long-distance Metalbending and her breaking the ground under it's feet and spreading it's unsteady legs wide, shoving it off it's feet, and the giant robot's were compounding when the latest round of attacks from Roy Mustang, Gibbs, Deadpool, Shego, Angilaka, Sokka, Katara, Aang, Naruto, Gaara, Cyborg and Zim's ship hit it: kunai wrapped up in explosive notes hit through the gaps in it's armor and exploded, followed by a barrage of green fire, light bursts and plasma bolts to it's chest, all the remaining water in the pool being turned into a spear and slamming into the join of it's left shoulder and cracking the frame, a massive flame blast to the same shoulder with power boosted beyond it's already ludicrous degrees by Firebending, sonic energy and missiles hitting it in the face, and the ground directly in front of it turning into a giant sand fist that punched it squarely just over the fuselage so hard the shockwaves cracked the street. (Some more.)

All of that was just too much for the Umbra Eternis to handle with it's operator not being conscious to supply it with both direction and power. It braced itself against the attacks, and just for a moment it seemed that it might withstand them completely, a testament to it's incredible defense. It's body buckled, though, the wave of attacks just too overwhelming, and with a pained howl it flew backwards, body tilting back almost reluctantly, and it quickly crashed back into the ground on it's feet, shaking before it went still, bleeding bits of Heartless that had been vaporized or liquified or worse in the attacks. Jarod and Greed, still in the fuselage, found to their delight that it was enough of a blow to the Umbra Eternis and it's Umbral Heartless to rip Jarod right out of their grasp and to the edge of the fuselage; Greed fell off, still holing onto Jarod's hand and slamming into the outside of the robot, dangling from the decidedly awkward position of holding on to dear life from a man whose arm was being painfully forced over a rough edge. Jarod grit his teeth and pulled himself to his feet, wincing the whole time from the pain, and from the shock the robot had taken. A shine of red in the black caught his attention, and he saw the Philosopher's Stone floating in the murk unprotected and unnoticed. Wondering for a moment if this was a trap and deciding that he was willing to risk it, he reached out for it (no small feat, given that he was still holding Greed up) and his fingers closed around it. He tugged and pull, thin fillaments of whatever it was the Heartless were made of holding fast to it and refusing to let go.

The vibrations made a disturbance in the Heartless, and Kimblee shifted restlessly until his opens opening, blinking miserably. Jarod froze in place as Greed shouted, "Hey! What's with the hold up? Clinging to my life here, buddy! And they're still shooting, it's really nerve-wracking!"

"Please be quiet or you'll wake him up," Jarod said, staring in horror. Kimblee shifted around some more, his eyes unfocused and dazed.

"What!"

"I said, be quiet!"

"What was that? I can't hear you over all the people shooting at the giant robot! Hurry up and get out of there already, I'm tired of people shooting at something I'm on!"

Kimblee shook his head, extremely slowly, and it was just barely possible that he might fade right back out again. "_Be quiet!_" Jarod hissed.

"I don't wanna," Greed said petulantly. "Hey, did I kill Kimblee when I smacked him down? Give him a check while you're there!"

"Someone say my name?" Kimblee asked, opening his eyes and shaking the dizziness from himself, and the Heartless tugged the Stone out of Jarod's fingers, ferrying back over to Kimblee and deftly avoiding Jarod's frantic grabs for it. Kimblee looked up, blinking again, and looked right at them: Jarod froze and Greed went quiet, realizing that something very bad had happened, and Kimblee just sat up, lifting his head a bit while the Umbral Heartless gratefully clustering around him to feed off his own layers of cynicism and brutality, replenishing themselves on it and growing larger like they had been before. Kimblee hardly noticed that, though, staring instead at Jarod with a bemused frown, as if he wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

Jarod, very quietly and very slowly, trying not to get any more of his kidnapper's attention, crawled up the top of the fuslage and still holding onto Greed. The homunculus in question had the sense to keep his mouth shut and not alert Kimblee any more than he already had, but Jarod could tell by the painful tightening around his hand that Greed was just bursting with all manner of sarcastic remarks too bottled up to stay quiet for long.

Kimblee stared at him a bit longer, at least long enough for Jarod to get halfway up the fuselage's opening, and then he blinked. Jarod looked at Kimblee's expression, and deduced the precise range of emotions the rogue alchemist was experiencing by the slight narrowing of his eyes and the minute twitching of his right eyebrow. The sneer alone was a story unto itself, though probably one with a lot of undeserved invectives at the reader and some extremely vicious writing. When he spoked, though, he sounded remarkably nonchalant. "Ah. You're awake."

"Yes," Jarod said. "You too."

They stared at each other. Greed scrabbled futilely on the outside, making a faint noise to fill up the silent tension-filled air.

"...Well, this is awkward," Kimblee said. "And anticlimatic."

"Yes," Jarod said again. He glowered at Kimblee and yelled to the street, as loud as he could, "_TAKE HIM DOWN! I DON'T CARE HOW YOU DO IT, JUST FORGET ABOUT ME AND FINISH HIM!"_

"Stop encouraging them!" Kimblee said, voice disapproving at Jarod; the man in question turned his back on Kimblee (an unwise move in any situation, let alone one where he was being very open about his monstrous nature) and desperately tried to get out of there, complicated by Greed's considerable weight and that the fuselage didn't have any holdholds for him to use. Greed swung in, bracing his feet against the Umbra Eternis' belly, getting it's attention even under all the cover fire going on, and he pushed away, tugging Jarod halfway out of the giant robot. At Kimblee's mental command, the Umbra Heartless rushed forward, crashing onto Jarod and engulfing him once more before pulling him back in; they found their progress severely hampered by Greed stubbornly standing his ground and pulling with all his might.

On the ground, Zim's allies groaned out loud at how close Jarod and Greed had been to escape. (If they had known how close Jarod had been to getting the Stone, they would have been even more outraged by how unfair his failure that was.) Several of them complained (Deadpool and Sokka being the loudest). And on Zim's ship itself, people were even louder about it. "_Oh, COME ON!_" Calvin yelled, banging a fist on the back of Zim's seat. "He was so close! That's not just cheating, that's deliberately prolonging a conflict beyond all reason! What does he _want _with that guy?"

"Maybe he's an old boyfriend?" Beth said. "That he once loved Kimblee with all his squishy meat-person heart but they grew apart 'cause Kimblee's evil and insane and likes tacky suits and maybe eats too much ketchup with his eggs so Jarod left him, and now Kimblee wants to take him home and make him _love him again!_"

"...What?" Zuko said, staring at her. "Seriously, _what?_"

"It could happen!" She said defensively.

"Didn't he say something about having orders to do it?" Hobbes asked, leaning on Beth's armor. "Because that's a pretty reasonable explanation; he's just following orders. Not an excuse at all, not one little bit and I kinda want to punch him for just that, but still. It's a reason."

"Just orders?" Courtney said skeptically. "Who here has ever gone to such crazy lengths because they were ordered to?" Zim, Hobbes, Zuko and Beth raised their hands. "People who aren't part of a faction that encourages going beyond the impossible for the sake of honor." Beth lowered her hand. "And is probably from a culture that emphasizes that sort of thing." Hobbes and Zuko lowered their hands. "And isn't probably schizophrenic." Zim lowered his hand reluctantly. His imaginary figment-angels appeared to console him in his time of sadness. "Ah, you see my point! No one's left!" Calvin raised his hand. "Oh, come on! You told me earlier that you're basically an anarchist, you hate orders! You're probably the kind of guy who deliberately interprets orders creatively just to spite them." Calvin lowered his hand, shrugged, and grinned.

"Whatever, no one really cares why he's doing it-" Zuko started to say.

"I care!" Courtney said. "I need a fully unbiased story and knowing his motivations is essential, or I'll just end up saying 'he's a murderous kidnapping mad bomber who killed Foster's because he's just a jerk' and that just sounds-"

"_THE POINT IS,_" Zuko said loudly over her. Courtney pouted, crossed her arms, and deferred to Zuko's superior force of self-centered anger-management problems. "The point is...oh, damn it, all we're doing is arguing about semantics while everyone else accomplishes things. At this rate we're going to be nothing but a dysfuctional bunch of idiots who don't know what they're doing!" Courtney opened her mouth. "Don't you dare say that's exactly what we are!" Courtney closed her mouth, looking smug. "Ugh, we need to start doing something drastic now!"

"I quite agree!" Zim said cheerfully, turning in his seat and pointing to Winry, whose seat was the only one with flight access (if they put them in two seats or more, then you might have two differing flight instructions, which would be a terrible pain for any difference engine like the on-board computers). "You!"

"Yes?" said Winry.

Zim pointed dramatically at the screen showing the Umbra Eternis. "RAM IT."

Hobbes said, "What?"

Winry blinked at Zim, an expression of distrust building there, and fading when she decided that the idea had it's merits. (How she came to that conclusion was anyone's guess; considering that she was engaged to the elder of Izumi Gibbs' adopted children the Elric brothers, it was presumed that a degree of useful insanity had affected her brain.) "Won't that, y'know, maybe kill Jarod?"

"No," Zim insisted. "You've seen how absurdly strong that robot is. Even with it weakened, it is still strong enough to protect it's occupants! At worst, we'll bang them around a little bit, thus allowing us to retrieve the Jarod-man before our foe realizes we slammed him!"

"...Makes sense to me," Winry said, noting that Jarod had more or less told people to fight Kimblee with all their strength even if it got him killed, and moved the ship into a slightly higher gear.

Zuko said, "_What._" Ignoring him, the ship obligingly lurched forward, building up speed and everyone who wasn't sitting down went rolling across the floor and smashing into each other, screaming like loonies.

On the ground below, Abel was concentrating as hard as he could on the stubborn metal of Umbra Eternis, and he happened to wonder why everyone else had stopped firing at the giant robot in question. He assumed it was because they didn't want to hit Greed (even though it couldn't hurt him) or Jarod (though a few of them, but mostly Shego, were getting pretty irritated with having to hold back because of him), as he couldn't be bothered to turn around and notice everyone else frantically pointing at the approaching (small) ship overhead. "What's everyone doing?" He said to Toph, his armor shaking with the barely controlled energies he was generating and shaping and shadow-tentacles rising out of his shadow to hold him down and stop him from being dragged out of his position.

"Probably 'cause something big and metal's moving this way," Toph informed him; she couldn't see it, of course, but she _could _feel it through her Metalbending, diluted her metal-sensing abilities were from that distance. Metal was metal, though, and it was her birthright to know all things that were of the earth, and it called to her.

"What?" Abel turned his head as much as he could, with enormous effort from the constrictions of his armor, the magnetized metal rendered into a nearly solid piece and so on, and he noticed the shadow of Zim's ship going by overhead. It became a moot point shortly thereafter, and he certainly noticed when it's personalized field grazed him, pushing him slightly off-balance and his shadow-tentacles had to pull him back into place. "What the-" The ship accelerated very slightly (thanks to Zim's ineptitude with the controls), and dispite how minor the movement was, it was still a ship capable of enduring the hardships of space, and knocked a few people over from the pressure created by it's fast movement. Abel stood firm, still anchored to the ground but very unsteady.

In the Umbra Eternis itself, Jarod had been dragged back under the Umbral Heartless but they were having significant difficulty reconnecting to him, mostly because he kept hitting Kimblee. It was somewhat to his detriment, since he was now ignoring Greed after the homunculus had finally climbed back up and was trying to remind Jarod that he was supposed to be rescued, not turn into a berserker. Still, he admitted, Jarod had just pounded Kimblee's head into the wall again so it was a pretty good show. "Ugh, what is with it and head injuries today?" Kimblee said, and blinked, trembling a little bit as more non-blood red fluid gradually oozed out of his skin and steadily evaporated, leaving a filmy residue on his skin.

Jarod didn't respond, being busy trying to kick the tethering muck off him. Kimblee winced, breaking off the attacks to steady his mind (too full of babbling arguing voice for his favor, though the Nameless-That-Was had disappeared for no adequate reason). Greed took the opportunity when he saw it and reached down to grab hold of Jarod's arm and pulling back with all his might, totally ignoring Jarod's indignated cries that 'Kimblee needed to be brought to justice' and 'I'm in the middle of something here'. He pulled harder, and Jarod got the hint and started kicking himself loose; there were popping noises as Jarod, with agonizing slowness, was dragged closer to freedom, and his hips were brought free with more unpleasant noises, and both of them kept fighting and moving, slowly but surely winning their fight.

Kimblee probably would have been more enthused than upset about this even if he hadn't been wondering why the people attacking his giant robot appeared to have fled for some reason, or for that matter why Jarod and Greed had stopped fighting to gape at something overhead, and even more peculiar, why Jarod suddenly yelled something to Greed about saving himself and giving him a kick that knocked him off the Umbra Eternis and to relative safety, and right before Kimblee could properly wonder what Jarod was panicking over, he noticed the ship flying over the street from up in the sky where it had been effectively invisible to his blind robot and his awkward placement, going down and aimed right at the face of his giant robot for a collision. It was a small ship, and moving at a fairly restrained pace, but it was still a ship flying at his robot. Jarod watched it for an instant and, being a man to take advantage of every develoupment in a scenario, threw himself backwards and braced for impact.

The ship accelerated. Windows shattered and walls cracked in escalating, winding patterns as the ship passed, the personal gravitational field that moved it taking it's toll on the surrondings with it's current intensity. A few outlying structures (a balcony, a few gothic gargoyles and some excessive salad-shaped decorations) were sheered off by it as it went right through them, and as the target of the approaching ship, Kimblee could only stare, too stunned to make a pre-emptive attack or do anything else constructuve (though that might have been the multiple concussions) and just managed the fortitude to summon up his absolutely flattest speaking tone and said, "What."

The sentiments of others were less restrained, mostly in the ship itself. "THIS IS CRAZY!" Courtney yelled, hanging onto a loose wire that she had mistaken for a bracing support, her and everyone who wasn't properly seated braced against the wall for impact.

"THIS WAS DEFINITELY NOT PART OF THE PLAN!" Hobbes yelled. "I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEIR PLAN ACTUALLY WAS, BUT THIS WAS DEFINITELY NOT PART OF IT!"

"Why is everyone yelling?" Winry asked, remarkably calm for someone piloting a ship about to smash into a giant evil robot.

"I don't know, these guys get so excitable over the most absurd things," Zim said. "LAME!"

"Actually, I think this totally rocks _hard!_" Calvin said excitedly, clinging to the back of Zim's seat so he had a front row seat to their crash. "We're using a ship as a bludgeoning weapon, how is that not awesome?"

The ship streaked down. "Oh," Beth said faintly. "We're going to crash." She paused. "Yeah." She sat down very quietly in a seat and made sure her armor suit was wedged in so firmly it couldn't be shaken loose, and sighed at her life.

Zuko followed her example, pinching the bridge of his nose. "...I hate my life and _everything _in it."

There weren't any such sarcastic comments from the people below. There simply wasn't time for them to make any (and yet there was in the ship, probably because it was funnier that way). All they could do was watch the Umbra Eternis hesitate as it became aware that something big was coming right at it, and then the ship crashed into the Umbra Eternis right into the partly immobilized Umbra Eternis, impacting it right in the chest between it's hunched-over head and the cavity that Kimblee and Jarod were in (so that neither of them suffered the direct effects), and hit hard enough to make shockwaves that shattered the street under it into dust, smashed the facades of the nearby buildings Sokka and Scar had been hiding in during the ambush and would have thrown Zim's allies all over the place if they hadn't run for cover, and they were still knocked around into each and went across the street. Abel and Greed, having been the closest at the time (with Abel still in the same spot and Greed right at it's feet) and the Umbra Eternis went flying.

It was so heavy that it came back to the ground shortly thereafter, but the impact had hit it hard enough that Kimblee was again totally unable to direct it, and one of it's feet got in the way of the other at the wrong moment. Or the right moment, depending on one's outlook on the matter. The Umbra Eternis skidded, tripped, fell into mid-air, and still being carried by momentum, crashed headfirst (and also ironically) into a building that had already been marked for demolition. It didn't smash completely through but landed in an awkward position on it's backside, crumbled chunks of masonry pinning it's arms for the moment. It made a small hacking noise, and it's head rolled back, black acidic goo dripping from it's chest.

"...Ow," Kimblee whimpered.

Jarod, bewildered to find that he was inexplicably still unharmed aside from a few aches where he had crashed into the walls a few times dispite the whole 'ship crashing into the giant robot' thing, celebrated by quietly moving out of the fuselage and escaping. Or he tried to; the Umbral Heartless once again demonstrated that they were masters of being jerks for no reason by waiting until Jarod was almost out of it before they rose up, engulfed him and dragged him back. "Seriously? Waiting until I'm almost free to capture me and crush my hope? _Again_?" Jarod said, more annoyed than anything else, but that might have also been the exhaustion. "Do these things have any sense of originality? It's like they compressed all the conventions and behavioral issues of standard-issue villainy into a cosmic horror swarm."

And Zim's ship hadn't stopped moving when it had crashed; it had only stalled a little before getting back on track. They had absolutely no intention of letting Kimblee get up and run away with his hostage (who had a pre-existing responsibility after being appointed by Zim to be _his _friend's psychotherapist, and no villanous agenda was going to get in the way of that) and evade his most well-deserved beatdown. Not this time. Not anymore.

Zim already had a plan. Sort of. "Where do the ejection pods or whatever desposit from?" He asked Winry.

"No pods or seat or anything that, but it fires from the front," Winry said, very vaugely. "It shoots you to wherever you've targeting on the screen."

"'Shoots'?" Hobbes repeated questioningly. "What do you mean, 'shoots'?"

Zim waved the worried tiger aside. "I'll deal with it when the time comes. Keep moving forward until we're within maximum safe firing range for whatever the escape pod system is."

"Okay, it's not really a pod and...wait." Winry's face paled slightly as Zim's rather obvious plan became clear to her. "No. No no no. No freaking _way_. You're not seriously going to-"

"Indeed I am!" Zim said, pleased that Winry was so startled by his plan that she hadn't made the ship stop, and it was still proceeding at a decent pace. He thought and added, "Wait. Do you think I'm going to eject myself to manually free the Jarod-man, or do you mean self-destruct the ship at such power that it tears a hole in reality and sets loose a fearsome elder horror that kills Kimblee for us but then we have to kill it by summoning another elder horror and then we have to kill _that_, and so on?"

"The first one!" Winry shouted.

"Ah, just so we are clear on the matter," Zim said.

"You wouldn't really do that stuff, would you?" Hobbes asked Zim uncertainly.

"I suppose not, it didn't work so well the last time I tried it on The Thing That Should Not Be But Is Because The Gods Got Drunk," Zim said, waiting until the ship have moved into position; it was a matter of wire-thin timing, waiting and waiting until that one screen that displayed the targeting had the little targeting cursor on it light up red, so Zim made some quick adjustments to it and locked onto the Umbra Eternis, ignoring Winry's frantic attempts to stop him from doing that. Cackling gleefully at the prospect of _finally _taking this vital step towards defeating Kimblee in a manner no doubt including excessive amounts of firepower, one of his spider-legs extended from his Pak and raised across the dashboard over by Winry, lowering itself just over the ejection button Winry had unwisely indicated earlier.

Winry's mouth dropped. "No, you idiot! That's not _your _seat-"

The spider-leg pressed the button. The floor directly in front of Winry's seat dropped open, all the relevent safety measures disengaged from her chair, and her chair also disengaged, the seat flipping down and neatly sliding Winry right into the hole. There followed a a lot of grinding mechanical noises from outside the ship as a large cannon extended from a hatch in the front while Winry yelled a lot of inflammatory accusations, and then further mechanical noises. On the camera-screens, they saw the truth of Winry's unclear statements about the ejection systems when, instead of escape pods, the mysterious cannon that had just appeared powered up and fired _Winry _from itself, the woman in question wrapped in a glowing green cocoon of the same energy fueling their ship, flying like a bullet and hitting it on the knee, bouncing a bit before the cocoon dissipated and Winry was left sitting on it's leg, angry but unharmed.

Winry's seat, the only seat that had direct access to the manual navigational systems, was very conspiciously empty. Calvin gave Zim a cautious thumbs-up before he sat in Winry's empty seat, willing to take over for piloting duty (even if he wasn't at all qualified for it). Zuko's eyebrow twitched nervously while his mouth opened and closed, not managing to articulate anything. Hobbes facepalmed. Courtney stared at him before she sat down and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to pretend that this was all a very bad dream. "Mr. Zim," Beth said, staying remarkably calm in the situation. "Did you just shoot our pilot out of a cannon and directly right next to the evil guy we're trying to fight?"

"On _accident_," Zim assured her. "On accident."

On Zim's shoulder, Sammael facepalmed even harder than Zuko. "We. Are. Going. To. _Die._"

Razael shrugged cheerfully. "It was fun while it lasted. FOR GREAT JUSTICE."

"The hell does that even mean?"

"Whatever you need it to. 'Justice' is the great equalizer of meaningless concepts that sound heroic!"

"Both of you, shut up," Zim said, getting weird looks from everyone because he looked like he was talking to thin air. "Anyway, uh, I just hit the wrong button. Easily resolved!" Zim hit the _other _button, and he was summarily dropped down a hatch that opened up in front of his own seat. "Whee!" He said as he went down.

"If I wasn't jealous he pulled that stunt off before I could I'd call him an idiot," Calvin commented. Deciding that he needed someone else to operate the other seat, he looked at the others speculatively; Hobbes had proven himself to be bad with piloting, he didn't want to involve Courtney or Beth in _their _team activities more than he absolutely needed to, so Zuko seemed the least of potential evils. Besides, Calvin reasoned as he imperiously waved Zuko over to Zim's vacated seat while the Firebender gave the dashboard a nervous look, it shouldn't be that hard for him: just grab the controls and push the buttons Calvin told him to. That Calvin was also working entirely on guesswork didn't really matter to him.

Down below, Winry had already been ejected from the pod and was storming up the front of the Umbra Eternis, deciding that she might as well do something useful while she was here. "At least it's not the most humiliating test run I've ever done," She said to herself optimistically as she climbed up the outward curve of it's chest.

As the ejection gun powered up, Winry made her way up the fallen mecha, unbothered by the Umbrals in their current state of borderline unconsciousness; the rapid and brutal attacks on the Umbra Eternis had done quite a number on them. She was grateful for that small piece of luck, though she still felt a deep sense of discomfort as she hopped over a shallow groove along it's hip that the Umbrals were sluggishly moving through and reminding her of clotted blood. She felt like the poor machines - both Greed's mecha and the Juggernaut, neither of them exactly blameless in the grand scheme of things but certainly neither of them deserving this...this _desecration -_ and Winry reluctantly felt that perhaps Scar _might _have had a point on the mortal problems of the more destructive applications of alchemy; it felt like she was witness to an act of violation and not just the lesser would-be evil or mischief that went on in town most days.

So, her somewhat volatile temper already lit at the atrocities Kimblee had comitted and her love of the things technological spurring her on to greater extremes, she made it to the fuselage where she saw Kimblee desperately trying to bury Jarod under the Heartless but not doing very good well. "I'm trying to do a job here and you are not being very cooperative," Kimblee complained, his arms latched around Jarod's neck while the other man furiously swam through murky Umbral Heartless with all the ease of someone trying to powerdive into cold syrup. "I appreciate seeing people with actual dedication to their moral codes, I really do, but I would at least like to see a degree of appreciation for my own work ethic. It's only fair."

"_I won't be caged again!_" Jarod cried zealously. He looked suddenly thoughtful. "Why does that sound strangely familiar? And why do I associate it with a wererat?"

"I'm not going to cage you!" Kimblee said. Jarod elbowed him in the nose. "What is with you people and my nose today! My point is that I'm not going to put you in a cage, metaphorically or otherwise, I'm simply going to hand you off to an extremely unsettling man who probably will!"

"Who do _you _know that would want to put this guy in a cage, aside from the obvious reasons?" Winry said, standing at the lip of the cavity that made up the fuselage and giving Jarod an speculative look.

"Someone named Mr. Lyle," Kimblee said without thinking. "I don't know why he wanted himcare what his reasons are, he just asked...oh dear, I shouldn't have said that. Very unprofessional of me." He paused, apparently just registering her voice, and he turned to look at her with raised eyebrows. "Miss Rockbell?"

"Yeah, it's me," Winry said. Jarod stared, clearly astonished that they knew each other. (And given his scarily comprehensive knowledge about everyone in town garnered for his many contingency plans, that was pretty impressive.) Kimblee started to open his mouth. "And don't start saying anything about weird or illogical or just how much running into me right here and now makes absolutely no sense. I know it doesn't, but that's just how things go these days. And you already ran into Scar and Mr. Mustang today, seeing me isn't that a big a deal."

"...No, I suppose not. Still, at least this doesn't mean there are any more unexpected...wait. Is Fullmetal here too?" Kimblee asked.

Winry shook her head. "Nah, he's out of town."

"Fair enough." Kimblee still looked unnerved at Winry's unexpected presence. "I do wish you had announced yourself earlier. We could have had a nice chat and caught up with one another." He glanced at her hand. "Is that a ring?"

"Yep."

"You're engaged then? To Fullmetal?"

Winry looked at Kimblee like he was stating the stupidly obvious, that he was making a statement so far on the outer side of obviousness that it if accelerated it would come back the other direction as mind-numbing obtuseness. What he was saying was very very very obvious, in other words. (There was a great deal of obvious going on there.) "_...Duh._"

"Well! May I offer you my congratulations, though I can't imagine why you never sent word to me." Winry stared at him. "Please don't look at me like that. I deserved to know! I've pitted my life against your intended's several times, did the same with your brother-in-law-to-be, held in protective custody as a hostage to secure your love's cooperation, was involved in the annhilation of Amestris and our world, and I was supposed to kill your parents before Scar stole my kills. Very rude of him, I should say. My point is, we have a _history_, you and I. That makes us something like friends, doesn't it? That _is _how friends work, don't they? I'm not very clear on the concept. Then again, you had no idea where I've been, so you could hardly have sent word and informed me of your nuptials."

"...Are you even more insane, or just stupid?" Winry said.

Kimblee frowned. "That is uncalled for." He frowned deeper. "Wait a minute, what _are _you doing here in the first place? ...Wait. Was that _you _in the ship earlier shooting at me?"

"Yep."

Kimblee looked unamused; it took a special kind of person to enjoy being shot at. Jarod, spending their exchange mulling over the smaller details in what Kimblee had unthinkingly spoken about, said, "Wait, did you say that _you _know Mr. Lyle?"

"In a manner of speaking," Kimblee told him, clearly intending on telling him nothing else and holding up the Philosopher's Stone and one hand, and grabbing Winry's leg with the other. Winry swung her free leg back and kicked him squarely in the fact while Jarod lunged at him, knowing full well that Kimblee only wanted to blow them to meaty bits, and fortunately Kimblee didn't get the chance to do that because at that moment Zim's energy bullet-thing was smashed into what was essentially the crotch of the Umbra Eternis, and due to the sympathetic connection Kimblee employed to operate the machine-titan, he had the singular experience of a small but very fast moving thing gaining weight with velocity and smashing into his groin. It was just phantom pain, but it still hurt bad enough for his eyes to water, an amusing gasp to escape from his lips, and he slid away with a tight grip on her leg, weeping in pain.

Winry and Jarod looked (after giving Kimblee another nose-kick that failed to disengage him) and saw the energy dissipating to reveal Zim standing up down there, giggling from the rush. "I WANNA DO THAT AGAIN!" He screamed. "Ooh, we _must _refine that design!" He narrated his thoughts on the matter while he stood up started running up to the fuselage. It was a fairly short trip, so he didn't get to ramble on for very long. "Make us be fired out of _bigger _guns or maybe put in a giant slingshot! Or more big person-shooting-guns all over the ship to drop us to the battlefield immediately! We can say, 'I need to kill something and bullets aren't fast enough'! Then we'll _be _the bullets! Then they shall call us bullet people, and bullet people we'll be. Hey, maybe we can make that like our team name or something." He climbed up to the fuselage, joining Winry and kicking Kimblee in the face so hard he was jolted off her and slumped face-down. "Hi," he said to Winry. "Being shot out of a cannon was fun, wasn't it?"

"No, not really," Winry said, a bit frostily. (Being shot out of a moving ship, even on accident, put her in a bit of a mood.)

"Eh, your loss." He looked at Jarod. "Hey. How's it going?"

"I've been worse," Jarod said casually. "Never as tired as this, but still worse."

"Wow. Your life must have totally _SUCKED_."

"Yes," Jarod agreed.

Kimblee lifted his head up, still dripping black-blue-purple gooey stuff and stared up at Zim. "Oh damn it. Not _you_." A hint of rage-red flushed in the black goo.

"Yes, me," Zim said, holding up the Keyblade and making the biggest flash of fire-made light he could. Kimblee flinched and Zim stepped aside so Winry could grab Jarod's forearm and start pulling him back with all her might. Zim didn't join in right away, opting to throw the Keyblade directly into the Umbral Heartless and grin at their immediate crumpling before he jumped into the fuselage, going over Jarod and landing on Kimblee's head hard enough to bury the Red Lotus Alchemist into the disturbingly squishy mass of the Umbral Heartless muck and raised up a small tide of it, pushing Jarod up and out in spite of the various protrusions trying to keep him anchored. Zim, still standing on Kimblee's head, grabbed Jarod under the arms and made a little hop so now he was standing on Kimblee's back, an exceedingly dangerous place to be given that Kimblee still had the Philosopher's Stone. He didn't seem to care, concentrating hard for a moment and his soles shoes started glowing, heat shimmering out of them and growing hotter and hotter, reaching the kind of heat that even the specially made materials used in Traverse Town manufacturing couldn't withstand. (The fact that it was magical heat didn't help.)

Kimblee screamed and thrashed; even his increasingly less steady grip on the world couldn't ignore two spots of rubber-burning fire right on his back, scorching through his coat and clothes and burning his back. Zim concentrated with all his might, thinking good and hard about how badly he wanted to this to be _done _already and the hostage saved and Kimblee beaten so he could get up and _leave _already-

Fire, he had been told, was will, and power. And Zim was nothing if not determined.

His shoes exploded, big fiery jets blasting out from his feet and flying him off Kimblee's back, evoking screams of pain from the Red Lotus alchemist due to his back being hit by big streams of magical fire, the Umbral Heartless around him recoiling in abject terror but unable to escape the flames and heat that incinerated so much of them. Zim was catapaulted to the entrance to the fuselage, bringing Jarod with him, and the man in question was actually pulled partway out of the muck, past his waist and hips, now lying headlong on the front of the fuselage but almost all of the Umbra Heartless stubbornly clinging onto him in various shapes. Zim wasn't bothered, and grabbing Jarod's arm with Winry while the man himself wriggled his way loose, went right back to work pulling him out by hand. Together, they slowly but surely did the job of tearing him loose from the Heartless' hold on him, and Greed's work in almost pulling him free before was making it much easier for them.

The Umbrals were still hanging on exceptionally hard, even though the Keyblade being stabbed into them was a grievious wound, and the damage already done to them didn't seem to be hampering their effectiveness very much. Zim was still making progress, but not as much as he would have liked. "This should not be this hard!" Zim said, his and Winry's continued efforts only getting Jarod out up to his knees. "How long have we been trying to do this!"

"Only a few minutes, if that," Winry said.

"STILL TOO LONG!" Zim screamed.

"Hey, how do you think I feel?" Jarod said indignantly.

"Oh, hush, you've been unconscious most of this battle, you practically had it easy," Zim said.

"I HAVE BEEN PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY VIOLATED BY HEARTLESS!" Jarod screamed, his composure breaking hard. "My tearducts itch with the contamination of pure evil and I _didn't even know that was physically possible!_ To say nothing of all these..._things _my brain keeps spewing forth! I'm remembering things I never experienced in the first place! _And_ I'm fairly certain that my sub-consciousness was somehow in psychic contact with Kimblee's mind!" Jarod shuddered. "I feel like I took a bath in acid." He frowned. "And I feel like I'm forgetting something about it that would be incredibly helpful right now."

"Hrm, I can see why that would be upsetting," Zim admitted.

"I don't," Kimblee said, pulling himself out again. He glanced at his outfit with clear displeasure. "I can't believe that I actually thought that submerging myself in pure darkness would be a good way to pilot a giant robot. Now my clothes are all...I don't know what they are, but it's certainly very messy."

"YOU DIE NOW!" Zim and Winry yelled, both kicking him in the face since they couldn't spare the use of their fists.

Kimblee clutched his nose. "Again with the nose! _Stop hitting me in the nose! _I have a chin, you know, it's perfectly suitable as a target!"

"Yes, but you really hate getting hit in the nose, which makes it a far more attractive target," Jarod said. One of his legs had come loose as he was talking (and Kimblee had been distracted) so he kicked Kimblee in the nose too.

Kimblee fell back, his nose definitely broken again. "Okay, okay, I will admit that I set myself up for that one-" Jarod kicked him in the nose again, and Kimblee dropped the Philosopher's Stone without realizing it. It bobbed up and down, floating up to where Zim and Winry were. "YOU BASTARD! STOP KICKING ME THERE!" Jarod kicked him again, in the side of the head. "Ow. That's better, I guess." Jarod kicked him in the nose. "STOP DOING THAT! I WISH I HAD A SUPERIOR FORCE TO BELIEVE IN SO I COULD ADJURE YOU IN IT'S NAME TO STOP HITTING ME IN THE NOSE! Why do you keep doing that?"

"Well!" Zim said cheerfully, glancing down and grabbing something from the Umbral Heartless and shoving it in his pocket. "To start with, it's pretty funny. You're overreacting somewhat to the nose-hitting, which is a great contrast to your usual indifferent demeanor, which provides humor in the form of bathos. At least I _think _it's bathos, but with linguistics conventions you can never be sure." He and Winry dug their heels in, tugging Jarod partway out of the Umbral's grasp; his back came loose and he was dragged nearly onto where they were standing.

"It's not," Jarod said knowingly. "Bathos is when you combine intellectual or formal speech with more casual communication patterns by accident."

Zim ignored him. He summoned the Keyblade, his will calling to it and driving it out of the Heartless and back into his hand, whereupon he put it into his mouth and held it by the hilt with his teeth. He grabbed Jarod with his freehand, pulling him more seriously and resumed talking, and was perfectly coherent because he was speaking with great spirit. (It made no sense, but neither did anything else concerning the Keyblade.) "Secondly, it's a fairly good place to hit you, although I am concerned that with all the nose-breaking that a shard of bone hasn't hit your brain or something. I'm not saying that's a desirable outcome thus far (though it would tidy up the situation considerably), mind you. Plus, the face you make when one of us keeps nailing you in the nose is hilarious!"

Kimblee sneered. Thanks to the copious amount of blood on his face (and the unidentified red substance that was dripping away from him), it was actually a pretty fierce expression. "So long as you have valuable motivations." He reached for the Philosopher's Stone, tired of Zim's obnoxiousness and the delay in his overal goal of basically blowing the hell out of this town (or city, he wasn't sure what it would be legally recognized as under the statues of most interplanetary governments that he was familiar with), and his fingers clenched around nothing but the gritty moistness that comprised the Umbral Heartless in their 'at rest' state. "Hold on a second. Hang on to that thought. I appear to have misplaced something."

"And that brings me to my next point," Zim said. He tilted over and let the Keyblade fall into the mass of Umbral Heartless imprisoning Jarod and grinned slyly as the crude conspiracy of chaos instantly pulled away and thrashed madly, much of it burning at the simple promixity to the Keyblade. "I totally swiped the Stone when you weren't paying attention and were complaining about your broken nose."

Kimblee froze. When he spoke, it was to break a horribly tense silence pregnant with sheer stunned amazement that would probably give birth to things blowing up. (Zim thought of the metaphor himself; in retrospect, it was very confused.) "_What._"

"Bye now!" Zim said, grabbing the Keyblade and leaning out before pulling the Keyblade back, the weapon's aggressive glow transforming into a violent prism of clashing lights and sharp-looking flecks of what looked like ragged strips of _reality _flying around it's outer edges, the power suddenly so intense that Zim's hand _hurt_, and sliced through the sturdy tentacle still wrapped bone-breakingly hard around Jarod's leg and incinerated it, cutting him loose. This resulted in him smashing right into Winry and Zim because they were still pulling so hard, but they didn't really care because, hey, they had just gotten the hostage loose.

"I found him first. Get your own," Kimblee said, clapping his hands and projecting a blast; Zim's reactions had been so amplified that he moved in the spaces between one instant and the next, his two brains taking note of this latest develoupment and analyzing the possible reactions before taking the safest one he could think of in the circumstances, and he pushed both Winry and Jarod into the fuselage and right onto Kimblee right as the transmutation was still making unstable energy matrices in the path Kimblee wanted his blast to go.

It was stupid, it was putting Jarod right back in the situation they had been working so hard to get him out of and it was worse because now Winry was in the same situation, but even so they weren't hit by the blast when Kimblee let it loose. Neither was Zim; he fell down at the last possible second into the fuselage too, and he threw himself down flat against the outer curve of it's opening and grateful that he was able to wince when the controlled explosion blasted out with it's terminal radius so terribly close to his face.

The blasting light faded and Zim sat up, Keyblade still in hand, well aware that he was insanely lucky to be getting away with little worse than a painful ringing in his internal ears and reddened stinging all over his face. He took stock of the situation at once, immediately focusing on that the Umbral Heartless, sensing prey that wasn't bearing the Keyblade, had swarmed over Jarod and Winry, engulfing them completely and doing a job of keeping them wrapped for all of their prey's struggle. Zim blanched; he had saved them from the explosion by literally throwing them to the Heartless, but he hadn't thought it would react _this _quickly. Thinking fast and noticing Kimblee glaring at him and clearly thinking of the best thing to do now, Zim said, "Hey! HEY! I still have your Stone-thing, yeah! If you blow me up right here you'll lose it! What are you gonna do about it, huh?" _Use the Heartless, use the Heartless! _He thought desperately.

Kimblee narrowed his eyes. "I wouldn't be so sure." _Crap, _thought Zim. Kimblee lunged, disturbing the Heartless enough for Winry to claw free and try to do the same for Jarod while keep the Umbrals off her. Zim raised the Keyblade but it was too awkward an angle and Kimblee crashed into him, knocking Zim to the floor and hitting the breath out of him. Zim tried to suck in air, not just because of reflex but to transform it into internal fire and maybe breathe some fire right into Kimblee's stupid face, and Kimblee grabbed Zim by the collar and lifted him up with one hand, and lightly slapped the palm of one hand to the other. "You are surprisingly heavy for a creature no bigger than a child," Kimblee mused. His hand tightened it's grip around his shirt and jacket, and there was a brief light flash.

Zim's jacket and shirt shimmered, their colors warping and distorted. "_Anything _can be made to explode, but things containing a portion of metal work the best for me," Kimblee told Zim, pushing him away. "Such as the metal in the adornments on your clothing."

Zim looked down, his shirt itching furious against him, and he wondered about the 'against' bit until he saw it distorting in such a way that it was bubbling up, folds bunching into loose liquid-filled boils, the jacket swelling up so much that he almost bent double from the sudden weight, both his jacket and shirt turning a cold gunpower-black and sloshing around-

They reached critical mass and exploded. It was not a big explosion, as Kimblee intended, and only made a cacophonic noise in the fuselage chamber, blinded Jarod and Winry temporarily and flung Zim into the side of the wall, knocking him silly and into the Umbral's waiting grasp, his shirt and jacket utterly gone and leaving nothing behind but marks on his upper body and bits of ashen tatters floating on the Umbrals, and then even that was gone. Tendrils and worse things slid over him, working on his hand until his fingers opened enough for the Keyblade to slip from his grasp. The Umbrals moved out of the way as quickly possible, leaving it to bounce once on the floor of the fuselage and the Heartless shifting thickly around it, afraid to even approach the divine weapon.

Zim grumbled, uncomfortable aware that he was naked from the waist up in front of strangers (and true, he had been among humans like enough to adopt some of their customs if not taboos, but he retained his people's uneasiness about lack of clothing) and tried to get up, aching all over. The Umbrals gathered up, drifting away from Jarod and Winry, whom Kimblee wasn't focusing on at all. "Return the Stone to me," Kimblee said. "I am only asking this once."

"No," Zim said, grabbing the wall and climbing to his feet, holding a hand out and starting to summon the Keyblade from the floor.

"Have it your way, then," Kimblee said. "I do apologize if I cannot think of a suitably charming one-liner to mock your passing."

The Heartless surged forward, shaping themself into something like a battering ram, all twisting horns and sharp armored plates and hardened muscular groupings that were still more liquid than solid mass. It still hurt when it rammed into Zim's belly, producing minor shockwaves in the chamber, and smashed him into the wall. Purplish blood leaked from the corner of his mouth and he struggled to keep the scream down. He turned it into a defiant scream and grabbed hold of the neartest Heartless bit he could reach - a toothy head that was mostly a set of massive bulls-horns - and squeezed it with all his might, his hands turning red-hot and shimmering with heat, transfering that heat into the Heartless and setting it on fire. The whole battering ram recoiled, and Zim threw a flaming punch that shattered the horns and made a unstable fireball that burned into the battering ram's core and tore it apart.

Black goo splattered everywhere and Zim fell down, already getting to his feet and trying to stay there while tentacles roped out and ensnared him around the arms and shoulders, trying to pull him down into the jaws biting and thrashing at his feet. He kicked at them, snarling inventive invectives, blasting flares of flame randomly at everything he could hit; he burned the jaws trying to chew on him, he sent a blast of fire at Kimblee - which the alchemist dodged - and he redirected that same blast with all his might no matter how hard it was or made him hurt, and it traveled around to strike the Heartless around Jarod and Winry, shattering the Umbrals and letting the humans go.

He summoned another blast of fire, his arms now seriously starting to hurt, and directed it beneath him, blasting the Umbrals out of his way and diving through the resultant hole, slamming into the floor and spying the Keyblade waiting right there, glowing softly and warding the Umbrals away. He reached for it, fingers almost in touching distance, and the Umbrals fired part of themselves into his chest, a dagger-shaped shard gouging into him and burned by the Keyblade's light right away, but it was still enough to move him away from the Keyblade and give the Heartless a semblence of courage, and more of them flowed together, swelling up into ever more gruesome forms before settling on a classic 'huge tentacle with spikes and stuff on it' and slamming into Zim, wrapping around his mid-section and hauling him up, absorbing all the Umbral Heartless in it's way.

The next thing Zim saw, it was Kimblee being propped up by the same tentacle holding himself. Kimblee stared at him, and the frightening thing about that stare was the lack of real emotion. There was anger, yes, but so muted and quiet that it could hardly be called anger at all; it was like irritation, though more inflamed and bitter, but whatever emotion it was Zim couldn't fathom it. Kimblee looked so..._empty, _full of nothing but bland hollows and nihilistic compulsions. His face twitched, and for a moment Kimblee's face was not Kimblee's face, looking like someone _else_...and then it was gone, so fast that Zim had to wonder if he had just been seeing things.

"I don't see why not," Razael remarked. "He sees us, and we're imaginary."

"Quiet you, this is a dramatic scene!" Sammael insisted.

Kimblee raised Zim to his face, and spoke. "Give me the Stone," he said again, voice quiet and dangerously silky.

"I already said 'no'," Zim said. "'N-O'. It means a response in the negative. BASIC ENTRY-LEVEL ENGLISH, SILLY PERSON. DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT SPEAK IT? Because I'm not altogether certain that we _are _speaking English, which does beg the question _what _we're speaking."

"If I tried to understand what you meant, I'm sure the hours spent doing that would mean I wouldn't have time to do this." Kimblee gestured, and a part of the tentacle distended into a smaller tentacle and growing sharp bits all over; organic knives and rounded claws and inappropiate teeth and more claws until it was just a large mass of cutting thing bound together by a thin but muscular mass. Kimblee gestured again, and it struck; Zim wriggled with all his might, the Keyblade buzzing uselessly on the floor below, but Zim had too little experience with it or it's powers to make it levitate or summon it without gestures or anything like that. The clawed tentacle hit him in the leg and struck upward from there, carving a long patchwork-style mess from his hip to his shoulder, and this time Zim _did _scream, mostly in fury and pain and also self-aware acknowledgement that maybe if he didn't annoy his enemies so much things like this would happen a lot less.

Purple blood gushed forward briefly; Irkens certainly didn't regenerate but they _did _heal quicker thanks to modifications made to the Irken children who were assigned as soldiers, because a soldier that bled a lot was something the Irken Empire in general had called 'totally lame'. Bleeding a lot was less of a concern to Zim right then, in favor of the face that his pocket had ripped, and a gleaming red stone was poking against his leg, half in and out of the gash in his pocket. Jarod and Winry got up in time to see this, and Kimblee had forgotten about them so the noise they made caused him to glance at them while the tentacle gave Zim an ungentle shake that dropped the Stone right out, where it would fall into the Umbral's liquid and be delivered to Kimblee.

In the time it took for Zim to process all this, an idea came to him.

His sides were bound, but his legs were not. Before the Stone could fall all the way, Zim stuck out his leg and his foot made contact with the Stone, the small red crystal landing on the tip of his toes and, after some foot-shaking from Zim, rolled down his foot towards his ankle. He raised his foot in time, trapping the Stone to a stop between foot and ankle, and grinning at Kimblee's gaping look of disbelief, tossed it up a bit with a small kick. He then lashed out with a much stronger kick laced with the elemental energies of Fire humming in his muscles and hit the Stone squarely at such an angle that the Stone was launched away, right out the fuselage and up into the air, where it would almost certainly be lost to Kimblee.

Jarod and Winry stared, and then they couldn't help themselves and laughed. "Oh," Kimblee said, face contorting into a prim little sneer. "You...my vocabulary deserts me, you are a complete and total _kneebiter_." He swung his arm in another commanding gesture and the tentacle swung itself out the fuselage at the Stone, uncoiling from Zim on the way and dropping him so that with any luck he would cease to be an immediate problem. (Kimblee had finally learned that Zim, dispite being a complete unknown to him, was _vastly _more dangerous than Scar or Mustang or anyone else he knew here, solely because of his ability to turn everything he wound up into a raging disaster.) Zim had other plans that way, and the Keyblade responded to his mental call and flew out threw the Umbrals and into Zim's waiting hand as he was thrown out.

The air was brisk and welcoming after all the brief time in that stuffy fuselage, and the first thing Zim saw after looking for something red and sparkly was the red crystal going up high, about to fall back down. More troublesome, the tentacle was already moving towards it, thinning out to almost comical extremes and little more than a wire-thin thing going straight for the Philosopher's Stone.

Zim flipped himself and extended his spider's-legs attachments, snatching onto the front of the Umbra Eternis and anchoring himself down. The ground rumbled unpleasantly, and the ground moved away from him, the metal around him creaking worryingly and then the air was whipping around him, and Zim realized that the Umbra Eternis was getting back up to it's feet, confirmed by the roar the giant robot gave, it's shadow aura flaring back up as it got it's foot against and stood up to it's full height. The sudden jerk would have torn Zim loose from his position if he hadn't been so solidly hooked down, and as it was he still ended up hanging upside down.

"Soooo..." Sammael said dully. "The Stone of doom is up where we can't reach it, we're dangling for our lives mere feet from the guy that wants to kill us, the hostages - and I mean that plurally, since that girl wouldn't be there if not for us - are at the mercy of those monsters, and the Heartless are within moments of getting the Stone back and rendering all that for nothing.

"You summerize quite neatly," Razael said. "Depressingly so. But you forgot the fact that the giant robot is back up and will resume killing us once it has the Stone back. Plus, I don't doubt that Kimblee will be so angry at our interference that he will _instantly _blow us all to tiny pieces. With _Evil Science_."

"Yeah, that too. Totally can't believe I forgot about that. I blame the bloodloss."

"Oh, pish-posh, those wounds practically close themselves."

"They do, I checked, but I'm still entitled to complain about them."

Zim clung to the Umbra Eternis, reasonably worried about being on the front of a giant death machine and fully aware that he was very lucky it hadn't deigned to destroy him yet. A more current concern was that the red stone still gleamed up high, the tentacle within moments of grabbing it, and Zim had brief thoughts of trying to do the rocket-flying technique he sometimes saw Zuko using, to try and outfly the tentacle and grab the Stone first. He thought better of it, partly because the last time he'd tried it hadn't worked the way he wanted but mostly because he had a better idea.

_Get the Stone, _he thought, holding tight to the Keyblade. _First make sure that he doesn't get it first._

He swung himself up, the tentacle above him contracting as it coiled around the Stone with a triumphant squeeze, and he swung the Keyblade into the very thin base of the tentacle right above him. It jerked, spasmed, and if it could speak it would have screamed. (Then again, the Umbra Eternis had a voice of it's own, and it screamed loudly enough to be doing pain-duty for the Umbral Heartless. That totally counted.) Zim swung again and it flailed around, light burning where Zim had hit it, and Zim gave a final swing, the Keyblade surronded by a glowing golden light ripping around like the blades of a chainsaw and thrust right through it, letting the energies of the Keyblade burn into it with a pleasing effect of shards of light blasting through it in randomized spots. The tentacle curled, uncurled, writhed and finally whipped around so hard that it lost hold on the Philosopher's Stone, tossing it up high again, and fell off as Zim severed it at the base, dropping down and disintegrating before it ever touched the ground.

_Okay, Aang's showed you all the conventions of heroic behavior! _Zim thought excitedly. _You've humiliated your villain, now get in there and do something that's all finishing-move-esque! What is 'esque' a suffix for, anyway? ...Oh, never mind, DO SOMETHING, YOU FOOL! Say, I yell at myself a lot._

Kimblee leaned out from the fuselage. "What the hell-" Zim sprang up, kicking him in the face. And yes, he hit him in the nose. "_The nose again!_"

Zim hauled himself over Kimblee's back and grabbed his coat, landing hard and throwing Kimblee over himself into the back of the fuselage. Jarod and Winry were already free, and Zim deduced that the Umbral had overextended it's available mass to grab the Stone and there wasn't enough left to cover the two humans. "Get behind me!" Zim commanded.

"What the hell's going on-" Winry started to say. She stopped. "Right, got it." She grabbed Jarod by the wrist and pulled the taller man behind her, behind Zim as he instructed.

Kimblee got up, rather unsteady with the Umbra Eternis shakign around like it was. Jarod and Winry had a time staying there, certainly. Zim stepped towards him, Keyblade humming and crackling with periodic discharges of elemental light, and stopped, looking at the Heartless. _Destroy the Heartless and the giant robot is inoperable._

No sooner had the thought come into his head that he flung himself at Kimblee screaming like a maniac, landing feet-first into his stomach and kicking him into the wall, bounding back up into the ceiling of the fuselage and kicking off to dive directly into the Heartless Keyblade-first, the artifact weapon shining with power.

He hit them and they rose up, stabbing and cutting at him with all multitudes of spontaneously generated blades and he didn't care; h whirled around, cutting their limbs off at the bases and parrying the claws and blades hard enough to shatter them, striking again and again into the main mass of the Umbral Heartless. With every strike the Umbral quivered and shook, parts of it bubbling and burning away, acrid smoke snuffed out by the flashes of light whipping out from the Keyblade in increasingly bigger contrails that followed the pain of it's strikes, outlining movements of the air, driving down into the darkness like nails and exploding in brilliant bursts of light, the continual surges inflicting a radiance on the fuselage that turned random parts of it into smooth crystal and cleaner metal and cut a jagged spiral all around the whole thing as a result of a particularily enthusiastic energy blast that went awry.

Jarod and Winry were relatively safe, but they were still much to cloose for it for their comfort. The light didn't harm them, or even come close to hitting them, but it was still uncomfortable to watch. Kimblee had it worse, being so deeply entrenched in what the Keyblade seemed compelled to destroy, and in a very short time he was covered in even more blisters and burns than before, and yet they faded almost as soon as they had happened, leaving behind the same pigmentation that Kevin Levin had once had.

And Zim went on, unknowingly calling on more and more power from the Keyblade in the extermity of his battle fury and unyielding need to destroy Kimblee once and for all; the light got brighter and more beautiful still, the white of all colors blending into one fracturing and blasting around in a spectrum of emotional colors more suitable for Zim's state of mind; mostly the green of willpower and courage, but there was also the red of rage (for all the evil Kimblee had done and not yet been forced to pay for), a hint of the blue of hope (his thoughts that this mind be done, his absolute certainty that he would _win_) and even a great swell of loving violet (and he would never admit it, but there were people there he _cared _for, that he would go on fighting for and living with and never ever let down as long as there was even a single isolated spark of life in his body), and it all should have looked silly for Zim; a almost-rainbowed lightshow, something so very unsuitable for a guy like Zim. And yet it wasn't like that at all; it was violent and larger-than-life, blasting out of the fuselage's opening with such force that Jarod and Winry had to jump out and hang for dear life on the outside to avoid getting hit and it _still _warped the metals and could be seen from miles away, crackling and blasting and rebounding with the complete absence of restraint or hesitation that was so very much like Zim.

It was something that Zim wasn't yet able to handle without consequence. He called more power out with instinct, shaping it into destructive force that he slammed into the rapidly dying Umbral Heartless in complete ignorance of what he was consciously doing (and would have been unable to repeat if forced to think about how he had done it), and the Keyblade _burned _with that power that was even greater than the fire he had summoned to kill the Darkside back on Earth and was enough to kill even horrors born of the ultimate darkness, and Zim lacked the experience to deal with that kind of power or shield himself from. Whether the Keyblade wanted him to be hurt or not (and it was certainly not; it wasn't one of those cursed weapons) didn't matter, and Zim almost broke off the attack when he registered the pain and saw his hand blistered and burned in the sun-bright light from the Keyblade's hilt, extending up it's blade.

Almost. He was definitely not in the right mood to be cautious over a little thing like personal injury; he still remembered that the humans of Earth had died because of a device that _he _had help create had opened a gateway for the Heartless to come through, and he was certainly not about to let the people of this town die because he lost his nerve over a few magical burns or losing a measly hand he could easily replace.

Dropping all concern for his well-being like the crazy person he was (and Razael cheered him for it), Zim swung the Keyblade up high, the luminous energies swirling into the faintest outline of a sword's blade, or perhaps merely the image of Sword itself, the ultimate archetype that represented what all swords were supposed to be, pain roaring up his arm as the power burned him, and the Umbral Heartless got itself together for one final desperate attack while Kimblee cowered with his hands clamped tight over his eyes, it's entire mass wrapping up and tearing open to a massive jaw tipped with sword-long teeth and rotating blades like a food processor inside it, bearing down on Zim. The Irken only laughed long and hard and mad, and _dived _into the descending Heartless.

There was a faint glimmer inside it, the light turning it transparent for a moment before it went dark. There was a wet noise, as if of a powerful weight piercing through...and then the Umbral Heartless exploded in a massive blast of the same light the Keyblade had made in it's extremity of power; Zim had stabbed it's very core, the pure and perfect light that both composed the Keyblade and radiated from it searing it to ashes before it even connected, and instinctively transferred as much of it's ambient power as he could directly into the Heartless in an explosive burst, obliterating fully half of the Heartless present as the animating forces of the machine-titan and blasting Zim, Jarod and Winry right out the fuselage with a triumphant yell, flying free from the Umbra Eternis' attempts to grab them, the Keyblade's unloosed energy still flying around all over the place.

For his part, Kimblee flung his hands over his eyes, screaming with pain even thought the Keyblade wasn't anywhere near him and the lights weren't nearly intense enough to hurt, at least physically, but the light of the Keyblade shone right through his physical body and into the darkest parts of his mind and illuminated them without mercy or gentility, showing them to Kimblee in a single moment without any subjectivity. For a single moment, Kimblee saw _himself_ as he was and not what he imagined himself, saw the dapper and charming explosives artist revealed for a monstrous shell of a man with dust where drive should have been, a _thing _that pretended to delusions of self-respect, a vile horror that was nothing but a self-important bloated mockery that had willingly submerged itself in the very worst of depravities for essentially no reason at all, and at the very core of him was a hollow shadow where a heart ought to have been, an antithesis of everything that he _could _have been.

Kimblee saw himself, and in that moment of perfect awareness and knowledge as the light burned away all the lies he had ever told himself, he felt totally disgusted with the..._thing _he beheld; nothing more or less than a miserable and empty horror that didn't even know how awful it was.

"I don't...I don't understand," he whispered, the illuminating fading from his mind, his mental state returning to normal but the revelation fresh in his memory, his psyche unraveling in it's attempts to reconcile the two opposing mind-sets. "I don't understand," Kimblee whispered again, more of the non-blood red fluid weeping from his body and looking uncomfortably like bloody tears. "I _don't _understand..."

_...Huh,_ Kevin said, his mind also been hit by the blast of light but unharmed by it because he wasn't a utter psychopath like Kimblee. _I feel...happy._ Ghostfreak said nothing, and he couldn't say anything at all, not crouched up into a tiny corner of Kimblee's mind and whimpering, whispering, sobbing to himself in terrified incomprehension.

Zim was not in a position to take his enemy's reaction into account, since he was still flying in the air. Winry and Jarod were moving slightly ahead of him like cushions that had been preemptively arranged for him to make the soon-to-be crash a little less painful, and he should probably have looked back to make sure of the trajectory (since that was just common sense when you shot yourself places with an explosion), but with the way things were going and his own usual skewed sense of priorties - skewed by personal standards, perhaps, if not usually moral ones - he found it more imperative to be looking.

He saw it at once, glimmering in the air and falling down towards the still standing Umbra Eternis, the red crystal that had started the whole obnoxious thing, and bore in mind that the whole thing had revolved around this little thing. So many people had died to create it, and more would die _because _of it. (Or by the use of it's power, which came out to the same thing, really.) This seemed an undesirable thing to Zim, and frankly the last few days had been upsetting enough without already having to deal with something that couldn't be resolved by just punching the person responsible in the face until they were incapable of coherent thought. (Though pummeling Kimblee's noise was _very _satisfying.)

No easy solution seemed apparent, at least right then. And then a thought came to him: something _could_ be done about it, right here and now and without needing to wait and prolong the Stone's component soul's sufferings or risk Kimblee getting the blasted thing, and he wondered where that thought had come from. Another thought came to him, quietly thinking of the Keyblade's vast power and the sheer untapped potential for doing good that it possessed in his hands, and that it could be turned towards righting this wrong. And Zim wondered where _that _had come from after admitting that, sure, yeah, he would have eventually thought of doing something like that anyway, but he had to be honest and acknowledge that if people knew he had been given a weapon a vast power, using to it to do good wouldn't be the first thing they would picture him doing: more likely he would use it's power to harass people that annoyed him, or blow up vending machine because it made a cool noise. And anyway, who said anything about the Keyblade having unlimited power? He just heard that it was a powerful weapon with magical powers, and aside from supposedly unlocking stuff and letting him Firebend he hadn't seen much proof of that yet, though he supposed the unlocking business might be a bit helpful right now. Then he wondered how the fook you went around 'unlocking' a physical object anyway; then again, the Philosopher's Stone was made of a lot of souls, so maybe he just had to unbind them but he had no idea how to do that besides maybe hitting it a lot and he thought that might break the thing or-

Another thought came to him, this one _definitely _from outside him and tinged with a frustrated impatience he had come to recognize from people who were begining to realize that Zim wasn't very good with taking hints. The thought...well, it wasn't a _thought _really, more an series of incredibly vast flickering emotional impressions scaling up into incomprehensibly abstract mental images that slid right out of his skull and inflicting cheery dreamscapes on everyone they contacted momentarily, and Zim got the impression that something that was not at all used to sentient minds trying to find a channel of communication that worked. It somehow worked itself inside his brain and wound up translated as an ethereal choir out of his most wonderful dreams speaking as if from the very heights of his soul in the voices of a thousand souls in perfect unison, and therefore something quite unsuited to say, '_Just hurry up and let the Keyblade do what it's made for instead of falling down arguing with yourself, you incompetent dumbass'._

Zim sniffed disdainfully. "There's no need to be rude," he told the Keyblade, which he suspected these...sensations were coming from. He listened close to the Keyblade, trying to get something else out of it and figure out what it meant by that, and didn't get anything forthcoming apart from the momentary experience of being connected to all realms of the cosmos (which he totally failed to notice due to lacking the right cosmic senses right then) and an incipherable sensation that three beings with an interest in him had just facepalmed.

He did get a strong compulsion to look straight up and saw the Stone again, now fallen past the Umbra Eternis' head level; Kimblee, even as dazed as he was, posessed the faculties to notice it even if it was strictly automatic. One of the Umbra Eternis' mighty gauntlets reached out, turning sideways to let the Stone fall right into it's palm.

Zim's guts twisted around at the thought, unpleasantly aware that he was getting farther while the Stone was getting closer to Kimblee; he was _not _going to go through all the trouble he had to get that Stone away from the rogue alchemist again. Perhaps more poignantly, he had been _inside _that stone, or in the same phase-space that personified it's constituent's mindscape or some other third thing he didn't have time to think of right now, and he _knew _what they were going through, that they were going insane from pain and that they most certainly didn't deserve this no matter how much of a pain some of them had been to him last night...

He had already failed the people of his world. He refused to fail the people of another one.

The Keyblade shimmered in synchronity with his will, and he felt the tide of beautiful, mad light rising up in his mind again, and he realized that was _himself, _perhaps mingled with the Keyblade's own strangeness, and as the light of the Keyblade flowed through him, swirling inside him and making his skin tingle like it was brushing up against purified fire, he let go of all fears and surrendered to the Keyblade's burning tides, and the power flowed through him, redoubling and channeling back into the Keyblade like a tsunami crashing back into the sea, and the sea was himself. The power _burned _again, his muscles seizing as something like fire and lightning in one crashed through his body and helpless to stop itself from burning, and he grit his teeth and let it flow through him, and it splashed right out of him in a massive flare, shedding luminsence all over the street. The light the Keyblade had released into the Umbra Eternis surged up out of it, knocking it away just enough to ensure that even if this failed that the Umbra Eternis couldn't simply grab the Stone from the ground or whatnot. The light surged towards Zim, colliding into the Philosopher's Stone halfway and engulfing it, bathing it in fierce light, and in the dazzling display of colors Zim thought the Stone's red looked almost..._green_.

The power Zim had acclumated from himself and the Keyblade roared out of him, gathering around the Keyblade in patterns that reminded him of what people imagined large-scale static electricity to look like; jagged bursts of energy flashing in unpredictable patterns. These, of course, were in a wider array of colors than the pale blue or yellow most people pictured, and they kept pooling together into random bursts of white shaded with solar yellow-orange, growing out from the Keyblade and swelling out so much that the power display was easily twice as big as Zim, generating such fearsome heat that Zim's arms were burning and his face was hurting, and again he dealt with it by ignoring it as long as he could; there were more important concerns than getting hurt right now.

And around the Philosopher's Stone, the light he had already called forth and unknowingly channeled to the Stone infused itself into the alchemically seperated bundle of souls, transfering it's divine essence bit by motonic bit into the crystal, and better yet, directly into the minds of the souls within it. And for them, it did the same thing that it had done for Kimblee, burning away illusions and darkness and showing each of them, in the core of their souls, just who and what they really were, and in doing so it burned away bits and pieces of the high energy matrice binding them together, and letting them call to their spirits, and the bodies they were properly bound to. Little by little, those souls were begining to wake up from the nightmare: one or two souls turned around and quietly broke away from the rest, zipping right out of the Stone and instantly returning to their bodies without ever being noticed or fussed over until someone noticed them breathing again, and in the large number of transmuted souls still trapped there in their own pain and confusion those were still ridiculously tiny numbers, not effecting the Stone very much. Little more than cracks, really.

And even so, with these souls stirring in the light being directly infused into them and waking them up, the red of the Philosopher's Stone had started to turn a brilliant, soft emerald-green.

And then the light blazing around the Keyblade, a chaotic mass of energy nearly two and half again as big as Zim and even bigger in the places where it spiralled off into weird patterns evocative of fractals, contracted, Zim's eyes shut tight in the painful degree of concentration he was pushing himself to; binding it close, holding it as tightly as he could, directing it and at the same time letting the Keyblade do what it wanted to do (and it wanted the same thing he did, he didn't know how he knew that but he knew it was true), a complicated act even without forcing himself not to think about the problem that he had absolutely no idea what he was planning on doing. The light grew and grew, bright enough to banish all the darkness for at least a block or two, and even then the shadows made where the light was obstructed by solid objects seemed _cleaner _than the corrupting horrors that had risen from them earlier, and together the lights shone in equal and synchronized splendor, something mysterious happening between them as they built up to an unspecified level of power.

On the ship, Hobbes stared at this through the cameras. "What's he _doing?_" He said, voice quiet and eyes wide. His hand kept moving to his necklace, nervously toying with a small trinket on it that was neither trophy tooth or pretty stone. "I don't...I've never seen anything like that." He paused, recalling some of the things he had seen during his adventures and added, "Not on this scale, anyway. Is that...what did you call it, Firebending?"

"No," Zuko said, mystified. "Firebending is related to light, but not that directly. I think. It looks more like those light-type powers he kept pulling out earlier."

"Well, whatever it is it looks really cool," Calvin remarked, hoping that the cameras were equipped to record stuff so he could persue this later and study it. The energy readings he was getting off the light wasn't registering on the energy measuring gauges, which meant that either it was too high for them to measure or it was a kind of energy it wasn't equipped to deal with. Calvin was inclined to go for the former, but the latter seemed just as likely. Maybe it was a bit of both. "Hrm...the things I could harness that kind of energy output for!"

"This is how disasters start," Courtney reminded him. "Someone starts trying to do things they shouldn't for progress' sake or they decide that they can mess with the laws of nature and then they suffer for it."

Calvin gave her a dirty look. "That's also how rising out of the dirty muck of prehistoric ignorance, curing diseases, understanding the multiverse's grandeur and improving the lot of all the rational species starts. Looking at the potential for scientific develoupment and immediately deciding that it's evil or should be abandoned for some childish notions of universal propriety is how people start backsliding into want and ignorance."

Courtney blinked. "Wow. You really take that kind of thing seriously."

"If I don't, then the Luddites _win!_ It's my duty to fight that kind of thinking whenever it rears it's ugly head, and my duty to _SCIENCE!_"

"Guys?" Beth said, a bit worried that Hobbes was staring at the lightshow like it was turning switches on in his brain, Zuko looked too fascinated for his own good, and Courtney and Calvin were getting into a full-blown conversation that totally ignored the situation. "Not that whatever you're talking about isn't important or whatever, but I think something's happening."

Something was. The Umbra Eternis had begun to stir again, still as stubbornly incapable of just laying down and dying like it should have had the decency to, and Kimblee was just barely able to stare up out and look at the Stone and see it hovering in mid-air in a sphere of light. He squinted in the glare, and he could see it glowing, bits of it chipping off and disappearing in tiny green flashes. Kimblee's eyes widened, perhaps in shock or curiosity, and the Umbra Eternis started to move forward, it's hands spread wide to grab the Stone, and when it's claws came close to the light around the Stone it sharply jerked away as though hitting an invisible surface, clawtips smoldering and glowing. The Umbra Eternis gave the light a distrustful growl, backing away warily with it's every movement heavy with growing fury.

Zim was now floating in the air, an invisible tether being connected between him and the Stone that was making him be pulled away and towards it at the same time: the force of the bond was pulling him in and the Keyblade drawn towards it, and at the same time a innate self-preservation instinct seemed aware that getting close to the swirling luminscence that had burned him pretty bad already was a Very Stupid Idea and was tugging him away, and this produced the net effect of keeping him still in mid-air. Winry and Jarod had gone ahead to the ground, where the rest of their allies had gathered at and Scar transmuted a slide out of the ground that the two fell into and slid down to the ground, crashing in a tangle but quite all right. Apart from Jarod's mental scars, but he already had plenty of those anyway.

The light flashed and shimmering around Zim in intricate patterns resonating with instinctive concepts that his mind unconsciously tried to translate and left with only a puzzling but welcome sense of 'all is well'-ness, growing larger and more intense. His entire body was begining to ache, his supposedly fireproof clothing begining to smoulder, and Zim still held on to the Keyblade as it created even more_ power_, amplifying what was already there and ramping it up to even greater levels perhaps equal to more than several dozen gigajoules, and a stray arc flashed away from him and grew larger away from them, going into the light spectrum invisible to human eyes and proceeding to accidentally overload every electro-mechanical device within two miles and transform them into more advanced and capable forms able to handle it's energy output, leaving behind a residue of energy that would power everything there for at least two and a half weeks before starting to fade away. This happened three times, in every direction until the last time when created a ripple that went through to the entire First District and it's very edges, causing no small amount of confusion and excited bewilderment to the more tech-savvy.

"Could you please stop doing that?" Kimblee asked Zim. "It's hurting my eyes and what I suppose could be called my soul."

_Not mine_, Kevin said. _And hey, those are MY eyes, stop calling them yours! Get your own body._

"Nope," Zim said, buzzing around in place as the connection grew so strong it was a gravitional force unto itself (although, gravity wasn't exactly the strongest of natural forces) and the Keyblade was painfully hot and a burning sword-shaped shard in his hands, it's metal going translucent and something..._else _being revealed, an incomprehensibly beautiful and earth-shaking bit of trascendent eternity wrapped up in a material form, and Zim couldn't even _see _it properly and it was translated into his brain as an ever-changing vortex of light and fire and lightning and a dozen other things that all came out to nothing less than raw power tempered with benevolence, and at this the connection between the Keyblade and the Stone became a brillaint path of the same wild colors as the light around both. It changed, indeterminably, hollowing itself out and growing so that it was larger than either Stone-light or Keyblade anima, and the Keyblade's light projected itself down that path and came smashing down into the Philosopher's Stone, drowning out the red light entirely to amplify the light purifying it's souls with every single bit of the power it had been building up the whole time.

"I can't help but think that this is a bad thing," Kimblee said flatly. The Umbra Eternis facepalmed with a big clanging noise, as if to say _'You think!'_.

The Philosopher's Stone glowed like a miniature sun, the light not diminishing so much as it focused itself into the Stone's substance, disappearing from the world and into the Stone's mindscape, washing over each and every soul contained within it. The howling storm within subsided, for a single brief instant, for the Keyblade's light came all their hearts and minds at the same time. For that instant, the pain was gone. The agony of being torn from their bodies, of a cruelly forced seperation and their lives being drained away into an construct feeding their essences into little more than the greatest power source of all, was wiped away for that instant. All at once, and again just for an instant, they stopped feeling pain, stopped feeling nothing but helpless mewling rage that erased their personalities into little more than maddened spiritlings knowing nothing but selfish misery, and once again became themselves.

That instant was enough to break their bonds, and show them the way home. Inside the mind's of those making up the Stone, it was a confusing and bewildering sight of the souls being freed from their prison and tumbling apart into over a hundred bewildered beings, their prison-universe vanishing before them. What Zim and the others saw was the light he had made seeming to disappear, and more accurately infuse all of it's energy into the Stone, leaving a dull insane red that blinked out into a more confused spectrum of colors and, with a faint noise like a whispered thunderclap, resolved into the brilliant and beautiful green; the green of willpower and courage, overcoming the red of loss and rage, and then at long last, without anything to hold those souls together anymore, the Philosopher's Stone simply _shattered_, exploding into a towering beam of emerald light, and Zim thought he saw figures moving around in it, pulling away from each other and dissolving into nearly recognizable shapes, free and seperate and alive.

And then they, and it, were gone. A lone crackle of green flashed in the air where it had been, and all was still. Zim was hurtled back to the ground, blasted back by the eruption, and right towards his allies, and Aang was helpful enough to steer him into the slide Scar had made for the other two humans; Zim crashed into it and came to a bouncing stop at the bottom, finally landing on his back a few steps behind them and a shallow trail cut in the ground where his Pak had burrowed through.

Zim sat up, Keyblade still in hand dispite the problems, and he said, "Somehow, it _always_ comes down to explosions. This is a fact of science."


	17. Breaking The Eternal Night

Well well well, another too-long chapter that took forever! I hope I've learned some pacing from this.

Just the epilogue to go after this before new worlds, don't worry, it's short!

Disclaimer: I continue to own nothing, and listing everything would take far too long and these notes are big enough as-is!

...

Morte liked to tell people that being a disembodied head had it's advantages in order to distract them from the fairly obvious drawbacks (and usually along with an anecdote about something interesting, like that time he accidentally irradiated a temple of Elemental Earth Evil with a liquid lunch, two rubber bands and a spelljammer reactor, and also the four other times he did it on purpose). It was a pretty blatant lie as his lies went (and he'd made a _lot _over the centuries); it seemed the main point of it was to suggest that the problems of no having any limbs or flesh or a real sense of touch or a host of other things he missed so very badly even though he couldn't remember actually _having _those things didn't really matter to him. (It was one of his very best lies, too.)

Watching the soldiers - or whatever the faction-types around here called the people that did the fighting professionally as opposed to habitually - rushing around in the aftermath of the Heartless' brief assault on the area after Kimblee had apparently taken up Zim's invitation to a battle, so enthusiastic and professional and eager in their work that it inspired suspicions of drugs in the water, irked Morte espicially badly with his own shortcomings in any ability to influence a battle positively. The battle had been largely concluded by the time they got there, so there hadn't been much need for him to _have to _influence any battles, and then the Heartless had gone somewhere else in a big hurry (and Morte had seen that sort of thing to know perfectly well that they were likely assimilating into a super-monster, joining Kimblee in the battle as his personal army or some combination of the two), leaving them not much to do but pick up the continued debris, arrange some more back-up and organize it the clean-up process with a remarkably laid-back attitude; after some more people had arrived on-site to help coordinate efforts, focus battlefield tactics in the area and generally make themselves useful, the tension of even the ex-Foster's inhabitants had loosened.

Morte's news that Roy Mustang and a small group of associates being en route to fight Kimblee too had _really _helped in that regard; Morte didn't know much about the man, but the mere knowledge that he had taken to the battlefield had instantly defused quite a lot of about-to-panic people and, a bit charmingly, led several of them to declare that they might as well just pick up the wreckage as usual, because the fight was so clearly _done _now that Roy was there; a general sentiment of 'Roy is awesome and everything he does is awesome FOREVER' was most of what he heard, suggesting an attitude towards an authority figure that was more appropiate towards a local superhero or a hometown celebrity. Admittedly, here they tended to be the same thing. Morte had noted that the townies were feeling, for the most part, generally positive that the Kimblee situation would soon be resolved. They were apparently so spoiled by the customary way most villains were defeated in this town that they had difficulty grasping the idea of the threat not being slain in battle or taken into custody. (Or possibly both. That sort of thing happened here sometimes.)

Constantly listening to people going on about how awesome they thought the high-profile leader from the Peace Marines was had gotten a little irritating, compelling Morte to find someway to make himself useful or, failing that, hang around somewhere that he could learn something. His whole theme was being a guide and despository of generalized knowledge, he knew when he should be taking an opportunity to get some. (Traverse Town's strangeness meant it was a bit new to Morte; he'd only seen six or seven cities like this in his lifetime, none of them glorified refugee camps and certainly few with the highly rarified circumstances to ensure good diplomatic relations in such a diverse population, and just overhearing random triva was _very _interesting, and synched up nicely with many of the theories and suspicions he had about the place, most of them reasonably benign.)

In short, the cowardly shame he had felt earlier was starting to turn into self-directed loathing stemming from everything he heard about the idolized leaders of the town like Roy Mustang and wondering why he, Morte Rictusgrin, with all the wealth of experience and knowledge he had amassed throughout what could be conservatively estimated as a 'really freaking stupid-long time' (even without addressing the time travel and existence loops and the occasional chat with a parrarel version of himself) couldn't apply it to actually doing something _useful _in a fight.

He could have resolved to do better in the next fight. He could have promised himself to find a way to make himself useful at the soonest opportunity. He could have sworn to himself that he would _definitely _think upon all his vast experience, filing the possibilities down until he arrived at the absolute best one that would be sure to make the others see him for his worth and value him and go for all that super-awesome good feelings trip and incidentally make his existence actually do some _good _for a change instead of being a useless little malcontent that screwed up everything he touched.

So, in keeping with the traditions he had unwillingly enforced on himself from his weakness of character and the veritable mountainside of mistakes building around him into the psychic equivilant of a concrete wall, Morte had instead fled the area with all the actually useful people on it and fled into one of the tents with the not-dead victims of the Philosopher's Stone and sulked. Bitterly, replaying all his most memorable failures of conscience and will over and over again until the bitterness overflowed to turn his thoughts into the most sour condemnations imaginable, turning on themselves and swelling larger into a mess of self-loathing and regrets just churning around on a scale that anyone under a thousand years simply could not imagine no matter how emotionally screwed up they were, but still sulking.

Still, Morte knew that he wasn't a complete waste of space thus far. Their quick little story back at the news studio had gotten out a _lot _of people who had been ill-equipped to handle a fight with a monster like Kimblee and whatever he had brought with him, and had gotten them out with a minimum of fuss to a place of relative safety. (As defined as the distance from the psychopathic alchemist.) Their remaining presence would have caused _way _too much trouble and potential casualties and Morte winced at the thought of them getting killed over this whole thing. They were here and sort of safe, so at least he could do a bit of crowd control.

He wasn't _completely _without worth. Morte knew he was being a jerk and just feeling sorry for himself when there were people that could use his help. He also knew that he just wasn't equipped to give them the help they needed, and he had trouble repressing the old suspicion that he _deserved_ to feel bad that he couldn't do anything about it. Making cosmic-scale screw-ups and then waffling around forever trying to do something about it only to fail miserably and feel _worse _was just his lot in life, or at least he had used to think that before..

Before the Chief had saved him from that nonsense. When the Chief had finished his business and atoned for his own sins the best way he could; by accepting the hideous punishments all the hells could offer for vengeance on the world-murdering sins of his first and successive incarnations upon his own head. Stupid, so righteous it hurt and making Morte wish he could be that noble, that was the Chief all over. And he still remembered that the last things the Chief had done had included relieving Morte of the guilt he suffered for his part in the whole tragedy, absolving him of that role, knowing what Morte had done and still wanting him on their journey, and telling Morte outright that he had always been the Chief's closest of friends...

Morte _could _do better. He knew he could, and he owed it to the Chief's memory to at least _try _to be more of a hero, even if it was just wrecking up nasty status quos and shaking things up wherever he went. (As he had been doing, to varying degrees of success, before he had been brought on-board for this thing.) He just didn't know how. Even floating around and talking, he was still not much better than the inanimate mimirs that he sometimes pretended to be; just like them, it seemed he required an outside force to goad him into actually _doing _anything.

Lost in his thoughts and moodily wondering how the Boss was doing, Morte hardly noticed the tent flapping open and Kim Possible striding in, a bit weary from the long morning but seemingly pleased by her success in keeping the current situation controlled. "So _this _is where you've been hiding, Mr. Rictusgrin."

Morte turned around, quickly repressing his startlement. "Ah! Warn a guy when you're jumpin' on him like that! I'm trying to sulk here and feel bad about myself, you're putting a damper on that."

She gave a short and mildly sarcastic nod. "I'll keep that in mind the next time I run into another hero with issues like this."

Morte let the 'hero' comment slide, fully aware that he really didn't deserve the label. "And drop the honorifics, kid. I ain't no 'mister'. And where the hell did you learn my last name that I made up?" Kim shrugged. "Eh, whatever. What are you wanting, huh?"

"Just trying to keep people rounded up," Kim said, gracefully navigating her way through the stretchers and makeshift beds to Morte, keeping her voice quiet out of respect for the unfortunates here; of course she knew that they were alive, but they _looked _dead and it felt like being in a place for the dead to be prepared. The feeling was less creepy than someone who hadn't lived with the constant danger Morte had, or the history of mass death that Kim did; it engendered respect and sorrow, not fear or unease. "You have no idea how hard it is to keep people sitting still and making themselves useful. The faction guys are all right, but the independants like me and Ron can be a total mess in situations like this. Keeping everyone together and not wandering off when the situation hasn't been confirmed finished or not is just common sense." She smiled and shrugged. "It's not so bad, though; it's just like herding cats. Not easy and after a little bit it's _impossible_, but keep them distracted and interested and you can sort of steer them. Being polite helps."

Morte's jawbone quirked. "I know a bit about that kind of thing myself," He volunteered. "I've run with adventuring parties before. Dealing with the kind of people who go in for that kind of life? Oh hells yeah, it's definitely an education for the kind of people that wind up in this place."

"Really?" Kim said. "You were an adventurer?" She gave him an awkward look, sizing up the cracks and fractures on his skull; Morte had seen that look often enough to know when he was being given a 'is that how he got his flesh flayed off' look. "...Must have been pretty exciting...?" She said lamely.

Morte snorted. "I didn't get like _this _because of something stupid like grabbing a Sphere of Annihilation in a statue's mouth or something like that. I don't know anything about me before I was...well, _this_." He gave a bob that succintly indicated all of him - not that there was much - and the statement was a lie; he certainly knew something of the person he had been, if absolutely nothing of his memories or identity or anything besides the occasional guilty twinge when he thought about doing something less than morally upright. He was grateful for his lack of knowledge there; knowing just the generalities was bad enough without knowing just how much of a jerkass he really had been in life. "I'll give you exciting, all right, though. The stories I could tell you, they'd turn your hair white."

"It'd be an interesting style change," Kim commented, twirling a lock of her flame-red hair around her finger and looking at it speculatively, as if picturing it white.

Morte hoped she would leave it at that. Hoped, but didn't think she would. Sure enough, she gave him a brief look, her curiosity piqued by the minor gossip-worthy tidbits he had left for her. Morte rolled his eyes; he knew what she was going to ask next.

Kim was a shy girl, Morte thought, watching her shuffle her feet awkwardly as she worked her way up to the question. "Uh," She said, and that was it. She shifted around some more, lips moving soundlessly as she tried out politer ways of phrasing the obvious question without being so direct as to be rude. "Um...I don't suppose you'd say...ah..."

Best to get it out of the way as soon as he could. Morte flatly asked, "You're gonna ask why I ran like a coward when I used to be an adventurer and ought to know how to fight, aren't you?"

Kim blinked. She coughed. "Uh. I wasn't going to say it as _mean _as all that."

_No, _Morte thought. _Because you're all sickeningly nice when someone hasn't pissed you right off like that Spike blighter._ Keeping the sentiment to himself, he thought for a moment; giving a technically honest answer while not treading anywhere near uncomfortable territory for him was a specialty of sorts. "Not exactly gonna be _useful _in a fight like that, am I? I was one of the front-liners in my adventuring days, I can tell you, and I can give harder than I look, but going toe-to-toe with a guy who can make things explode with his bare hands isn't up there? Yeah, I'd die quicker than a kobold in a dungeon that ain't kitted out for traps."

"Maybe," Kim said , not looking convinced. "But plenty of the guys that stuck aren't aren't metahumans or have any real powers. All they could get were really big guns, and they still stayed to fight."

"I don't have hands to hold guns," Morte said. "Not really something that would work for me."

"You would if you got plugged into a robot or something." Morte found that idea interesting, actually. "But that's not my point. Lack of large-scale metacombat abilities didn't keep anyone from staying there. Well, anyone with common sense. So what's bothering you?"

If Morte had eyebrows, he would have raised them. "What's with the billion questions?" He snapped. "And why do you care if I went runnin' with my tail between my legs? If I had any. You know what I mean."

Kim shrugged, not looking terribly put off. "You just don't seem like the kind of guy who'd be comfortable staying outside the combat."

"You don't know enough about me to be sure about that." Morte gave her a minute adjustment of his and a eye movement that together approximated a frown. "Hell. Hardly anyone on my team knows anyone on it at all."

Kim nodded. "That's true. And you know something?" She pointed a finger delicately at him. "You're in the perfect position to do something about that?"

"I am?"

"Sure. You're the only one with no existing ties to anyone else. Zuko is an old friend of Zim's, and a battle-buddy besides. Calvin and Hobbes are brothers and best friends. Shoved up into a team like that? If they butt heads, someone _will _take sides on principle. Since you don't have any pre-existing issues like that with any of them, you're a mediating force among them. You can use that."

"Been thinking a lot about this, have you."

"It just seemed like a reasonable idea," Kim said. "I'm all about helping other people whenever I can. Providing a little strategic advice to a fellow adventurer is the least of it."

"Nice of ya, but I told ya, I'm not an adventurer anymore."

Kim smirked. "Not the way your group's going." Morte had to admit, she had a point. "Besides, you should at least _try _to be optimistic. Between you and me, and please don't tell any of them I said this, but you guys need _someone _to think straight. Zim's kind of nuts, Calvin's not a whole lot better, Zuko has a pretty decent head on his shoulders but he's got way too much of a nasty temper to make it stick that much, and Hobbes is the sanest, but he strikes me as the kind of guy that made egg other people on if it looks like fun. Which leaves you."

"...Your analysis of our team's psychological profile fills me with _so _much hope for the future," Morte said sarcastically.

"I try." Kim frowned. "...Wait, everything I said wasn't that nice, was it? Oh snap, _please _don't tell any of them I said that, and if you do _PLEASE _make it sound nicer than what I actually said, I didn't mean it like what I said-"

A knock came. Morte found this odd, since there were in a tent and there wasn't anything for someone to knock on, and he realized that it was just a really big guy stomping on the ground really hard. "Who the hell is that?" Morte said.

Kim's self-conscious spazzing immediately stopped and she brightened up. "Oh, I know this guy!"

The tent flap opened, and in stepped one of the largest men Morte had ever seen that wasn't classified as the more human-interaction friendly scale of giants; the first thing that Morte saw was the white, of a uniform similar to the Peace Marines but applied onto a much larger than normal body as it arrived, seeming impossibly contorted to fit into the tent's opening. There was an indistinct movement, an adjustment of arm and massive rolling shoulders and a flash of dark purple, and an absolutely enormous man in a more ornate than usual variation of the Peace Marine's uniform was standing there, somehow managing to barrel down through the tent in a respectful and discreet fashion, massive boots stomping down on the ground hard enough to propel the rest of the body forward, a partially opened longcoat strained tight over a massive bodybuilder's frame and constantly clinking with the weight of the medals pinned to it, and neatly hanging from one pocket was an old silver pocket watch of Amestrian make and alchemic symbols on it, and Morte found his attention drawn upward as the giant approached with the sort of exuberance normally seen in lit fireworks; the immense broad shoulders graced by uniform officer's stripes with multiple pips on them, and hovering over one was a small and insanely cute moose-like robot. Morte looked higher and higher, to a regal head bald except for a single curly lock of blonde hair, an enormous lantern jaw forming the outline of a classically noble face of heroic proportions (as suited to the man's form) and an enormous curled mustache over his mouth.

The giant came to an abrupt stop right in front of Morte and Kim. "Ah, good fortunes come upon me!" He boomed, saluting her. "Precious heroine of our town, I had found a lost refugee and had wondered where you'd gotten to!" He cast big innocent blue eyes upon Morte. "Hrm? And who might this gentleman be?"

"I ain't no gentleman," Morte said. "Who the hell are you?"

The giant made a booming chuckle. "Good sir, a lack of manners is no reason to disparage presumptions of gentility! Why, behold myself!" He flexed suddenly, fists the size of hams clenched mightily as his enormous biceps wrestled with his coat arms. "I was stripped of all my family honors myself!" He twisted, posing heroically so that his back bugled, hands stretched down from his chest. "My sister earning the inheritance before our world was claimed by the demons of the shadows, and then all cast into darkness and ruin!" He flexed like a muscleman, one hand stretched out towards an imaginary sun as his eyes gleamed with intensity.

"And yet do I permit myself the indulgence of presuming that it is a reason to let my ancestry down! _NAY, I SAY!_" He spun and pointed at Morte, still flexing with his other arm. The little moose bounced up and down like the arm was a trampoline, giggling monotonously in squeaks. "I shall tell you, gentility is a matter of deportment and good grace, sportsmanship and valor! Of setting upon yourself an obligation to everyone before you, excercising every minute of every day with genteel decorum and elegance paying due to those that have gone before! My good sir..."

He flexed so violently that his dress shirt tore, immense muscles sculpted by dedicated hours of bodily training just too much for his shirt to live with any longer, and his skin gleamed so much it suddenly sparkled pink. "_**Just who do you THINK I am? **_But wait, have no fear, I shall tell you precisely who I am!" More flexing. "I am an elegant artist of alchemical technique, always aspiring towards greater knowledge and scientific endeavor _FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND_! A soldier dedicated to the protection and guardianship of this town and all who pass through or dwell here! A vanguard against the foul villains that seek to ruin our good anarchy! A gentleman and a scholar, whose _MIGHTY _spirit forged through education and experience dwells within an _AWE-INSPIRING _body perfected by the ideals of _SCIENCE! _Whose magnificence-forging alchemical technique has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations! _CAPTAIN ALEX LOUIS ARMSTRONG OF THE JUSTICE MARINES, FORMERLY MAJOR OF THE AMESTRIAN MILITARY, THE STRONGARM ALCHEMIST, HERE AT YOUR SERVICE!_"

He bowed in a courtly old-fashioned way; body bent at waist level, one foot dipped back and arms spread wide, and it was clear that his hands were encased in lethal steel; he wore a set of massive gauntlets with holes for his fingers and massive spikes on the knuckles, with a transmutation matrix on the back. Morte didn't recognize the specific symbolic equations, but there seemed to be a theme of creation in destruction, earth-themed shapes and general bombastic-ness. More sparkles happened.

"...What the fook?" Morte said; he'd been around a long time to have seen some weird stuff, but seeing something like _that_ still freaked him out.

"Yeah, we all feel that way about him," Kim muttered. "Don't let it on though, he's sensitive."

"Hrm? What was that?" Captain Armstrong said. The robot squeaked. "Ah, yes, my friend tells me that you were warning this person not to voice imprecations on my sanity! Rather pointless, since I now know of said imprecations!"

"...Seriously? That thing just squeaked at you, how the hells do you 'know' what it's saying?" Morte muttered. "I knew a guy like you. Crazy-ass ranger who thought his companion hamster was a miniature giant space hamster. Always yelling random stuff you'd expect from a _paladin_. Had a sweet tattoo, though. Either that or a permenant fingerpaint thing."

The robot squeaked dolefully. Morte thought he seemed faintly familiar. "By Jove, you're right!" Captain Armstrong said. "He _is _rather quiet when he voices those comments, isn't he? Keeping himself quiet so that he can voice rude comments without letting anyone know! Or is it something else entirely; perhaps we are dealing with a devious fiend plotting evil schemes upon our town! Shame on you if you are; it's not bad enough that we have so many of those already, but so soon after this atrocity! That's not just evil, that is _UTTERLY TACTLESS._ So, what are you muttering about down there!" The man loomed over Morte, flexing ominously. "THAT'S VERY SUSPICIOUS!"

Morte hovered away. "Oh, crap-baskets."

"Calm down, Captain Armstrong," Kim said placatingly. "He's not plotting anything, he's just an opinionated jerk."

"Wow, _thanks_," Morte said sarcastically. "You're the best character witness ever."

"I try." Kim returned to Armstrong, who was slightly mollified by her assurences but kept giving Morte stern looks. "What is it you're doing here, sir? Isn't there morale raising you could do?"

"Ah, but that has already been accomplished beyond my most exuberent hopes!" Armstrong declared. "I need not return to the task, for my manly method of total masculinity have already inspired them beyond limits that even my immense reserves of heroism can hope to exceed! I can hardly imagine how, though, I was not even halfway through my list of specially forumated heroic poses to raise morale and induce great _VIGOR _in the men and women and unaffiliated genders! They were so invigorated they ran off in a hurry to their tasks! They even insisted many times that they could stomach no more further enthusiasm! I pushed them to their absolute limits! I am _SO PROUD OF THEM. _Alas, but for the possibility of pushing them _beyond _those limits, but not all are made of the same sturdy and _MANLY _materials of those of the Armstrong line!"

"Ah, you mean like your sister, Missus Olivier in the Council?" Kim said brightly.

Armstrong paused. "...Yes. Yes she is. Made of far sturdier materials that mortal men shudder to think of in competition with their own masculinity. Ah, some people simply can't handle a bit of competition." The moose squeaked. "No, I am not avoiding the fact that my sister invariably pounds me to a mere shell of myself whenever we spare." Squeak. "And I am certainly not ignoring everything you're actually saying and attributing my own defensive thoughts to your statements. And I am also not pretending that you agree with everything I say!" Squeak. "And I shall pretend I didn't hear that!" He frowned. "Now what was I talking about again?"

"The reason you're in here, specifically."

"Ah, yes." Armstrong gave the tent a sad and forlorn look. "How...how very tragic this all is." He sniffled once or twice, and Morte thought he was going to sit down and sob out his existential grief like a man. Armstrong managed to contain himself, though. "I...regret that it came to this. I only wish that I had been able to join the manhunt for Kimblee and bring him to justice for his many cruel deeds, but if I can assist reconstruction..." his shoulders rose and fell, a simple slightly sad shrug, as if to say 'that is all right with me'. He then indicated the moose-thing. "I encoutered this jolly fellow during my round of inspecting the volunteers. An unusual case; no one could identify him, though he apparently came in with your group from the news studio event. And Miss Coco vouches for him, it seems. Quite lovely that she found a romance for herself, at last! Truly, _everyone _can meet someone suited to them and know love in all it's splendor!"

Morte made a gagging noise. Kim frowned. "Wait, he was with us? I don't recognize him..."

Morte did, though. "Hey, wait a tick! That's the little moose-thing that was tagging along with the boss-man ever since we made that run down to Foster's!"

Kim blinked. "Wait, really? He's a friend of Zim's?"

"Hrm?" Armstrong said. "You are familiar with this Minimoose, fellow, then? I was hoping I could locate his comrades; he seemed a bit lost out there, without direction or purpose! Floating about, all by his lonesome..."

"He's some kind of sidekick of the leader-guy on my crew," Morte explained. "You remember the broadcast we sent out earlier?" Armstrong nodded. "Remember the crazy green guy?" Another nod. "That's the guy."

Armstrong's eyes widened. "Ah, I see now! But then why was he with you?"

"I dunno. Guess he felt he was better off sticking with us. If the Boss didn't like that or even noticed he left, he didn't say anything about it. Or told him to go with us when no one was looking."

"Well, that makes a degree of sense then," Armstrong said genially. "And if he is a companion of the man assisting in the battle against that disgrace to all alchemy, than I for one certainly value his presence here." Minimoose squeaked indifferently. "Why yes, thank you, I _am _quite proud of my hair curl. This distinctive manner of honorably curled hair has been _passed down the Armstrong line for generations!_"

Morte ignored him. The sanest solution seemed to filter out the more grandiose Captain Armstrong kept saying. "Come to think of it, he _was _tagging along with the Boss back before we skipped the place for our own good. Didn't do much. Guess we just forgot about him after a while." Minimoose glared at him and squeaked warningly. Morte rolled one eye slightly, rather like he was raising an eyebrow. The two stared at each other. Minimoose was the first to back down, though Morte wasn't sure if he was conceding or had just lost interest. "Suppose he came with us and, again, no one noticed him. Quiet little guy. Wonder what he was doing around here, then?"

"Probably didn't think he could do much," Kim suggested. "No big deal, anyway. But I do wonder what he was doing squeaking at people?"

"I gathered that he was attempting to obtain some information on how normal reconstruction procedure went. He seemed quite fascinated," Captain Armstrong said. "And he is with this 'Boss' of yours? Zim, did you say his name was? Fascinating fellow, I would like to speak with him. I admire the cut of his 'jibe', as they say!"

"No one says that. Never say that again," Morte said flatly.

Armstrong bowed his head, abashed. Minimoose squeaked worryingly. "Have no fear," Captain Armstrong said soothingly. "I am sure he will perform admirably. Such battles as this are commonplace in this town!"

"And the constant explosions we've been hearing? And the two or so big explosions?" Morte cut in.

Armstrong's good cheer faltered somewhat. "...Those are somewhat rarer," He admitted. He looked around the room and sadly added, "As is this level of...casualties."

"Yeah," Kim said quietly, her general upbeat optimism diminished. Both the adventurer and the Justice Marine captain were silent for a moment, both respectful and afraid.

Morte felt like a jerk. "Ah, come on," he said, trying to lighten the mood and not look at the almost-corpses. "I bet you anything that the next big explosion is from my crew and this big group we set ourselves up with! Beating down this Kimblee berk and whatnot. Blowing up Heartless, it's all good."

Captain Armstrong gave him a pentrating look quite at odds with his attitude. "You truly think so?" He asked, interested.

"Sure. I haven't been for these guys for even a full day yet and I've already gotten that they're _really _into making a big mess of their enemies wherever they go. Which admittedly is just this one district, but it still counts. Trust me: next explosion will be a good thing."

Kim opened her mouth to respond. Minimoose froze up and squeaked frantically, spinning around and looking outside. "Hrm?" Captain Armstrong said. "Your instruments are picking up a great deal of energy?" More squeaking. "Even more than that being discharged over the past twenty minutes?"

Morte had a greater concern. "The hell's that light?" He asked, noticing a distant light filtering through the fabric of the tent and shining so brightly every corner of it was illuminated, the dusty scars and cleaned remnants of Kimblee's actions on these people softened in it's radiance. "Feels..._weird_."

Kim gasped, very softly, her eyes wide and her body going very still. "Oh, my stars and garters," Armstrong said, hushed as a child at their first fireworks display. Minimoose glanced at him, squeaking and saying '_you wear garters'_? Neither of them answered him and he peeped in disgruntlement.

The light flashed brighter, and the noises outside the tent ceased, as what was surely every single person working, patrolling or just hanging around in the vincinity of Foster's ruins stopped just long enough to stare at the light streaming up more than halfway across the First District. The air shifted, the atmosphere changing, and while Morte was no mage (harboring a touch of dislike for it in fact, a common reaction after being looked down on by wizards as a 'brutish fighter, a meat shield that didn't even have meat'), he knew magic when he saw it.

This wasn't magic, at least not arcane workings of the hidden sciences of the multiverse. This was...Morte had absolutely no idea what this was, but he had tasted the shock of positive energy-infused power surging through a place, felt the warmth of _Goodness _infused into will and sent streaking down from the Upper Planes to heal the suffering and cleanse evil's taint, and seen the workings of true belief-summoned miracles with his own eyes. This was magic, yes, and it felt like _divine _magic to him.

Morte supposed he should have been paying more attention to the Keyblade's specific magical functions.

Potential and reality crashed into each other and the light turned green, a radiant and glorious collection of shades ranging from purest viridian to respledent emerald to frequencies that were almost blue and some nearly a yellow that looked like soft gold spun into lightning cracking the sky, and then _something _hit them like a shockwave, a barely visible green ripple ruffling the sides of the tent and giving Kim and Armstrong a bad scare, but Morte felt the movements of something _huge _stirring somewhere, but could hardly notice that compared to the way the very fabric of the tent was infused with a greenness that was the apothesis of all green, and even then he distinctly felt something like over a hundred people in sudden motion, the green light centering around the still bodies of the soul-stolen victims of the Philosopher's Stone and glowing so brightly they looked like bundles of light, sharply defined and still infinite in their scope, a constrast that hurt his brain thinking about it.

One by one, the glowing lights diffused, bodies glowing a few moments more before they all simultaneously started, as if something vital inside them had moved back in, the place still tinted with a faint shade of green that reminded Morte achingly of the glories of the Olympian Glades of Arborea, his memories instantly bringing up island-sized trees converted into cities and titanic buildings flying across the sky filled to the brim with generational parties and fey spirits of chaos born of goodness just flying around and hanging out with people, and above it all the certain knowledge that you were in a place that was _right _and _good._ Right here and now, though, Morte was irresitably bound to realize that the bodies were twitching slightly, fingers curling, eyelids flickering...

Several dozen rasping breathes were exhaled, and fresher quantities of air sucked in. Stretchers and makeshift bunks creaked as suddenly very alive bodies gradually and haltingly moved, sat up or otherwise got up in some manner or another. One by one, right in front of the _very _astonished Morte, Captain Armstrong, Kim and Minimoose, people whose souls had been stolen by Kimblee and left for dead were getting back up, still shocked into silence and looking around; some staring with frank bewilderment at their surrondings, some still fresh enough from their experience to be bouncing in their beds for the novel glee of _feeling _again, a few staring blankly in mildly puzzled glee for some reason, and while a few were hardy enough to be sufficiently recovered to be analyzing themselves and checking their bodies for damage, most were incredibly confused and relieved at the same time.

People began to speak, the whispers and surprised statements and incoherent babble coming in starts and bits at first, but then Morte abruptly realized just how insanely crowded it was in the tent when they all started talking at the same time, the din rising to a thick hammer upon the hearing organs (not that he needed any) from all the people yelling and shouting over each other. At least six different sets of lovers and friends caught sight of their counterparts and burst out of their beds and ran sobbing for each other, getting their clothes tangled in their stretchers and dragging them with them, knocking over _other _stretchers with their occupants still in them and dragging them along, their complaints and furious promises of retribution totally ignored. A few people fell out of their stretchers for other reasons, being a little too enthusiastic about being alive again and stimming their ways right onto the ground.

"They did it," Kim said faintly, although no one heard her but it was still vital for posterity. "They actually _did _it!"

"My God," Captain Armstrong said. "They're not dead. _They're not dead! THEY LIVE AGAIN!_" He abruptly burst into inelegant sobbing, so struck by the emotional moment he grabbed Kim in a mighty bear-hug. "_I AM SO MOVED!_"

"OH GOD THERE GOES MY SPINE," Kim squealed.

"Holy crap, I was _right!_" Morte said. "An explosion really did fix everything!"

"Vot ze hell are ye talkin' about?" Andre said, sitting up and looking totally unbothered from recently returning to fleshyness after about twenty minutes or so as a disembodied spirit in a realm of pain. "Vait, why am Hy in ze hosh-pital place? Hy feel itchy and want to hit things zat are red."

"Ow," Captain Razor said, clapping his hands over his ears. "Shut up that noise, I just got back from being technically dead, I don't need hearing damage!"

"What they said," Freya said belatedly. She rubbed her forehead. "Oh dear Lord, that was...extremely unpleasant to live through..."

"Whiner!" Andre said. Freya punched him in the face. "Hah! Now _dat's _vot Hy'm talking about, voman!" She punched him again.

"Oh God, I don't feel good," Bonnie said, looking distinctly ill and clutching her stomach.

"What the hell do you have to complain about?" Morte asked her. "You just got back from being dead."

She shook her head. "I don't know..." She blinked, noticing Kim. She opened her mouth to deliver an invective. A glimmer of the light's good feelings stirred and she closed her mouth, simply not feeling the old bitterness as closely as she once had. She shook her head again, looking deeply confused but strangely happy. Also, less sick. "Huh. I feel weird."

"_THIS IS SUCH EXCELLENT NEWS AS I HAVE NOT HEARD SINCE SCAR VOWED TO ABANDON HIS WAYS OF VENGEANCE AND JOINED OUR FOLD!_" Captain Armstrong, somehow drowning out the other voices with his sheer volume and emotion, shouted. "_MY HEART'S MIGHTY EMOTIONS KNOW NO BOUNDS! COME, WE MUST EXPERIENCE THE YOUTH OF OUR HEARTS, FOR I CALL FOR A GROUP HUG FOR ALL!"_

Every single person there was silent. "Er, what?" A grouchy human doctor named Cox said, looking horrified at the notion.

"_IT MUST BE HUG TIMES NOW!_" Armstrong bellowed, falling upon them and grappling them in the mightiest hug he could muster, tears falling from his face as he scooped up Freya, Andre, Razor and Bonnie (since they were closest) and hugged as mightily as he could hug. The sounds of their bones creaking was alarmingly loud.

"OH GOD, THE PAIN!" Kim said. On the bright side, her spine popped back into place.

"Cyborg parts...grinding on non-cyborg parts!" Razor howled. "WHY, GOD, WHY!"

"WHY ISN'T THIS AGAINST REGULATIONS!" Freya demanded.

Bonnie said nothing, for she was smothering between Armstrong's bulk and everyone else. She managed some loud whimpering, though.

"Bah, hyu call _zis _a hug?" Andre said, unimpressed. "It'z not a real hug onless dere's at least four hospitilzations and someone's arm goes missing and ve haff to call a blood fued on account of me eating somebody's hair!"

"A HAPPY ENDING! I AM SO HAPPY I HURT!" Armstrong said.

Morte considered that his happiness was hurting _other _people. The other people had caught onto this, and everyone who was physically capable of doing so jumped out of their beds and ran right out of the tent screaming like maniacs, dragging those unable to move to save them from the hugging horror of an overly emotional Alex Louis Armstrong.

He wisely sneaked away to follow them, only to be met by another blast of sound as the escaping crowd ran smack into the group of people that had been about to enter the tent to see what was going on, and consequently there ensued _more _excited hugging when people saw that so many people had just been re-ensouled again, and a small party broke out on the spot to celebrate the occasion even though Kimblee was still on the loose.

Morte quite eagerly joined the party, taking care to avoid Ron Stoppable as he showed up to wonder why his girlfriend was yelling for help only to be drawn into Armstrong's doom hug himself, wondering to himself how the hell these people had set up the party so fast (and the _police force _being the ones to set it up, too) but feeling pretty good about it all the same. He felt so good, in fact, that his self-doubting issues of earlier were all but forgotten.

The almost-dead people had been reensouled, apart from a few unfortunates (not that he cared too much about them, since he didn't actually know them), Kimblee had to be severely weakened for that to happen, and a good victory party was rolling. So, knowing as much about the ways of the multiverse as he did, Morte automatically knew that the battle with Kimblee was far from over.

He just hoped Zim and the others could finish it before the party broke up by the people who were already being boring and insisting they should get back to work on reconstruction and stuff. (Mostly the people who had just been ensouled, sadly enough.)

...

Kimblee was feeling several unpleasant experiences right now. Dust on his nice suit, settling on his skin and making things all messy. Blood in his mouth, and a foriegn taste he didn't like. His body aching all over, and a sense of something being horribly _wrong_. And worse: against even the war inside his head as bits of his psyche tore at each other like the world's most localized civil war, Kimblee was dimly aware that something had gone horribly wrong.

The screaming in his head was a fairly important sign.

Spots of green still blotted his vision, nearly but not quite as annoying as the persistent grinding aches pounding relentlessly at him like a whole-body toothache, all manner of horrible emotions and half-thoughts flickering across his mind faster than sand sifting through his fingers, swirling together in a gut-wrenching miasma and leaving his head fit to burst. More obnoxious still, he felt a familiar dripping moistening his clothing that had nothing to do with blood, and his free hand moved to a copious quantity of the red fluid that was most certainly not blood.

He raised his hand and stared at it a moment longer. It welled up, drops gathering together as thickly as syrup running together, and fell away with a thick splatter on the metal around him. The Umbral Heartless drank it up, for whatever reason, but they weren't terribly enthusiastic about it. He dropped his hand and stared blankly into the sky, where the spot of air where the Stone had just been floating before it had been unsealed was still tinged with remnants of green light.

Kimblee's mouth formed silent words. He didn't bother articulating them. The stone, he thought. The Stone was gone. All the effort he had put into it, all the hard work in decoding Jack Crowley's notes (and attendent sexuality-related trauma), the clandestine skulking to set up the transmutation circle, the damage he had taken while activing it, and all the pains he had suffered to keep the Stone...all of that was for nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

And yet that hardly seemed to matter, not with the things screaming behind his eyes. "No," he muttered. "That's...it is fine, I can handle this...they won that little victory, it simply makes my own victory better..." He hissed at the effort of just speaking. It _hurt_, nearly as much as trying to think in straight lines or breathe or do anything without thinking of that horrible, glorious, searing, beautiful light...

He tried not to think of it, not to think of anything except recapturing Jarod and killing people and getting the hell out of there (not explicitly in that order), but it weighed on him. It was hard to think of anything _except _that light, or more precisely, the..._things _he had seen. He glanced at his hands and shuddered, trying to think of anything except the brief hallucinatory sight of blood surging away from red-stained hands, which was an odd mental image because he'd rarely ever touched those he killed personally.

Blood on his hands. So much blood that he could have drowned himself in it a dozen times over. It was an amazingly vivid and persistent mental image.

He just couldn't stop looking at his hands. It was better then thinking about what that light had shown him. He moved uncomfortably, and the dank coolness of the Umbral Heartless rose around him, settling around him and supporting him, and at their touch, Kimblee's mind cleared up a bit, the troubling thoughts growing dimmer and faint. "I...I still don't..." He breathed in, out and repeated, visualizing himself expelling all the nasty self-defeating images. "Never mind that. Remember the directive. Cause chaos and spread destruction. I have done that already. I have succeeded; no matter what happens here, I have won." His lies were plainly transparent, even to himself, but he didn't care very much, it still made him feel a little bit better. And the Heartless' presence, like that of an unpredictable but currently loyal beast even though it would be as happy to eat him as his enemies, was comforting.

He started whistling to himself, recalling a cheerful tune he had sung in prison when he had been bored, and strength gradually poured into his body from the Heartless.

"What the zipwick is he being so cheerful about?" Zim wondered from where he was still sitting on the ground, giving Kimblee a deeply distrustful look.

"No idea," Aang said as he hurried over, bits of rock uprooting themselves as he passed. He grabbed Zim by the arm and helped him up, the Irken's feet too unsteady for him to stand for an unnervingly long moment. "Zim...what _was _that? What did you do? It was all..." He waved his hands around, trying to articulate it before he gave up and spread his arms wide. "That was _amazing_."

"Do tell," Zim grunted. "I've no idea what I did. I think...I think I just reversed whatever was keeping the souls in the Philosopher's Stone locked in there." He frowned. "Do you think they went back to their bodies?"

"If what the alchemy guys said is true, they'd be drawn back to their bodies once the Stone was destroyed," Aang assured him. "And they'd know, right?"

"...Good," Zim grunted, swaying on the spot. Aang summoned a wind to steady him, and when it touched his hands it _burned_. Zim screamed, and clutched his hands under the tattered remnants of his shirt.

Aang's eyes flashed. "What's wrong with your hands?"

"Nothing!" Zim tried to keep them hidden. "Just power backlash or something like that, it's no-"

Aang forced his hands out, grabbing him by the wrist and forcing his arm up. Zim pulled away instantly, but not quickly enough to hide the still warm and faintly smoking marks on his palm and further along his arms. The Airbender stared at him in horror. "...What _happened _to you up there?" He repeated, eyes wide. "Did you use a dangerous technique that's supposed to be forbidden and it burned you! That kind of thing never works out!"

"I don't know," Zim said honestly. "And it's not that big a deal anyway-"

"_You burned yourself!_" Aang shouted, attracting the attention of their allies, who'd been so stunned by the unsealing of the Philosopher's Stone they hadn't made a move to finish off Kimblee or do anything other than assisting Winry and Jarod off the ground.

"I can deal with that," Zim said disinterestedly. "The Stone's gone, the souls are back to their bodies (hopefully) and Kimblee's just sort of sitting there. Problem solved! You're just whining about details."

"It's not over," Aang insisted. "It's _never _that easy! And may I remind you that you burned yourself? You need to have that looked at. And how in the Storm's hammer did you burn yourself anyway?"

"Unimportant!" Zim said, but too late; several other people were now clustering around him, the rest of Team Avatar minus Zuko and Abel among them, and even Zim's ship was flying slightly closer so the rest of his crew could get a better look. And from the look of these other people, they had the same uncomfortable questions Aang did. Zim grimaced, resigning himself to the inevitable.

Roy, while he was growing inexplicably fonder of the schizophrenic little refugee, was more business-oriented then the others. Knowing the important thing was to make sure Kimblee was down for good before tending to anything else, he nodded at Greed, Scar, Gibbs and Angilaka. They glanced at the fallen Umbra Eternis, deceptievly still but the Heartless within it gradually getting more active, and as one they hurried over to it. Shego and Deadpool followed along, after a silent 'follow me' gesture from Greed.

The giant robot didn't get up when they got within striking distance of it, nor did Kimblee do more than stare sullenly at them. As they got within a few paces of it's feet, Roy muttered to his group, "Unless he's totally incapacitated, Kimblee's too dangerous to take any chances with. If he so much as blinks, kill him."

Shego nudged Deadpool. "Dude, the big bosses are giving us total kill permissions. This is the _best day ever_." She reconsidered after the dirty look Scar gave her and added, "Aside from all the death and destruction and devastation on a totally ludicrous scale and the abominable misuses of science meant for the benefit of mankind. Yeah."

"What she said," Deadpool said. "On that note, Gibbs-man! Gimme a gun! Like a rocket launcher! Or a mini-gun! Or a rocket launcher that shoots miniguns that fire rockets! Or a nail gun! Or a gun that shoots nails! Or a nail that summons guns that shoot nails that summon nail guns."

Gibbs said, "No, no, no, _no, _no, no, and _what_?"

"Hey, they're legitimate weapons. I know a guy in the Beach District. No questions asked, no passports required, and a special discount for quests of vengeance, espicially if you promise not to start killing random people and get all indiscriminate. That's a real problem sometimes."

"Who wants to vote to ignore him and focus on the bastard that mutilated my robot?" Greed said.

Everyone but Deadpool said, "_Aye!_"

Deadpool sulked. "It's a conspiracy, I tells ya."

"Right," Roy said. "So, everyone clear on the 'kill Kimblee if you need to' thing?"

"Understood, sir," Gibbs said, and six sniper rifles combined into a chain gun appeared from his shoulder, the absolute minimum required for his powers to manifest them.

"I call dibs on his suit!" Deadpool said. "Espicially if we shred it with like a million-trillion bullets. Shredded suits are _the _look in the Upper District this year, and you get two cool points for matching body armor and war wounds."

"I'm cool with it," Shego said, after Greed gave her a look.

"No problems here, man," Angilaka agreed. "Scar, you cool with this?"

"Killing him would accomplish everything we have promised on behalf our duties and that I have personally promised," Scar said after a tense personal moment. "As well as being tremendously satisfying to me personally. And yet..." He grimaced, jaw muscles tensing painfully and his hands slowly clenching and unclenching, longing to be around Kimblee's throat hard enough to give a final twist. "...It would be more appropiate to take him alive." He said slowly and with enormous reluctance, as if every word of that was like pulling meathooks out of his flesh and even more painful.

Roy gave him a sidelong look. "Yeah. It would be." He was silent for a moment, deeply surprised by hearing such a sentiment from _Scar _of all people, even with the deep sense of disgust evident on Scar's expression. "Well. Let's just see how this goes."

As they approaching Kimblee, preparing to open dialogue one last time with Kimblee, Shego said, "Say, with all us heavy hitters, shouldn't we be getting Abel up here too?"

"No," Scar said bluntly. Angilaka glanced back at the group behind them, where Abel was passively overlooking and quietly interjecting counter-arguments in a intense discussion of some kind with Zim and the rest, and she sighed in relief.

"Why? Things go bad, he can just rip Kimblee's head off. No exaggeration, either."

"Yes," Scar said patiently, as if overriding her sillyness. "But you miss the fact that Abel is very, very _stupid_." They stared at him. "What? You know he is. Stop staring at me like that. _YOU _try spending nearly every waking moment when he suddenly becomes severely codependant and confused about his sexuality and insists on being around all day long. Every day. For weeks and weeks on end, doing nothing but _blathering _on and on and _on _about the most incomprehensibly stupid things as they pass through his mind, abandoning and forgetting them as they come and no matter if you punch him in the mouth or stick a pillow in his face or blast his head off or shove him off a cliff or throw him into the jaws of a rancor he _just will not shut up_." Scar shuddered. "You have _no _idea how annoying he is...pray that you never do."

"...But what does that have to do with not having him face off with us against Kimblee?" Greed said.

Scar blinked. "What? Oh. That. That is because this is a situation that requires finesse, cool heads and _not _a rampaging zealot who may be just as liable to tear him in two for his sins as bring him in."

"But we brought you. And, for that matter, _Deadpool,_" Angilaka retorted. "Only he's minus the zealotry."

"Got me there," Deadpool said. "And replace the sins bit with 'if it'd be funny or if someone dared me'."

"Oh, just shut up and assume I know what I'm doing," Scar snapped, a vein pulsing in his forehead. "Abel's better off as back-up in the almost certain event this goes horribly wrong."

"Right," Roy said, anxious to finish the whole thing. "Let's all pretend we agree with you. Blah blah blah, Scar's right, whatever, it's done. Okay! Got bad guy dialogue to do." He stepped up near the Umbra Eternis and spoke up. "Kimblee! Listen up, will you?" Just in case, Shego powered up.

Kimblee stared at them, blinking heavily. "...I hear you," He said. He lazily waved a hand, indicating to get on with it.

"Surrender now or we'll beat the living hell out of you until you are incapable of independant movement and probably kill you in the process," Roy said flatly; while his every instinct as a heroic authority figure screamed to make a dramatic speech deconstructing Kimblee's flaws and illustrate how his diseased plan had always doomed to failure, and how the overwhelming strength of Traverse Town's military and citizenry would destroy every threat in their way, and something about how this was Kimblee's very last chance to survive the unspeakably brutal beatdown he was about to encur and he should surrender now to resolve things peacefully and at least survive, but Roy knew perfectly well that doing things like that just gave the enemy time to recover and resume the violence, and besides epic speeches would just encourage Kimblee to come up with one of his own and he _really _didn't want to hear more of the man's psychotic and admittedly intelligent thoughts. (Granted, his comments during the Ishbal Extermination Campaign had forced Roy to see the atrocities he was commiting for what they were and there would _never _be any excuses for his orders and eventually dedicating his life to atonement for his war crimes, but he was _never _going to admit to anyone that the crux of his life's goals had come from the cynical philosophy of a psychopathic he was currently fighting.)

Kimblee raised an eyebrow very slightly. Gibbs raised his sniper chain gun, locking onto Kimblee's head; the slightest movement from him would unleash a barrage of precisely targeted bullets and blow up Kimblee's skull. Shego's hands glowed with green fire, ready to be focused into a laser that could burn a hole through his skull. Deadpool got a sub-machine gun Gibbs reluctantly produced fro him. Greed armored up, and cracked his knuckles. Angilaka picked up Greed, holding him overhead like he was a throwing weapon. Roy held his fingers up, ready to snap them and incinerate Kimblee. "Ah. _That _sort of situation." Kimblee seemed distracted, probably by the Stone's recent cessation of existence.

Behind Roy, Scar's silence was like a beast, crouching and so tense you could feel it just _screaming _to unwind and kill it's hated enemy. "What do you say?" Roy said, raising his glove for one more blast. "Make it easy on yourself for once. Besides...I wouldn't want to damage the robot much more. I could use it for military research."

Kimblee stared at him. His brow furrowed. "_Excuse _me?" he said, going slightly red in the face and fists clenching. A vein in Kimblee's head twitched. Already, the offending (_illuminating) _thoughts had grown harder to recall clearly, and since he wasn't trying to remember them at all, his mind was gradually refocusing itself into what was, if not crystal-clear clarity, at least suitably translucent straight-forwardness.

He still had his mission: destroy as much as he could, sow chaos and discord, and then get the hell out of there before he got killed. (That last part was more or less unspoken, and Kimblee supposed it wasn't that important.) Right here and now, several of his enemies were at hand; out-gunning him, true, but that wasn't so terrible. If anything, it just made things nicely dramatic.

He debated whether or not he should pretend to surrender; it would put him in an ideal place to strike, but on the other hand they wouldn't be so stupid as to allow him to retain the transmutation circles on his palms or give him any means of blowing stuff up. And they would be _certain _to make him suffer for their indignities...

And yet, the most galling thing was the thought of his Umbra Eternis being reverse-engineered by them. Fury rising at the notion, he tilted his head and saw that they were losing patience. He had to make a decision _now_, or they'd kill him on general principle. Perhaps he could manipulate them, say just the right thing to make them hesitate or instill a bit of dissension in their ranks that he could exploit. He looked around, realizing that this group was _far _too small and the others had to be close by, and saw the ship that had rammed him earlier, floating above a larger group that seemed in the middle of a loud argument (something about burns and dangerous magical artifacts that was probably cursed or something like that) and he thought about blasting them while they were unoccupied; it would make an excellent distraction and make Roy and Scar (and those other two he didn't care about) freeze up just long enough for him to charge off and make for his getaway. While he didn't _mind _dying, exactly, he didn't see it as the most favorable outcome. Leaving this place, getting to the place where Deidara had told him a getaway ship was waiting for him..._that _was the most favorable outcome.

But it was so hard to think. Hard enough to move, hard enough to keep the whispering things between his ears from talking over his thoughts because it was begining harder to tell what _were _his thoughts and what were their insistent suggestions, whispers and thoughts blending together until he didn't even know what he was anymore.

Easier, he thought, to just kill everything in his path, and let the validation of his destiny overwhelm the treacherous speech of the voices in his head.

"We're only asking once!" Greed said bitingly, now sitting on Angilaka's shoulder because she was getting tired of holding him overhead. "Take it or die already!"

Kimblee ignored him, and he struggled to think of a plan. He considered the ship floating a good distance down the street; the very same ship that hadled to his current issues and was reasonably well-armed, and needed to be taken into consideration. Still, it was not an immediate threat or else it would have already fired on him. He took quick stock of those people near there, many of them having proven themselves to be considerably powerful, a few of them on the same level as the faction's heavy hitters, and at the lower end of that scale there was the subject of the apparent argument, that Zim person-

His thoughts froze, and reorganized themselves.

_Zim_. The same little insane alien who had, as far as Kimblee was concerned, had come completely out of nowhere to delay and disrupt his plans for no real reason. The same person who had proven himself a vastly irritating nuisance with very little potential for amusement, would simply not stop going off on random tangents that distracted Kimblee at hideously dangerous moments, had actually removed Jarod from Kimblee's custody, somehow destroyed the Philosopher's Stone when doing that was impossible without working with the damn things for years, _would just not die already_, and had even unleashed that-

Kimblee shut his eyes. He would _not _think of the light Zim had summoned in that last devastating attack. He did not dare to.

Rage and spite swelled from him like poison from the rotting carcass of a toxic horror and the Heartless feasted upon it, regaining some of their strength, and it flooded back to Kimblee, renewing his own strength, and then it finally seemed clear to him. Everything seemed clear: the importance of his mission, the need to _break _everything around him, and that Scar was a less pressing foe than the alien.

Fight the alien, he thought. Destroy him. Reclaim Jarod. Make this world pay for it's insults. Do the damage, and leave. Or else die in process. Either way, his mission would be _done_.

His path seemed clear. He smiled at the notion, like a man seeing the perfect and immaculate truth revealed to him in all it's resplendent glory, and the darkness poured loose from the Heartless, invisible and unnoticed. Yet more of it's hollow but all-consuming strength poured into him, one last surge for a final show of his conviction, some from within and more from the Heartless, and the frame of both the Umbra Eternis and Kimblee invisibly surged with that power. Metal was corroded, and flesh weakened by the ultimately destructive influence of the Heartless, and neither cared. Not when there was this last final chance to _win_.

Kimblee believed, in the end, that there were either orders or intent and that was all that mattered for deciding what to do, regardless of circumstances or personal inclination. He didn't mind what other people did, provided they did it according to their beliefs and pursued with all vigor, but just doing things because you thought you couldn't stomach otherwise was...well, he had no words for it, but the very idea repelled him.

These people did not follow that failing. For whatever their reasons, they _believed _in this town and in it's survival. Kimblee didn't know if surviving had simply become habit for them, if they had been subsumed into the chaos or they just liked life here, but the lengths they had gone to defending it impressed him. Just giving up now would be a poor repayment of such generosity of spirit.

Kimblee smiled as the renewed power flashed through him, through the machine-titan's mighty frame and stunned Roy, Scar, Greed, Shego, Angilaka and Deadpool for a few treacherously long moments. More than enough time, for what he needed.

If things could have turned out better, Roy and his group would have recovered from the shock of direct exposure to the elemental manifestion of the Heartless' darkness in time to counter the reactivated Umbra Eternis and finish it off before more harm could be done: they were tough enough to survive whatever it could initially dish out. They were strong enough to wear him down, and even kill him given enough time and inclination. And they were certainly determined enough to pull both previous statements off; they had their town to fight for, and an enemy that has something to believe in is far worse than a strictly mercenary one.

But Kimblee simply did not give them any chance to pull that off, and before they could recover from the stunning, he commanded the Umbra Eternis to get up, and it rolled to it's feet right through the building it had fallen in, parts of it clanking laborously but it still had the strength to pull itself up, grabbing handfuls of building and hauling itself back to it's full height, dented and damaged and hurting but still so capable of killing everything in sight. It growled, black fluid dripping from it's jaws like the ichor slick on it's ruptured wounds, and Kimblee drew on some of the residual energy the Heartless had absorbed from the Philosopher's Stone, circulated and refined it with a single clap of his hands. Scar's eyes widened as he fell back, recovering first. His hands landed on the ground, and without seconds to spare as punishing light flared from Kimblee in a shaped explosion, he transmuted the biggest and thickest shield he could around him and his allies. It had just finished curving towards them when the blast struck.

When the debris finished falling, the dust cloud had already thinned through, and they had not suffered so much damage that they had been killed or seriously hurt, but they _had _been blasted backwards, smashing into building walls and knocked silly by them. Only Greed was still conscious after the fact, and Scar managed a few hateful words and a matching glare at Kimblee before he collapsed. Greed climbed out, taking stock of the situation and hurrying to wake his fellow heavy-hitters up. The Umbra Eternis walked right past him, perceiving that they were no longer factors in the battle, and Kimblee gave them a passing glanc, and Scar a brief look. "...Another time, perhaps," he said regretfully.

It was done in seconds, far too quickly for the others to intervene and do anything about it. Once the massive form of the Umbra Eternis clanked it's way through the cloud of dust made by the blast, every single person still standing froze up, unwilling to believe that even after all the damage it had taken, all the firepower they had thrown at it and the mighty blast Zim had unleashed the stupid mecha and Kimblee _just wouldn't die_.

Still, most of them were expecting this to happen anyway, and reacted accordingly. "_BLAST HIM!_" Zim yelled, still under the impression that he was in charge of this mission, and no one cared to point out to him how the chain of command worked in this town (which still really amounted to 'do whatever you feel like unless it's evil or someone asks you to stop'), though if pressed they could just say later that it seemed like the obvious choice. Everyone opened fire as Zim suggested, moving to different parts of the street so they wouldn't all be taken out in the inevitable charge: Gaara and Naruto moved farthest up the street, Naruto producing clones that threw themselves in huge clusters and spun up Rasengans while Gaara flew up on a sandy cloud that Sokka hitched a ride up before he could fly away, Gaara creating gigantic spears of sand that he threw at Kimblee while Sokka fired his gun and tried to hit Kimblee.

Right behind them were the benders, riding on a platform the two Earthbenders had made: Toph ripped up the street under the Umbra Eternis, pulling up the ground to trip it up and pull it under so the earth's teeth could grind him to pulp, Aang casting down hammer-hard blasts of wind to knock it down. There was still plenty of water in the area, and Katara pulled it into a water whip she spun high overhead, letting it fall apart and freezing it into dense chunks of edged ice she launched at Kimblee, intending to skewer him directly.

Behind them, Cyborg stood his ground, a vanguard between the Umbra Eternis and Zim's group, now consisting of himself, Abel and, on a less awesome note, Winry and Jarod, who were hardly in any condition to fight: Winry had no weapons, and Jarod was barely conscious. Cyborg's shoulder-pauldrons opened up, tiny missiles sliding out as his on-board computers calculated trajectories and fired them while he fired sonic beams from the cannons both his hands had transformed into, a dozen other weapon systems transforming from parts of him and attacking all at once. Abel summoned electricity through him and fired it at Kimblee, and most of all Zim picked up the Keyblade, his hands stinging even through the bandages Katara had put on him during the little argument Kimblee had interrupted, drew up enough of it's power to feel his hands ache and transformed it into flames that spread away from him like the wings of an awakening dragon, spreading out over the width of the street, and even feeling as dizzy as he did doing that, he forced it outwards as an unstable artillery strike aimed right at the Umbra Eternis.

And last of all was Zim's ship; though slow to move, and slower to reach it's speed (at least without risk of hurting the others), it was still armored and equipped with powerful weapons designed to be used against ship's of it's own caliber and not ground-level combat. The Umbra Eternis, being a giant robot, was more or less the sort of thing it was suitable to fight, so Calvin and Zuko saw no real problems in firing the biggest salvos of power they could manage. It's cannons powered up and fired sustained green blasts at Kimblee, and even though they noticed the power levels going down sigificantly fast and drastically, they didn't mind too much, not suspecting that perhaps this round wouldn't go so well.

It was a formiddable group. Kimblee felt flattered; either he had carved his fate such that he was destined to fight such admirably powerful opponents, or this town's survivors were a lot stronger than his intel suggested. Or perhaps, he mused, adversity brought out the best in them. He applauded their tenacity either way, and the Umbra Eternis just wanted to fight: as it started to speed up to meet the oncoming attacks, it opened it's crippled jaws wide, clanking desperately for a few moments before they opened wide enough for it's vocal synthesizers to activate and unleash a mad scream, escalating up the audible register and quickly inaudible except as a distortion more correctly recognized spiritually than anything as ordinary as with the senses; the challenging warcry of an infernal monster declaring that it had already begun it's own apocalypse...whether that of itself or it's enemies was of no consequence.

It would either die or it would make others die. Both would silence the pain carved into it's psuedo-mind.

The attacks came, and the Umbra Eternis dodged them as best as they could, no longer as confident in it's armor as it had been, running down the street and aiming itself at Zim. The shots from the ship came first, and if they hit Kimblee might have been taken out or at least seriously hurt, but unfortunately the Umbra Eternis dared to make a leap and narrowly avoided getting hit, the explosion launching it far enough to land on it's feet and skid before it got back to it's feet and started charging, running right into the Rasengan-bearing Naruto clones. They smashed into the Umbra Eternis, releasing their swirling spheres of masterfully concentrated energy like miniture hurricanes. One Rasengan could kill an ordinary man and do enormous collateral damage, and these multiple Rasengans managed to actually knock the Umbra Eternis around and dented the frame of one arm rather drastically, blasting the thing back a few giant paces. A small hit, given the scale, but it was enough to render it absolutely furious and crush the clones in a single move. That was too much time spent standing still, and Gaara's giant spears and Sokka's gunfire came at it. The machine-titan simply took the blasts head-on, but that wasn't the same as saying that the plan was fool-proof and Kimblee still got hit by several shots that burned right through him, and when the Umbra Eternis arrogantly tried to destroy a sand spear with a single punch, the spear exploded harmlessly into sand and reformed as several dozen smaller spears, sharp and jagged lengths, and moved like they were homing in on Kimblee (or, more likely, were being guarded by Gaara), and only by wrapping it's arms around Kimblee and charging through was Kimblee prevented from being skewered or shot anymore, and he still had some tiny spears piercing through his arm and some holes in him from some of Sokka's hits.

It then found itself smashing into a portion of the street Toph had made shallow and crumbly. Remembering what had happened the last time someone had messed with the street under it's feet, it jumped back but still had a foot sinking in. Trying to pull it out, it got hammered hard by Aang's wind-blast, buckling backwards, mechanisms grinding and pushing to the breaking point and for a few pistons in it's shoulder breaking completely. Bits of it's mechanisms fell to the ground, uncannily like strips of it's own muscles torn from the stress of battle. Ice crashed into the damaged shoulder, knocking it sideways and pushing it perilously close to falling into what could well be another pit. Trying to ignore the pain in the shoulder, it was faced with the different problem of a massive rock bigger than the Umbra Eternis itself, torn out of the street by a combined effort from the increasingly desperate Aang and Toph and launched right into it's face. It jolted Kimblee, an awful bruise on his jawline, and he toppled into the weakened street and crashed through it, charging forward against as soon as his mecha's feet could hit the ground and charged through it, tearing through the street at street level, and a large laser cannon appearing from his back pointing backwards like a crude jetpack and blasted hard enough to give him a boost out of the pit and keep on charging.

Gaara flew back, Sokka shooting furiously as Kimblee from their sand cloud, and the sand ninja pulled the sand spears he had previously thrown (including the tiny ones in Kimblee, tearing free along with chunks of Kimblee), gathering all the sand together and forming it into massive grasping hands that he slammed into the Umbra Eternis, holding it back for just long enough for it's momentum to make the robot leave the ground for a few seconds. It surged forward a bit, some of the looser sand working it's way into gaps and seams in the robot's exterior, and held it there long enough for their other attacks to hit it: Zim's fireblast hit it in the chest, closely followed by Abel's lightning and Cyborg's multitude of technological destructiveness, a culmative effect so powerful the Umbra Eternis shuddered, the ground blowing apart around it as it slunk down, pulverized Umbral Heartless gushing from it's mouth and painting it's jaws black. It actually coughed, wheezing and snarling weakly.

"It's working!" Zim screamed. "_I knew it, I KNEW IT! _KEEP DOING THAT! KEEP HAMMERING IT DOWN, KEEP BLASTING IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, _BREAK IT DOWN TO ITTY-BITTY PIECES AND BREAK THOSE AND THEN BREAK __**HIM!**_ _ATTACK ATTACK __**ATTACK!**_"

"Got it!" Cyborg said, firing more and more mini-missiles and side-mounted lasers and salvos of rockets from his legs. He blinked, glanced at Zim as if horrified that he had been taking orders from him, and shook his head, returning to the fighting.

The Umbra Eternis struggled, wriggling in it's sandy cage even with all the damage done to it and, by proxy, Kimblee. It roared, more feebly than ever but it was still a roar, and perhaps only an echo of the rage building in Kimblee. Gaara was the first to realize that the fight was not quite as one-sided in their favor as they might have hoped: his dark-rimmed eyes widened as he felt the intense pressure being applied to his sand in too short a time for him to harden it properly. "Wait! I can't hold it-"

The Umbra Eternis roared again, jaw-affixing mechanism almost strained to the breaking point from the strain of how wide it's jaws opened, and flexed it's limbs with all the might remaining in it's Heartless-fueled body, tearing right through the sand limbs and slamming it's hands together with such power that it generated a shockwave that knocked a fresh wave of Naruto clones away, dispelling them and smashing the real one into a wall in a way that would have been seriously dangerous if Gaara hadn't cushioned his fall with a mass of sand at the last moment. Gaara pulled the sand away from the Umbra Eternis and funneled it around himself, forming it into spears, and before he could complete them the Umbra Eternis raised the gauntlet on it's more intact side, repulsor disc powering up and firing an intensely hot laser from it, not aimed at Gaara but at the sand he was using as a weapon, the resultant blast catching it and superheating it at once into a useless mass of liquid, raining down to the ground and sizzling horribly, and it was _extremely _fortunate that anyone under him had gotten out of the way before it fell down, or else it would have seriously hurt them at the very least. Gaara reconsidered a head-on attack and flew up, and the Umbra Eternis charged through again, plainly uninterested in that Gaara was flying away on his sand cloud, grabbing Naruto and flying him and Sokka to safety, circling around Kimblee and flying after him.

The Umbra Eternis stomped right through the mess it had made of Gaara's sand, it's feet pounding and lifting off with the red-hot liquid dripping from it's feet without anything more than a mild tingling sensation. The benders were the next in Kimblee's path and Katara, wanting to eliminate a potential battlefield threat, struck the liquified sand with a lash of water instilled with the deepest cold she could manage and snuffed it out, steam pouring up before she spun the water back and left a twisted bulk of craggy glass. While she was still circling the water whip back, though, the Umbra Eternis charged right past her, picking up some of it's earlier speed. It's left foot came within a few feet of stepping right on her, and when the huge hunk of metal moved right over her and kept going in a series of street-pounding bursts that knocked her off her feet, all she could do in the circumstances was ignore the fact that her heart seemed to have stopped beating for a few moments and throw her water at the mecha's hip and freeze it on impact, hurting restricting it's ability to run. It hopped and skipped a few steps before it realized that it's leg wasn't moving so well before it smashed the ice off, and even then it's leg wasn't moving quite right.

In the meantime, Zim's ship had finally gotten turned around and was again trying to ram Kimblee, but had lost too much power feeding into the propulsion field to turn itself around. "Die DIE DIE!" Calvin yelled, hammering the firing button and growing more incensed as nothing happened aside from a message informing them that there was insufficient power for that; an apparent safeguard in the system was that it refused to direct any power to non-essential systems when doing so would draw from the life support and flight systems. Useful, in normal circumstances, but not here. "Warrgh, _STUPID POWER LIMITERS!_ Why doesn't this ship have any normal ordnance! Why didn't she put any missiles in!"

"Why _would _she or Cyborg have put missiles in?" Hobbes pointed out. "Why in the world would they have given this thing that much firepower? Frankly, what they _did _put in for self-defense purposes is a bit much. Probably contravenes a few international peace treaties somewhere, and it's just as well that this place isn't a signatory to any of them."

"Stop being reasonable!" Calvin pounded his head against the dashboard. "Come on, you're a freaking genius. You've been touched by the wellspring of raw inspiration, you can make a working combat-worthy hoverbike from the stuff in the average garage, you can blow stuff up without even trying, you can warp reality with disproved theories and mechanisms, you can make this work for you! _Think!_"

And as stressed as he was, nothing came to mind. His head just spun with frustrated vengeance fantasies and the overriding need to do something. He pounded his head against the dashboard again, but in frustrated resignation. To his surprise, when he looked up, the power had increased a lot, but not enough to power the weapons. There was enough for acceleration, though. "Well, it worked for that same idiot that got me into this mess," He grumbled, sitting back up and putting his hands on the control throttles. "Full speed ahead!"

"Actually, I think it's more like semi-high speed in atmospheric conditions, but if you say so," Zuko said, pushing the drive-shift style speed control to a higher setting. The engines fired, and they were pulled slightly back from the inertia.

The Umbra Eternis, as was predicatable, was still smashing through everything in it's path right for Zim, though Zim and everyone else reasonably assumed that Kimblee was after Jarod again (which worried Jarod himself quite a lot). "Good thing that cat guy isn't here right now, or I'd be giving him a hearing problem again about now," Cyborg said, his forearm transforming into it's sonic cannon configuration again. He grimaced, knowing that even it's high-power yield wouldn't be enough for this, and sent a mental command that shut down his personal safety protocols, accessing his sonic cannon's maximum power settings, and resulted in his cannon growing larger, all of his arm sliding into it and reforming as additional components for it and making it into something like an seige cannon. Several small pistonlike objects slid out of his arm cannon's sides, and they just so happened to be his cannon's power limiter, preventing his cannon from reaching levels of sonic output that were hazardous to his safety. He didn't care about his safety with lives at stake, and he activated his cannon at all the power he had available, with the result of a massive blast of sonic energy that completely obliterated his arm up to the shoulder in a burst that threw him back until he crashed into a building far behind him while the same blast pulverized the street under it, cracked the walls around it like eggshells, and struck the Umbra Eternis hard enough to seriously damage some of the less safely shielded internal components (not that Kimblee knew too much about those), rattled a few of it's armor plates out of place, and most impressively with it's powerful arms braced over Kimblee for protection, still smashed Kimblee into the back of his own fuselage, several teeth knocked loose and blood streaming from his nose.

The Umbra Eternis skidded briefly, internally recoiling from the damage. It stood still for just long enough to make it clear that it had been genuinely hurt again, and in spite of that it kept moving...but not as fast as it had before. It was still moving, and on the other hand of the optimisim scale it had slowed down. A bit, anyway. Unfortunately, by this point it was upon Zim and Abel, and because those two were protecting Winry and Jarod, it was also upon Winry and Jarod, who had just escaped from the accursed thing and were none too happy about being that close to it again.

Zim was, though. "AT LAST!" He shouted happily, holding up the Keyblade and pulling energy from it and firing it out as a large fireball that nailed the Umbra Eternis in the eye. A pointless notion, because it had been blinded, but Zim was just happy to be fighting something. "WITH MY BARE HANDS I BREAK YOU! C'MERE AND FIGHT ALREADY!"

"Please stop taunting the homicidal maniac in a giant robot made of invincibility," Jarod pleaded weakly.

"Nope! Why would I want to do that?" Zim yelled. As in answer, the Umbra Eternis appeared in front of them, one of it's enormous claws pulled back for a punch. "Nope, still not going to take it back! Because this is going to be totally awesome. YES."

"Freaking lunatic," Winry muttered.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Zim replied.

"I doubt it would matter one way or the other," Abel said as Winry grabbed Jarod and made as if to run away. He held up a hand to caution her to hold on a moment as he charged up, glowing so bright Zim had to close his eyes and still saw flashes of whiteness, but the smell of burning ozone was much worse. A bolt of lightning blasted out from him, hitting the Umbra Eternis very suddenly in the shoulder, Abel's attack so large and uncontrolled that it was more like a beam and not a bolt (even though lightning didn't come in beams) and threw it backwards nearly as hard as Zim's ship-crash had done earlier. This time, though, Kimblee compensated for it and it spun in mid-air, smashing into the ground and shattering the ground under it into a large hole that it climbed out of, it's shoulder scorched by the heat of Abel's attack and some of the detailing _melted_. Any lesser metals would have been turned to slag instataneously, which said a lot about the amazing quality of the metals Kimblee had synthesized for this robot. It stood up shakily, bits of electricty still arcing through it's body and incinerating Heartless, shorting out improperly shielded mechanisms and generally playing merry hell with the electronics.

"I thought I made this thing non-conductive," Kimblee said, rubbing at a nasty scar on his shoulder from where he'd been leaning against the fuselage when the lightning had struck and superheated the metal. He stood up, trying to shrug it off, blissfully unaware of the ship flying towards him from behind, trailing by Gaara and his companions and about to visit horrible vengeance upon him.

That is, he wasn't _aware _of the ship exactly, but he certainly heard the noise it made. Aware that _something _was coming, he decided to make a try at being sensible and smashed through the building on his left, getting out of the way in time for Zim's ship to fly right past where he'd been. "_ZOG IT!_" Calvin screamed as the ship kept on flying, it's particular form of movement preventing him from steering it around to hit Kimblee or doing anything other than keep moving forward and tilt up to avoid hitting anything. Abel and Zim watched it go with a touch of disappointment, while Winry shouted at them, "HEY, GET BACK HERE! I'M THE PILOT PERSON HERE!" Jarod feebly indicated his own desire to be on the ship and out of there.

The Umbra Eternis stepped back out, confident of a lessened chance of ship-related doom, and turned just enough for Kimblee to notice a small sand cloud carrying a few people on it decelerating not quickly enough to slow down; it had been following in the ship's wake to sneak up on Kimblee, and that was totally spoiled since they'd been spotted. The Umbra Eternis almost lazily brought it's arm up high and then down, slapping the offending sand cloud; Gaara swept the sand up into a round ball around him, Naruto and Sokka, curling up together in midair and shielding them from being crushed, but they went bouncing along the street from the impact, narrowly missed hitting Katara and smacked right into Aang and Toph, bowling them over and still going.

Roy and the others had gotten up by this point. "Okay," he said, breathing heavily; he wasn't really superhuman aside from having access to advanced science that allowed him to develoup techniques that made him the equal of heavy artillery. "Okay, we got sucker-punched," he said to Greed, Scar, Angilaka, Shego, Gibbs and Deadpool as they ran down the street to catch up with Kimblee and resume their potential assasination resolution.

Of them, Greed was the only one fully recovered, followed by Angilaka due to her resilience. Shego and Gibbs were reasonably okay, given that Shego's metahuman status came with a degree of inhuman endurance, while Gibbs was just plain _tough_, for no reason relating to his powers. Deadpool was a regenerator, but he evidentally deemed it neccesary according to the laws of comedy to be more of a ditz than usual and act like he had a concussion. Scar...was Scar. He wasn't acting any more or less winded than usual, so Roy assumed he was just faking being okay to keep up the whole 'warrior-priest of Ishbal' mystique.

"Yep, sucker-punched," Greed said, Lin's voice chipping in. "_Again_. You guys suck!"

"Yeah, what would you do?" Deadpool retorted. "Swing a sword at him?"

"If Gibbs didn't give you any guns, you'd only have swords to use too," Lin said.

"...DAMN IT. I can't think of anything funny to say to that. Something about fish-tacos and 80s power metal? Nah, that doesn't work too well. But then 'Fish Tacos With 80s Power Metal' would make a cool name for a alternative rock band. And you have to do a guitar riff every time you say it. Someone get me a guitar! The muse speaks to me. LUCILLE, WHERE ARE YOU?"

Angilaka facepalmed. A poor decision, as she almost tripped right over Roy. "Hey, watch it!" He snapped. "We're supposed to be attacking Kimblee, not each other! And pay attention to the-"

"GIANT BOWLING BALL OF DOOM!" Gibbs said.

Roy blinked. "Wait, what? No, I meant the giant robot." He noticed the aforementioned giant bowling ball of doom coming right for them. "Oh. That. Yeah, that's a thing that's happening right now."

Scar slammed his hands to the ground, transmuting the street such that a number of large blockades rose above the ground under the bowling ball, breaking up it's momentum, causing it to violently decelerate before a particularly large bumb knocked it into the air. Angilaka rushed ahead and into it's path, her arms spread wide and catching the massive thing, almost being knocked over but just barely managing to stand her ground and deposit it on the ground, breathing heavily and looking serious sheepish. She gave it an experimental tap, and it cracked open to reveal a frantic Naruto and Sokka, and a totally stoic Gaara (but then he always looked like that).

"...Did you just say a non-sequiter instead of me? That's all kinds of weird," Deadpool said to Gibbs, while everyone else was puzzled about the weird circumstances before they got right back to the chase.

Oblivious to the drama behind him, the Umbra Eternis and Kimblee kept charging forward, but didn't go very far before another bolt of lightning hit the Umbra Eternis in the side, making his arm spasm uncontrollably and Kimblee scream as his back was burned, lying as he was against the metal as the lightning struck. "Stop right there, criminal scum!" Zim said while behind him Abel was still radiating electricity, and with his temper well and truly broken the ancient vampiric prist walked up to the Umbra Eternis in a disturbingly patient way, various metal objects - trash can lids, window frames torn loose from their walls, and similar things - orbiting around him and glowing with electrical surges. "If you have any other tricks up your vestments, I would advise you to employ them now!" Zim commanded Abel, keeping a wary eye on Winry and Jarod.

"Very well," Abel said. He kept walking, his shadow twisting unnaturally and expanding off the ground in a cloudy aura that twisted around him a few inches from his skin, completely covering him in a darkness that was somehow different than what the Heartless embodied. Zim, now overtaken by Abel and feeling that Abel was stealing the show, was in a good position to see the back part of Abel's armor shift as his back bulged, bubbles of flesh running down and abruptly expanding into, of all things, two massive wings that looked classically angelic; black and coated with even darker feathers, the wings somewhat larger than Abel and strangely ragged, until it was clear at closer examination that the 'feathers' were made as much of a odd organic metal generated from his body as they were of flesh or the same solidified dark matter swirling around him, formed into muscular tendrils and fleshy layers all wound together, all covered with more of the metallic substance Abel had extruded to make the feathers. His armor adapted to the wings, reshaping itself to cover them as well as possible without limiting Abel's mobility, stretching itself thin in the process.

"I...would have prefered to not have to do this," Abel said to Kimblee, holding his arm out. The armor around his forearm shifted aside, revealing that the clothing on his arm had been burned to tatters by the forces he'd been throwing around. His skin was alarmingly pale, like the skin of a dead thing, and powerfully muscled now, but more disturbingly the flesh rippled and surged, and blood tore free from his bared arm, surging around his hand and reshaping itself into a form that Zim couldn't determine; it was a mess of spirals and curves and hard lines and what looked bizarrely like fractals, and stranger still the blood was hardening into a solid shape that was growing taller than Abel, becoming a distinct form like it was being poured through a mould. And as soon as Zim had noticed this happening, the process was finished, and Abel's blood had shaped itself into a massive, ridiculously ornate scythe: it's business end was a mass of differingly shaped and sized blades that were culmatively a sharp mass nearly as long as Abel was tall, it bulged with disgustingly organic cords and chains, and the haft Abel held it by resembled a spinal cord. It remained the red of the blood it had been made from for a moment, and then the same process that had produced Abel's wings turned it an inky black identical to his freakish feathers, leaving him holding a vicious weapon made of a metal congealed from his own body. Abel held it over his shoulder and the air glinted blue around it's blades, so sharp that passing currents of air were sliced up, the constant air slices producing a blue glow.

Zim and Kimblee both stopped to stare at Abel as he flapped his wings once and took off into the air, flying straight at Kimblee, who only said, "Well. _That's _new."

"HURRY UP AND HIT HIM ALREADY!" Zim yelled. "Also, you should have done this transformation thing way earlier, that would have been totally awesome." He nodded at Winry and Jarod. "And you two go somewhere else."

"No, we were _so _going to jump right into the fight," Winry said, managing to hoist Jarod on her shoulder and dragging him with her, wtih some difficulty.

"Please don't say things like that, you're really tempting fate that way," Jarod remarked, voice wheezing with every other syllable.

The Umbra Eternis made as if to charge at the retreating humans. Abel's eyes narrowed under his helmet, and he slammed into the Umbra Eternis' front so hard that it was shoved backwards, too imbalanced to slap him away. Abel took advantage of this, electricity arcing around his wings as he generated another massive blast directly into the mechanisms of the machine-titan, overloading them so much that the servos in the right hips and the mechanical muscles in the left shoulder actually exploded, both parts of it's body going slack while smoke poured out.

And then, it was made clear to the rogue alchemist too late, Jarod and Winry had gone (having retreated into the nearby buildings and out of sight, but he didn't know that). He didn't have time to deal with it; he snapped back, burns appearing on the corrosponding parts of his own body, and even though he couldn't move the giant robot, the Heartless did it for him, moving it by themselves to punch Abel with a blow he flew around, only glancing a hit on him. It still hit hard, cracking his armor open, pulverizing his ribs into splinters and pulping a lungs even before he crashed off a fire escape and onto a rooftop. He roared like a monster, voice grating and oscillating in a odd amount of ranges, and flapped his wings to shed a controlled burst of lightning into the arm that had struck him, striking around the metal and frying the Heartless animating it, putrid lumps of black goo crisp on the metal when the electricty stopped crackling.

The Umbra Eternis recoiled, pulling back and flexing it's arm in apparent pain, it's once constant growls subsiding into a flat clicking that approximated surprisingly pitiable whimpers. Kimblee frowned at Abel, realizing that he was more of a threat than anticipated, and forgotting all about Zim or catching Jarod or complaining at Winry for not telling him she was engaged, he bade the Umbra Eternis at Abel, and the machine-titan reluctantly complied, like a rabid attack dog being commanded to go after a very territorial wolf. Even as it charged (and it wasn't that far in the first place), Abel was already standing back up, his body contorting horribly as it literally ate itself from the inside-out, absorbing the damaged parts and regenerating them in moments in the most horrifying way possible.

Abel flexed about for a moment or two, until he was healed enough to satisfy his ability to do battle, and once he felt himself satisfactory he made a gesture at himself and his armor was magnetically pulled back into working order around him, the dents smoothing themselves out and the metal affixing itself properly to his frame. He said nothing but focused on Kimblee again, his wings flaring out and generating another bolt of lightning. Kimblee saw it coming and the Umbra Eternis summoning a laser cannon from it's shoulder, and opened fire as it took the lightning bolt with a whining grunt. It's laser blast hit the foundations of the building Abel was on, blowing it into halves and surprising Abel, breaking through his guard at least long enough for the Umbra Eternis to rush in and grab him, the claws of it's left gauntlet lashing around him in mid-air and smashing him into a building, dazing him, and then it squeezed. Abel howled, with a sastifying cracking noise, and Kimblee grinned as he he felt the transmitted sensation of blood and bone cracking in his grasp, Abel's tough armor cracking like an eggshell and flesh puping through it. Not one to take risks, Kimblee powered up the repulsor beam and fired it with all he had, and with Abel in his grasp he had no chance of missing. The blast became a painfully bright hotspot in the middle of the neighborhood, and when it faded the claws glowed a faint white as the heat dissipated, and an unmoving heap lay in the machine-titan's grip, still holding a scythe that was, disturbingly, pretty much unharmed.

Not wanting to take any chances, he squeezed again, intending to smash the electrokinetic vampire to pulp...only for his robot's fingers to refuse to move dispite his willing them to, as if the metal had been frozen or was being controlled. Kimblee had little time to consider this, as Abel smashed loose, his incredible strength doing so with little effort, pushing one of those massive fingers out of his path and winded his scythe back, it's bladed edges catching a seam in the machine-titan's claws: because the seam was _precisely _between the mechanisms of the finger and the tougher armor plating, it was nowhere near as tough as the rest of it, and Abel, simply trying to retrieve his scythe, didn't even realize this when he pulled his scythe up and sliced through those mechanisms, severing that finger. He was fairly pleased, though.

Kimblee grabbed his hand and howled, feeling like his own finger had been cut away. Abel's eerily calm expression gave way to an utterly terrifying grin, his teeth like a locked bear trap, and wound his scythe back, the pole elongating until it was more than twelve feet long, and then he smashed his scythe into the Umbra Eternis' forearm so hard that the nearly indestructible metal was still dented fairly deeply, and left nasty scoring where he had struck it. He pulled his scythe back and he struck again, and again, increasing the power of each successive blow until the air itself was pounded by his strength, shockwaves tearing around the Umbra Eternis and scarring the nearby surfaces. Lightning roared around Abel as his attacks came faster and faster, Kimblee's merely human eyes insufficient to see his speed, and to him Abel had become a blur outlined in both vibrant darkness and perpetual flashes of lightning.

"How can you even be using that?" Kimblee yelled, his arm going weak as his free hand reached out, and the Umbra Eternis swatted Abel aside with the corrosponding arm. "_The element of Darkness does not work in direct sunlight!_"

Abel chuckled as he let himself get hit, the sound wet and wild and totally unlike anything the normal Abel would have said. "We use different definitions of darkness." Even as he said this, though, he had to flare up his own shadowy aura (presently solely to protect his wings and scythe from being harmed by the sunlight; as a vampire vulnerable to the sunlight in his current state, if they were exposed directly he would be totally defenseless and in great danger, perhaps at risk of explosions) to keep up with the increasingly strong sunlight as the barrier Kimblee had made earlier was being worn away by passing time. He flapped his wings, halting his trajectory, and flew back to the arm that had hit him, the hand spread wide as it charged up another blast.

Zim, patiently waiting for what seemed like a good and opportune moment, readied the Keyblade. He grinned, a warrior fully in his element.

Annoyed with those interruptions, Abel powered up with electricity again and channeled it into his scythe as he swung the blades right into the disc-shaped repulsor casing, releasing a massive surge of electricity and blowing the repulsor apart, several smaller explosions throughout the offending arm that knocked it back, trailing small broken parts behind it. Kimblee snarled, pulling it into a fist and swinging...not at Abel, as the vampiric priest noticed with alarm, but at Zim, who had gotten close for a sneak attack but ruined it by screaming like a lunatic because it sounded cool, now just in range to get crushed. Zim saw the fist coming and readied the Keyblade, totally confident he could parry the blow, possibly because he was totally out of touch with reality or because he was completely right but no one knew it yet.

Fortunately, the giant punch froze in mid-swing, as Abel's powers of magnetism just barely caught it, right before it would have hit Zim (and probably crushed him or at least hurt really very badly) and freezing it in place. Zim swung the Keyblade back, power crackling from it in random flashes of light that transformed everything it touched in interesting and benign ways, and slammed it against the hand so hard that the nearly indestructable metal _dented _from that single blow, and light erupted from the Keyblade in another flaring blast, knocking the arm away and the Umbral Heartless boiling in their material cage, every movement from the giant robot slower and weaker. "Do something magnet-y to it!," Zim shouted at Abel. "Rip the arm off or something!" Abel looked at him for a moment, awed by the Key's light, and then at the arm to focus on the metal. He couldn't manipulate the metal - and he wasn't sure why - but the metal in _everything else _in that arm? That was fair game.

He concentrated on the skeletal frame and the muscle-patterned machines wired around it, the mechanisms that allowed it to move and automatically stabilized it and a dozen other minor things that were neccesary for the machine-titan to move it's arm at all, and none of those things were made from the irritatingly strong exoskeleton that made this giant robot so hard to hurt. He concentrated hard, pushing his power to the limits he had in his current state (limits that were imposed by himself, too), compressing and stretching and twisting the metal he had telekinetically taken hold of, and he finally just _pulled_.

The Umbra Eternis screamed like the damned, it's arm twisting and pulling away. Abel spent too much effort and accidentally propelled himself to an unfortunately far distance, his wings flapping uselessly...and yet he grinned victoriously nonetheless as the robot's arm, a source of much devastation and doom during the battle, tore almost completely away from the Umbra Eternis' shoulder, crippled as the parts connecting it to the shoulder shredded in the grip of Abel's magnetic pull before the arm snapped back, still just barely held together by the machine-titan's outer frame, twisting as much as it could with the restrictions of the exterior armor, and it was only because of that armor that Abel couldn't completely tear it away.

But yet the arm was rendered useless, it's size ensuring that it was little more than a massive source of dead weight and dangled uselessly from the machine-titan, pulling the Umbra Eternis off-stride as it tried to charge at Abel and instead tripped face-first into the ground again. It got up, stance awkward and weaker than ever. Kimblee himself blinked. "Strange," he said. "That was so incredibly painful I don't think my brain can even register it. Oh, wait, never mind, there it goes." His right arm twitched in phantom pain, skin turning into a collection of very interestingly nasty bruises. "Hurm. That is _amazingly _painful. I may have to do studies about it."

"You see? There's a bright side in this for you as well," Zim said cheerfully while he climbed up a building, vaulting over the top of it and spinning in midair to take advantage of Kimblee's distraction to swing the Keyblade and shoot a blade-shaped beam of fire at him. The Umbra Eternis reflexively stepped aside to take the fireball in it's armored side, and Zim caught sight of the weakened spot Kimblee had managed to patch up earlier. "Hey, I forgot about that bit right there."

"Please forget about it again," Kimblee said, commanding the Umbra Eternis to swing it's remaining arm and smash the building and Zim with it. Zim moved out of the way, bouncing off the wall of the adjacent building as the giant metal fist broke through the rooftop he had just been on, bouncing right back and spring-boarding off a broken piece of rooftop that came his way, but calculated incorrectly and wound up landing on the shin of the giant robot. Kimblee noticed and, remembering what had happened the last time Zim had managed to crawl up and face him directly, panicked. "No no _no NO_, not again! I will not permit that a second time!" He raised a massive foot and stomped it down as hard as he could over Zim, after stumbling a few times due to the Umbra Eternis' body shape making it a bit awkward.

He missed, and by then Zim was already climbing up past the foot, bringing the Keblade to bear upon the Umbra Eternis with the same fury as before, contrails of light flying away with the reckless abandon of a guy who had no idea what he was doing but was having too much fun to care that his hands were begining to burn anew. "Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself!" Zim said childishly.

"That doesn't make any sense, _you _are the one attacking me," Kimblee pointed out even through the constant flashes and pain.

"Untrue! You have brought this upon yourself! Hah, see what I did there? That is what is known in the common parlance as a 'burn', or else a 'slam'. I'm saying that correctly, right? If I am doing so I may look foolish and that would be most inauspicious. And _now _I'm wondering what the hell I just said."

"Damn it all, do you _ever shut up!_"

"Not in my experience, no, not really."

Kimblee caught sight of Zim after a lucky twist-around, and Zim bounced off one piece of rubble and another, jumping back and striking with the Keyblade and making a localized explosion to blast him away, and then out of it's hand-range and then exploding himself _back _towards to keep doing that over and over again...

It was going pretty well right until he blasted himself right into it's had through sheer horrible luck. "I sense this was an error in judgement," Zim said, deceptively calm as the claws gripped tightly, pinning him against a cold and hard palm, sharp edges digging into his back. He wriggled nonetheless, and the rest of the fingers closed in, squeezing him so tightly he made a squeaking noise (his lungs being crushed, actually) and kept him immobilized and unable to wriggle free.

Frustration and irritation burned through Kimblee's reserve, much like the crimson life-containing fluids leaking from otherwise undamaged skin, faster and faster, and again he ignored this sign of his increasingly worse condition, or that Kevin's babble was getting louder, or that his body was getting slower to react, and quicker to fight against him. Focusing on what he considered to be the more pernitent problem, he brought Zim up to the fuselage so Kimblee could look him face-to-face again, and made _quite _sure that the insane alien was totally incapable of moving. "Hello," Kimblee said coldly.

"Hello," Zim said back. "Even though we're acquainted with each other. Yeah." Kimblee brought him slightly closer, putting their faces within a few inches of each other. "Whoa! You dare invade my personal space! It is making me profoundly uncomfortable! Also, you smell funny. Why did you make a giant robot without an air conditioner again? Oh, right, you never told me in the first place. Which is quite rude of you. Inquiring people may want to know!"

Kimblee ignored him, which was the usual response to Zim's cheerful rants. He just stared at Zim for a long moment, brow furrowed in concentration, and with the pain he was in - the culmative pain from the long fate, the strain of using the Philosopher's Stone and commanding the Umbra Eternis, the toxic side-effects of being around the Heartless too long, and now his own body backfiring and rejecting him as displayed by the red fluids similar to the substance he had previously been embodied in - it was an effort to focus at all. "You took something of mine," Kimblee said with unsettlingly pleasantness. "I must confess, I am intrigued. It took me so much time and effort and mental scars to find the means of creating that Stone, and then that was dwarfed by the effort it took to create it. I almost got killed multiple times, was ambushed repeatedly, had to fight atop a building while being attacked by a psychopathic super-soldier allied with a dragon-themed woman with a spear, a cyborg and a sizeshifter, and only barely managed to create that Stone with not even half the amount of lives I wanted. All that time and effort, and I had to put _more _into keeping your lot from taking it from me, and then, you make _all _of it completely meaningless by destroying in a moment what it took me nearly an hour to accomplish."

He finished, and a reply seemed expected. "Yes?" Zim said politely.

Kimblee said patiently, "And how do you think that makes me feel?"

Zim thought about it. "Upset?" He hazarded.

"Upset?" Kimblee repeated. "_Upset_? Hrmph, you disappoint me. I'm _impressed _that you accomplished so much, in spite of having absolutely nothing to do with me beforehand. You're a bit like a...a _giant flea_. That came in from space. Very unexpected, you know. I actually feel that a measure of congratulations are in order, so well done, I suppose." He shrugged indifferently. Zim stared at him, bewildered. "What?" Kimblee said, his face undergoing a series of odd contortions. "I doubt it will make a considerable difference in the long run. With my giant robot I'm still vastly superior to you, I have my normal alchemy to rely upon, and the whole attempt to retrieve the Stone from me was quite enjoyable apart from the horrible injuries. You have acquited yourself well, even with absconding with Jarod. Very nicely done."

"Right, I have much pride in myself. Might you consider putting me down and surrendering or something like that?" Zim said. "I'm not much for the cliches like that but Aang would be mad if I didn't at least try, and this fight has gone on quite long enough."

"Hmm..." Kimblee appeared to seriously consider it. "No. No, I don't think I will. It would be _terribly _anti-climatic. At this point, if I was to even try I believe your allies would execute me on principle. No, I think I'll just crush you now." The claws of the Umbra Eternis began to squeeze, fully about to apply enough force to pulp Zim's body...

And suddenly stopped. Something in Kimblee's face shifted, his attention distracted, and the Umbra Eternis went limp as his face went white with strain. Kimblee said nothing, his skin color was actually changing to a paler color. His face was changing, his various features getting leaner and...younger, and it seemed to Zim that this person did not look at Kimblee at all anymore, as he spoke to Zim. "You're a pretty awesome crazy guy," The cracked and faint voice whispered as he exerted what limited influence he had on the Umbra Eternis to force it to open it's hand. Zim hopped out, stared at his erstwhile foe for a moment and wondered what the hell was going on. He didn't get much chance.

"Finish me!" Not-Kimblee urged him. "Before he takes over again! Believe me, you're not going to get another chance at this, hurry up and _kill me!_" He didn't wait for Zim to try to do anything but weakly forced the Umbra Eternis' arm over a nearby rooftop, dropping Zim on it.

"Hey!" Zim said. "Now wait a moment, I'm not going to kill you. I don't even know you. Who the hell are you and what are you doing transforming Kimblee?"

"My body. Him posesessing me with evil science. Really bad day. Long story," Not-Kimblee grunted. "Just hurry and...oh, damn it, too late-" His face twitched, the essential emptiness of Kimblee-ness coming back into his face, and his body started turning back into the image of Kimblee as the Red Lotus Alchemist resumed control. He gave Zim a infuriated and desperately, miserably tired grimace before his face twitched one last time and Kimblee was looking out through his eyes again. Zim, even more confused, glanced aside and noticed something approaching from over the rooftops. _At least I delayed him for long enough, _he thought optimistically.

Kimblee, frustrated to the point of near madness, didn't even bother making any declarations but just raised his arm up high, a railgun materializing on it, and before he could employ it he was doubled over as a massive blast of fire from behind him hit the Umbra Eternis in the back, right into the patch he had made for the hole they had made in his back. The Umbra Eternis whirled around, Kimblee gaping in infuriated disbelief as everyone who'd he smashed over in his charge to corner Zim: Roy Mustang and the team he had assembled (the Flame Alchemist still crackling with alchemical energies and just barely managing to stay standing from the energies he was expending), Angilaka, Shego, Deadpool, Scar, Gaara, Naruto, Sokka, Toph, Aang and Cyborg.

"...I wish I believed in a god or something so I could use it's name in vain," Kimblee said tiredly. He started to pull the Umbra Eternis into an attack, but they commenced their own attack immediately. Gibbs produced a laser gatling gun while Roy created a firey explosion and directed it, and together they opened fire directly at Kimblee, and even though Kimblee still put his giant robot's arm in front of him for protection, it still pushed him back, the Umbrals straining to keep the machine-titan still. Sokka, Shego and Deadpool opened fire as well, the individually potent and culmatively lethal array of blasts blasting out the mechanisms in it's knee, nearly crippling it's leg. Naruto, now equipped with a plasma rifle thanks to Gibbs, created twelve clones of himself, each one carrying a plasma rifle too, and the thirteen of them opened fire with startling precision, hitting a few exposed circuits in the Umbra Eternis' shattered shoulder, blowing up a good number of the Umbral Heartless and causing a backlash that forced Kimblee to stumble the robot back, his arm going wide.

Kimblee jerked back to awareness immediately, trying to move his arm back, but couldn't; Gaara was manipulating the grains of sand his earlier attack had slipped between the outer armor and into the frame underneath, and even though it took so much power that he wasn't able to fight in any other way, he was immobilizing it and leaving Kimblee defenseless. Cyborg held up his remaining arm, transformed it into a sonic cannon (in it's controlled configuration this time) and released a spray of sonic energy directly at Kimblee with enough force to smash him into the back of the fuselage, making him bleed from his ears and knock teeth loose.

Sputtering blood, Kimblee clapped his hands together and released a blast that, while lacking the enormous power the Philosopher's Stone had given him and hit a building instead of his enemies, still made a lot of rubble fall at them. Gaara flinched and directed a thick shield of sand out of the ground, protecting them from being squashed but allowing Kimblee to finally pull his arm back around himself, dozens oversized plasma casters materializing on it and firing at them. Gaara's sand shield still protected them from the first wave, and Aang's command of Firebending was close enough to allow him to push them back and hit Kimblee with the rest, almost knocking him over.

Kimblee, arrogant though he was and determined to accomplish his mission, began to realize something quite horrible. His mind had only began to articulate it as Zim leaped screaming back onto the Umbra Eternis' back that was foolishly turned to him at the time, hammering at it's back, light flashing out and passing through the metal and doing no harm to it, searing the Heartless animating it, and the psychic pressure of that light hit Kimblee like an anvil hits a melon, manifesting as a splitting headache happening so hard his vision went white with pain for a second. The Umbra Eternis stumbled, and Zim seized his chance, hitting it harder and harder, ignoring how the Keyblade was getting hotter in his hands, or more accurately he was using his limited understanding of Firebending to redirect it and create blasts of flame shooting out with each swing. The Umbra Eternis flailed, turning around and shaking itself madly to shake Zim loose and not doing a very good job.

"Hang on, Zim's still there!" Aang yelled before they could start shooting and potentially hurt him. The others considered this, and seeing how Kimblee was moving around and unintentionally putting Zim's out of harm's way, waited until he was unthinkingly putting his front to them again and gleefully opened fire again. Kimblee screamed as they hit him, his armor still virtually immune to everything they could throw at it but doing him no good as his robot started failing under the assault, it's poorly planned-out engineering tearing itself apart under the stress.

"I don't care anymore, will you just _die _already-" Kimblee started to say, and a full-round of green energy from above hit the Umbra Eternis in the face again, funneling deep into it's mechanisms and causing some of it's insides to _melt_, fires blazing out of it's suddenly uneven features. Kimblee howled, confused and pained, and looked up to see Zim's ship flying at him from where Zim had seen it coming just a few moments ago, cannons still glowing from it's blasts at Kimblee. Even more ominously, Abel Nightroad was perched atop it, his scythe clenched between his hands as his wings transformed into the flood of darkness flowing from him and melding with the ship, reinforcing it's armor and allowing him to channel energy directly to it's power reserves, causing the ship's visible power conduits to glow with random bursts of dark energies that were still somehow benevolent; unlike the Heartless, this was a darkness that shielded and shaded, and did not corrupt things or break them.

"_GUESS WHO'S BACK, DUMBASS?"_ Calvin screamed over the loudspeakers, cackling maniacally. _"Packing an indestructible vampire powering my engines with enough power to fuel up a minor country!_"

"_That would be us," _Hobbes added through the loudspeaker, at a more reasonable volume than his friend.

"_So just shut up and die already_," Zuko added, as Abel let loose a flare of lightning that he channeled as safely as he could into their power reserves, turning the run-off inward to himself and projecting it into a bolt he threw at the Umbra Eternis' feet, blasting the ground underneath it and knocking it head over heels again. Zim springboarded off a plate of metal and sprang onto it's arm, running over the shoulder as it fell and staying safe as it hit the ground and the moment it stopped moving, he ran off to where he was sure he had seen Jarod and Winry go, a new plan forming. "_I am so very sick of you shaking off everything we throw at you!_"

"_What he said!_" Courtney and Beth chimed in. Abel, for his part, didn't have the loudspeaker at his disposal, so he just waved. He wasn't sure if anyone noticed, but it was the thought that counted.

"Well, damn," Kimblee said as their ship powered up it's cannons and flung his giant robot's arm over his face. It didn't do him much good, as the build-up charge of the cannons was so bright it momentarily turned it into a greenish light in the sky (tinted blue, due to Abel's darkness) and released a massive surge of concussive energy that punched the Umbra Eternis several feet through the earth, legs digging through the ground as it was pushed backwards until it fell on it's back, smashing _another _hole into the street. A successive number of volleys hammered into it, pulverizing the street some more and making a dramatic and concealing dust cloud.

"Not too bad," Calvin said, the ship decelerating with considerably difficulty and floating down to the ground after he noticed Zim calling for them, Jarod and Winry being grabbed by their wrists and pulling behind Zim and looking very confused. As soon as the ship was close enough, the cargo doors opened and Zim bodily tossed Jarod and Winry into it, the Keyblade feeding him the strength he needed for that single feat, finally getting them to the safest place in the battlefield, and in retrospect should have gotten them there in the first place. (Their shouts of pain made it a bit less heroic, but it was still pretty cool.)

A large tower of smoke rose into the air. "Aaand, he's still not dead or whatever," Zim predicted. The Umbra Eternis rose up, stiffly and staggering at the left leg, but still active. "Totally called it."

"Just keep hitting him!" Roy yelled, and everyone opened fire again. Taking this as a cue, Calvin hammered the button again and again (after setting the attack to 'Smite' to be less energy intensive), shooting waves of cannon-fire at Kimblee while Abel summoned bolts of lightning he used to keep Kimblee off-balance. Zim waited for a a large rock that Toph launched at Kimblee to slam him in the back, and then he made his way to Kimblee, bouncing up from wall to robot in half a dozen jumps using his incredible and newfound magically-assisted jumping prowess, aiming it so that he crashed into his back (right on the weak spot they'd made earlier, too) and swung the Keyblade into a likely looking seam between plates, channeling as much power as he could and blasting it into the giant robot.

Kimblee stumbled, screamed and everyone halted for a moment when they saw the small surge of light (small compared to the Umbra Eternis, anyway) that was quickly coming to mean that Zim was there. "He went _back _to fighting him head-on!" Hobbes said, aboard the ship. "...I don't know if I want to shake his hand or smack him silly."

"Pretty brave of him, though," Winry remarked, she and Jarod going up to the bridge post-haste and a bit annoyed that no one wanted to give up a pilot's seat to her. (Zuko tried, but Calvin objected on dramatic grounds; their first team fight needed their flagship operated by their _team _and nobody else.) Beth nodded. Jarod snored from a seat, having passed out from sheer exhaustion. Calvin rolled his eyes, pretending he wasn't jealous of Zim's sheer bravado.

"Sir," Gibbs said. "What do we do? We can't give everything we got with him still on that thing."

"Keep shooting, but support him!" Roy said. "Don't aim anywhere near him and try to keep Kimblee off-balance!" Gibbs saluted and did just that, the others following his example.

Kimblee was not handling this trouble well, and just screamed inarticulately, Zim _still _bouncing from spot to spot on his giant robot's back and hammering it with the Keyblade and using all his might, trying to force that awesome power that had burned his hands to emerge again and strike down Kimblee. He knew it could do him serious harm, maybe even kill him too, and each increasingly more powerful swing that unleashed mere trickles of the Keyblade's unfathomable might, he found himself thinking with savage glee that he honestly didn't care at all.

Zim didn't care if Kimblee killed him as long as he brought down Kimblee in the process. (_A flash of light from the Keyblade hit hard enough to knock another servo loose, tilting Kimblee's stance._)

He didn't care if he was caught in the crossfire by his allies in the midst of his berseker play, not as long as he was managing to do Kimblee harm. (_Another flash of light, striking so hard the impact sounded like thunder. Kimblee screamed, faltered, and was knocked back by the other's attacks._)

He didn't care if he would fall here and now in this alien street in a universe far from the one he had been born in, if he died before he could ever find Gir or Dib or any of the others. (_A surge of light and fire, mixing so deeply into each other it was hard to tell the difference, making an explosion that spun the Umbra Eternis around in mid-step, opening it's front to a direct blast from the ship.)_

He didn't care if his mission failed before it ever begun properly, not as long as he struck down the Heartless Kimblee had summoned and rendered Kimblee helpless. (_A blow that erupted into a light-based blast, the white flare refracting into a dizzyingly beautiful array of colors blending into the next, forming into solid shapes that bounced off the Umbra Eternis in a variety of angles, hit the walls and bounced right back, hitting the Umbra Eternis all at once at the same time the many _many _other projectiles did._)

And he certainly didn't care if he got blown up right here. It'd be _wrong _to be that level of stupidly selfish, because that meant he would be close enough to smite Kimblee, or at least knock him unconscious, and that meant it would be worth it. It would be dying a worthy and honorable death, and Zim had secretly thought for a while that such a fate would be a fine way to die, and make up in a small way for his lifetime of evil and senselessness, by striking down something of pure evil in his dying moments. He prefered to live, of course, and atone for his crimes with the remainder of his life's actions...but slaying a monster like Kimblee was certainly a worthy action, and he desired greatly to acclumate worth. (_In the course of his attacks, a small chip had been made in the outer armor. Seizing the opportunity, Zim stabbed the Keyblade in and unleashed another surge of power that struck into the core of the robot, into the web of Heartless that powered the unholy thing. The Umbra Eternis halted, _screamed _and clutched madly at itself as light streamed out from inside it, burning away at it's insides, and Kimblee howled like a fire had been set off in his guts._) And still Zim kept hitting, refusing to abandon the attack or retreat or do anything that would not ultimately end with Kimblee defeated, and he found himself grinning at the thought of their inevitable victory.

The Umbra Eternis, now greviously wounded, stepped back to avoid the next avalanche of attacks from them, a Firebending-enhanced blast of flame from Roy Mustang almost searing Kimblee if the giant robot hadn't stepped out of the way, and a cascade of cannonfire from the ship hit the Umbra Eternis in the sides and leg. _I'm losing_, Kimblee thought solemnly, his confidence draining into bemusement, wondering when things had gone so badly, and unhappily realized that his downslide had started ever since he had fought Roy Mustang and his allies earlier. His inability to kill them, even with his shapeshifting powers and the Philosopher's Stone enhancing his alchemy, had only been a precursor to the utter failure fast looming over him.

Another wave of firepower, amped up by Gibbs' full round of explosive missiles, hit the Umbra Eternis in the shoulder and knocked a servo loose, sympathetic feedback tearing the sinews in Kimblee's own shoulder up. More fire hit him, more blasts and plasma and lasers, and a horrible thought struck him. _He was going to fail_.

Kimblee had to stop to breathe, his vision going blurry as the constant impacts were threatening to knock him unconscious, and he choked on the strange red fluid seeping out from his lungs. He coughed in a series of painful spasms, and some of it landed on his hand. He stared at his hand, at the fluid mixed with dark blood, and he suddenly knew that he wasn't going to stay awake for much longer, and if he hadn't escaped by then, or gone to safer harbors, he was either going to wake up in chains or be dead by then. His breath stopped short at the thought, and a thought became clear, even through the pain of the constant harrying attacks hitting his giant robot and Zim's blasts of light.

He knew, almost without the shadow of a doubt, that he probably wasn't going to survive this.

He had bit off too much, tried to accomplish far more than he could have, and it was now all falling apart around him. He couldn't finish this now as he had intended when he had made the Philosopher's Stone, not with all the forces arrayed against him. He had thought his power would be enough to save him, but the Stone had been taken from him, the energies he needed for his shapeshifting powers had been removed, and his own body was backfiring on him.

Something had gone wrong with the process that had infused him into Kevin, he realized. Or perhaps there was some unknown factor in Kevin's body that had been rejecting him the instant he had been infused, or some other matter that he couldn't possibly know, and perhaps when that blonde boy with the strange device had ripped the Omnitrix's energy away from him it had accelerated whatever degeneration process that had already been in effect, and Kimblee shut down all thought on that matter because it was totally pointless.

Somehow, against all possibility and expectation, dispite all his prepartion and skill, Kimblee just knew that he was going to _die _here, alone in the streets with only jabbering voices in his head for company, unmourned and uncared for except as an object of hate by Ishbalan refugees, and all his hard work and expertise would have been for nothing. _I'm going to die now, and I won't have even done HALF of what I had wanted to do here_, Kimblee thought mildly, feeling a little disappointed in himself. It was impressive, he suppose, but he could have one so much _more_. And it was strange, he realized, that it suddenly mattered to him. Thoughts of his death had never mattered before, and he certainly didn't know why the thought of dying scared him so badly. He felt like he had been at the cusp of some vital understand, and now it was going to be yanked from him and he would fall into oblivion and never know what it was...

He was confused. He was tired. He ached in ways he couldn't really comprehend.

And, like ice melting only to refreeze in a newer and sharper configuration, he decided the only rational solution was to do something _big_. If he was going to die, it was going to be incredible. "Then let it be so," he whispered.

"Hey, he's talking to himself in a creepy quiet voice again," Zim observed. "That's usually a bad sign in guys like that! Trust me, I'm a professional, I KNOW THIS STUFF." The Umbra Eternis backed up, flinging itself into a wall, and Zim jumped off before he could be crushed, slicing through a large piece of rubble that came flying at him, and his spider-limbs popped out of his Pak and caught him on the wall just in time for him to see the Umbra Eternis staggering away, Kimblee's inappropiate laughter growing gradually louder the whole time, even though he was _still _under fire by everyone else. This time he didn't even seem to be noticing it. "Guys? _Guys! _He's gone crazy! Crazier, I mean! _Way crazier!_" No one responded. Zim grimaced. "Great, they don't even hear me."

Actually, they could. Sort of. "What did he say?" Calvin said aboard his ship. "I thought I heard Zim say something."

"I don't know, I couldn't hear over the sound of Kimblee doing that," Beth said, pointing at the Umbra Eternis now lumbering over to everyone on the ground (still clustered around Roy for maximum formation benefit), darkness shimmering over it's metal body and weapons began to materialize. Unlike the relatively smooth transference of weaponry out of the existence-in-potential they had done previously, darkness bubbled up around the Umbra Eteris in big nasty boils, blue-black matter forming over it's arms and shoulders in huge repulsive bubbles, metal forms moving and bulging underneath. They popped and revealed...well, after this long it was obvious what he was summoning: more weapons.

A _lot _of weapons. Rocket launchers and missile launchers. Plasma rifles, plasma casters and plasma cannons. Gigantic scaled up miniguns, some with standard ammunition and others that shot lasers. Giant robot-sized grenade launchers, hosting grenades that were individually the size of cars. The same railgun he had summoned before, now clustered with at least four more, welded together in a rotating gatling gun of stupifying power. Upon the shoulders were more weapon clusters of the sort it had employed earlier, except that these had even _more _weapons on them, more grenade launchers and missiles and even a few mininuke launchers.

There were even _more _weapons then that, too lost in the cluster of weaponry to be seen properly, and Zim had a brief selfish swell of relief that none of them were aimed at him, replaced by a bigger swell of abject horror that they were aimed at Aang, his friends and everyone around them. He made an incoherent snarl of defiance, Keyblade in hand and fire surging around him, the heat transmuting into light at the edges.

Kimblee stepped forward, about to fire, and was once again caught unprepared by Calvin flying their ship right into him once more, shoving him into the air and hitting him with a follow-up shot while he was still in mid-air, blasting him through several more buildings, and with all the weapons on him, Kimblee was so seriously imbalanced that the Umbra Eternis rolled head over heel a few times, several of it's weapons snapping off their fixtures, and when it got up, it's remaining hand knocked a few off for maximum mobility, clearly willing to sacrifice raw power for enough speed and balance to get pushed over everytime something hit it hard enough. The unneccesary weapons shed, it hauled itself back up.

The ship pivoted around, trying to face Kimblee again and shoot him down. Zim ran from rooftop to rooftop, blasting himself around as neccesary until he was in sight of it and shot a flare up to get their attention. "HEY! Don't leave me behind while you take all the fun of the battle!" The ship turned towards him obliginly, with agonizing slowness, and as soon as Zim thought it was the best possible moment he generated a powerful enough fireblast from his feet that he rocketed off the roof and right into the cargo bay, landing on the walls and bouncing off onto the catwalks. With the doors closing behind him, and Kimblee a bit a stunned by that stunt, Zim rushed to the bridge as fast as he could, knocking Beth over onto Jarod without realizing either of them were in his way and not really caring afterwards. "HI, I'M BACK."

"Oh God, _this has been the worst day ever_," Jarod said miserably, groaning in pain, and groaning louder when Beth stood up, her power armor grinding against his poor bruised body. Hobbes, who liked to think of himself as a gentleman, picked Jarod off the floor and gingerly put him into a seat as far from Zim or Beth as possible.

Trying to ignore him, Zim said, "And what was that? I had to _jump _onto my ship? We need to get a grabbing claw or a tractor beam, _something _to get us back on this thing in a hurry!"

Winry sputtered incoherently, her craft insulted. "You're lucky you got a ship on such short notice anyway! And as a _favor!_"

"Didn't we get this ship because Zim's some chosen one or something?" Zuko wondered.

"I dunno. I don't think Cyborg even knew about that," Calvin said.

"Chosen what-now?" Courtney said, intrigued.

Calvin cheerfully divulged the fact that Zim was the chosen one of a powerful magical relic supposedly capable of destroying the Heartless for good, in spite of the fact that they might want to keep that detail under wraps for a bit. Zuko, seeing an opportunity when it came to him, hurried out of his seat so Zim could get in it; Zim was actually qualified to pilot, for one thing. Once Zim was firmly back in the seat, he went back to what he did best as a leader: yelling at people for no reason. "What's going on down there! I need a status report!"

"Well, Kimblee's gotten back up and now he's charging towards the other guys," Calvin reported, looking at the screens.

Zim turned the intercom on. "Abel! Are you still there? Go on and fry that lunatic before he kills someone!"

"Calm down, the loudspeaker's on, he already knows!" Calvin said, hammering on the 'Smite' button again and again. "Hurry up and get us closer!" Zim grabbed the control mechanisms and the ship accelerated.

Abel could hear all of that perfectly well and his eyes narrowed as they got closer to Kimblee, partly because he really hated that guy - espicially with his Crusnik power making his mind more unstable and pushing him towards violent solutions, his already erratic mind increasingly focused into a monstrous storm building up towards a fury of apocalyptic proportions - but mostly because the ship's weapons were powering up and the green light made his eyes ache. He wrapped his wings around himself to shield himself as the weapons built up to their optimum charge with the power he had supplied, his aura of lightning fading as he ceased pouring power into their ship, opting instead to pull it back into himself and charge up; under the circumstances this was a stupid idea, but he wasn't thinking clearly or strategically. His rationality, for the moment, was being traded in for raw power.

The gun's light faded, forcing them to pull power from the core to build up a proper charge again, this was easily done - though it worried Calvin a lot - and while they glowed a brighter green again, Abel jumped off of the ship, the force of his flapping wings knocking it slightly off-course, and dove down at Kimblee while roaring with all the force his growing madness could summon, putting the Umbra Eternis' own roars to shame. He flapped his wings again as tendrils of darkness tore loose from Zim's ship and uncoiled back into Abel's body in brief bursts of blood and blackness. He raised his scythe, glowing with a massive surge of electricity measuring in the gigajoules, and released a beam of pure levinic forces through it.

Kimblee heard the crackle of the lightning, and the rumble of nearby things exploding in it's wake, various metal things tearing away from the ground and drawn by the intense electromagnetic current Abel had invested in it. The various lesser metals of the Umbra Eternis' frame buckled, momentarily thrown against each other by that magnetic current, and this time Kimblee had the presence of mind - and desire to avoid getting electrocuted again - the Umbra Eternis forced itself into a diving fall, going right into the big hole it had climbed out of earlier, narrowly avoiding the massive blast of lightning that streaked on overhead, it's intensity forcing Kimblee to shut his eyes, and he heard a distorted crackle. He opened his eyes, blurred white spots in his vision, and the lightning bolt was gone, as Abel had cut off the power to it when he saw that Kimblee had dodged it. He was hovering right above the pit now, wings growing larger and increasingly less like something that could have naturally formed.

The Umbra Eternis scrambled to it's feet as Abel flew in, ozone frying as he powered up again so intensively that every single metal thing within half a mile was tugged towards him: the Umbra Eternis itself, the various metal things on people's clothes, the frames in windows (tearing themselves loose), Zim's ship as it barreled on, and so on. "TO THE ARBITERS OF THE DEAD I SEND YOU!" Abel screamed as he hurtled down at Kimblee with his scythe held high in a killing blow, his voice echoing into registers that human ears weren't designed to hear, and slightly muffled as his mouth was twisting into a shape that wasn't designed to make sounds, or work around a human skull anyway, and the helmet wasn't helping matters. (Fortunately, his jawbones were reworking themselves. His body was pretty easy-going that way.)

"Why do I _always _attract the zealots?" Kimblee asked rhetorically, the plasma weapons still on the Umbra Eternis powering up and forcing their forces into a culmative effort, producing a massive ball of plasma that grew slightly larger than the fuselage Kimblee was in, wobbling dangerously and fully capable of disrupting itself and killing everything in a half-mile radius, including Kimblee if it misfired. Abel heedlessly flew straight at it, confident he could deflect it, and Kimblee waited until he was less then fifteen feet from him and shedding aimless lightning bolts like molten metal dripping bits of itself before Kimblee issued a mental command that altered the firing weapon's settings slightly, turning the ball of plasma lopsided and hollowing it out before it spilled out and fired, lancing out as an enormous beam that seared the air - glowing with a blue light as the air in it's path was incinerated - and the descending Abel Nightroad didn't even bother to move but flew straight into it, not just confident he would survive but utterly oblivious to everything except slaying his foe. He flew right into it and his personal field of magnetism held it at bay for a moment, his inhuman strength of arms actually forcing it to part around him. As the plasma surged all around him, superheating his metal to an intolerable extent even for him (his armor was built to shield him, not supplement him, a design flaw that he vowed to have fixed), Abel's concentration wavered, and the beam tore through, blasting him with all of it's fury.

Everyone on the ship winced when they saw that. "Relax, I'm sure he'll be fine," Zim said, not really even convincing himself. "Yeah. Look, you can hear him screaming, that means he's alive. And I'm not helping, am I?"

Abel did scream, and it was not hard to imagine why. In a single instant, his armor was melted into a molten mass of dribbling slag while the intense heat fused his skin and flesh into one before flaying it from his body, burning his internal organs from the inside out while his wings turned to ash. It still wasn't enough to kill him (Crusniks like Abel being infuriatingly tough) but it was enough to stop him, and the beam continued to fire, _still _incinerating and hammering him and generally doing nasty things to him through the power of plasma until it blasted Abel right out of it's trajectory, shooting him somewhere else away over the buildings. While all Zim could see from the camera's view was Abel blasting off somewhere over the line of buildings, Abel found a good deal more painful than it already way: he wound up crashing into the side of a small snack-bus that had been abandoned in the evacuation and bounced off, skidding off the ground until he came to a stop, gravel and broken stone stabbing into his chest. His lungs had regrew at this point and he groaned, a semblence of rationality returning to him as the damage began to heal, and Abel shakily stood up, using his largely intact scythe to slice his way out of his useless armor and emerged a horribly hurt wreck already reverting to his humanlike state while his regenerative powers went into overdrive, burning through his store of power and forcing him into a kind of heroic sleep mode.

And he still found the strength somewhere to stand up, scraggles of white hair crowning his burnt scalp, and lifting one leg over the other with such serious determination that he seemed more of a divine automation that a man, he started to walk back in Kimblee's direction. His will couldn't support his body, not as badly damaged as it was and he fell over, legs reduce to flesh-wrapped bones unable to support him. He fell down belly-first, screaming as more rocks sank deep into him, and with nothing else for it, he grabbed at the ground and clawed his way along it, dragging himself by his fingertips towards where the battle rage, completely unwilling to stop fighting or do a thing that might get anyone else killed, no matter how completely pointless the gesture was. Rocks and debris sliced jagged wounds in his flesh that closed up quickly, the organic noises nearly as sickening as his screams, and he endured it all just as he endured the agonies of extremely fast regeneration, unable to stop himself from instinctively burning through his body's store of assimilated blood and life-forces, already reverted back to as normal as he ever was. He considered his total failure here, bits of metal tugging at him before coming to sad stops, acknowleging that it seemed he hadn't made much a difference for all his preparation and it only redoubled his determination to keep moving. His scythe, held between his loosened teeth, could not sustain itself any longer and fell apart into a shower of blood, quickly reabsorbed into his body to provide a brief burst of some much needed power. It helped his skin grow back, which was a relief.

(And on the bright side, it would be another point in his favor of constant oneupsmanship with Scar. It annoyed him how little Scar care about the competition; some things that man just did not _get_.)

Back at the fight scene, the Umbra Eternis used it's gauntlet to grab the smoking remnants of it's plasma weapons - now melted, slagged, burned out and otherwise rendered useless after being used to disable Abel and remove him from the battlefield - and tear them off it's shoulders, the giant robot wincing slightly. Kimblee wondered how it could feel pain while he rubbed his own shoulder, and the Umbra Eternis dropped the weapons without any thought. He turned around and smashed his way out of the pit, focusing once more on Roy, his group, and the refugees he couldn't be bothered to remember. It reached it's arm down, a cannon powering up for a blast before they could counter, and even if they deflected or avoided it like they had so much else it would still cause an acceptable degree of collateral damage-

Zim's ship, Zim's team infuriated by how badly Abel had been harmed and most espicially Zim, came back onto the scene by having their ship fire a number of high-power blasts in the Umbra Eternis' wounded back, the ones that missed tearing up the ground around it and throwing off it's balance. Zim's voice over the intercom screamed something inchoherent and absolutely furious beyond any sane measure (and it was probably something like 'don't you dare' or 'you touch them and you will die' or something like that, Kimblee heard that kind of thing a lot) and Kimblee winced, trying to drown out the noise even as Roy and the rest recovered from the shock and opened fire of their own; Scar basically went mad with rage, howling vengeful promises in the ancient language of his people as he slammed his hands to the ground and every piece of loose metal and broken stone and fallen walls glowed blue and were transmuted into a very simple and absolutely massive cannon that only needed to fire once, delivering a payload of a cannonball nearly as big as the Umbra Eternis itself, and in the fallout of the other attacks falling on the giant robot, it bent yet more of it's internal frame into increasingly unrecognizable configurations.

In the ship itself, the crew glared bloody defiance at Kimblee and Zuko shouted "OPEN FIRE!", flames blazing from his throat and giving his voice a crackly effect that Beth, Courtney and Jarod, always happy to indulge in some Traverse Town street theater (as they called the more awesome daily adventures) applauded.

"Zuko," Zim said sullenly. "You're not supposed to be giving orders. _I'm _in charge."

"...Oh, right, sorry," Zuko said. "Orders?" He grimaced, finding the concept distasteful and clearly realizing that he had joined the group in a presumably subordinate position.

Zim coughed. "Ah, yes. OPEN FIRE!"

Calvin slammed the 'Smite' button and the cannons, already charged to their optimum power levels, fired their green beams at Kimblee and targeted directly at Kimblee himself. The Umbra Eternis put it's hand over him and protecting him from certain incineration, the impact unbalancing it, and while the Umbra Eternis hastily righted itself, Calvin and Zim managed to manuver their ship behind the flailing robot, targeting the badly repaired opening on the giant robot's back and locked on before they fired the cannons again at a higher setting, putting as much power into it as they could afford: the cannons surged with green fire, flashing dangerously, and projected massive beams that converged into a swirling drill-shaped beam directly onto that weak spot, striking so hard the Umbra Eternis was pushed high into the air, higher than all the buildings in the area.

If the Umbra Eternis hadn't been so fortified, it would have ended the fight right there, and quite possibly killed Kimblee. As it happened, the beam pierced the patched-up spot after a moment of hammering against it's poor shielding, flooding into the device's internal mechanisms and causing a tremendous amount of feedback that launched it into the air, green energy incinerating copious amounts of the increasingly smaller Heartless aura as various mechanisms in it failed or broke down or even burst apart inside it, bringing it so very closer to the point of ruin and defeated. Kimblee himself was alarmed to find that the Umbral Heartless had been so depleted that they were nearly gone, leaving him with only a connection of thin tendrils extending to him from knee-high pool under him. Deprived of so much of it's motive force so quickly, the machine-titan's frame creaked ominously.

He wasn't particularily put-out by this. "You are some of the best enemies I have ever met!" He cried happily as he fell down, angling the Umbra Eternis that it landed right on the ship right behind it's assortment of guns where they wouldn't be able to hit him without some serious difficulty. "Scar was actually a little boring compared to you. You have pizazz! Is that still a word? Pizazz? It's an unusual word to begin with." He didn't wait for an answer and started hammering on the ship with his robot's remaining arm, ignoring his variety of potential weapons in favor of good old pummeling, Scar and the rest completely forgotten.

To say that the crew of the ship were upset at this turn of events was an obnoxious understatement. "OH CRAP HE'S ON THE SHIP GET HIM OFF GET HIM OFF!" Hobbes screamed, shaking Zuko in his panic while Beth frantically tried to get the door open so she could get out of the ship and fight him instead of being stuck there. Courtney had joined her, but she probably didn't want to fight him directly. (It wasn't like she had any means of doing that.) Jarod only facepalmed, his exasperation so great that even in his infirmity he was compelled to express it.

"Why are you shaking me, I'm not driving!" Zuko snarled, shoving the frantic tiger away.

"Because you'd listen, and you're _sane!_" Hobbes screamed, pointing at Zim and Calvin, who were demonstrating what he deemed an inappropiate reaction to this turn of events.

"The psychotic maniac who pilots a giant robot made of evil and can blow stuff up with his bare hands is on my ship, no dout intent on tearing in and killing us all!" Zim said, giddily clapping his hands and pointing out the obvious. "That is _incredible!_ Already we have such a excitingly drastic turn of events! This adventure is gonna be awesome!"

"I can't _wait _to see what this thing has that can kick him off us!" Calvin said, cheerily hammering on all the buttons he could hit and causing various synchronized tracks to play at the same time, little cleaning robots to slide onto the floor and back, the lighting systems to make interesting flashing designs, the top of the roof to turn transparent and back, three of the monitors to display a cartoons-only channel and a video game score board and a tap-dancing prawn-thing respectively, fire extinguishers to spray Zuko, a disco ball to extend from the roof while the floor went all shiny to match, a giant blow dryer to wipe the foam off Zuko, and the disco ball to retract and the floor revert to normal.

Zuko stared at them, as this was somewhat more alarming than the crazy madman whose continued assualts on their ship's hull was rocking the ship. "...Oh, the Lady Amaterasu shine mercy on us all," He said flatly, wiping a remaining bit of foam off himself. "They're both insane."

"This adventure is gonna _suck_," Hobbes said miserably.

"We're gonna _die!_" Courtney screamed from the back of the cabin.

"At least my coffin will be a metal hulk and I shall die surronded by the fruits of natural philosophy," Winry said with a shrug, and she hugged the wall fondly. Jarod stared at her and moved very slightly away.

"If we do, I can promise you that it's gonna be _awesome!_" Calvin yelled, grinning like a total maniac. "I got a plan, you guys! Take from a guy whose first love in the mad sciences was creating things that fly; Kimblee's giant robot is _not _built to fly or sustain the stresses of flight! We get him in the air, we can beat him with an minimum of collateral damage!"

"Then fly us into the air with all the speed you can manage!" Zim commanded. "Even though I'm the one with his hands on the steering mechanisms. Yes."

"Okay," Calvin said, twisting the interface and fueling it just a bit more, though it was already overcharged from Abel's earlier efforts. And in the nick of time, too; there was a creaking noise as Kimblee dug his robot's fingers into the outer hull, twisting it around, and Calvin pulled back on his interface after hitting several buttons to reroute power from the weapons to the engines.

On the outside of the ship, the Umbra Eternis was smacked around by the rising pressure applied to it by the increase of power directed into the flight-generation field created by the ship's, and the surge was like a punch to the gut for Kimblee; not surprising, considering that it apparently operated by repelling gravity and applying it's own gravity pull and in effect Kimblee had been lifted up and smashed back down by the gravitational trick. The Umbra Eternis stubbornly clinged on even as the ship's constant forward advancement took an upwards tilt, it's remaining hand holding on to the hull like grim death (which it intended to bring, of course). Kimblee kept an eye on the cannons powering down, momentarily grateful that they couldn't swivel around to shoot him, and his attention was swiftly drawn by the ship's sudden acceleration skywards, rocketing up past even the highest buildings of the area in short order, and moving on up. "What are they up to now?" Kimblee roared, his previous enthusiasm draining away. He could appreciate a lust for battle, but this nonsense was hell on his nerves. The centrigual forces taking it's toll on his battered body didn't help: as the ship was now spinning in place, perhaps trying to dislodge him, it was at the center of powerful forces presently tending to the job of trying to grind his internals into goop, and it might only be a matter of time before that actually happened. (It wasn't like his robot suit protected him from that sort of thing. In this respect, it was more of a huge harness than a protective shell with weapons on it.) "_Goddammnit, this was a stupid idea!"_ Kimblee yelled, his voice trailing faintly, the last sound Roy and the rest of his team heard before Zim's ship ascended into the sky properly, leaving them all behind in a blaze of green light.

The group assembled instinctively as they watched the ship go. "...Dude, what the hell?" Naruto said, summing up what everyone was thinking. (Some in more poetic language, but the basic message was the same.)

"Knowing Zim and the company he's been keeping, probably something insane," Aang said. He tried to decide whether or not to fly after them. He watched the ship, and knowing quite a bit about the physics of aeronautics, relaxed. "Everyone, please stay down. It'll be okay."

"Are you serious?" Gaara asked him, sand drifting around him and half-formed into a flight-capable platform.

"Trust me," Aang insisted. "At this point, we'll probably just screw up whatever they're planning."

"...All right," Gaara said reluctantly, deferring to Aang's wisdom. He bowed his head, and the more rational among them facepalmed, certain this was going to go horribly wrong. It wasn't like they could do anything, though, with their two fliers deciding that things were well-in-hand.

And yet, it seemed that they were absolutely right.

Now farther up than anything had been during the entire duration of the fight, the ship continued to accelerate upwards, almost tearing Kimblee off with the velocity alone and forcing his robot to secure a marginally more secure grip by grasping at seams in the hull to tear them open, with the intention of eventually tearing a hole open, jumping in and killing everyone inside, but he was taking it one step at a time, and that plan was seeming increasingly unlikely. He was considering just cutting his loses and getting the ship to drop himself to the getaway ship Deidara had promised him. So far, he'd managed to wedge the Umbra Eternis' legs up against two of it's field-projection engines to keep it there pretty well. Kimblee tried to say something, both he and the Umbra Eternis scream bloody defiance at them, to express his absolute certainty that they would die now and enlighten them to their significance before applauding their courage in opposing the wills of those that had sent him, as he had so many times in this fight before, but no more.

He had been burned by lightning, pummeled by incredible strength, suffering dozens of small blows inflicted by sympathetic connections with the giant robot he piloted, had suffered so very much damage in a fairly short time, and he couldn't muster the strength to do anything except cough so wetly and painfully that it felt like his throat was eating itself. Something red and gritty spewed from his lips, and a substance that was not mostly blood dripped from his body at various points corrosponding to the chakras. "Damn it," Kimblee whispered, putting a hand to his chest and almost screaming at the flare of pain, his ribs ached, and felt like they had been crushed into gravel. "I need to end this now. I need to make one last big move and finish everything before I make my getaway." He reached his hands out longingly, so close to such a glorious final move that he could taste it, and the taunting nearness of it rankled him. For that ship was made of metal, while he was inside of a giant shell made of metal, and the nightmare-things giving it unholy quasi-life still coursed with the power of stolen lives transformed into the purest of energies. And he, the Red Lotus Alchemist, had pioneered the remaking of metals into custom-made explosives.

The Umbra Eternis and this ship, formerly a threat and now an opportunity, would make an absolutely glorious bomb. All it would take would be a single transmutation, and then his work would be done. The rest of it would happen by itself, and he would be able to escape with his duty finished without him even needing to see it happen. The refugee's illusions would be shattered, their faith in their ability to protect themselves completely demolished, and Wuya's goals would be advanced just a little bit further, and Kimblee would have the satisfaction of having played his part.

The wind roaring in his face hard enough to cut him with grit, the pressures bearing down on him like a hammer upon a nail and the stresses inflicted on his machine by the propulsion-field made getting him close enough to transmute it a dicey proposition. The Heartless surged around him, crackling with red energy, and he could _feel _the power taken from the Philosopher's Stone surging around them, _into _him. Just a little closer...just a little closer... The Umbra Eternis leaned in and groaned with the effort, and Kimblee reached, his hands coming closer and closer to the ship's hull. All that metal, all that raw material waiting to become something transcendant and beautiful...

He never did stop to think what it was made of or if he could transmute it, which would have rendered the whole exercise exquisitely useless. It would have been a pretty nice crowning moment for his utter failure, though.

The crackle of the loudspeaker turning on startled him and Kimblee jerked back, losing his concentration and causing the Umbra Eternis' grip to slip, and it almost fell right off; it maintained a lucky grip on the hull, digging it's claws into the metal with barely enough strength to keep it's shoulder-attachments from tearing loose. "Hi, obnoxious and probably smelly jerk we're fighting!" Calvin said cheerfully over the loudspeaker.

"Trust me, he smells quite awful," Zim added.

"Who the devil are you?" Kimblee said, not recognizing that voice from any point during the fight.

"Hi," Calvin said again. "I'm Calvin Cadia, and-"

"I thought your last name was Nocker," Zim said.

"That's a title, not a name. As I was saying, I'll be the guy totally whupping you today, and so are these guys. Say hello, everyone!"

"You already know me," Zim bragged.

"I really don't like you very much!" Hobbes said brightly.

"Meh," Zuko said.

"Hi," Courtney and Beth said, obviously terrified.

"I've got nothing to say to you," Winry said.

"...Hey," Jarod said, a bit chipper despite the circumstances.

"Why are the girls and also Jarod talking?" Calvin wondered. "You're not part of this crew."

Over the sounds of those girls (and Jarod) loudly replying with much fury, Kimblee blinked slowly over his pain and said, "Ah. Hello to you too...however you people are." He coughed wetly again. "I suppose I should be pleased to destroy you, after the courage you have shown, but I'd really like to finish this, this much unprotected air travel is doing horrible things to my organs."

"All part of the plan, buddy!" Calvin said. "Which is working out splendidly and you're not even consciously helping me figure out how to beat you. I mean, what kind of idiot _are _you that you build a giant robot out of the best materials you can find and you don't even engineer it to withstand high pressures or the other lovely rigors of mech combat? You didn't even _shield _yourself."

"I am _not _an engineer!" Kimblee snarled, suddenly in a mood to do something nasty. Since he couldn't smash the ship open with the robot's remaining limbs and he had the presence of mind not to waste his one shot at finishing this on a simple revenge attack, he settled for the Umbra Eternis hurling itself at the ship and knocking it slightly off-course, veering it to the left as it leaned a bit, it's sharp acceleration upwards pushed out of orbit. Calvin swore over the loudspeaker as he corrected this, the efforts of the ship turning back straight up smacking Kimblee around in his own giant robot.

"Where did you learn stuff like that?" Hobbes said, appalled. "Mom and Dad would be ticked if they heard you talking like that!"

"Oh come on, we haven't spoken with them in like six months, it's not like they're going to care!" Calvin said irritably. "And I hang around with physicists and engineers all day; I pick these things up! Though that Morte guy is probably a better resource for cool insults."

"Then he is a terrible influence!" Hobbes snapped.

Zuko stared. "...Is that really important right now!" He demanded. "Is...is this a thing that's happening now? Or have you forgotten that Kimblee-"

"Excuse me, _I'm still right there_!" Kimblee screamed, kicking the ship as best he could without dislodging himself. "Concentrate on the matter at hand! _Me!_"

"Right, yes," Zuko said, facepalming. "See, _he _gets my point and we're the ones trying to kill him or whatever."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "I get it already, it's all about you! Attention spammer." He spun the control rods randomly.

"_Not like that!_" Kimblee screamed, the ship flying straight up and spinning in wild unpredicatable directions, and since Kimblee wasn't anchored very well, in addition to having his guts pummeled by the forces involved he was smashed from side to side of his own fuselage, brusing himself and getting his limbs punched into his own body and other assorted unpleasantries. "Ow! Ow ow ow, oh I brought this on myself-OW!" This last bit coincided with him smashing into the wall of his fusage with all his body weight on the wrist. "Crap damn it. I think I broke my hand."

"Then let's try again, only the _other _way!" Zim said with a cackle, doing the same thing with the control rods that Calvin had, only the other direction. More ow-ing from Kimblee ensued, and there was much rejoicing at his wholly-merited suffering.

As the ship happily bounced Kimblee into an increasingly bloodier pulp thanks to his misunderstanding of how giant robots were built and the consequences thereof, Calvin and Zim quite happily took turns swinging the directions of the ship around and flying it around in extremely erratic directions: one moment they were flying rightwards and pounding Kimblee in his own craft while he tried to get a grip on the ship, and the very next moment they were going back down for long enough for the sudden acceleration to bash Kimblee back and then they were going up again, the change so swift they could hear Kimblee's screams mostly muffled by the wind. The changes in direction were complicated by their ship's apparent inability to move in anything except a straight line and gradual curves, forcing them to move against their ship's own pull if they wanted to move direction more quickly, and since that made intolerable stresses, they had to settle for just flying in extremely large loops instead of flitting all over the place. It still had a nasty effect on Kimblee, so it was all good.

(On the streets below, quite a few people throughout all of Traverse Town were watching their progress, but given how fast the ship was moving, they had a hell of a time keeping track of it. Some of them thought about joining in, but almost no one had any idea what was going on. For Roy and his group's part, Aang still remained stubborn that Zim knew what he was doing and the best they could manage was getting Cybord to try hailing Zim's radio, but neither him or Calvin had noticed him calling yet.)

On the outside of the ship - and beaten sillier than ever - Kimblee felt that he needed to make some sort of comment and yelled, "What do you intend to do? Build up speed until I am at most my unstable and make a sharp turn that will wrench me off and leave me to fall to my death?"

"A decent plan," Zim remarked. "But I think not. It leaves too many variables open. I mean, sheesh, that armor could protect you even though it's more likely it would just splatter you, you could make a blast right before you hit the ground that cushions the impact, you could have yet another sneaky back-up plan, you could somehow teleport yourself away...something unpleasant like that."

"Good points," Calvin said. "And my plan is a bit simpler than that, anyway. But splattering you _would _be pretty cool, yeah."

"I definitely agree," Jarod said.

"Are you quite done criticizing my handiwork?" Kimblee said coldly, blood and other stuff painting his chin and much of his jaw a disquieting shade of crimson. "I have said before, engineering is not my specialty."

"Then why make a giant robot?" Zuko asked as Winry sputtered in fury at Kimblee's casual acknowledgement of spitting all over her chosen career path.

There was a long pause, and a brief increasion of tension over the speakers that suggested they were staring at Zuko in disbelief. "It's a _giant robot_," Zim said slowly. "Why wouldyou _need_ a reason to get one, even if you have no idea how it ought to be made?"

"...Ah, silly me," Zuko said sarcastically.

Eager to do something to make himself feel a little more useful (or at least that he wasn't among crazy people), Zuko then pointed at a blinking light over a small display that had what looked like a call address and a cartoony version of Cyborg's face next to it. "I think your robot friend is calling. Or has been trying to for a while."

"Huh?" Zim said. "Is _that _what that screen means? I thought it might have been an address application or something dumb like that. Noticing briefly that the display was a little metal box with an overlarge screen that it had just been barely wired around and a grill-like speaker built into it, Zim considered briefly what Cyborg had found all this stuff to make the ship and pressed the button. "Yes?"

He recoiled immediately; the blast of sound from the other end was hellishly loud (and fortunately Hobbes had expected this and had ducked through the room). "_WHAT ARE YOU GUYS __**DOING**__!"_ Cyborg screamed over the line, the old-fashioned speaker giving his voice a slightly tinny quality. Next to the caller identification screen, a small guage that calcalated the volume whined up from 'Super Serene Silence (TM)' to 'Locate An Indoor Voice' without a beat, and it was an appropiate measure. His voice had gotten so loud that Calvin winced even with hearing that had been slightly deadened from too many years getting the business end of explosions and the force of it almost floored. Jarod hit the floor, ears clasped around his head and muttering a perfect recitiation of the _Eddas _to himself in the original languages of it's writers.

"The obvious thing, of course," Zim said, twisting the knob to a a convinient volume control and dialing the volume to a more appropiate level. Hobbes came back in, whistling innocently and pretending he hadn't just been in unspeakable pain. "Avenging the dead and restoring the injured and bringing in the villain of the day, that sort of thing! Also, why are you yelling?"

"_You have that psychopath on your ship and you're flying all over the damn place!" _Cyborg howled in mingled bewilderment and fury. "_We can't get a lock on you! None of us can fire without hitting you guys too! Your buddy Aang won't fly us up there because he thinks you don't need the help and he's convinced our other flier the same thing! Kimblee could blow you out of the sky at any second! WHY WOULDN'T I BE YELLING?"_

"...Huh, when you put it that way we sound psychotic or stupid," Zim said. "And I may be, so no big deal there. Be assured, we have everything under control. There's a nice big plan that will defeat Kimblee once and for all, allowing us to resume the schedule as previously planned. I guess."

"_You_ guess_!"_

"Well, he hasn't been forthcoming with any details." Zim shrugged, although the gesture was wasted since Cyborg hadn't installed viewer screens in there, a rare lapse in judgement for his engineering skills. "How are we on that, anyway?"

"Give us about a little more distance to minimize property damage and casualties," Calvin said, steering the ship so it was pointing straight up and rocketing ever higher. They heard the bumb where the Umbra Eternias flailed around as a consequence. "And we'll be in the clear!"

"_'Property damage and casualties'!_" Cyborg repeated. "_What are you _doing_?"_

"Something excessive and probably ill-conceived, but if I don't try to pull it off my preparation will be wasted and that would just be totally lame," Calvin said solemnly. "It will work. It'll definitely work. Trust me!"

"_This is crazy, man. Swing that lunatic down here and crash him, I can fix whatever he does to your ship but if you stay there he'll _kill _all of you! Just, I don't know, head down and keep him disoriented! We got a clear zone for you to smash him into, we can set another trap for him and take him down before he even knows what's going on-"_

"No," Zim said quietly.

Cyborg kept talking for a bit before he realized what Zim had said. "_-There's some open ground over on the sixteenth turn over off the Old Tank Road, some old houses that used to be assault fortresses on wheels that we can weaponize, knock him off and get him down there and we can demolish him right then and...wait, _what _did you say?"_

"I said no!" Zim repeated, louder and grinning this time, plainly excited by the prospect of their nearing victory.

_"...I'm sorry, I could have sworn you just heard a good plan that won't get you killed and you just said 'no'."_

"Yeah, I expect this because it's what I just said," Zim said, closing his eyes and trusting to his piloting instincts as he laid hands on the controls again, putting the ship into a spin that battered Kimblee some more and kept him from tearing into the hull as he had been sneaking up to do while Cyborg had been calling. "No worries, we have it all under control."

"On the balance of probability, that's probably untrue," Hobbes interjected.

"Shh!" Zuko hissed. "Don't tell people that, they'll think we're weak and incapable of doing things ourselves!"

"But we _are _incapable of doing this ourselves!" Hobbes retorted.

"Yeah, but _they _don't know that!" Zuko insisted. Hobbes facepalmed.

"_...Damn it, I must be out of my mind," _Cyborg said reluctantly. "_Okay, we're handing it all to you. Good luck, man, and don't you dare get yourself killed._" With a heaviness that sounded like someone who thought that he should be thinking that he was sending someone to his own funeral but believed otherwise in spite of himself, the frequency channel closed off.

The silence in the bridge was broken shortly afterwards by Kimblee and his broken and fading voice. "Touching," he rasped. "Care to divulge this plan to me? Display some manners and tell me how I'm going to die."

Zim started to respond with something to the effect of 'screw you' but with more eloquence and also more screaming, and thought better of responding to Kimblee's challenge, mostly because he actually didn't know the plan. "It's a surprise!" He said brightly. He looked at Calvin inquiringly.

Calvin looked back, having been doing some hurried calculations and putting some long-awaited coordinates into the radio-thing he had been carrying around the entire fight with no opportunity to use it safely. "We're ready," He said simply, and a little abashed; after all this, it seemed funny that it was going to come down to something that would probably end it pretty quickly.

Zuko, holding tightly to the back of Calvin's seat in a desperate attempt to keep his footing in the ship's wild rocking, stomped his feet down hard and grabbed hold of a nearby pole that was probably meant for holding hats and coats to steady himself. "Is there anything we need to do?" He asked, voice surprisingly steady.

Calvin thought about it. He did a few calculations. "Yeah," he said, grinning as he tossed the radio-thing to Zuko. "Hang onto that and hit the button when I tell you to, and _only _when I tell you to!"

Zuko looked down at the device. It was such a tangled mess of looped wires hooked into themselves, small lights blinking over crude dials and power gauges that it would have been hard for him to find any buttons even if there weren't over six different small switches and buttons of varying size and color. "Um," He said. He thought hard for a moment, trying to phrase the thing properly, and just repeated himself helplessly. "Um."

"Good to hear," Calvin said. "Hold on _tight!_ If that thing busts, we're going to have horrible explosion-related problems." He took hold of the ship's controls and kept a close eye on the power gauges, looking at them wonderingly as they started powering up right in front of him. "And hang on to something, it's gonna get bumpy!"

On the outside of the ship, even being hammering by gravity and various other forces conspiring to pummel him into pulp, Kimblee had enough presence of mind to say, "Tell me something I do not already know!" and braced himself for the horrible sound of the Umbra Eternis' face grinding against the ship's hull as it tried to move closer to the top of the airship and away from both potential places to be fired off, and the heaviest parts of the ship's armor. For a moment, he had an experience of fleeting empathy for the people who had to deal with his armored robot, and then felt disturbed, unable to recall ever feeling empathy before and the experience disturbed him. It made him think that maybe he could have done things different, or done his job with less casualities, and that concept alone was so foriegn, so _alien _that it actually hurt...

The Umbra Eternis' crawl halted as Kimblee tried to sort his confused thoughts out, and was nearly torn off by an almighty lurch from the ship. They flew into the clouds, forcing him to shut his eyes and shield his face from the heavy mist (and ignore how slippery it made the Umbra Eternis' grip on the metal surface that was the only thing keeping it from slipping off and falling to it's death), everything suddenly bitterly cold and his fingers aching and as Kimblee managed to sort things out and decide that if he even if they did beat him here and knock him off to his death, he could just transmute his giant robot with everything he had left and turn _that _into a truly spectacular bomb.

The ship lurched again, and he was almost thrown off. He cursed and the Umbra Eternis snarled, and Kimblee was worried by how _weak _the noise was, a feeble growly noise that sounded more like rusted gears clapping against each other. He had no time to concern himself with it, for the ship lurched _again_ as it put up another burst of speed, rocketing through the thin layer of clouds, far above the quickly fading remnants of the smog-like substance Kimblee had made earlier to protect his Heartless servitors, and flew into sunlight more direct and pure than anything he had encountered since donning his giant robot, and he almost slipped off right there; it was no fault of his own, apart from some brief discomfort from the intense sunlight that forced him to close his eyes, but the Umbral Heartless were not so lucky. While they were currently in a diffused form incapable of acting in most of the ways that were suitable for a Heartless, they remained essentially Heartless (and 'essential' was the right word, being boiled down to a particularily elemental state) and even protected by the armor, they were an intimate part of it.

The sunlight burned them nearly as badly as the Keyblade's light did, and Kimblee struggled not to writhe in discomfort as he felt bits of what felt like his mind scream in pain as the dark energies fueling his ship were burned away, one by one, tiny clawing noises in his construct as bits of the dark essence seperated into a proper Heartless from the shock and was destroyed almost immediately. The armor offered barely any protection; in their current state, the Heartless were a intimate part of it, and even being shaded from direct sunlight didn't make any difference as long as the Umbra Eternis was in direct contact with the sun.

Kimblee urged the Umbra Eternis to turn away and crawl under the ship, where it would be more protected, and the brutalized machine-titan eventually responded, but only slowly, only with an agonizing jerking series of movements as it hauled itself down, a stumbling series of unsteady little motions that would have been enough to make it's position extremely precarious even if it hadn't been on a ship moving at unsafe speeds enough to constant pummel it. Kimblee dared to move it's feet from the footholds, reaching an arm up to grab another handhold, and the ship gave an mighty jolt from underneath him, rocketing to the side with such force that with Kimblee digging his robot's feet back while he held onto the small tear in the hull with all the terrified might his damaged machine-titan could manage, the sheer weight of his robot tore a small section of the hull open, peeling slightly away from the rest of itself and exposing a interior layer. It wasn't opened up, but it was still a nasty blow.

"Hey!" Calvin yelled over the loudspeaker as the damage was reported to him by Zim, who was keeping an eye on that sort of thing. "Stop wrecking my ship!"

"You mean _my _ship!" Zim said. Calvin ignored him.

"It will be over if you just stop and let me finish you properly," Kimblee said, his words slurred. The last lurch the ship had given had smashed his face into his fuselage owing to a bad angle he had been in at the time, and now his jaw ached so badly Kimblee knew it was dislocated, and several teeth that hadn't been outright broken had been knocked loose. "But then, that wouldn't make it very satisfying if you just gave up."

"Shut up!" Calvin said suddenly, twitching so violently he looked fully prepared to run out of the ship and over to Kimblee and beat him up with his bare hands just to shut him up."

"Uh," Zim started to say.

"NO! I am so _sick _of him saying those stupid self-righteous speeches. He rambles and he rants and he doesnt even sound like he knows what he's saying half the time!" Calvin broke into full-fledged ranting mode, now screaming into the intercom at Kimblee. Hobbes rolled his eyes. Zim blinked. Zuko looked away, grimacing at what he clearly thought to be a childish fit. Everyone else just stared. "And you know what _really _pisses me off about this lunatic! _THE MISUSE OF APPLIED SCIENCE, THAT'S WHAT! _He's one of those backwards-thinking delusional _morons _that give everything science-y a bad name! Because of lunatics like him, you can't even throw a brick without it hitting half a dozen incompetent morons who go 'ooh, science will doom us all!' and 'technological is the fruit of all evil!' and 'the stuff we have now is cool but we should stop going any farther right now because we're hypocritical lazy jerkasses who are afraid of change and should never have left the Stone Age' and kinds of other stupid-stupid-_STUPID _things I've heard over and over _and over and OVER! _That...that idiot isn't even a real scientist, he's just using discoveries as a means to an end, not to see what he can find out or apply them to beneficient ends! And the robot!" He continued to rant.

"Uhh..." Zim said, looking to Hobbes for help. (Samael amused him by floating next to Calvin and going 'blah blah blah' in perfect synchronization with the boy's rambling.)

Hobbes waved a hand. "It's best to just let him get it out of his system," He advised. "Interrupt it halfway through and it gets turned on you, and yikes, I can tell you that's not a good idea." He gestured towards Calvin, who seemed to have reached the point of his rant. "See, he's almost done!"

Calvin's voice suddenly lowered a pitch, as if the frenzied rancor he was building into had collapsed into itself and made a portal that rocketed his speaking patterns a few years into the post-puberty future. "You make a robot when you have no knowledge or business making one, you do devil's work by forging a Philosopher's Stone out of people like they're just _resources_, you spit on _everything alchemists are supposed to stand for_, you misuse every single scrap of knowledge and learning _real _scholars have lucked into from years of study and dedication, you warp everything people like _ME_ have ever stood for, and you act like we're supposed to applaud you for it. You self-satisfied mental defective, I really want to know, are you putting on the most elaborate farce I've ever seen or are you really that much of a complete and unbelievably pathetic _IDIOT?_"

Kimblee's eyes opened so wide he thought his pupils might shred. Aware of a dull throbbing somewhere in the back of his head and his arms feeling _wrong_, he slammed his hand against the fuselage. It wasn't to transmute anything, or make any sort of deliberate action. His self-control simply broke and the fuselage was a convienient thing for him to hit. Right then and there, if he had retained enough temperance to blast the ship with all he had, than perhaps things would have turned out differently for him. Perhaps he would have been able to escape, or engineer some sort of massive bomb like he had planned. Perhaps he could have accomplished his mission and been able to gloat about it to torment Traverse Town or Wuya's other enemies at another time.

But he failed then and there, because he didn't do anything smart. He should have ignored Calvin's insults and startlingly intense fury, and simply acted in a manner more suitable to someone of his (self-perceived) high station. He could have done _anything _and it would probably have been smarter than what he did then, which was to intentionally ignore every other stimuli and factor at work, suck in the biggest breath he could manage and howl, "_Don't you dare look down on ME!_"

He rammed the Umbra Eternis against the ship, furiously clapping his hands and generating a flow of alchemical energy, red energy flashing ominous around him as he called the surge of Heartless who retained some of it's energy to him, never thinking that with his focus waning the Umbra Eternis' grip on the ship loosened and it's claws were drawn away from the hull, the Heartless too weak to maintain it by themselves. And thanks to all the bumping and lurching and general pummeling he had received in the course of his attempts to stay on or climb on the ship, he was just barely close enough to touch the hull, espicially with part of it torn away like it was. He lunged forward, the Umbra Eternis doing the very same and jumping _off _the ship, just barely a few feet but still detaching from it in his mad attempt to turn the ship into a giant bomb and make them pay for insulting him...

His hands froze moments before he could do it, their flesh almost totally Kevin's skin tone. Kimblee heard Kevin chuckling malevolently somewhere in the back of his head, pleased over this one final exertion of will. The alchemical energy dissipated into the air, no doubt to cause unusual but ultimately non-lethal events some time later, and Kimblee's reserve crumbled. Over the intercom, Calvin ominously said, "_NOW._" Kimblee heisitated just a moment, wondering what that was supposed to mean.

And then the ship abruptly turned as best it could, which was still enough to have the side of the ship suddenly rise up and smash into the Umbra Eternis a second time like an oversized and exceedingly oddly shaped baseball bat, solidly knocking the giant robot safely right off the ship and over it, still moving fast as it steadied itself and flew on. "_NO!_" Kimblee screamed, his composure shattering as the last fleeting grasp of a glorious victory or even a satisfactory mission literally slipped from his grasp. The Umbra Eternis swung it's remaining arm feebly, reaching for the ship. It's claws bounced off the retreated hull, repulsed by the propulsion-field, and than Kimblee began to fall, too far away to do anything. "_NO!_"

"Gotcha," Calvin said from the ship, as Zim cackled madly, rocking in his chair in total unrestrained glee. Behind them, even Hobbes and Zuko were grinning at Kimblee's falling form, seen through several cameras. Hobbes was planning on getting a recording of it for posterity. Beth took some pictures with an on-board cameras. Courtney was already planning the interview questions. Winry cheered, while Jarod just nodded once in relieved satisfaction. "Zim's grumpy friend! Press the big red button I put 'Boom' on!"

"My name is Zuko," said the aforementioned grumpy friend of Zim, though he was in a progressively better mood and didn't say it with more than his usual level of grouchiness. He found the button without much difficulty, paused a moment to wonder if this really was the correct thing to do, decided to trust Calvin and the device he had been carrying around the entire fight and his unstated plan, and he pressed the button that had been awaiting pressing for such a long time.

There was a faint clicking noise. Several lights that had been previously dimmed turned on, faint buzzing noises coming from the device as a preprogrammed signal was sent on with the coordinates piggybacking on the signal, and then the device dimmed. Zim looked around, lingering for a moment on Kimblee's falling form. "Is that it?"

"Nope," Calvin said, pulling the ship aside and curving it around so they were now going after Kimblee again. "Best to stay away from him if he attacks, but we should stay close enough so we can blast him even if this doesn't work!"

"Okay," Zim said. "I-" He stopped as the ship picked up a heavy noise coming from the news studio they'd left behind a long time ago and that Calvin had done some mysterious things to. "Wait. What was that noise? Sounded like something exploding."

"Yes," Calvin said mysteriously, and he grinned.

"I'm not going to like this, am I?" Courtney said faintly.

...

Back at the plaza where all this had started going absolutely catastrophic (for Kimblee), the ground was rumbling most ominously.

The news studio they had invaded, ransacked and commandeered stood firm for the time being, not quite affected by the processes happening within it, but the ground underneath it tore apart in plumes of flame, flat crumping noises echoing as bits of the street were blasted right off.

Throughout the building, quite a lot of mechanisms that had been intentionally pushed to the very limits of their breaking points were being shoved right over those limits. Machines that Calvin had jury-rigged to overclock, powerful explosives waiting to be activated by the final results, went to work and accomplished their mission in a matter of moments before shutting down and begining to set off their attached explosives. Even more explosives had been secreted all over the building, hidden from sight and the casual inspection that their hurry to be out of their would have entailed, not attached to any timers or sensors but set up to explode at the appropiate moment anyway. Gauges whirled, steamed rocketed from vents moving mechanisms whirred to ear-splittingly loud speeds untill something snapped and they burst apart, tearing up whatever they had been a part of and amping up the process they were in the middle of. Under the building itself, special explosives that Calvin had prepared beforehand erupted in small blasts, thundering through the underground tunnels and blasting more of the street up, totally shattering the foundations of the news studio. Calvin was _very _good at explosives (having a great deal of practice in their making, after all), and so they didn't damage the news studio at all, merely unmooring it from it's foundations and causing it to lean very slightly from side to side until it settled down into a happy medium.

Under normal circumstances, that was still a bad thing; it leaned precariously thanks to the specific pattern of explosions, now actually leaning in the direction that Kimblee was at and aimed precisely at him, and the first earthquake to come along would probably knock it right over. This wasn't much of a concern, given that most earthquakes that hit the town were artificial in origin and not terribly large to boot, and anyway the earthquakes would never have the opportunity to try it out.

At that very moment, the jury-rigged machines Calvin had made and placed in the basement doing their jobs in admirably short time, the crude explosives Calvin were pushed far beyond their limits and finally reached the limits Calvin had expected for his intentional bout of explosive overclocking, and the boilers in the basement (stuffed to the brim not with water now but so very many packages containing explosive substances that Calvin had created with some creative application of detergent, carbonated liquids, a few other things he had neglected to mention to anyone and whatever he'd found lying around), now heated up to an intolerable degree, and finally exploded in a massive blast that would have surely defeaned anyone who was close enough to hear it. And again, if things had been ordinary, this would have likely caused nothing more than severe structural damage and a lot of insurance claims. But then, Calvin had already weakened the walls on purpose, and consequently, the walls were shattered by the directional blasts, and combined with several dozen other smaller initial explosions all along the basement, each and every one precisely calculated and targeted for maximum effect, the building was not shattered, blown apart or imploded under the stresses or anything boring like that: instead, before the smoke caused by the destruction of the foundations even had a chance to begin clearing up, the news studio was blasted loose from the ground, the multiple explosions launching it right into the sky and right through the dust cloud and flying onwards in much the way that buildings ordinarily don't, it's bottom half blackened and busted up but inexplicably intact dispite all the flames trailing from it.

It arced through the air, seeming to hover before gravity took hold and it began falling again. This was all according to schedule; the second part of Calvin's signal finished relaying it's instructions as the systems recalibrated various other jury-rigged devices inside the building for Kimblee's location in accordance with protocols to maximize impact and damage, and _more _explosions ripped through it's sides. These ones didn't do much damage, mostly coming from the very bottom of the building, a very peculiar device that Calvin had imbued with a portion of the same semi-mystical energies that fueled his pyromantic gauntlet fueling the flames from these latest explosions and giving them new life, swelling them up to a size greater than the building itself though curiously heatless while still producing enormous force sufficient to send the building rocketing up into the air like the giant missile it was increasingly resembling, bizarre almost-colors warping the air in it's wake as a result from the magical energies Calvin had invested into it.

It flew on, the precise explosions Calvin's coordinates had translated by the machines he had rigged the basement with propelling it at Kimblee's direction and adjusting the sustained explosions (now serving the same purposes as rocket engines: i.e., making a big thing fly in basically straight lines at incredibly unsafe speeds) in incomprehensibly minute alterations to keep it aimed precisely at Kimblee's rapidly descending giant robot. An enormous amount of hidden explosives inside it (some modified machines and other things, most simply made by Calvin on the spot and none of his assistants realizing them for what they were), most of those explosives in the basement but an astonishing amount of them on all levels, the bulding-missile that had previously been a news studio speeded onward, rocketing towards it's destination with grim purpose.

(After the recordings of this incident were distributed, this particular moment got a lot of attention and made a lot of money. Even the somewhat jaded residents of Traverse Town had to admit that weaponizing an entire building by turning it into a missile was a pretty awesome move.)

...

Kimblee was aware of many things, falling down from the sky to what might be his death, the fact that he had no longer had access to the sort of power that would enable him to transmute a giant robot into a bomb that could have rocked Traverse Town down to it's foundations, and almost certainly was the end of his mission one way or the other, and closer to hand he was aware of the wind in his fast hitting him so hard and fast, not the least because of the speeds he was falling at, and his face being cut over and over by the grit on the wind. He had managed to force the Umbra Eternis to turn itself around and present it's back to the wind, protecting him from it, and even that wasn't much better; he kept pictured the impact soon to come shoving a jagged piece of metal into him, and it was a very persistent image.

He was also aware the Umbra Eternis was reacting more slowly to his commands (not that it mattered at this point), and it's responses to him had already become sluggish before getting much worse. Commanding it to do so much as lift an arm was like forcing an unwilling body to wake up far earlier than it was used to, and he needed it to do much more complicated things than just lifting it's arm; under combat conditions, it's lack of responsiveness would be a death threat. And the whispering in his ears had died away to little more than a quiet noise like the wind drifting across broken metal; the Heartless were almost depleted, and his machine-titan had become slower as the Heartless that animated it had died. It was as strong as ever; it's armor as unbendable, it's remaining weaponry dauntingly powerful and it's mechanical muscles vastly superior to many metahumans. But it didn't matter that it's physical body was strong enough to fight when the darklings that made it move had almost been snapped away by the Keyblade's power and then burned away by exposure to sunlight unlessened by cloud cover, to say nothing of the countless mighty blows that had whittled them away one by one. The strength of the Umbra Eternis was as mighty as ever, but it wasn't doing him any good.

And not least of all, he was aware that he was almost certainly not going to survive this battle, or even the next few minutes. It hovered in his mind, nipping at every exposed thought, turning his usual calm and focused mind to darker-than-usual brooding. It didn't bother him, precisely, but what did bother him seemed a bit more disturbing than the sight of the panorama of Traverse Town got closer and closer, the ground that would splatter his body to ruined pulp under the weight of the Umbra Eternis growing rapidly closer.

He was begining to wonder if Wuya had sent him here to die.

It was a curious thought. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer. Unlike some of her other more skilled agents, Kimblee didn't know Wuya particularily well; he knew her well enough to be familiar with her easygoing and friendly behavior with her subordinates and allies, and that actually _trusting _her was a very dangerous move, but he didn't know her personally. (And the idea of being so friendly with his superior by actually knowing her on a personal basis seemed mildly offensive to his sense of decorum.) And so he knew, mostly because of what the majority of her luckier employees said when they knew she would hear of it, that she disliked wasting valuable resources like Kimblee and his alchemical power.

Unless, of course, that she had a _purpose _for him getting killed out here in the field.

And that didn't make any sense at all, he thought as he stared at the approaching ground and grimly noticed that Zim's ship was keeping pace with his own descent, not close enough to be hit by Kimblee's on-board weapons and far enough to move out of the way immediately if Kimblee tried to transmute a blast. He returned to his thoughts, and decided that even _if _Wuya was willing to cut him loose for whatever reason - it wasn't like his alchemy was singular, part of the deal of his employment was that he provide all his alchemical research to her, and it would be a trivial matter for her to teach a talented alchemist the secrets of his method and make another Red Lotus Alchemist - getting a useful experiment like Kevin killed too just seemed wasteful and impractical.

Unless, of course, Wuya didn't care if he lived or died. Since she had permitted him to be used as his body for this mission, it seemed logical that she didn't think his death would be a hindrance, or that his survival would be a boon.

Inexplicably, this troubled Kimblee. It suggested that he was being permitted to die here, as part of a greater plan that he didn't have the importance to know fully about. He knew what she was _planning _to do on a cosmic scale but he didn't know if 'causing chaos in Traverse Town and such' was his actual purpose, or if his rampage was just a red herring to draw them into a territorial frame of mind. That seemed the only result that would occur after such an attack. And how would _that _help Wuya? If anything, it would make her inevitable and final attack on them more difficult if they put more effort into fighting threats more efficiently. Kimblee thought hard, and a new thought occured to him: perhaps Wuya was planning on tricking them into being _allies_?

The thought made him smile at the sheer audacity of it. Give them an enemy to fight. Let them defeat that enemy. And then, months or even years down the road, Wuya with her vast army and control over the Heartless would appear and offer them her help against future threats, in exchange for helping _her _deal with a few threats that weren't politically feasible for her to fight directly...

An interesting scheme, he thought, if that _was _her plan.

"Unless, of course," Kimblee said hoarsely to himself, because there wasn't anyone else he particularly felt like talking to. "It's less complicated than that and she _really _just wanted me to kill things to rouse up the refugees. An excellent question."

_Yes, _Ghostfreak replied, his 'voice' much weaker than before and almost afraid. Kimblee was far less afraid of death than Ghostfreak was. _I do not relish the idea of merely being a distraction or a nebulous monster to rally her enemies around and blind them to her threat. However, who am I to denounce such an ingenious plan, not when I was once such a mastermind in my own right and...hold on a minute, do you hear a blasting noise? Like some sort of rocket._

"...I do," Kimblee said, and sharply looked at the approaching ship. It was still following at a safe distance, and slowing down suddenly, and it had launched no rockets or missiles at him. "It's not _those _idiots, and I'm fairly sure I ran out of missiles some time ago. So what's making that noise?"

_Ahem, _Kevin said with what Kimblee deemed to be intolerable smugness. Kimblee's neck turned of it's own accord, and his head was forced to look at an incoming object in the direction of the plaza that their fighting had started in. _Look that way, idiots._

Kimblee looked, not sure what he was supposed to be looking at, and then he _did _realize what he was looking at, and all mental operation ceased in stupified astonishment. "...Is that a flying building?" He said flatly.

_Yep, _Kevin said.

"Coming right at me, no doubt somehow homing in on my location."

_Sure thing!_

"And _many _times larger than the Umbra Eternis, which is currently lacking enough power for me to defend myself in any appreciable fashion."

_Yeah, that's pretty much the situation._

Kimblee stared miserably at the rocket-building. "...Why would you draw my attention to that?"

_I wanted to see if you'd freak out or not._

"You loathsome ruffian," Kimblee said with a surprisingly even tone of voice.

Much like Kimblee and Kevin, Zim's crew had someone to gleefully point out the weaponized building's presence to them as it was coming more or less at them, and that person was Calvin. The one who nesscitated his explanation was Zim, who took a look at the radar (a small screen that, instead of displaying incoming threats or something like that, was the display panel for a small computer that analyzed all information relating to scans of the surronding environment and produced a read-out of all pernitent potential threats. It was probably less efficient but more accurate) and saw that something was inbound, and a check at the cameras confirmed that something was approaching fast. "Gentlemen, I believe Kimblee has somehow acquired even more backup," Zim said grumpily. "It's coming fast."

"Oh, don't worry too much, that's one of mine," Calvin said quickly. "And it's aimed at Kimblee."

"What's aimed at Kimblee?" Beth asked.

"Uh, this thing," Zuko said, pointing. He and everyone else who wasn't piloting the ship peered at the nearest available screen. "Wait. Is that thing a flying building?"

"Yes," Calvin said. Courtney stared, too horrified for words.

Hobbes, who was more keen-eyed, stared for a little too long. "...Is that the news studio we took over?"

"WHAT?" Courtney yelled, tugging at her hair in horror.

"Yes again," Calvin said. "Before we left, me and those guys I roped into it modified the stuff down there so...uh, it's a bit technical, but basically I turned the whole thing into a guided rocket."

"You. Did. _WHAT?"_ Courtney screamed, rounding on Calvin.

Hobbes, looking resigned, pinned her in a bear hug and kept her away from Calvin while Zim said, "You turned a building into a rocket." Zuko gaped at Calvin with his mouth open in infuriated astonishment. Beth gasped. Jarod raised an eyebrow. Winry shrugged. "You mean to tell me that you took the building we were in, went skulking about with a small group of technicians and other employees that worked there, modified the things down there so that it would be a rocket when you wanted it to, and somehow none of the technicians noticed this?"

"Yeah!" Calvin said, nodding smartly. "Even she didn't notice." He nodded at Courtney, who redoubled her efforts at anguished gibberish. "Not that they should have, since I never really explained myself and I doubt any of them had any idea what I was doing. I bet they thought it was just defenses or something. And I totally got away with it under her nose! I am _awesome_."

"...Why in the hells would you do that!" Zuko yelled, his arms spread wide as if pleading for some vestige of sanity from the heavens. "What could have _possibly _ever made you think that this would be a good idea?"

"YES!" Courtney snarled, looking as though she would like nothing better than to throttle Calvin for this. "WHY! Dear God, why?"

"I knew we were fighting a powerful guy, so I figured I might as well prepare a backup plan just in case things got _really _crazy," Calvin said. "I just never had a moment to put it into action, and there was unacceptable collateral damage the few times I _could _have just blasted him with it. Now, though, we're miles in the sky with no one to hit but Kimblee, and I've made sure it's going to crash-land into a place that's already been trashed beyong recognition!"

"I KILL YOU!" Courtney snarled.

"No you won't," Hobbes said firmly, holding her tighter.

"Where did you aim it?" Zuko said.

Calvin started to answer. Zim cut him off with an impatient hand signal. "Worry about that later!" Zim said. Zuko gave Calvin a look of deep mistrust, but complied with Zim. "This building missile will dispose of Kimblee?"

Calvin nodded. "If he somehow survives this - which I totally expect he will - he'll be in _no _condition to keep fighting."

"You crazy bastards!" Courtney shouted.

Winry said, "Then we make sure it does that! And hurry up, he's trying to get out of this!" She pointed at a screen that showed Kimblee's giant robot flailing and twisting around like mad.

"What's he doing?" Hobbes asked, trying his best not to let Courtney go prematurely.

"Looks like he's trying to move himself out of the rocket's path," Calvin said. "No worries there; I already made sure that the rocket's trajectory will compensate for any attempts on him to move out of the way. Just in case, though..." He indicated the button labeled 'Annoy' and had the computer lock onto Kimblee again. Courtney wriggled some more in Hobbes' grasp, still shouting desperately to get them to stop before she realized that this was their best chance to win and relented, grumbling mutinously.

The ship pressed forward, accelerating enough to get close enough to see Kimblee clearly, and now he was not only flailing around to move his giant robot out of the way of the flying building that was a little less than halfway after him, but had produced several large gatling lasers from the shoulders of his robot and firing them blindly. The shots went wild, and he plainly didn't care, since he wasn't trying to shoot anything, but was using the recoil to push himself out of the missiles way, and little by little, he was doing it. He was moving slowly, gradually, so that it would be _very _close indeed, that the rocket would miss him by a hair, if even that...but all the same, it would miss.

Zim ran through the calculations, the mechanical part of himself that was most evident in his path doubling them, and came to the very same conclusion, the intolerable and horrifying thought of Kimblee actually _escaping _this final gambit that so many lives were depending on, the vengeance of the lives he'd stolen and already expended. Without needing to think about it, Zim felt grim satisfaction at the sight of the computers confirmed that the Umbra Eternis had been locked on again and were ready to open fire. He reached over to Calvin's side, thoughts blazing in his head-

_I won't let him get away this time, I won't let this monster escape the judgement he deserves, I won't fail ANOTHER world, I won't I won't I won't...!_

-and he slammed his hand on the button labeled 'Annoy', hoping that it would do worse than that. It made a satisfying click.

Zim heard the slight humming noise (ferried through the outboard audio sensors and relayed into the bridge) of the ship's cannons charging up to a small but concentrated blast. The screen with the Umbra Eternis on it now had a green target superpositioned over the Umbra Eternis, which was now drifting slightly to the left and away from the oncoming news studio, and Zim realized the problem with shooting him right then and hurredly grabbed the ship's control rods again and pushed hard to the left. A massive lurch hit the ship as it pushed against itself, throwing Zuko and Hobbes to the ground and right into Winry and Courtney (much to Zuko's discomfort and Hobbes' satisfaction, to say nothing of the girl's issues with this) and drifting slowly but surely to the left before coming to a stop again, in a deadline to Kimblee and at the right angle to knock him back into the rocket-building's arc.

Zim didn't say anything. He didn't make any clever comments or smug declarations of victory or anything like that; it didn't feel right, and Kimblee wouldn't have been able to hear him. But he did smirk knowingly, his hands still clamped on the control rods, and he waited as everyone else leaned forward, voices hushed and expectant, the air thick with the hope they did not dare to vocalize, the whispering prayer they were all thinking: _WIll this work? Will he be stopped? Will he finally be defeated? Please, please please PLEASE let this work...!_

For his own part, Kimblee felt strangely hollow as he felt himself falling out of the missile's range, even though it was still moving in his general direction. He still had a chance to make things work out for him, he need not die by building impact (and that was a strange thought, he decided even as he wracked his brain trying to think of ways for him to make a building become a missile, so he could use the same idea later) and he might even _survive _this day...but it just didn't seem as important as it should have. An intrusive and alien thought (_'Should I have killed all those people?') _kept slipping into his mind, tasting so strongly of Jarod's own consciousness that he kept glancing back to make sure that man wasn't there, and yet the thought also felt like one of Kimblee's own, and he didn't understand it at all, not one bit.

"Damn it, it _hurts_," Kimblee whispered, feeling desolate and alone as he had never felt before, had never even _thought _that he was alone. "Why does it hurt? I don't...it doesn't...why? Why?"

_You're babbling_, Kevin said, his 'voice' getting stronger and more confident, and that was another thing Kimblee didn't understand. _You're slipping, man. Gonna fall down and crack. Break and burn, you'll see. _Kevin laughed, wild and throaty and freer than anything Kimblee had ever heard.

"Shut up!" Kimblee snarled. "This isn't over, it's not over, you shut up now and wait!"

_No way, _Kevin said briefly. He seemed to smile. _It's all green from here._

Kimblee wondered what in the name of Xerxes that was supposed to mean, and then he saw a flash of green at the corner of his eye. He had just enough time to turn his mecha around and see Zim's ship, still too far for him to take a decent blast at it but close enough for it's cannons to fire up just enough to suddenly release small streams of green-hued energy, directed at the Umbra Eternis with a machine's unerring precision. He turned the Umbra Eternis around as quick as he could and while it saved him, they still hit hard enough to knock Kimblee silly and bang his head against the fuselage walls yet again, made a feedback pulse that took the gatling lasers out of commision, and worst of all, pushed the Umbra Eternis out of it's slightly safer freefall and right back into the path of the incoming building-missile.

Kimblee was still reeling from the attack when his vision cleared amid Kevin's insane laughing and Ghostfreak's horrified shrieks, and for a single awful moment, Kimblee's eyes went wide with perfect comprehension, shutting down a little bit at the horror of the fact that a building was flying across the sky and about to crash right into him. By then the flying building was so close, too close, and he found himself stunned by the sight of it, a broken and damaged building flying less than several dozen feet in front of him. The sunlight shined over the metal in glaring bright spots that hurt his eyes (and hurt the Heartless worse, though the Umbra Eternis remained stubborn and alive) and he put his hand over his face to protect his eyes, and then he could just hear the roaring noise of the flame's propelling it at him, the whistling noise from bits of the torn metal on the sides of it sliding through the air and vibrating with the force of it's journey until bits of them snapped off, the smell of it's extremely odd flames and above all, the sheer crazy impossibility of a flying building aimed at him like a missile.

His mind kept circling back to that last detail. It was exerting a powerful hold on him.

He held his hands out and thought furiously, unsure of what would happen if he just blasted it, the explosions might knock him out of the sky and send him faster to the ground and either his death or more likely incarceration; he already planned to pull out all his guns and shoot them at the ground prior to impact to cushion the blow, and he suspected that the Umbra Eternis just _might _be tough enough to protect him if he crashed. But then that would make it tricky to transmute the Umbra Eternis into a bomb as planned and probably make it so that he wouldn't do even _half _the damage he wanted it to do, even if it was powerful enough to create shockwaves that would hit the neighborhoods below him, or even that ship that was still following him...

Kimblee tried to think. He tried to evaluate the circumstances, think of all possible factors (though there weren't that many, not now), narrow it down to his best options and carry the very best of those out, but it hurt to think, and those troubling alien feelings just wouldn't stop bothering him and it wouldn't let him just focus, and his mind went into a freefall much like the actual one he was trapped in, and he remembered when that boy - Calvin, wasn't it? He was sure he had heard one of the other combatants call him that once or twice - had used that energy to suck out the Omnitrix energies. At the time, after the shock had worn off, he had thought it had been an unexpected boon, since it had put Kevin in some distress and quieted him for a while, but now he wished that hadn't happened: if he could still have transformed, Ghostfreak could have lent him his powers again and allowed him to phase out of the giant robot and float to safety and the escape ship, so that he could resume his attack another day.

It was curiously humbling. The biggest threats he had faced today hadn't been his nemesis Scar or his old enemies from Amestris, but the crew of the ship harrassing him right now, a small band of exceedingly loud and unpredictable maniacs that no matter what he did just _wouldn't die_.

The plan with all the guns appealed to him and Kimblee smirked, dispite the pain. "I am not so easily beaten as that," He whispered, so weak that he couldn't speak any louder. He concentrated, pulling the Heartless to his command again, and he felt a trace of fear at how hard it was, both communing with them and how long it took for them to react. All the same, though, shadows rippled around the Umbra Eternis' body, and more weapons appeared: oversized cylindrical cannons from the shoulders, clamped together and firing from the same fuel sources built into them, an array of guns at the robot's back and all stacked together to point outwards, a set of giant miniguns that fired explosive grenades and more weapons, as many as he could remember putting in it. All those weapons fired kinetic based ordnance, and by firing them at once he hoped to push him out of the way of the missile-building, because falling to his death and turning his suit into a bomb on the way seemed preferable to being hit in the face with a building. He readied himself, forming the mental trigger-

And Kevin suddenly radiated pure aggression, red-hot and so intense in his sudden struggle for his own mind that it threw Kimblee's thoughts and distracted him, and the moment was lost. To make things worse, his enemies noticed his new weapons and took action, firing pinpoint blasts at the points where the weapons had emerged from the giant robot. The impacts rocked Kimblee and the blasts struck home, hitting where they affixed to the Umbra Eternis and blasting right off, spinning into the air and flying away, sucked into the jetstream and away from him. He spun around, the sudden weight loss disorienting him, and there wasn't much he could have done to stop the blast that hit him point-blank and launched him ahead towards the flying building, helpless to stop it. Over Ghostfreak's frantic screams and Kevin's self-satisfied chuckling, Kimblee noticed that the ship flew down towards the loosened weapons (now deactivated and inert) and caught them, it's cargo bay doors opening and letting the weapons fall in with only a little bouncing from the sudden weight. The doors closed, and with a new supply of weapons freshly secured the ship was back on track, still flying after him and accelerating, and Kimblee wondered what they could possibly want the weapons for.

The missile-building was looming, less than forty-five seconds from impact, and the heat from it's friction-burn was boiling the air, burning his skin and hair, and the Heartless were recoiling from it as well but for different reasons. Now somewhat alarmed at it's closeness, Kimblee started to sweat...and realized that the slickness on his body wasn't just sweat. He looked at the red substance coating his clothing and said, even though he should had more important things on his mind, "Alright, I really should have investigated this sooner but what _is _this substance?"

_Looks like that weird crap your boss injected into me but was also you_, Kevin said. _And just saying that makes me feel stupid. What idiot thought that making your semi-immortal by turning you into a soul-in-a-syringe was a good idea?_

"It was Professor Hojo's idea, and really that answers everything right there...wait, why am I telling you?" Kimblee said, annoyed. "And _I _thought it had been terribly clever. Than again, I may have been a bit drunk at the time." He thought fast. "Damn it, your body must have been rejecting it. Those energies you were infused with, they could have been interacting with it in an unforeseen way; no wonder I was able to assert more control when I wasn't accessing the shapeshifting powers, espicially after they were released from me. And it's a moot issue, given enough time your body may well reject my consciousness or at the very least the serum, leaving my consciousness stuck in your body without a means to remove myself, and...wait, why am I telling this to you? Talking to you has never been anything but a disappointment and distraction, and _God damn it _the building is thirty-two seconds away from me!"

_...Huh, so it is,_ Kevin agreed. Ghostfreak did the mental equivilant of a facepalm. Behind them, Zim's ship got out of the way in a hurry, zipping under Kimblee and doing it's best to turn around and keep up with them.

Kimblee stared sullenly into the incoming building, now so close he could count the individal cracks on the roof if he wished to. The heat so intense that he could feel his hair smoldering, he ignored it and sighed, trying to think of something cool to say. Nothing came to mind, and all he could say was the most persistent thought in his head. "Today," he said. "Was a complete and total waste of time." His arms aching and still controlled enough by Kevin to refuse to respond, he closed his eyes and the Umbra Eternis acted on it's own, fulfilling it's instinctual drive to protect Kimblee by pulling it's arm over him and curling up tightly.

And, at last, the weaponized news studio that had sent the transmission that had lured Kimblee into this battle did the job of finishing the fight it had begun, as was only appropiate. It had tricked him into sending all his forces at them in an ultimately futile attempt to kill his nemesis Scar and bring up his personal body count a bit higher, forcing him to expend all his resources and pushing him into a battle where he had succeeded in killing no one else but instead making him _lose _his precious Philosopher's Stone and slowy whittle down the strength of his machine-titan, destroying the Heartless allies he had summoned; all of that had begun with that news studio and the people who had commandeered it, and when it at long crashed headlong into the Umbra Eternis with a massive impact that carried it onward, with such force that even the immovable object that Kimblee had imagined his defenses to amount to were not enough to save itself, it was with a sense of the battle coming full circle.

In general, a perfect defense trumped immense force, but happily this was not the case this day. The Umbra Eternis could do nothing to save itself and was hit by the roof of the news studio so hard that the Umbra Eternis was drilled right through and stuck halfway out, the walls smashing into it at such speeds that it was like being smashed into a slab of pure kinetic force that would have torn a less sturdy machine into shreddings. And for all of the strength it had displayed, the Umbra Eternis no longer held enough of that strength to withstand this attack, not after the long battle had taken it's too, and in that very first impact it's crude animating mind was first battered senseless and then mercifully extinguished when the mechanical components of the thinking engines in it's skull were crushed by the impact. The Umbra Eternis died then, it's mechanical body freezing in place as the Umbral Heartless swarmed around inside it, parts of it still moving in a last sad gasp of imitated mechanical life.

The rooftop effectively imploded and the next layer smashed on through, crashing into the Umbra Eternis and shoving some very heavy machinery and reinforced building materials into it's face. It struck so powerfully that the backlash hit a few misfired circuits in it's circulation systems and a small explosion went off in it's lower body, tearing it's hips off-kilter and twisted the entire lower body around, the armor dented and almost breaking from the stress, and the left leg snapped at the joints, smashing back into the main body by the continual forces hammering it over and over again like a particularily vindictive hammer.

The floor pummeled the Umbra Eternis senseless, and the next two after at did the same, and the floor after that had a great deal of technical equipment among the things Calvin had rigged with explosives, and when the Umbra Eternis hit them, they went off with sufficient force that, combined with the enormous pressures from the building's assault, bent the Umbra Eternis' arm in half and a errant metal edge from it's armor sliced Kimblee nearly from shoulder to hip, and he was literally a few inches from being horribly disembowled. He didn't appreciate his luck, having already blacked out from the pain of the constant backlashes inflicted on the Umbra Eternis as it was drilled through the building, more carefully set explosives combining with the sheer power that a rocket-propelled building tends to posess and the resultant shockwaves shredding it's internal equipment to useless bits.

The building was tearing apart around it, the walls flying away as they did their work in bringing it closer to a final death bit by explosive bit, and as it did the building flew onward with it's doomed foe carried with it, aimed at the location where all this mess had started. Heat and force and pressure combined to grind the Umbra Eternis' vaunted defenses down. Earlier, it might have been able to withstand this, and that was a big 'what if', and it was a pointless question, given that it had been damaged enough that those defenses no longer mattered now. Bits of armor were being shredded off, and while it wasn't much, chunks of wall fired at sub-sonic speeds were shoved into them and through the Umbra Eternis, dozens of such piercings done in moments.

The Umbral Heartless fought as hard and as long as they could, trying their very damned hardest to endure; in their present state, it was all they could do. They were only capable of holding on to the fabric of the world they had been pulled into, pulling tight on the concept of the unstoppable predator Kimblee had unwittingly cast them into, their shattered essences clinging onto this last desperate chance to remain, to take vengeance and feed on everything they could kill to fill up the gaping abyss within themselves. They lasted long enough for some measure of credit to be given them, even with the play of powers that were twisting the Umbra Eternis into a ragged mess and crushing it afterwards, but they still only lasted up to the point where it smashed into the room where the transmission had been filled, for some of the building's primary back-up generators had been located right under that floor, and when the Umbra Eternis hit them they went up in a terrific blast, and the battered Umbra Eternis could only take so much and the Heartless much less, and in that blast they were finally and mercifully wiped away from the world, their essences disengaging and flying back to the terrible and empty realm they had been called from.

The smoke and fire and flying rubble made by the Umbra Eternis being smashed through the news studio were briefly met with the smog-like form the Heartless sometimes became when they died, and then that too faded away in moments. And still the building kept pulverizing the fallen machine-titan, it's flight taking it into a downwards arc. The Umbra Eternis was shoved forward deeper into the building, it's arm hanging on by threads and cables and most of it's armor severely banged up but otherwise intact. It went sideways through a floor, was flipped around when it hit the next, and it's head was twisted almost completely around by the power of it's next impact, Kimblee, now a bruised and bleeding wreck just barely clinging to consciousness, failed to Zim's ship now behind them and following the missile-building as closely as they dared, continuously stantly shooting blasts at all the bits of rubble that fell from the weaponized news studio, vaporizing them and stopping so much as a single piece of it from hitting anyone or causing more collateral damage (apart from the obvious bit caused by weaponizing a news studio in the first place).

And then, it smashed through the last floor (the basement were Calvin had done the most vital of his weaponizing work) and the news studio's furious assault on Kimblee at last ended when he and his giant robot impacted the generators and other power supply things that Calvin had overclocked to both turn the building into a giant missile and operate as that missile's explosive payload: he struck it with all the acclumated energy the Umbra Eternis had been hit with during it's impact with the news studio. Kimblee had a brief moment, before he finally blacked out, of appreciating the irony of a final explosion, greater than any of the others and at the very least an equal of one he could have made himself, being the thing to finally defeat him here.

That explosion was mighty indeed, painting the sky a bizarre and fetching array of weird colors from all the different fuels that had gone into the explosive packages, and the immense shockwave from it vaporized what was left of the building (a few well-placed shot by Zim and his ship's guns finishing any errant pieces) and then the light cleared, leaving a short-lived smokecloud behind, and somewhere near the bottom of the smokecloud a charred and largely intact metal husk blasted away, falling in the same arc the news studio had been pushed into. To the ground it descended, trailing smoke like a comet's tail, and Zim's ship followed it like a extraordinarily persistent predator determined to finish the job.

Zim noticed only then precisely _where _it was going to crash, and he deemed it seemed appropiate that it would end at the place where all of it had begun. His ship moved after the fallen machine-titan, eager to meet it.

...

Presently and blissfully oblivious to the totally awesome happenings with Kimblee, Morte had found himself winding up doing something he was actually good at but wasn't particularily pleased with, as requested by Armstrong after he deemed Morte to be espicially suited for this task: distracting people by telling them the most interesting anecdotes he could think of so they didn't go off and try to rush into what was probably a delicate situation. "...And, bearing in mind the flaw of gaining power by grafting the parts of Vecna to yourself by first cutting off that part of yourself and grafting Vecna's bits to the stump, that's the third least-borning version of the time I got at least sixteen villains killed by claiming I was the Head of Vecna!" Morte finished.

His captive audience's reactions varied, and the ensuing arguments were even more of an effective deterent towards action that giving them something to do. "Yeah, sounds about right," Captain Razor said, having done his best to get the on-site and non-hospitalized members of the Foster's security doing so productive and now settling in for just hanging around and being very awkward about the whole 'Foster's being totally wrecked' thing. (He and his fellow officers were being admirably stoic after they had seen what was left of Foster's, except for Andre who was pretty blase about the whole thing.

Freya was more skeptical. "Who in the world would be stupid enough to cut off their own head and replace it with what they were told is the former head of a godlike mage who ascended into true godly power?"

"Hy t'ink it sounds good for a laugh or two," Andre said, proving Freya's point. "And I ran vith a few masters who would have done it just for laughs."

"Another rousing tale of evil being smote by it's own foolishness!" Armstrong declared passionately. "What say you, fellow random citizens and refugees!"

"I've heard worse," Mr. Herrimen said, sitting in a wheelchair and being dutifully pushed around by Eduardo the ogre. "But then, and I do apologize, I've certainly heard better."

"I thought it was pretty awesome," Ron Stoppable said. On his shoulder, Rufus shrugged.

"It was a little too farfetched for me," Kim added.

"Meh, it was okay," Danny Fenton said, giving a 'so-so' gesture with his hand. The rest of his crew. As he and his friends Sam and Tucker were sitting atop Appa in the crowd, this gave them a measure of influence due to how impressive they looked and several people revised their opinions to match up with theirs.

"YOU SUCK!" A number of revitalized and former victims of the Philosopher's Stone shouted, still a bit filled with hostility towards people that annoyed them after their ordeal.

Morte grimaced. Sort of. "Ingrates."

As news spread that Morte was done with his anecdote, others became even more vocal about their dislike. "Oh thank God, he finally shut up," Pants-Man Audrey said, clapping in relief. "I don't think I could take more insipid babbling about stories that don't actually go anywhere and don't make even the slightest amount of sense. Are you sure you're not making this stuff up?"

"As sure as I am that it makes no damn sense for us to be hanging around and having a party like this," Morte said. Around him, a full-fledged celebration was unfolding and somehow planned by whoever's idea the party was to _also _have each act of partying assist in reconstruction in some fashion; there was a bunch of men hauling around the larger chunks of rubble so they could climb up and hang a generic party banner that someone had hastily scribbed 'Hooray, We're Not Dead!', someone had installed a giant disco ball-and-speaker that doubled as both as an automated DJ and a display for coordinating the efforts through the specific patterns of light it displayed. And of course there were those kids that were dancing around an effigy they were burning (for some reason) right in a heat-powered truck equipped with a shovel it used to clear the larger debris out of the way and into a neat pile where Foster's had once been. For some reason an awful lot of the rubble was going around Foster's, and that made Morte a bit suspicious.

"Point," Razor remarked. "But this isn't the real party. This is just work. And a preliminary for the _real _party. Which will take place following reconstruction of Foster's later today."

Morte couldn't blink, but he managed a long stare at Razor. "...That easy, huh?"

"That easy," Razor confirmed with a sly, knowing grin.

Morte gave him a suspicious look. The anthropoid cat declined to elaborate, so Morte dropped it.

The restless crowd got impatient with the conversation. "SAY SOMETHING COOL!" Someone yelled.

"Hey, a minute ago you were all going on about how lame I am," Morte said, a touch offended.

"That was then, this is now, NOW ENTERTAIN US!" Another someone whined.

Morte rolled his eyes, and in doing so was in the same position as about a dozen other or so people that that noticed a bright spot in a sky that was suddenly a lot less darker than it had been for the past half-hour or so. He peered at it, feeling the phantom-feeling prickles of long-since lost muscles that should have been sliding over his skull in a frown, and saw that it was getting closer. He also knew a good distraction when he knew it. "Hey! Everybody, look over there!"

People looked around, bored and very eager for any kind of distraction from the still depressing scene. Danny looked around. "What are you talking about?" Morte bobed his head up. Danny looked and saw the bright spot, now apparent as a large falling object that was on fire and coming right for them. "Oh, that." Danny blinked slowly as everyone caught sight of it and started panicking. "Guess we should move, huh?"

"Hmm," Armstrong said. "That would certainly be an efficient move."

"KIMBLEE'S BACK!" Ron shouted with surprising accuracy, grabbing Pants-Man Audrey and shaking him frantically. "FEEL FREE TO PANIC AT ANY TIME. DON'T YOU WORRY, I ALREADY GOT A HEADSTART ON THE PANICKING!" Audrey put a oversized hand on his face, muffling him a bit, and he gripped Ron's face and dragged him off to what appeared to be safety, hoping he wasn't earning Kim's displeasure. (The woman was frightful when she was angry.)

The various officers and agents of the factions present - Peace Marines in their longcoats and naval attire; Crossguards in their non-denominational trenchcoats; Peerage representatives in their mini-mechas with walking plant minions; the host of the independants who registered with the Free League for census reasons even though they didn't really count as a faction - immediately got up. The competent ones took positions in readying to protect the hospital and the Foster's grounds from further attack or evacuating the people there. The _in_competent ones just freaked out and ran like idiots. The competent ones shook their heads at this disgraceful behavior and silently added their idiot brethern to the list of 'people to protect' and decided to have words with their superiors over this, perhaps reassigning the panickers to a less stressful post. (Like kitten handling, or a hug examination facility.)

In short order, the grounds of Foster's were cleared and it was pretty lucky too, considering that the falling object crashed hard enough to hit the ground with a tremendous blast that tore the nearby trees to splinters, scattering them all over and uprooting a few more. Shockwaves tore up the ground for about a mile, growing less drastic as it went out, so the worst that happened was the Foster's rubble got a little more ruined and a lot of people were knocked around. The downed object kept going after it hit the ground, rolling forward and tearing through the dirt, digging a shallow path behind it and bouncing a few times before it came to a stop, the flames still burning and a few patches of ground on fire that were quickly doused by a few attendents who had the foresight to have brought hydro pump packs and fire hoses. Those same people turned the hoses on the burning object, putting out the fires, and as soon as the steam made from the superheated metal went out, the people who hadn't panicked got a little closer to see what it was.

Morte, being of a mood to show that he wasn't a _total _coward, was one of them, and he was the first to get a really good look at it. "The hell?" He said. "It's a busted-up robot!"

"Actually, it's a busted-up giant robot," said Agatha Heterodyne, who had finished fighting Heartless elsewhere and had arrived to oversee the reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.

"Eh, it's a distinction without a difference," Morte retorted, and further commentary was derailed by another wind stirring up the ashes on the grounds and making a suitably dramatic scene as another strange thing appeared; Morte turned around, attracted by a fresh outbreak of interested chatter, and saw an odd-looking rattletrap ship flying in from where the robot had come from, coming to a stop a short distance from the downed robot so abruptly that it bounced and crashed onto the ground, thankfully without any damage. It hit the ground at an angle, and the cargo doors were now propped open.

Danny came over, accompanied by Kim and Ron. (Audrey was being helpful, and Kim was taking her chances with being on the front line here. Ron was just along for the ride.) "That has got to be some of the worst piloted I've ever seen," Kim muttered to Ron, a bit tactlessly. (And hypocritically, given her driving habits.)

A loudspeaker buzzed on the ship, which Morte realized was in the perfect position to shield people from the robot if the robot got back up and started hitting people again. "_I heard that!_" Two familiar voices boomed out.

Kim's jaw dropped. Ron blinked. Morte's jaw literally fell off him. "Little loud guy! New Boss?" Morte said after he flitted back to the ground to retrieve his missing mandible. "You gotta be zoggin' kidding me."

The ship powered down, and after a short wait, the cargo doors were forced all the way open. Morte had a brief image of a orange-furred shape behind them before Zim slid out, waving triumphantly. As luck had it, people had stopped panicking after it became apparent that nothing bad was happening, and lots of people cheered on the basis that they were being waved at. Calvin came next, looking a little dizzy. Zuko put a hand on his shoulder and steered him off the cargo's rampway, and got him over to a tree to help balance him. Hobbes was the last of the crew to walk out, and from the looks of it, he had been holding the doors open. Fortunately, they stayed open this time. Courtney, Beth and Winry came out next, the latter two carrying Jarod with his arms over their shoulders, Beth doing so more easily than Winry due to her powered armor.

"Gentlemen, _BEHOLD!_" Zim said, waving the Keyblade and producing a chaotic stream of lightbursts that exploded overhead into very unexpected but awesome fireworks that got the remaining attention of everyone and certainly impressed on them that here was a good guy (it was a rare villain that announced himself with fireworks, and certainly not in such a manner); it helped that the fireworks spelled out 'I AM AWESOME' and a small arrow pointing down at Zim and his crew. Zim glanced up, wondering how the hell he'd done that. "And gentlewomen, also behold! And other genders if you have them, we're not picky. Anyway, behold, _I TOTALLY BEAT KIMBLEE!_ Who is right over there, totally defenseless and stuff."

"You mean _I _beat Kimblee," Calvin pointed out. "Or my cunning plan did, anyway."

"Shush, you're ruining the moment."

The crowd, a large assembly of people who had been hurt badly by Kimblee one way or another for they had lost their home to him even if they hadn't been temporarily killed and utilized by him or a loved one or friend had been, stared at Zim. To a man (or whatever), they gaped at the small and peculiar-looking Irken who bore the scars of a long and brutal fight he had clearly come out only just barely on the winning side, the rest of his crew nearly as beaten up. Courtney, Beth, Winry and Jarod, realizing that they might be lumped in with Zim's crew and not sure if they liked the idea, quietly shuffled aside and assimilated into the crowd to find Jarod proper medical attention and also so Courtney could mourn her news studio. And possibly plot revenge with her other coworkers.

A new mood went through the crowd like a slow-motion ripple, picking up speed only gradually, but by the time it became evident to Zim the ripple had became a wave, and the crowd was all too eager to succumb to that wave, and they abruptly rushed forward, screaming and shouting and totally madly gleeful, too confused on the circumstances to be sure of what to do but reasonably clear on general procedure in this event. Just to be sure, Armstrong reminded them: "THE VILLAIN THAT DID HEINOUS DAMAGE TO OUR TOWN AND OURSELVES HAS BEEN DEFEATED! YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!"

"CELEBRATION PHASE TWO IS A-GO!" Ron cheered.

Everyone screamed something like 'WHOO!' and immediately began cheering Zim and his crew, people rushing in small groups and gatherings to congratulate them and find out more. Zuko blinked, the praise unsettling him, but he got over it and smirked, waving awkwardly to the people that came over and squealed excitedly, demanding his autograph just in case he wound up being famous and cool and stuff. Hobbes was all too pleased to find out that he was the sudden focus of interest to quite a lot of girls and people who immediately pinned him for a knight in spite of the lack of any significant regalia. Calvin was just as upbeat about a number of people lifting him up on their shoulders, giving him congratulating fist-bumps and back-slaps in a display of needless melodrama that he easily outdid in sheer dramatics just through his voice volume. (Plus, he was wearing mad science gadgets. That always got attention.) Zim had his hand shaken by all manner of people that came right out of nowhere to him, in a big hurry to crowd around him and see just who had beaten the big bad guy _this _time and be the first to tell their friends that they had met the hero of the day (an important tradition in Traverse Town).

Morte stared, jaw hanging open. "Okay," He said. "What. The. _Hells_." He shook his head and hovered over through the crowd, pushing quite a lot of people out of his way even though some of them were absolutely huge compared to him, shoving them like they weighed as much as wet bags; not espicially simple, but he was more than strong enough for it, shockingly enough. "Boss!" He called out, finding Zim among a bunch of people who weren't doing much but were just kind of there. "You're still alive! What the hell happened up there?"

Zim started to answer, but Appa trundled through the crowd and people got out of his way in a hurry. Danny slipped off the Sky Bison and tottered over, looking almost too weak to move but too insanely stubborn to lay down. "Little buddy!" He croaked, phasing right through anyone in his way and seizing Zim in a fierce hug. "You're alive!"

"Eurgh!" Zuko yelped as Appa bellowed with happiness, lunging at him and cheerily licking him like a giant dog. "Down, bison! Down, I say! Okay, okay, I'm glad to see you too!"

"Yes, yes, I'm alive, celebrate with feasts in my honor!" Zim wriggled out of Danny's grasp, looking incredibly uncomfortable. "Geez, calm down, you'll give yourself the brainworms or whatever lazy malady humans get."

Danny wavered on his feet (literally, he went a bit transparent for a moment or two) and finally fell onto his backside, still staring at Zim with a pleased sort of exhausation. "You're alive," He whispered, grinning faintly. "You're alive, you're still alive..."

Zim looked uncomfortable. "As are you. Focus on that, will you? You'll feel better, trust me!" Danny looked doubtful about that, but the groaning noise of metal against metal interrupted any further comments from him. Zim whirled around and saw that the broken and beaten shape of the robot was moving around like a mortally wounded beast too hurt to get up. "Oh. He's _still _not dead. _JUST AS PLANNED_."

"Oh come on, I should be saying that! It was my plan!" Calvin said irritably.

"'Him'? 'He'?" Morte said. He looked at the beaten robot, looked at the wary glances Zuko and Hobbes kept directing at it, and he put the details together. "Is that the Kimblee guy?"

"Yeah, I already said so!" Zim said.

The people celebrating around them froze. "Did he say 'Kimblee'?" Someone asked.

"Solf J. Kimblee, the guy that started all this?" asked Captain Razor angrily.

"The same guy that murdered all those people back in his own world and didn't learn the lesson?" Someone else said.

"Kimblee...?" The name was becoming a quiet and insistent murmuring as the crowd collectively worked something out. "Kimblee..."

"Kimblee...!"

"Kimblee!"

"_KIMBLEE!" _Quite a few people screamed in outraged fury, having not really processed that the man himself was sitting right there as indicated by Zim in the heat of their excitement that the battle was over. "Kimblee! Kimblee! Kim-blee!"

"Uh oh, sounds like a riot situation," Calvin said, getting away from his supporters before they could go into full mob-mode or something.

"Wait, what?" Danny said. "I'm sorry I'm getting on in the 'stopping the mob' thing we do at times like this, but what happened back there? How'd he get in a robot? Where did he get a robot? How did it get beaten up? Where are the rest of the guys? And where'd you get a ship!"

"It's a long story-" Zim started to say.

"Kimblee summoned the robot," Zuko said, finally getting away from Appa by distracting him with the very large punch bowl someone had left out. "He made it from other robots. We spent most of this time whittling it down and Calvin turned a building into a guided rocket that defeated it and brought it here for some reason. And a guy called Cyborg made the ship for us for some reason." He nodded, looking satisfied with himself. Appa charged over, knocking people aside in his haste to get over to Zuko and bumped him to the ground, nuzzling the young Fire Lord affectionately. Zim caught sight of Zuko's face, just barely visible out of a small part of the fuzz, and he didn't seem particularily upset about it.

"Okay, so the story is much briefer when Zuko tells it," Zim concluded.

"Oh." Danny looked uncertain again. "So...did we, I don't know, _win?_" At this the crowd hesitated, the mob mentality freezing as they realized that they might just wind up being in the position of being the big crowd of enemies that got blown up by the revived villain.

"Technically, yes, I can't see most people getting up from what we did to him, but...eh, that's mainly hard to say," Zim said. The Umbra Eternis trembled again, and it's arm slid away from it's front, the fuselage warped and bent but still miraculously intact by some combination of it's incredible toughness and sheer luck, and within it was, of course, Kimblee. The man was still alive, beaten more than halfway to death and very much unconscious. Inexplicably quite a lot of him was covered in the same sort of metal as the Umbra Eternis, a metal that shattered off his body as they watched. Zim didn't get any time to wonder when Kimblee suddenly had matter absorbing powers (perhaps related to the shapeshifting ones from earlier) when the man moved. People flinched and some screamed, but all he did was wriggle his arms a bit, making a few interesting noises, and then made a quite inasupicious 'meep' and promptly fell into proper unconsciousness, this time for real. He fell out of the Umbra Eternis, sliding down the side of it and hitting his head again on the way down in such a way that would have knocked him out if he weren't already unconscious and landed squarely on his back next to it's arm; brusied, bloody, burned, battered and beaten.

Everyone, Zim and his crew and errant passengers and crowd alike, stared at Kimblee. Kimblee twitched a bit, and did nothing else; not dead, against all the rules of common sense and logic and fairness, but still unconscious and very definitely, finally defeated. There was silence, tight with swelling glee and the tension dying until Zuko broke it entirely. "Yeah, he's out."

Zim nudged him. "Fellow adventurer, learn some drama!" More loudly, Zim screamed to the crowd and raised his hands, firing a few jets of flame into the air jubilantly. "_WE DID IT! WE WON!_"

The crowd looked from Zim's crew to Kimblee and back again. They once again expressed their approval via shouting and cheering before abruptly cutting off, staring intently at Kimblee, the man who had done so much evil to them in so short a time. Furious discussion engaged in the crowd on the whole subject of lynching the bastard right then and there or just throwing him into a sub-space vault with all the other evil jerks, with Andre and most of the surviving imaginary friends (except for Wilt and Eduardo and Mr. Herrimen, of course) pretty heavily on that side, while cooler heads (most prominently Captains Razor and Armstrong) insisted on due process and proper trials and _then _throwing him into a sub-space vault with all the other evil jerks. The more sensible heads prevailed and the crowd reluctantly stood down. There was some grumbling, but overall the mood of the crowd amounted to 'eh, good enough, now let's get back to PARTYING!'.

The rest of Zim's crew relaxed enormously at not needing to deal with _another _angry mob, and even more happy that the fight had finally ended all because of their efforts: Calvin punched the air and whooped victoriously, getting dizzy and laying back down in a hurry. Zuko imitated Zim's gesture, making only a single fire that was still better than Zim's. Hobbes clapped gleefully, like a little child getting presents. Morte gaped again, but this time it was from happy shock instead of disbelief. "Holy crap, you _actually pulled it off!_" He said, and even though he was always grinning, his grin was more genuine now.

"You dare a note of surprise?" Zim said haughtily, but still grinned, and the crowd celebrated, a good number of them splitting off to find food and drink and throw it at people in the proscribed fashion acceptable in these moments. Tired, Zim sat down with the Keyblade in hand, looking faintly unsettled about something. He tilted his head, stood up again, and went over to Kimblee; a thought persisted in his head that this had to be finished, but since Kimblee was clearly out of it, he didn't know why he felt so compelled, like sparks of light were buzzing in the back of his and pressing him onward.

Zim stood and walked to Kimblee, staring at him once he was right next to him. He tilted his head from side to side, watching the Keyblade gently moving around by itself while his hand was gripping it and dragged around by it. It was eerily like watching a dog sniffing around for an elusive scent. Light flickered around it, much as it had during their fight, but instead of the violently bright contrails of randomized color these were mostly a gentler white edged with faint traces of green and blue, and Zim assumed there was a significance to this. As they passed over Kimblee, the colors turned more muted for a moment, and with a faint shifting that reminded him of something probing deeper into something and being colored by the depths, the colors turned a fearful shade of a yellow tinged with indigo. It made for some pretty interesting shading.

As the colors passed over him, Kimblee turned slightly. His eyes flickered, and he looked up at Zim as though from a great distance, eyebrows narrowing at Zim like he he was trying to make him out from a long distance away. Kimblee grunted, his arms moving slightly, and then they dropped, too exhausted to move. Zim poked him with the Keyblade and grinned as he said, "We're not done yet, you and I."

Kimblee opened an eye as much as he could. With the heavy bruised swelling his eyes nearly shut, it was a good effort. "Beh?" He mumbled, dislocated jaw doing a poor feat of communicating properly.

Zim clicked his tongue once, unsure of what to do next or how to proceed. He could feel _something_, a insistent stirring that he wasn't sure came from the Keyblade. It was coming from Kimblee of all people, and he wasn't sure how to identify the sensation; the best he could think of was a choice between sitting on incredibly complex threads that made up the world and feeling someone bouncing slightly out of place on them, or that he could almost see someone at the periphery of his vision that Kimblee had been violently superimposed over. Neither was strictly accurate, but Zim was familiar with the idea that some things had enormous difficulty being communicated to sentient minds; he was a bit disgruntled at actually experiencing such a thing. He remembered the _other _in Kimblee who had briefly tried to get Zim to kill him before Kimblee could take over, and the desperate unconcern for his own well-being.

It didn't seem right to kill someone who wanted to die to stop a maniac, even if that someone wanted to be killed. And Zim had already seen enough of people dying to last him a long time.

Kimblee's eyes closed and cracked open again, and it was not _Kimblee _who looked through them. "Hey," that not-Kimblee voiced croaked, face shifting strangely, that red not-blood fluid positively gushing from him. "You won."

"Yes," Zim said warily. "I did."

As the fluid fell away, Kimblee's body grew a little smaller and paler. His features twisted up and began settling into a different pattern, looking like someone else entirely. Some of the damage reverted in the process, and Not-Kimblee managed a small broken laugh. "...Nice. Can't believe I'm not dead yet."

Zim frowned. "Why do you want to die so badly? And who _are _you?"

"...'m just a half-human freak who got seriously unlucky," Not-Kimblee said, looking surprised that Zim wanted to know. "And dying would have stopped Kimblee from using my body to do all that stupid crap, so..." He wasn't capable of moving on his own, but he still managed a small shift of his shoulders that was almost a shrug. "Can't believe I didn't die from all that anyway. My powers picked a _great _time to kick in, didn't they? Probably gonna die from getting hit as bad as I did anyway." That almost-shrug again, and it seemed to say, _No great loss._

Zim's jaw tightened. He couldn't say anything for a moment, and he almost said, _I'm sorry_. Stopping other people from dying had been the _point _of this whole self-appointed mission. He had seen enough of dying this last week alone to last him the rest of his indefinably lifespan, and he had killed enough before he had been shown how sad and pathetic he really was. Killing people, even in the service of the right and proper thing, was something Zim had become considerably uncomfortable with in normal circumstances, not least because of Aang's example and the usual vauge impulse to outdo his friends somehow. (But outdoing Aang's technical pacifism was probably impossible for most people.) The death of anyone else, was something to be deemed dirty business and regretted, and atoned for.

But Zim was tired of regrets; he had over a hundred years worth of regrets to bully his conscience with, and he had decided a long time ago that he would live this new life free of regrets. That he would do absolutely whatever he had to do to live unburdened no matter what the cost was for him life and limb. He swallowed the miserable apology, and glanced down at the Keyblade, thinking that there had to be another way.

He stared at the Keyblade, barely aware of Zuko and Hobbes asking Morte what the hell was going on and not getting any satisfactory answers. The Keyblade, Zim remembered, the weapon that had been described in extremely frustrating and vauge mystical terms, that was supposedly capable of vast and incomprehensible feats outside of anything he had ever experienced. It had, they had told him, spiritually grafted itself for a reason. There was a purpose for it's raising him to the level of exalted heroes, he had been told, and he didn't see much of a better purpose than preventing one more horrible regret from happening right in front of him.

His grip tightened around it's hilt, the warm of the Keyblade rising to a less-than-gentle heat less intense than the force that had burned his hands earlier. It wasn't so different from the fire that he had recently learned to control, and he grinned at the thought. The Keyblade had imbued him with the ability to Firebend, or something very much like it, and Zuko had told him repeatedly that this was flat-out impossible. The Keyblade had the power to cut down monsters that everyone in this town seemed to treat as nameless horrors from the darkest corners of space, and the ability to undo any lock whether it was a literal lock or not. There was no reason, he thought, that it couldn't do one more impossible thing today, and he slowly raised the Keyblade, with no clear idea of what he intended to do aside from an image of the person whose body Kimblee had somehow stolen lying dead on the ground and the powerful thought of _Do not let that become reality._ "Zim?" Zuko said warily. "What are you doing?"

"...I have no idea," Zim said, the light flowing into him from where the Keyblade had somehow grafted itself to his very soul. He pointed the Keyblade at Kimblee's body, Not-Kimblee staring up at him with a detached interest, and at the periphery of his vision Zim saw the restless crowd watching him to see what he was doing. The Keyblade buzzed in his hand, and Zim had the impression that he was supposed to give it something to work with, a focused intent or something mystical and stupid like that. _Think, _he told himself, trying to concentrate in spite of him not having the slighest idea what he was doing, what he was supposed to do or even how to do anything at all. _Think! What must I do to fix this? How can I best resolve this? _It was happening so suddenly, everything was unexpected and he didn't know what to do, his body ached and his hand still screamed lingering pain from the Keyblade's power-induced burns from earlier, and he didn't know how he was supposed to fix this new thing, if he was just going to seperate Kimblee and his victim or what-

Zim stared blankly into space, and a solution became clear to him. _Ah, _he thought smugly. _Of course._

He still didn't know if the Keyblade was alive or not, but a sensation of approval flowed from a within-that-was-not-within this plan seemed to meet with approval from it's dubious intelligence, and the Keyblade swung down on it's own, flying over to Not-Kimblee and Zim was so surprised by it he almost lost his grip on it, and it was bad enough just clinging on to it and being dragged through the grass, digging his heels into the ground and getting to his feet a short distance from Not-Kimblee, the Keyblade still flashing and buzzing in his hands, now pointing at Not-Kimblee's chest, glowing first faintly and rapidly glowing brighter, a pale blue radiance tinged with greenish-yellow in random spots.

Not-Kimblee stared at the Keyblade's light as it washed over him, his open eye blinking with obviously pained slowness. "Dude," He whispered, mouth dropping in an expression of childlike awe that looked extremely strange on Kimblee's face. (Okay, it didn't look _exactly _like Kimblee's face anymore but it was still close enough to freak Zim out.) "That feels..._nice_..."

Zim grunted in response; all his attention was focused on a _pulling _sensation, subleter perceptions taking precedence and his mind struggling to translate it into sometihng he could handle it this wound up with his looking at Not-Kimblee and for a moment he didn't see a human bordering on death but a-

Well. He didn't know _what _he thought he saw. His first thought was that part of him was looking at what Kimblee's body was made of on the same cosmic scale of reality that the Keyblade operated on, unimaginable numbers of threads made of the pure quintessence that made up the basic building blocks of reality before being spun into the forms that he as a material being actually experienced, and that there were _two _competing forms right there cohabiting the same space; one of them was maimed, hurt and bleeding on a level that went beyond the merely physical but otherwise whole (except for a peculiar bur of prickly psychic energy that felt something Danny was probably more suited to deal with), but the other, which he presumed to indicate Kimblee, was a twisted-up bundle of psychotic motion in misleading stillness, large chunks of it left out as if something vital had been left out and only gradually filling in now, and hooks of psychic energy extended from it into the smaller presence to bind them together and impose itself upon it in a dominant fashion.

Zim stared it for a brief moment, fascinated by the sight. He was aware that he was almost certainly _not _looking at the nature of the two personalities he was dealing with but a dumbed-down version that was suitable for his mind to process, and when he thought about it, the sense of what he was looking at wavered, Kimblee's true body bleeding back into view here and there, and he had to focus on the magical perception filtering through. "Okay," he said, getting a better idea of what he should do. "Okay! Those spots, here and there..." He peered closely at where Kimblee's psychic hooks (or whatever they really were) met Not-Kimblee's essence, and while most of those 'hooks' had dispersed to mingle with the other psychic presence, they were mostly obvious as the cruel mental invasion they were and in a few places had disengaged entirely to leave Kimblee floating freely, no doubt to die without a body of his own when this stolen body finally expired.

Looking at...well, whatever it was he was looking at it, Zim got a rough image of how badly Kimblee's body was hurt, and felt a swell of vindictive pleasure at his suffering. Viewing it seemed to transmit the essential details even though he had no idea what he was looking at, and he tracked a few faint spots that looked the most important to the hooked bits where Kimblee had latched onto Not-Kimblee. Wondering for a moment if there was a way to force all the damage onto Kimblee so that he alone would suffer, Zim allowed the Keyblade to release some of the power it was harnessing and a small surge of light flashed from the glow around him, washing over Not-Kimblee. Zim heard a faint sighing sound, and some of the hooks shrank away, already damaged, and he just _knew _that something had changed. A sense of sudden sureness radiated into him, _transmitted _into him, and Zim glanced suspiciously at the Keyblade, for that certainly had come from outside him. Dismissing the problematic implications for the moment, Zim pointed the Keyblade at what seemed to be the best areas to begin, and paused; the Keyblade kept moving a bit on it's own, and it seemed that it knew what it was doing. Before he could follow that through, the Keyblade moved on it's own, pointing at a disturbing mingling of essences where Kimblee's inhumanly still psychic presence was a murky mass choking the turbulent form of Not-Kimblee, and light flashing around it and struck down into that spot, pushig it around and pulling it apart...

Not-Kimblee flinched. He made a faint noise of astonished shock, and Zim saw past the image to see Not-Kimblee writhing in place, spots of unmarked flesh here and there and the flesh of his shoulder bulging out beseeching and then a _hand _sliding out from there, his body twisting places as if another was emerging from him, and-

Zim grimaced, trying not to look too closely and somewhat aware of the various nosies of disgust from the crowd, and a few expressed notions of interest. (From Calvin in his group for starters, though Morte mentioned that he'd seen grosser things then that and biological fusions had gotten pretty stale.) His mind made up even though he had no idea what was going on, he let go of all resistence he had been holding towards the Keyblade's power. _Just make this work, _he thought grimly, and felt a surge of what might have been satisfaction from that burning mass of light within him and held in his hand, and threads of light weaved together at the Keyblade's tip, shaping into a form that was first impossible for him to discern before it appeared to look something like a small glowing ball before it released itself as a coherent beam directly into the whole of Kimblee and Not-Kimblee's selves (and even that was just a form his mind could handle, he had no idea what was _actually _happening) and as it made contact and the whole thing flashed up with three faint cries of surprise (one of them too weak to hear, one screaming in agony and one that sounded like Not-Kimblee relieved at long last), Zim remembered the same things he had felt when he had done something similiar with the Philosopher's Stone, and drew on the same thing that had come naturally then. He didn't fight it or force the unsealing, he let the purifying energies flow into it, much as Zuko had taught him to do when influencing flames; he _felt_ the light pour down into it, flooding as a storm crashing into a water-starved desert, filling every dried crevice and washing away the lingering dark taints of the other consciousnesses there, detaching them, pushing them away...

And then, in a single burst of frenzied movement, he felt the psychic 'hooks' tying Kimblee to his victim seared away, that strange third entity wailing in fury, and Zim kept the power flowing as hard and fast as he could, and and then _that _entity was carried away on the same surge of power that was pushing Kimblee loose and snared onto Kimblee, binding itself as thoroughly to him as it had to Not-Kimblee. In the work of a few moments, buoyed by the inexpressible joy and excitement that it was to directly channel the Keyblade's holy power through his own will, Zim directed the light into every last lingering bit of Kimblee that remaining in the psychic energy of his host, snipping him away from that host bit by bit until there was nothing holding him there, just a free-floating toxic influence just waiting for physics to catch up and expell him. Zim was less patient, and gave another push that manifested as a final and bright flash of light, the aftershocks of which Zim was briefly aware came with the psychic image he was seeing fading in an instant. There was a brief slurping noise, from the red stuff being drawn back into Kimblee's body, consumed by the process happening to Kimblee's body (_distilled into purest potential and reused, _a voice whispered to him and he had no idea what meant), another bright flash of light as the red stuff transformed into flesh and blood and bone and also clothing.

The end of it was actually a bit anticlimatic after all that built up: the light abruptly got a lot fainter, as if used as fuel to energize something, and was followed by two brief startled yelps, the faint noise of something hitting the ground after a short impact, and then a mildly disappointing silence.

Zim blinked, a bit miffed that there weren't any more explosions like the last time. The light faded entirely, the Keyblade cooled from burningly hot to it's usual comforting warmthc, and as the filters from around him died down he noticed that there were a lot of really lot chattering and bewildered statements being yelled all over, possibly because instead of one person that had fallen from the wreckage of Umbra Eternis there were _two _now; Kimblee himself, not altogether different in apperance but somehow even _more _injured than before (he'd acquired a few mysterious burns, for one thing), but the one lying next to him was another story: a young human male in his early teens, perhaps thirteen or fourteen. It was hard to tell with the stains all over his body, the overlarge clothing and the filthy state of his overgrown hair, not to mention he was one of the single most sick-looking beings Zim had ever seen, and yet he was completely uninjured. It seemed all he needed was a good long bath, perhaps a stay in a spa somewhere, and maybe some group therapy sessions.

"...Huh," Zim said.

"What just happened?" Hobbes said, looking dazed and fascinated and a bit blitzed out from all the lights.

"I have no idea," Calvin said.

"Oh, it was a combined-body takeover mashup splitting thing," Morte said knowledgeably. "...That's pretty fricking stupid."

"How the hells do you know that?" Zuko said irritably.

"Eh, I been places. You pay attention to things long enough, you learn how things work good and proper."

"And yet you can't learn to be useful."

"Bite me, dragon breath." The boy grunted, more strongly than any other sound Kimblee had made in the last few minutes. Zim stared. A lot of other people stared. Morte floated right over to Zim and said, "Hey! Boss! _What the hells did you just do!_?"

Zim looked from Morte to the boy, then to Kimblee and back to Morte. He looked to Zuko and Hobbes for help, but they just shrugged cluelessly at him. So Zim looked at Morte and opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and said, "Ah...you go first, what did _you _see happen?"

Morte did that 360-degree eyeroll that resembled him blinking. "I saw you point that thing at the Kimblee nutter, everything got all glowy and then..." He made a harsh wooshing noise. "Bam, there's _two _guys."

Courtney wandered over to Zim, eager to take a role as spokeswoman for the crowd. Armstrong came with her, mostly just to make sure no one got out of hand or tried to have a debate-duel without him handing out appropiate weapons for a party. "You! Keyguy that blew up my building! What happened just now, what did you do?"

"That was me!" Calvin yelled. No one listened.

"I think he was possessed or something," Zim said vaugely. "Kimblee was possessing him, I mean." He gestured at the boy, whom he noticed was already stirring, though it didn't look like he was in any shape to move around. Even divorced of the damage that had been directed onto Kimblee, he looked like he had been through absolute hell for quite a long time. With his pale skin and dark hair, he looked more than a little like Dib, and Zim grimaced, wondering bitterly if Dib wasn't going such an experience at that very moment. "I think the Keyblade...unsealed him. Something like that." He shrugged. "Who knew." A few people took pictures of the historic moment, eventually leading many to dub Zim 'Shrug Man, the Glorious Hero of Indifference in The Face of Miraculous Awesomeness'.

Courtney looked nonplussed. Zuko looked at the Keyblade, frowning. "It can do that? That's...refreshingly benign." Photos were taken of Zuko as well, and since none of them bothered to get his name, when the photos went viral people eventually decided to call him Two-Face Bishie-Boy. (The latter because he was so pretty, and the former even though there already _was _a Two-Face living in town but Harvey Dent wasn't twofaced anymore so he didn't mind surrendering the title.)

Zuko looked at Hobbes, probably to gauge his reaction, and looked startled at the sight of the tiger-boy gaping openly at the Keyblade and looking from it to the Not-Kimblee boy, more openly fascinated than Zim had ever seen him. He settled for staring at the Keyblade, a look of frank wonder that was a bit more suitable for someone who had just had a religious experience. "That's...just _fantastic_," Hobbes said faintly, mouth loosely opened into a silly grin. He looked at the boy, and he faltered a little. "If that hadn't happened, we might have ended up..." He stopped, looking uncomfortable. He made an awkward gesture that sort of looked like he was miming a snapped neck. More pictures were snapped of Hobbes, and he would be labeled by the people who didn't bother to get his name as 'The Quite Appropiately Titled Sir Not-Killing-Anyone-At-The-Moment-And-Quite-Glad-Of-It'. (And that was how Hobbes wound up winning Traverse Town's annual Most Pointless Publically Acquired Title With A Needless Amount of Hyphens Conquest a week later.)

"Accidentally killing this kid?" Morte said bluntly. He didn't look happy about it either. "...Yeah. Lucky break there." Photos were taken of him, presumably because he was there, and the same people who were absolutely awful at giving them names termed him 'Lord Schmitt A'Refreshingly Macduff of Morporkia-Prime, Cosmopolitan Edition' for reasons that absolutely no one was ever clear on.

"...Yeah," Hobbes said quietly, and smiled gently again, thumbclaw peacefully clicking against a odd ornament on his necklace that Zim hadn't noticed it before; a stone rectangle with a big crack in it, apparently carved from a single piece of rock and not very well at that. Calvin gave him a brief slightly sad smile, as if he were happy for his brother for some reason. (No one took pictures of Calvin except when he happened to be in the frames of the other shots. He was eventually nicknamed the Random Dude In the Background. This wasn't as demeaning as it sounded, because since the people who didn't bother to do research had no idea who he was, they had no choice but to invent the most insanely awesome stories of how he wound up being there at this historic moment, the least interesting being that he was just catching his breath after hitching ride on the ship following his assault on a gang of biker-demons by throwing a puppy at them and making a getaway on an interdimensional spelljammer.)

The crowd was standing right around them now, he noticed as their faint murmuring reached a peak, curious and totally confused, and Zim caught a glimpse of people looking aside as someone pushed their way to the front, and with the way his life had been going he wasn't terribly surprised to see that it was Bloo shoving his way to Zim, Mac and the rest of their friends (including, Zim was pleased to see, Minimoose, and to a totally indifferent degree Mr. Herrimen) coming through. More gently, Kim and Ron followed behind them, taking advantage of the brief gap in the crowd, and an android Zim didn't know but had some truly awesome pants kept pace with them. "Green guy!" Bloo said, waddling frantically over to Zim while his friends trailed behind, looking tired and scared.

Zim looked at him, waited for a moment, and inclined his head. Bloo took that as an invitaiton and said, "Dude, what _happened! _We saw a green light a few minutes ago and _BAM!_ Most of the guys that kinda-sorta died got back up and were all alive again and none of them knew what had happened! And then a robot crashes into the ground and _you're _back and you're all like, bang, I'm back, and then that robot went ka-bloosh, and then a guy fell out and you made a big flashy thing, and...and...another guy's there!" He waved his pseudopods wildly, so overexcited he almost toppled over. "_What happened, man?_"

"Um, yeah," Wilt said timidly. "What, uh, what _did _happen?" By his side, Eduardo muttered something quickly in Spanish, staring in horrified fascination at Kimblee's comatose body and with some concern at the other boy. Coco squawked...something, and Zim didn't catch what it was.

Mr. Herrimen couldn't speak for a moment but shook a lot, his wheelchair creaking in protest. When he did, his voice was hoarse, raw with emotion. "Please. What. What happened? What has become of...of _him._" He gestured feebly at Kimblee's unmoving body, hand shaking with repressed fury and more evident satisfaction.

Zim started to speak. He stopped, not entirely sure himself. "And what happened to the rest of the guys?" Kim said fretfully, waving to catch Zim's attention. "Are they on that ship? Is my dad and his boss-" She stopped, looking afraid.

Ron swallowed nervously, and even Rufus on his shoulder shivered, clinging to Ron's neck like he was a giant comfort blanket. "Did Kimblee...uh..." He waved his hands around, more subdued than Zim had yet seen him. "Y'know. _Hurt _them?"

"And what about the rest of them?" The android with the awesome pants asked. "Our leaders! And Abe and Scarl? And also Beth, I guess."

Danny, hiding behind the rest, peeked out and said to his friend, "Dude. What happened to Aang and the others? Are they...alive?" He swallowed, eyes wide and wet and blinking furiously.

The rest of the crowd swelled around Zim, and a host of miserably demanding questions assailed him: where was so-and-so, what had happened then and there, was there a Heartless portal in the town, had other people shown up to help Kimblee, did he find out why Kimblee did it or if he had allies, did anyone else die, what happened when suddenly almost everyone came back, why hadn't everyone come back...

Zim stepped back, alarmed by the intensity and terrifying _need _of the people who wanted answers and closure so badly, and it didn't help that he didn't _know _what had happened to them, and he didn't know what had become of his allies either, and he felt a surge of terror for Aang and the rest...

Appa turned aside, ignoring the crowd (he kept growling at the ones that got too close, ensuring that he kept an acceptable amount of personal space which kept their area nicely clear) and looked up at a moving object in the sky. Hobbes looked aside and made a high growling noise in gratitude. Zuko beamed at the sight, and Morte lazily said, "Hey. They're...uh, they're back!"

Zim looked aside for a bullet-fast Aang to fly from nowhere and slam into him with a joyful hug. "Zim! You mad genius! You _did it! YOU DID IT!_"

"GUYS!" Calvin yelled. "IT. WAS. MY IDEA!" Predictably, no one listened, and if they did, no one cared. Appa charged over, knocking Aang over and enthusiastically nuzzling him with even greater fervor than he had Zuko, who was also joining in with the frantic relief. Zim, knocked on his back, was therefore looking at the sky and saw that Morte had noticed the odd sight of a sandy cloud descending from the sky, and on it was everyone from the fight that had been unceremoniously tossed aside by Kimblee. It came to a slight crash on the ground, crumbling and dissolving back into normal sand that was swiftly collected by Gaara and sucked back into his gourd, dumping everyone on the sand rudely on the ground; Toph pushed through the people in her way and fervantly hugged the ground, grumbling impreciations at Gaara for seperating her from the precious earth, but if he heard her or got offended, he didn't show it.

There wasn't much respite, for several of the more battle-driven members of the group ran up, weapons ready. "All right, we're ready to finish it!" Naruto roared, dragging Roy and Scar with him for some reason. "Just show us to Kimblee!" Zim pointed at Kimblee, who was still unmoving. He grunted a bit, but that was it. Naruto blinked, very slowly, as the rest of the group gradually settled down while they realized that the battle was already over. "Wait, it's over? What the hell? We were all revved up and everything!"

"It's really over?" Sokka said. He sighed in relief, looking ready to just lie down and go back to sleep for a few hours. "I didn't think that stupid fight would _ever _stop..."

"I second that," Aang said, and they high-fived.

Their group quickly discussed this (their reactions ranging from the relieved - like Angilaka, Katara, Winry and Cyborg - to the surprised - like Greed, Gibbs, Courtney and Beth - and even the disapointed - like Deadpool and Gaara - and varying emotions inbetween), their shock fading into incredulity. Eventually, Abel, who had been apparently picked up by their friends on their way there and Zim was pleased to see looked totally healed up apart from deep weariness, took stock of the situation and shrugged. "Well, Commander-Admiral Mustang _did _get a call from one of his guys here saying that the situation was in hand."

"That I did," Roy agreed. "Not that I still have any idea of what happened. I seem to remember you hitting Kimblee with a building?" He gave Zim an inquiring and slightly jealous look, and Zim didn't know if it was because Zim's team had ultimately defeated Kimblee or if was just because they did it so awesomely.

"Stop saying it was him!" Calvin said irritably, walking over to see what all the fuss was about. "I'm the one who rigged that news studio to be a missile just in case we needed something _big _or if I wanted to make something cool happen-" He stopped, noticing that Courtney was staring at him, her eyelid twitching worryingly, and Beth was taking several steps away from her. The people in the crowd who worked with her (the tentacle girl, the clone news anchor and various others) recognized the warning signs and outright fled for cover. "Um. Why are you staring at me like that?"

"My building," Courtney said, her voice quiet and tight and a little higher-pitched than usual.

Calvin worked with a lot of very smart but slightly unstable people, and knew certain signs pretty well. (He'd have to, given that he _was _a very smart but slightly unstable person. It was practically a job description.) "Uh oh," He said quietly. Zim and Morte exchanged a glance and sidled away.

"My _building_!" Courtney yelled, shoving through everyone in her way and stomping over to Calvin, fingers curling like she ached to wrap them around his throat and strangle him.

"Hey, I can explain that!" Calvin said, backing up a little. He thought fast, and came up with nothing. "Uh...um. Crap."

"_MY BUILDING!" _Courtney howled, grabbing him by the collar before he could do something sensible like run away. "_WHY DID YOU BLOW UP MY BUILDING!_"

"Technically, it was more of a controlled demolition caused by crashing into a giant invincible robot made of evil-" Calvin started to say.

Courtney pulled him up until the rather short preteen was level with her face. "I don't care about technicalities, _you destroyed my building and lost us our studio! What do you think's gonna happen to our jobs, huh?_ _And you didn't even TELL US!_"

"I did imply a lot," Calvin said, getting annoyed. "And it _worked_, didn't it? And I didn't tell you because you probably wouldn't have let me, geez. And you got an exclusive story out of it."

"You _blew up my building!_" Courtney yelled again, face going a bit white with fury. "You lost us our _jobs! _What's the point of having a news story if we can't publish it!"

Her fellows from the news studio gasped. "He did _what?_" They gave Calvin downright murderous looks. Much of the crowd was looking disapproving. (Naruto, Shego and Greed, on the other hand, gave Calvin a big thumbs-up when Courtney wasn't looking. Deadpool pulled up a sign from somewhat that scored five out of ten. Calvin thought the explosion had at least been a seven, maybe an eight.)

"You had us help you sabotage our own workplace and blow it up!" A technician snarled.

"Months of work, lost!" Another wailed.

"No it's not," Calvin said, reaching into his pocket and throwing a flash drive at them. "I put all your work into that thing just in case you needed a back-up like this. You still have all your data and recordings and unaired transcripts and stuff."

"...Oh. But you still cost us our equipment and premises," the technician said bitterly.

"I got yelled at, traumatized and now I lost my job!" The tentacle girl wailed. "Today is a terrible day!" Some of the Foster's people gave her dirty looks, probably feeling that at least _she _didn't get temporarily killed or something.

"...Okay, maybe I didn't think that through," Calvin said, looking worried. "Hobbes, buddy! Back me up!"

"Um..." Hobbes looked at the mood of the crowd, which was leaning back towards lynching again. "...Can I have a few moments to make up my mind?"

"_HOBBES!_"

"Okay, okay, geez!" Hobbes went over to him. "Uh...look, how much does it cost to buy and outfit a news studio so you guys can get back to work? I'm pretty sure we might be able to reimburse you."

"Actually, that won't be neccesary," Roy said, Gibbs giving Zim's group a sour look. (Zuko grimaced; he hadn't even _done _anything. He was immediately swarmed by the rest of Team Avatar, who weren't paying attention and demanded Zuko's presence in a group hug.) "Since collateral damage happened to your workplace in such a way that impinges your ability to work, and it occured on a mission that the Crossguard and the Peace Marines had under their respective jurisdictions, we'll reimburse you and set you up with a new workplace."

"Oh, really!" Courtney dropped Calvin, all thoughts of indignation forgotten. "What kind of a reimbursement are we talking about? 'Cause I had some _very _nice ideas involving one of those mobile news studios that are also semi-sentient whales that they farm in the Beach District. And can we get more computers? And premises away from epicenters of incident occurances this time? And some automatic editing units that make us look as good as possible and a Integrity Inflicting Editing processor? And one of those vending machines that give free muffins from nowhere?" Roy groaned, and waved over Angilaka to reluctantly take over the job of talking terms with Courtney, from where the giant woman had been explaining to her faction members what had been going on.

The crowd started to disperse, their curiosity apparently satisified, and the ones who wanted to see Kimblee taken into custody remained behind. They didn't have long to wait, as Scar quietly came from behind the others, feet silently bending the grass under him and moving as smoothly as a desert wind. He might have noticed that a great deal many people were now staring directly at him, perhaps justifiably concerned about what he was going to do; the history between him and Kimblee had been shared freely, after all. Team Avatar froze as he approached them, or more accurately as he walked towards Kimblee, his eyes strangely unfocused. Zim watched him coming, considered taking action, and then banished the Keyblade. Scar's footsteps got heavier, as if he was weighing Kimblee's crimes against him and this town and placing them on his shoulders, the memories of the atrocities of the Ishbalan Civil War grinding down on him and the certain knowledge that Kimblee's crimes today were in part the consequence of his failure to slay him pressing him down even further.

Ron squeaked a bit, and Zim saw a few of the people in the Crossguard's uniforms watching Scar anxiously as the Ishbalan warrior-priest walked past Zuko and Team Avatar, seeing as Zuko had effectively appointed himself the one keeping Kimblee in custody until someone more official came along. Scar glanced down at them, his gaze sliding from Zuko's own mutilated face to the harrowed look Zuko gave him, the young Firebender pointedly looking away from Kimblee as if saying that whatever Scar might do to Kimblee wasn't something Zuko would concern himself with. Aang and Katara looked uncomfortable, but didn't say anything, perhaps too horrified by the full extent of Kimblee's evil to press the issue before they saw what Scar's intentions were. The sight of the ruins of Foster's had a harrowing effect on them all, espicially with Kimblee lying beaten in it's wreckage.

Zim quietly walked to where Kimblee was before Scar got there. Scar gave Zim a warning frown, and Zim ignored him in favor of hopping aboard the remaining arm of the Umbra Eternis, looking down at Scar and Kimblee curiously. Scar looked at Kimblee, the fingers on his right hand - his _destroyer's _hand - flexing with a noise like grinding stones, and then at Zim, giving him a hard and flat look. Zim pointedly looked at Kimblee; he wanted to see what Scar would do next.

Scar reached down and effortlessly plucked Kimblee off the ground, grabbing him by the face with his right hand, and squeezed so hard Zim could hear the bones in his hand tightening. "Killing Kimblee would probably be dramatically appropiate at this venture," He said amiably to Scar, as if Kimblee's survival or death at this point didn't make much difference to him.

"_Yes_," Scar said, gritting his teeth and a vein popping in his temple, his eyes flickering briefly, and his eyes looked as hard and bright as blood splashing onto stone. Much like the blood that had been spilt today, Zim supposed.

The idea of more people dying today had a peculiar effect on his stomach. And yet, he didn't deny that Scar deserved his vengeance, and that Kimblee was a wretched horror that needed to be put down. (Zim didn't think he really counted as a person anymore, anyway.) Either way, Zim didn't think he had the right to deny Scar his vengeance; the idea made him feel like an interfering busybody. Even so...

The image of Kimblee dead on the floor right here was a potent one. He didn't know if he was supposed to feel happy at the delicious irony of him dying _here_, where he had done so much evil, or if he was supposed to be repulsed by the idea of trying to put a noble face on more killing; he had seen too much death in his life to be entirely casual or dismissive of it anymore. It troubled him to be even thinking of passing judgement on Scar's enemy and nemesis for him. So he was surprised when Scar, as if with a great effort, looked at him and said, "You made the decision to chase after Kimblee and you were the one who ultimately brought him down."

"What?" Zim said, caught off-guard by this. He honestly thought that Scar would have just exploded Kimblee's head and been done with it. "Really? Oh...yeah, I did! Hah, I'm awesome!"

Scar, who tended to treat humor as an abberation that needed to be patiently outwaited but realized that now was not the time for that, gruffly said, "Your input in what to do for Kimblee in the immediate situation would be..._valued_." He scowled fiercely, like saying this was physically painful. His eyes flickered briefly towards Kimblee and the hand holding him by the face tightened until the knuckles went white.

"...I dunno," Zim said, startled at having his opinion asked for (espicially given how much right Scar had to kill Kimblee, and considering how sensible it would be). "What would you generally do if he survived?"

"We would have him detained in such a way that he would be unable to use his metapowers, put him to a trial by a court of his peers (by which I mean a randomly chosen jury, not specifcally people from the Peerage), and should he be found guilty, for a crime of this magnitude, he would be exiled to a sub-dimension known as the Vault with the rest of the irredeemable monsters we cast out."

"What, you wouldn't just execute him?" Zim said, honestly curious. Having Kimblee executed for his crimes seemed a fitting way of elminating him for his evils. "That would seem more sensible. And dramatically suitable."

"Most people with the political power to ensure that are..._adverse _to such final measures," Scar said, sneering derisively. "Those that are not are typically over-ruled. Clearly he didn't approve of a mildly soft-hearted mentality, probably because he was from a culture that had arisen in a desert and apparently develouped a religion with a very strict code of honor-related conduct; a culture like that became tough just to survive, and the kinder ideals often didn't take root very easily. Zim could empathize; the Irken Empire had grown in harsh enviroments, according to their tangled and myth-colored histories.

Zim wasn't much interested in the politics behind it, he just didn't want Kimblee to show up again later, as he inevitably would; the time he had spent as a team with Danny and Aang had taught him that any villain who wasn't definitely dead (as in, you had seen his body yourself and even that was more of a guideline) would _always _come back to harass you later on. And since he was expecting Mr. Lyle to reappear eventually for whatever inscrutable purpose, he didn't really feel like having two new enemies teaming up to fight him and his new crew.

He stopped for a moment, realizing that he was already coming to think of Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and now Zuko as a crew instead of allies of opportunity.

Scar seemed to require a definite response from Zim, though, so the ex-Invader put aside such curious thoughts for now and, not entirely sure he was suitable to render any judgement or why in the world Scar wanted input from _him _to begin with, haltingly said, "I suppose you should do what I do in situations like this."

Scar regarded him coolly. "And that is...?"

"Screw regulations and the letter of the law and protocol and all that other boring stuff and do what seems like the correct course of action to yourself," Zim said. "Kill him right here and now to satisfy your vengeance. Give him to the court systems, which with the evidence against him will _surely _cast him out with the other monsters and also satisfy your vengeance in a more passive way. Or just throw him to that crowd and see if they tear him to pieces. Whatever works."

Zuko raised an eyebrow at this, neither approving or supportive. Hobbes frowned gravely. Morte nodded eagerly. Calvin just looked uncomfortable.

Kimblee shifted slightly; Scar tensed, ready for violent retribution should the rogue alchemist do anything to escape (because quite frankly they'd had _enough _of his bullshit to last them an entire month's worth of serious incidents) but Kimblee merely turned his head a bit, grunting something too quiet to be understood. Zim heard his tone of voice, a pitifully bewildered and lost sound that was completely out of place for the man, and from a quick glance at Scar, even his enemies would have been startled by it.

Scar looked down at Kimblee for just a moment, but it carried on for a long time; Zim tensed, waiting for Scar to do whatever it is he intended, and in all honesty he expected him to kill Kimblee right then and there. Scar's hand tightly firmly around Kimblee's face, turning slightly so it covered his mouth, and Zim saw a disquieting smug look twist Scar's face into a savage grin, full of pride and restrained violence at having this monster in his grasp after all these years.

Kimblee had exterminated Scar's people, Zim remembered, or at least had a monstrously extensive part in that. He had done it with glee and satisfaction, and apparently regarded the continued existence of the Ishbalan people as a personal failure on his part. He had _enjoyed _ripping the souls out of a few hundred people to create an artifact that he had been extremely blaise about losing, and had been so _casual _about it. He'd torn his way through this First District, doing immeasurable damage to everything in sight, toying with the minds of everyone he could for nothing more than the simple sadistic thrill of it, and it was only extradinary coincidence and the strategies of Roy Mustang's group that had stopped him from killing more people on purpose or from getting caught in the crossfire. And he had done all that while wearing the body of someone who was so determined to stop more damage that he had repeatedly tried to get Kimblee and himself killed.

And worse, Kimblee had implied that he had done all that mostly because he could. Because there was no real need for him to have a reason in the first place. Maybe someone had ordered him (and certainly someone had given him the resources to accomplish part of it), but Zim had done this sort of thing himself to know that he would have certainly done it himself for no tangible purpose, if the right mood took him at the wrong moment. He was a _monster_, a digusting sham of a human being, and deserved even worse than what he had gotten.

And yet, even knowing all that, Zim felt himself feeling less vindicated by Kimblee's torment, and felt that he pitied him instead. Kimblee's twitching reminded him more and more of a rotten bit of nearly-dead roadkill at the side of a road, and not a defeated foe. He was _pathetic_, and evil as Kimblee was, Zim thought it was the kind of mindlessly unknowing evil that inspired as much pity at hate. Killing him right now would be an act of mercy, pushing him off the playing board and leaving history to think of him as a momentary abberation and then proceed to forget about him altogether, and it occured to Zim that there really was no alternative for Kimblee's life. He would pay for the evil he had inflicted, and it irked Zim that Kimblee wouldn't ever understand _why _he was being punished.

The same thought ran through Scar, judging by the flickering of his face as his stony glower cracked and bent and finally broke into a split-second look, his eyes lowering away from Kimblee's countenace. His hand squeezed around Kimblee, in the way he always did right before he used the destruction application of his alchemy, and then he made a brief frustrated grunt and dropped the Red Lotus Alchemist to the ground, the man beaten and broken and spared. "He deserves death," Scar said sullenly.

"Yes?" Zim said, tilting his head.

Scar muttered something under his breath, grumbled a few more things almost loudly enough before he grunted in dismay and exhaled long and wearily. "_Damn _his hide, I've gone soft," Scar whispered. "But I have done things the right way for too long to abandon it now. I will do this _by the rules_. Whatever his fate is, it will be _clean_." He sounded pained by the thought of it, and he bent down, roughly grabbing Kimblee's hands and forcing them down before he placed his own hands on the ground beside them. There was a flash, and the ground broke apart and reformed into a set of solid stone handcuffs around Kimblee's wrists, forcing the palms straight out so that he couldn't put his hands together even if he broke his wrists to wriggle out of the handcuffs. As a secondary precaution, Scar put a finger to Kimblee's palms, one after another, and with further flashes of alchemical light destroyed the outer surfaces of his skin. It was barely noticable, and done with such precision that the only apparent effect was some serious reddening of Kimblee's palms, and the tattooed arrays on his palms flaking off and falling away.

Scar stood up, watching Kimblee's last defense leave him, and stared down at the murderer of his family and people for too long to be comfortable. He looked away, clearly struggling with himself, and strode away, leaving Kimblee alive but harmless, ready to meet his fate at the hands of the town's people. Scar stopped a few steps, looking back with clear bloody-minded longing, and forced himself to keep walking away, his hands bunched into fists the whole time.

"Hey," the boy said weakly. "Did everyone forget about me or what?"

Scar looked back. "Hrm? Oh. You." Looking very frustrated, he walked back, pointedly not looking at Kimblee, and picked the boy up before slinging him over his shoulder and walked towards the hospital. The boy seemed oblivious to his less than gentle treatment, staring at his pale hands with great avidity for some reason, and before they walked into the crowd and proceeded to become a new center of attention, Zim saw the boy give him a weak but happy thumbs-up, and the single biggest grin he had seen on anyone all day.

Zim found himself smiling back.

He sat down, deciding to guard Kimblee just in case he woke up and tried to escape, and Morte floated by. He looked awkward for a short moment, the area around them reminding them of all that had happened and his own refusal to join in the fight. But the palpable relief of it finally being over compelled Morte to lighten up and say, "Nice work, Boss."

"...Yes," Zim said after a moment, looking cheerful. "I know." He glanced at his hand, still aching from the Keyblade's burning it, decided it was totally worth it before he noticed a shadow over him. He looked up and saw Roy Mustang, a huge but kind man towering behind him. "Yes?" Zim said warily, not sure he liked their business-like look.

"I'm Field-Admiral Roy Mustang," Roy said unneccesarily, and indicated the man next to him, who Zim noticed had a recorder device in one of his hands. "This is my associate, Captain Alex Louis Armstrong, also known as the Strong Arm Alchemist."

The man bowed deeply. "It is a pleasure to meet you, newcomer to our fair and much-varied city of a thousand surprises and significantly more outrageous reactions!" He boomed in a voice that was just too loud to be suitable for most people. He saluted Zim with a crisp snap. "My _MANY _thanks for bringing this traitor into custody, so that he might stand trial for his many crimes and, of course, ending the threat before something much worse could happen! And doing it in such a splendidly _MANLY _fashion as well! I nearly weep at it's magnificence!"

Roy grimaced, edging away from Armstrong a bit. Zim looked with renewed interest at the man. Morte said, "Uh, do you have to yell like that?"

"Of course! I would shame my lineage if I did not!" Armstrong boomed boisterously, striking a pose. "_FOR THIS MANNER OF THEATRICAL OVERACTING HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG LINE FOR GENERATIONS!_"

"That makes perfect sense!" Zim declared.

"No it doesn't!" Roy and Morte said.

"_OH YES IT DOES!" _Zim and Armstrong replied, yelling for no reason. By a stunning coincidence, they struck an identical pose in the midst of their overacting.

Roy put his face in his hands. "Oh dear God," He mumbled. "He just _had _to be the officer in charge here, didn't he?"

"What do you two want, a job offer?" Morte said. "'Cause I don't think you guys are gonna want to go with us into space and stuff. There'll be, y'know, cosmic rifts and planet-eating insect swarms and really persistent librarians that never stop hounding your for that chump change for an overdue recording."

"I do apologize, but we have not come here to extend or accept job offerings!" Armstrong said, somehow managing to make a loud and hammy yell apologetic while Roy sputtered furiously at Morte's temerity and cheerful waiving of the local hierarchy. "We simply wish to hear the truth of how this dreadful fiasco was ended and Kimblee apprehended, old boy!"

"Oh, it's a debriefing, is it?" Zim said.

"Yes," Roy said. "Where's the rest of your team? They should probably be here for this. It's best to have a varied view." He paused, looked down at Kimblee with undisguised disgust, and added, "General Armstrong, deal with him. I want him secured and ready for transport to the nearest judiciary facility as soon as possible!"

"Ah, yes, that would be the Shirestalker's Courthouse For Rent and Family-Friendly Rodeo Clown School!" Armstrong said knowingly. He tapped his mighty chin with a faint echoing noise as he considered Kimblee and raised a finger into the air. "Aha! I know just the way to keep him in suitable bonds!" He raised his massive arms into the air and plunged them into the ground so hard that he made small craters that had nothing to do with alchemy, though the flash of light from his gauntlets certainly did. Dirt and rocks pillared out of the ground around Kimblee, hardening into artistically smooth surfaces and wrapping around the man in a hollow form that quickly finished being transmuted, proving itself to a big chunk of rock shaped into the likeness of Armstrong's head, with only Kimblee's face and hands extending out of it so that he appeared to be popping out of it's forehead. The exterior of it was somehow made to be translucent, and Zim could see that the inside of the stone wasn't exactly hollow and pressed tightly but not uncomfortably around Kimblee with small bits going into Kimblee's pressure points to paralyze him. (Those needles were somehow so stylized that they looked like tiny cats with the points gripped in their teeth. Now _that _was dedication to one's artistic skill.)

Eduardo, who was a junior cadet in the Peace Marines after an incident some time ago involving a doomsday button and a sackful of rubber giraffes, was brought over to cart Kimblee away, and the Red Lotus Alchemist never even woke up through out the whole procedure. Zim watched him go, with some interest (and amused himself watching Bloo try to kick Kimblee in the shin before realizing he was encased in solid - though translucent - rock and hurt himself) and then did the job of getting everyone else over there; it was a bit time-consuming. Calvin was with Courtney and discussing potential upgrades she could get to cover the whole 'using your workplace as a guided missile and not telling you' thing; Hobbes had somehow been discovered by the rested-up Mall Crawlers and being begged for stories of heroism and valor that he was almost certainly exaggerating (and puffing himself up to look good for the girls); and Zuko was with the rest of Team Avatar and filling them in on what the ship was like. He got them there, though, and after Roy gave up on trying to keep this semi-private and just between them, their hangers-on came with them to listen in.

Their reactions were pretty funny, espicially when they got to the part where they hit Kimblee with a flying building. (And it was pretty cool to see Courtney at least enjoying that she had a pivotal role in finishing off Kimblee by proxy.)

The first thing to do, obviously, was explaining just what had happened with them and Kimblee after he had grabbed onto their ship and they had flown off with him, featured a short summery of their attempts to beat him up before they had made Courtney and Beth jump ship (which the two girls gladly confirmed, after Roy asked them for posterity's sake) and, since it had happened so fast and it was hard to remember every little detail, quickly got to the part where they had fired a building into his face. Roy had made the obvious decision to ask Calvin just why he had modified the building into a targeted missile in the first place, and Calvin had told him, "Because you never know when you need something really big to hit the bad guy with. You never know when they'll pull up something crazy-big like he did, so aren't you glad I was prepared? Honestly, it's a good thing I made the prepartion, even if it would have been looking stupid if it had been useless. Too bad he never gave me a chance to use it sooner."

(And when he was prompted why he didn't use it sooner, Calvin had said, "Because it would have caused stupid amounts of collateral damage, duh. But the fight already did that anyway. Hrm, maybe I should have done it just in case and warned you guys so we could have finished it right away. I'll remember that the next time something like this happens." It was admitted that he sort of had a point, but the 'next time' bit made Zuko and Hobbes very uneasy.)

With Zim and his crew's element of solo fighting summerized, it was just a matter of running through the rest of the fight so the official records could be sure of what exactly had happened (it wasn't uncommon for such things to be modified into scripts for popular TV shows or new stories, according to Morte, to Zim's surprise) and checked against everyone else's accounts and would later be referenced with the surviving footage the town's cameras had captured, and probably released under the supervision of Courtney's group who still retained the rights to the footage for entertainment purposes. It took longer to get all the fight and it's elements sorted out (and they had to interview the others first to get everything truly sorted out, and Roy had Courtney deal with that part so she could have her story right now, and loaned her a recording device for the occasion). Eventually, after it was made quite clear that all the pernitent information had been delivered, Morte asked who the boy Zim had split from Kimblee had been, apparently curious. Roy informed them that he was apparently called Kevin Levin, though none of them recognized name except for Roy noting that the he'd 'heard that name in a report or something somewhere, but I don't have anything specific.'

Afterwards, things were fairly short. The matter of the possession and it's circumstances were something Roy promised to get to the bottom of after Kimblee's interrogation, scheduled to take place soon afterwards, and Roy was certain that a conviction would follow not long after. He wasn't sure why Kimblee had kidnapped Jarod, though he mentioned that Kimblee _had _repeatedly mentioned being under orders to do that at the time. That was good, because according to Roy, "That means that he wasn't acting alone and we'll be forewarned the next time they show up, if there is a next time. (But you _know _there will be.) Bad news, because we have no idea who they are, what they want or what they have against us."

Calvin mentioned Mr. Lyle possibly being involved, and at the two marine's surprise, explained the business with the man last night. Both were quite interested; apparently they'd heard the name in connection with a very nasty law firm associated with demons and devils. At the very least, the timing was decidedly suspicious.

Upon being instructed to locate any organizations he could dig up that had a connection to this Lyle, Armstrong had boomed, "_I SHALL NOT REST UNTIL THE MIGHT OF MY BODY AND SOUL PULLS THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS ILL-DOING INTO THE LIGHT!_" For no apparent reason, he flexed, and all of his uniform above the waist exploded from the sheer might of his flexing, revealing his incredibly muscular physique. He flexed and posed some more, all the better to show himself off. "_BEHOLD MY MIGHT! DO YOU NOT SEE THE POWER OF THE ARTISTIC BODYBUILDING TECHNIQUE? THE ELEGANCE OF MY FORM! THE POWER OF MY WELL-HONED CONTAINER! A STRONG INTELLECT MUST REST WITHIN A MIGHTY BODY, AND MINE IS QUITE MIGHTY INDEED! IT SHALL NOT FAIL IN THIS TASK!"_

"...Yes," Zuko said awkwardly, edging away from him. "We can see that." He mouthed _please make him stop! _at Roy.

Roy mouthed _I tried, he just won't stop! _back at Zuko. Armstrong continued to flex and pose. Hobbes imitated his poses, a bit annoyed that he was just too lean to pull it off. Getting back on track, Roy continued. "_But _I digress. If you have been made a target of this Mr. Lyle, I would be extremely careful if I were you. Nothing good ever came out of any dealings with Wolfram and Hart or it's employees."

"We've been told something like that," Zim agreed. "Is there anything else?"

Roy shook his head. "Nothing that I can think of. Good luck with whatever you're doing, guys, but as for me, bereaucracy calls. I'd like to see if there's at least _one _good thing we can get out of this." He gave the Umbra Eternis a long and contemplative look.

Calvin, noticing his expression, whispered to Hobbes, "You still have that shield you made from it's armor, right?"

"Yeah," Hobbes whispered back. "I still have it on the ship."

"Nice thinking. Wouldn't want them taking it away to do some analysis. We could do some cool stuff with that armor."

While they were talking, Roy had walked off, and sensing weakness the crowd rushed in past him, eager to confront Zim on the fine details of his defeat of Kimblee before they had to hear it from the news people. Hobbes, thankfully, marched forward and announced himself as Zim's spokesperson, and had the expected effect of focusing their attention on him so that Zim and the others were left alone. "Good man," Zim said. "He might be good to send as our diplomacy person, actually."

"He does stuff like that a lot," Calvin said, raising an eyebrow at Zim's intelligence. He sighed, flexing a little bit. "I dunno about you guys, but I'm still not sure how our ship works. I think I'll find Cyborg and talk shop. Maybe he has a manual or something. Someone get me if anything exciting happens."

"Hang on," Zuko said. "We haven't decided what we're going to do next. What's our plan?"

"Plan?" Calvin said blankly.

Zim looked at them questioningly, not sure what they meant. "Think he's talking about your itinerary, Boss," Morte stated. "You was supposed to be sightseeing, picking up supplies, getting some last minute things done? Then Kimblee went and wrecked it."

"Oh, right, that." Zim frowned. "Well, I'm certain that we're far past our leaving date at twelve o' clock, so I see no reason for us not to at least _try _and keep some semblence of an agenda and leave right now."

Hobbes shrugged. Zuko nodded. Calvin yawned disinterestedly. Morte said, "But you already got done with a fight. Isn't it a bit much to already be raring to do something else?"

"No," Zim said flatly. "If anything, it has only fueled my enthusiasm! And if there's anything we're missing, I'm sure we can find a spaceport to pick it up in. They were all over the place in my home universe, and these different universes can't be too much different from mine, after all. They have _humans_, just like Earth, and the fact that they apparently come from dozens of worlds is astounding on it's own besides the fact that they seem largely similar."

"I suppose I should say something to make you think more sensibly, but honestly I'm just too wolf-chewed tired to try," Zuko confessed. "I still think we should say our goodbyes to the others before we go; if we die on our journey without saying goodbye first, they'll feel bad forever."

"You are an absolute fountain of gloomy thoughts," Zim complained. "It's like standing next to a geyser that spews angst comas. And anyway, I have that covered. Come on, let's go find Minimoose." He noded at Morted. "You! Go wait at the ship. Me and Zuko will finish our matters first. I do not expect it to take long and I...er, uh." All thoughts were put to a stop when he noticed a few bodybags being carried off to austere motorized wagons on the street, the various faction people carrying them unusually somber.

"...I don't think we did it in time to save everyone," Zuko said, voice heavier than usual and a bit distant. Zim saw him looking at a few people who hadn't joined in the good mood; Zim suspected that, based on how solemnly they were watching the dead bodies being carried away, they were almost certainly family members or friends of the deceased.

"...Next time," Zim said quietly. "We will do better than this."

Zuko nodded. "Yeah. We will."

They gave each other furtive nods. As they watched solemnly, a thin voice near them said, "Pardon me. If you would wait a moment?"

Zim looked and saw Mr. Herrimen looking at him beseechingly. "Yes?" He said warily.

Mr. Herrimen looked at him for a good long while, having some trouble marshalling his thoughts. A grand speech clearly formed, almost on his whiskered muzzle before dying, thought improper and unacceptable for the moment. This happened at least three times, Zim patiently waiting for the figment who's home and domain had been destroyed not even a few hours ago to say his piece. Eventually, Mr. Herrimen choked out, "_Thank you_. For everything."

"...All I did was beat up the bad guy."

Mr. Herrimen bowed his head. "You freed the people he killed to obtain that damnable Stone. So many of my people have their loved ones and lives back. You avenged everything that has transpired here today, and returned more of it then I could have ever dared hoped for." He took in a long, rattling breath and ground out, "So I say this again. _Thank you._ Thank you for everything you've done for us."

"Ah?" Zim said. He fidgeted and managed to say, "Ah, er, um. You're welcome?"

Mr. Herrimen leaned forward in his wheelchair. He stuck out his hand. Bemused but understanding, Zim took his hand and shook it, understanding the gesture for once.

Mr. Herrimen left at that, seemingly choked up and with rather weepy fur around the eyes, and when he was gone, Zim was distracted by a movement somewhere in the distance, near the bunched-up trees on the grounds. He looked closely and saw what appeared to be a black-cloaked figure on a large white horse, bearing a scythe, and fading in and out of few was a small group of strangely translucent figures, gathering closely around the cloaked entity.

Zim peered closely. They didn't appear to be in any distress; a few of them seemed mildly put-out, but for the most part they seemed more relieved than anything, and certainly not of them were particularily unhappy. For some reason he thought a few of them looked familiar, and thought he had seen some of them during his time in Foster's last night, and at least one of them in the bodybags he had seen being taken away to pay respect to the dead. The cloaked figure looked directly at Zim, apparently surprised, and Zim stared at the being's eyes, which were bright blue lights within a dark hood. The entity raised a hand that looked alarmingly skeletal, and it took him a moment to realize that it was a greeting.

By the time it occured to Zim to return the gesture, the hooded being had gathered up the crowd, somehow fitting them all on his horse and started to ride, and then they were gone.

"...That was strange," Zim said, feeling like he had just witnessed something rather important and disgruntled that he didn't understand the significance.

"What was?" Morte asked.

Zim gestured towards the woods. "Didn't you see that?"

"See what?"

"A guy in a cloak on a horse. He took some people away; teleported or something."

Morte looked the way Zim had indicated. "I dunno, Boss, I didn't see anything there."

"...Huh," Zim said, thinking _Great, MORE stupid hallucations. _He made a point of ignoring the indignated voices of Razael and Sammael. He decided it was probably just a consequence of channeling too much magic or something stupid like that and pretended he hadn't seen anything.

...

Not too long after that, after a still unconscious Kimblee was carted away to await his trial and with everyone pitching in for decency's sake, the rubble was soon cleared and piled up as directed, packed it together in the middle of where Foster's had originally stood. At this point Team Phantom showed up fully rested up to see what was going on and also join in on the party which was now reaching critical mass. Zim and his crew had decided to stick around and enjoy it for a while, basking in the attention they were getting from the grateful, the well-wishers and the simply curious. (The grudging but genuine thank-yous from people he'd offended last night such as Bonnie Rockwaller and her crew helped. The thank-yous from people like Freya, Captain Razor and Andre the Jagermonster were even nicer.)

When it was done, the rubble stacked up without any care for type of material or how it was supposed to be positioned (and they were assured that those things weren't important), a simple alchemy reconstruction matrix had been drawn in a wide perimeter that roughly matched the dimensions of the previous Foster's building after some brief consultation of the original schematics, and everyone who was still there ordered into a group in front of the whole thing and waited, mostly people who had lived at Foster's and had been assured that the whole 'nowhere for them to live' situation was about to be fixed.

When the crowd was sorted out, it became clear that alchemy was going to be used to repair the evil that a rogue alchemist had done to this place: eight of the strongest alchemists that could be found on short notice - Scar, Roy and Armstrong among them, along with five other people Zim couldn't be bothered to remember their names - had assembled around the reconstruction matrix, and had put away their respective specialized transmutation equipment (those that could, that is) as it wouldn't be required right now. They took up positions around the reconstruction matrix, ignoring the mutinous mutterings from the anti-alchemy people (who were a bit justified in being traumatized by improperly utilized alchemy), though Scar probably had his own misgivings even if he kept quiet about them. "What are they doing, exactly?" Zim wondered aloud in his place where his crew had gathered alongside Teams Avatar and Phantom with Abel for company, Appa standing away from the crowd and kept company by Aang and Ron (who had an unexpected affection for the sky bison).

"Using the remains of Foster's as raw materials," Calvin said knowingly. "Even the parts of it that were vaporized. I saw them getting guys to gather up all the dust they could find. It'll probably be a bit smaller all the same, but it should work."

"_What _should be smaller?" Morte asked. Calvin just smirked, gesturing towards the alchemists.

Roy seemed to be indicating that they begin. "Gentlemen?" He said simply. The other alchemists nodded curly, and he laid his hands to the ground the reconstruction matrix had been inscribed on, and the others followed suit, all of them placing their hands down and concentrating hard.

Nothing appeared to happen immediately (though Zim felt a faint pressure from the area that reminded him of the tide coming in) and some people in the crowd who weren't familiar with alchemy complained. "Is that it?" Sokka asked. "I thought they were supposed to be doing something-"

"Hush," Abel said from directly beside him, making Sokka jump. "Wait and see."

"But it's boring!" Toph whined.

"This is _SCIENCE!_" Calvin snapped. "It's not supposed to be entertaining for your benefit, it's supposed to be _FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND!_" They stared at him. "Uh...yeah, sorry, knee-jerk reaction. People complain about science, I start rambling about it's awesomeness. Impulse control thing."

After that everyone got quiet, and the pressure built, coinciding with a faint tingling of the teeth. Several people, Zim among them, felt a strong sense of subliminal movement (again, like invisible tides moving around them), and perhaps because of that the grass directly around the alchemists was moving without any wind to be doing it, and still most of the people there didn't notice it and muttered something about putting on a lousy show and wasting time and other stuff like that. (They could be forgiven for it; most of the complainers were Foster's regulars and they'd had a _really _bad day.) A few people shuffled around awkwardly to put the stress off their tired legs and made ripples in the crowds were people shuffled aside so they didn't get hit and the people next to them did the same weird and so did the people next to _them_, and Zim had a bunch of people bump into him because he wasn't paying attention, which was very invasive, and so he didn't notice that people had suddenly stopped talking.

He looked to the alchemists, and a moment or two passed before faint and lovely flashes of blue light ran along the reconstruction matrix, scribing out a circular pattern around where Foster's had once been only a few hours ago. The air wavered and shimmered, strange afterimages in the wake of the flashes as if potential other realities were being half-glimpsed through the incredible power at work. The flashes grew brighter and increased in number; first slowly, and then with greater speed and ferocity, the alchemists pouring more power into their work.

"Okay, something's happening, something's definitely happening!" Katara said, stepping back a bit.

Zim had a moment of alarm before he calmed done; the sight of the lights were similar to what Kimblee had done, but were altogether different, and it was plain that _this _style of transmutation was totally different from Kimblee's rough and brutal methods of tearing energies apart and throwing them around with reckless abandon. This blue light, though, was soft and gentle, it's soothing blue vastly different from that baleful red, sliding from the earth with all the irresitable power of a vast cosmic process of rebirth and renewal glimpsed by the many small parts that composed it. It was beautiful to watch, wondrous in all the ways that Kimblee's Stone had been awful, and some people had other reactions.

"Zuko," Sokka said suddenly. "That light! It looks like..."

"I know," Zuko said, suddenly thoughtful and giving Aang a brief glance, noting that the young Air Nomad was totally entranced by the light. "It looks like the glow from the Avatar Spirit."

Silence greeted this pronouncement. Toph surprised everyone when she didn't make a blind joke but said, "Hey, Aang, do you feel that? The ground right under us...I feel something moving around us. And it's...nice. Like I was standing over a huge river and a little bit of it diverted somewhere else." She smiled faintly. "Feels pretty good."

"Well, that's alchemy for you," Abel said kindly. "Not all of it is like what Kimblee practices." They nodded briefly at him, unable to take their eyes away from the blue light now actively streaming up from the ground, swilring around the reconstruction matrix in steady waves, more flashes of light crackling inside the area.

The blue light surged, and in a single moment the remnants of Foster's Home glowed with the same blue light as the alchemical energies were channeled into it, infused with them before breaking apart into their fundamental elements and taking the form of a briefly shapeless mass, and then the ground itself turned the same shade of blue as the light all around, weaving and shining as if to dispell the darkness that Kimblee had brought down upon them.

It lasted for a moment, the alchemists pouring yet more power into the very fabric of the ground itself, spinning pure potentiality into the deconstructed remnants of Foster's materials, recreating the cycle of life and death and rebirth in miniture and drawing power from that great cycle. One by one, the auxillery alchemists fell back, leaving Roy, Armstrong and Scar to finish the process (as they were the most powerful and skilled alchemists present, except for possibly Calvin but nobody had asked him for help) and they pushed the last of it into the final stage.

It was done in a single flash, the ground seemingly leaping straight up and transforming as it went, shaping itself into a new form that Armstrong controlled due to Roy being fairly unskilled in this sort of thing and Scar being content to allow Armstrong to do it. The crowd watched hopefully, and many of them were amazed at the wondrous sight of the ruins of Foster's being reborn into a new building by the same power that, misused by a madman, had ended it, and now was resurrecting it by the means of good men who used it's power wisely. Those who had thought it a strictly evil power were silenced or at least stayed silent, Zim among them. "You see? Calvin said quietly. "Now you know why the real alchemists say '_Alchemy is to be used for the benefit of mankind'_." His eyes gleamed zealously. "That is it's purpose! Discoveries polished out of theories and experiments, adapted into techniques and methods, and inform the body of centuries-old scientific laws and philosophies that tell it's students the arts of fixing a broken and negative world!"

"It does?" Zim said. He wasn't even remotely skeptical, and as a scientist it was fascinating to learn about this foriegn art.

"That's the whole premise of alchemy," Calvin said, with all the honest earnestness of someone who truly and genuinely _believed _in what they were talking about. "It fixes what's broken. With the power of alchemy, there is _nothing _that can't be repaired, made whole again or turned into something better than it's components!" He made a fist, quivering with the intensity of what he was saying. "These worlds we know _bleed _with negativity. They churn with sin and pain, and they make cycle of revenge and suffering that propagate the misery. And even so, they can still be made better! Add positive ideas and feeling to the flow and that flow will be made positive, wiping away the negativity until nothing is left of the bad old remnants! _That_ is the heart of alchemy! Moving on to improve the world one little bit at a time, moving the cycle on and making things better, walking with the cycle of life and death and rebirth, and bit by bit _fixing _all that is broken! A true alchemist makes himself the fulcrum of that cycle in miniature for the benefit of mankind." His voice took on a slightly bitter tone. "A lunatic like Kimblee would never understand that." The bitterness stopped, and he sounded happy when he added, "_This _is what alchemy's all about."

He had good dramatic timing; he had finished his little speech just as the broken remnants of the original Foster's Home were transformed and incorporated in the process of the alchemical ritual, reborn into a new shape that spread out over the grounds in new floors and walls that seemingly sprouted up fro mthe ground, growing while new foundations and underground causeways were made underneath. Higher walls appeared, more floors swelling up and creating new rooms and chambers and hallways, a new building taking shape in a matter of minutes. Zim watched, and thought that Kimblee's efforts seemed almost entirely for naught; they could do nothing for those people that he had killed, but at least Foster's Home could endure as a testament to his utter failure, and no sooner had he finished that thought than rooftops appeared, finishing the process (and perhaps suitably, as it had been where Kimblee had started the death of the old building), and it was done at last.

Dust billowed up, stirred by the sudden mass shifting, and conviniently hid the finished structure from view. Blue light sparked, like heat lightning flashing behind clouds, and the alchemists staggered back, winded but pleased with their efforts. "It is finished," Scar said triumphantly, as though this were the final victory over Kimblee, all his efforts for naught, as even Foster's Home, the place where his evil had begun today when he took the lives of over a hundred people and obliterated their home to show off his power, had been reborn.

The dust cleared. Roy and Scar were the closest and their reactions were enough to clue everyone that the final result wasn't exactly expected and a dumbfounded silence ensued. Armstrong simply flexed dramatically and cheerfully said, "Behold this most baroque and grand result of the dream of Foster's and the alchemical techniques of my forefathers! A synergy formed in the bonds of retribution and justice! People of Foster's, _YOUR HOME HAS RETURNED TO YOU!_"

"...It has?" Bloo said blankly.

Bloo had a bit of a point, since it was pretty clear that the building now standing proudly over the grounds wasn't exactly the image of Foster's Home; it occupied roughly the same amount of space and about the same size (it had to be, given that it was made from the recovered materials of the old place), but while the old building had been a single huge mansion that made more space by going straight up, this was actually a series of fairly dense three buildings arranged in a circular pattern around a broader circle, the one in the middle being the densest. A number of elegant walkways open to the air connected the three buildings at various levels, with sturdy enforcements arranged into minimalistic designs, and there were matching light escalators placed into the walls.

It had the same sort of style that you would have expected from a guy like Armstrong; the resources at hand had forced him to use as little as possible with his preferred style, but he had done a good job of making it look as tastefully bizarre as he could. Cheerful looking gargoyles that looked a lot like Armstrong making poses that happened to double as educational fitness lessons if you did them in the order they were positioned at peered from every surface, many of them part of a water runway system or serving some other subtle fuction, and matched nicely with the plentitude of balconies that had predominated on the outermost rooms on the last building, all the way up to the rooftops, which were slightly arched but suitable for someone to walk around on. There seemed to be a particular order to the buildings, too; while all off them were plainly residential, the middle building seemed to corrospond to a administration and central hub for the new house, a straight section going straight to it's front doors and the sidewalk on the ground going right there, so that the other two buildings appeared to be shaped like horseshoe rings around it. It's front doors, oddly enough, were set into what looked like a giant replica of Armstrong's body, flexing a mighty pose. (He was making an identical pose, and someone took a picture.) The other two buildings were more egalitarian, the outermost building slightly larger and with the most accomodations for the more unusual inhabitants of Traverse Town with specific requirments, such as isolated quarters or aquatic environments, and the middle building curiously appeared to have slightly more rooms, perhaps meant as a priority rooming area.

"Well?" Armstrong said hopefully, looming over Captain Razor. "What do you think, my good man?"

"Uh," Razor said meekly. "It's...uh...really great?"

"Wow," Bloo said, awed. "That's _awesome!_"

Armstrong beamed. "Oh, such thanks is marvelous to behold! _YOU ARE WELCOME!_" He hugged both Bloo and Razor, crushing them both with his massive strength, but sobbing too manfully to notice.

"Dude, stop crying, you're embarrasing yourself!" Razor said, inbetween trying to breath with Armstrong literally squeezing the breath out.

"_Real men have the courage to show their tears to the world!_" Armstrong said. "At least that's what I tell my sister when she hits me for being a weakling. Oh, the humanity of my unfeeling sister!" He sobbed louder, drowning out their protests. "I can only apologize for my inability to recreate everything as it was; I cannot remake your possessions, or the precise nature of your quarters, but I can at least give you back your home, and also a library I added for the sake of it, and plenty of other things I can't remember just now! _TONIGHT YOU CAN GO TO YOUR NEW HOME AND REST EASY!_" Bloo and Razor squeaked their approval, promising him many grand thanks if they would just please put him down now. He obliged, to the lasting gratitude of their spines. (Or whatever Bloo had for a spine, the poor blob-thing.)

Scar and Roy looked at each other, silently vowing never to speak of this voluntarily. In the meantime, the crowd stared at the house with measures of surprise and confusion. A short debate broke out before people started trickling out of the crowd, curious and wanting to see what their new home was like, and plenty of people followed in suit after they debated it's merits among themselves before deciding to take a look.

"That's, uh, that's an interesting house," Sokka said faintly.

"You realize we're gonna live there for the time being, right?" Toph said.

"...Aw crap," Sokka said.

"It's not so bad," Katara said, even as she eyed it dubiously. "I mean, it's...artistic. That's something, right?"

"Eh," Danny said.

"I think it's fascinating," Sam said appraisingly.

"I like the way that Armstrong guy thinks!" Tucker said brightly. Sokka stared at them in horror.

"Huh, so _that's _why Dad didn't let his co-workers come home to do interior decoration!" Kim said. "Or maybe it was because lots of them are basically insane."

"Feel free to believe both of those," Gibbs said from directly behind her.

Angilaka took out a notepad. "Note to self," She said as she jotted a few of the building's coolest features down. "See if Armstrong is seeing anyone. Or, at the very least, if he's teaching any modern art classes." Beside her, Pants-Man Audrey whistled innocently, knowing perfectly well that Armstrong was a professor in modern art but choosing not to tell her right then.

"Are we recording this?" Courtney asked a technician with a camera.

"Yes!" The technician said.

"Awesome! That's a great shot for the story! A tacky building, but a great shot. I can see human interest all over it! Also, weird gargoyles. But mostly human interest. We got a big story on our hands folks, make the most of it!"

"Have fun!" Beth said cheerfully.

"Good luck with your insane co-workers," Courtney said. Beth nodded.

Shego stared at the new Foster's building with a disgusted look. "Holy crap that's tacky. You could kill people with it's tackiness."

"An obscure field of assasination, but worth checking out," Deadpool commented.

"You guys have no respect for modern art," Lin and Greed said, their voices overlapping each other.

"We should get that guy to redo Titan's Tower," Cyborg said in admiration, in a more buoyant mood after some talks with Calvin on the finer details of the ship he gave them and general discussion on the matters of super-science vehicles. "If we can get him to tone it down a bit."

"I know Armstrong pretty good, and trust me, this _is _him toning himself down," Winry said dryly.

"That is pretty nice," Aang said near Appa, and leaned over to see what Zim thought of it. "Hey, do you see Zim anywhere?"

Ron shrugged. "I thought he was with his guys right by your team."

Aang looked closely, and saw that Zim wasn't anywhere in sight. "Man, he left before anyone could even see him going! And he took Zuko with him..." He grimaced manfully and slumped back. Ron watched him, concerned, and Aang looked up at the sky with a wistful sigh.

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and Zuko had quietly left while everyone else had been reacting to the sight of the new Foster's Home, moving through the crowd and making it to the street bordering Foster's domain that their ship had been moved to get it out of the way, parked next to the mobile hospital and looking so unsteady that it should have fallen over. That it hadn't was a tribute to Cyborg's engineering skills, tacky though the result was.

Zim glanced back at what the crowd, and faltered a moment when he saw his friends realizing that he had left with his crew, looking around for him and their calls for him lost in the crowd's chattering. He couldn't help but see them, because with his ocular implants it was a simple matter to pick his friends out of the crowd: Aang and Danny, Sokka and Katara, Toph and Tucker and Sam. And without meaning to, he extended the same gesture to the people he had only just met: Abel and Scar, Cyborg and Winry, Kim and Ron (and Rufus too), and the many people that Zim's crew had fought alongside today, though he didn't care as much about them and didn't really know their names anyway.

"That's a nice house," Morte offered. "Kinda tacky, but I've seen worse."

Zim ignored him. His gaze lingered on Minimoose, the little robot he had made - that he was, in a sense, responsible for and could even be loosely considered his child - and he forced himself to look away. Knowing that he would definitely return was the only reason he could do it without hating himself, and he still felt like a coward. He shook his head; they needed to move quickly. "Do we have everything we need before we leave?"

"Yep!" Hobbes said, hoisting up the extradimensional dufflebag filled with the fruits of his earlier shopping expedition. Zim wondered where it had been but didn't really care.

"Anything we're forgetting?" Zuko said.

"Don't think so," Calvin said, distracted by a slim device that was a sort of electronic book; they were sold as blanks, and information was downloaded into them so they could serve as back-ups or references. In this case, Cyborg had downloaded all the pernitent information for their ship into it, making it into a user's manual. (Though he warned that it might still be a little unpredictable. The remnants of technology that ran on such bizarre laws that Calvin's inventions wouldn't have any other consequence.)

"If there is, we won't remember it," Morte joked.

"Unless we do remember it," Zim said, misunderstanding him. "But then we won't, because we will have forgotten, and then we might remember, unless we've still forgotten, and then we won't have remembered it, so we might rememfer it and then it won't be forgotten, except if-"

"We get it!" Hobbes said, cutting him off. Zim grumbled.

"Well...okay then," Zim said, wishing he had a cooler thing to say. "Let's get going!"

Calvin and Hobbes rolled their eyes at his lameness, and Zim glared at them for insubordination. Predictably, they ignored him and walked up the open cargo doors and into the ship, heading straight towards the bridge. "At long last!" Morte said. "It feels like we've been here for...what, five years or something?"

"Don't exaggerate, it only feels like that because of how long it takes to get anything done," Zuko replied. Morte laughed. Zuko gave Zim a significant look as they started to walk after Calvin and Hobbes, and Zim stopped where he was, looking up at Zuko expectantly. "C'mon," Zuko muttered, walking to the ship slowly with the air of someone who had something serious to say.

Morte gave Zim a significant look. "Looks like your second-in-command wants a bit of a personal word," He said quietly. He floated ahead faster than Zuko was walking, so that he was politely out of range of them and couldn't eavesdrop.

Zim watched him go and looked at Zuko. "You're my second-in-command?"

"I am?" Zuko echoed. "Huh. You have strange choices in personnel."

"Well, only a second-in-command would constantly question my command decisions. So, what is it that you wanted? We need to leave before anyone notices that we're gone."

"Yeah. About that." Zuko scratched the back of his head, looking unusually awkward. "I don't...look, why do you want to leave now? Without even saying goodbye to anyone?"

"You were there," Zim said. "We said our goodbyes. More or less. Anyway, and they might have tried to hold us back for a while if we had. Best not to give them that chance and leave while we can."

"I know," Zuko said. "I'm not arguing against that. It was the calm and rational decision, and really weird coming from you. But I don't think that's what you _wanted _to do."

"...No," Zim said quietly. "I would have preferred not to do this." Zuko raised an eyebrow. "I wanted to say goodbye properly. I wanted to look Aang in the others in the eyes...or bellies, but it's not my fault every one I know is freakishly tall. But like you said, giving them the opportunity to try and talk some of their precious 'sense' into us would bring more harm than good at this point. We needed to leave _now _and get this mission started, and we couldn't afford any more delays."

"Even though you're almost certainly going to forget your mission and goof around on random stuff that gets your attention?" Zuko pointed out fairly.

"Well, yes," Zim said dismissively. "But that goes without saying. And...I think it's better this way. Almost certainly. Probably. I guess. I don't want Aang to get upset like he might in a face-to-face confrontation." True, Aang hadn't been that upset when Zuko had announced that he was leaving with Zim, but things had been hectic and he only had until now to realize that Zuko - _their _Zuko, the fifth member of Team Avatar, their representative from the Fire Nation and the guy that was just as good as Aang's older brother - was going to leave on a dangerous mission and there was no knowing when he come back. Or when _any _of them would come back.

Everyone on his crew was leaving someone behind, Zim thought briefly. Dropping their lives for this mission of his, and he didn't even know _why _Calvin and Hobbes and Morte were doing besides 'our king told us to'. It was an interesting thought.

He returned to business. "I don't want to go," He said again, voice nearly-whispering and hurt, like a little child that didn't want to be away from his family and was only just realizing this, but had taken too many steps to back out now. "But there's other people that need to come and make home here."

Zuko nodded, slowly and seriously. Zim knew he was thinking about Dib and Gaz and Gir and anyone else they might find. "I understand." He clapped Zim on the shoulder, tremendously awkward in this little gesture of solidarity but honest all the same. "That's the biggest reason I'm going with you. I'm paying you back for all the times _you _helped us out." Zim looked up at him, eyes wide in bemused surprise. Zuko smiled, lips quirking at the unmutilated side of his face. "That's what loyalty counts for. You've stuck by me and the rest of _my _team when we showed up out of nowhere on your world; now that we're stuck in the same boat, it's only fair that I return the favor."

Zim couldn't speak for a moment. "...Thank you," He blurted out, so quietly he hoped Zuko hadn't heard him and he could pretend he hadn't said that.

Zuko had. He issued a hoarse laugh that sounded more like a amiable growl and made that awkward smile. "No big deal," He said, shuffling away and not making eye contact. "Just looking after my own."

Zim was so surprised by _that _that Zuko had walked away and into the ship, his hands stuffed into his pockets, before Zim recovered and dashed off after him into the cargo hold, and the doors closed after them with finality.

Zim and Zuko went up the steps of the catwalks overlooking the cargo hold, going through the doors at the bridge-side and walking into the bridge to find Hobbes anxiously strapping himself into the safety harness at one side of the wall and Calvin already in one of the seats, priming the ship for taking off; studying gauges, measuring power output, directing energy to the appropiate processes, shutting off safety limiters and enabling whatever super-travel system this ship had, that sort of thing. Zim hopped into the other seat, Morte bobbing over it like an anxious mother-hen and Zuko followed Hobbes example by strapping himself into a harness at the other side of the room.

"Geez, you guys are wimps," Calvin complained. "Once we're free of the planet, the ship's personal gravity systems will kick in. It's not like we'll be thrown around once we're clear from orbit."

"I'm not taking any chances," Hobbes said. Zuko clearly shared this sentiment.

"This entire mission will be filled with you two complaining, won't it?" Zim said. "Right. Science officer boy!"

"My name is Calvin!"

"Yeah, you. Is the ship prepped?"

"As much as I can figure out..." Calvin took a look at the 'reference guide' Cyborg had given him and took a quick look at the sections referring to prepping the ship to take-off from a planet and start moving from world to world. With a grin he set it down, indicated a flashing light on the dashboard over a sign that said 'Ready To Roll' and said, "Yes! Good to go!"

"Then let's get to it!" Zim declared, reaching out to do just that, and paused. "How is that done? You have the reference booklet."

"Oh, yeah." Calvin reached for a button-laden lever that had an astonishing resemblence to a stick-shift, set between the two pilot's seats and moving it's setting from 'Atmospheric Flight' to 'Inter-World Travel'. It clicked into place, and Zim saw several displays switch at once, displaying readouts of local atmospheric conditions and suggesting exit methods; at the same time, the propulsion discs on the outside of the ship slid on concealed tracks into slightly different positons, powering on and producing a movement field in a more streamlined form that suggested the shape of a bullet, bouncing the ship into the air and rocketing it into the sky.

Hobbes and Zuko were lucky to be strapped safely in; the sudden acceleration would have knocked them around otherwise, and Morte was unceremoniously tossed around, Calvin and Zim quite oblivious to this, though even they noticed the floor vibrating slightly under their feet, the ship moving even faster than it had at any point during it's fight with Kimblee. "Wh-wh-why's it moving so fast!" Hobbes yelled, voice stuttering from the vibrating put on him.

"It has to move this fast to escape the planet's orbit!" Calvin declared, grinning like a maniac; he was a total speed fanatic, and this was almost as good as being in a speedy wartruck armed to the teeth in a racemeet. "Cyborg explained it to me: we move at maximum speed and shoot right off the planet like a bullet, and then once we're in space we can safely activate the interdimensional travel function!"

"And that is?"

"I dunno. Way he described it to me, it sounded a bit like Immaterial warping!"

"Oh," Hobbes said, not sounding entirely reassured. Zim agreed, since he had no idea what the 'immaterium' was but it sounded ominous.

The ship surged forward, moving fast enough to disregard gravity, and the clouds fogged up the cameras for only a few moments as the ship barreled into the skies above the city (and the vibrant green glow of it's propulsion field was now bright enough for the friends they left behind to see them far above the skyline and watch them go, fading to a gleaming speck as they passed through the nanomachine layer). Whiteness pushed away on the visual displays, streaming off in interesting spiral patterns from the propulsion field sliding them away, hints of blue and black visible in gaps as the clouds gradually got thinner, the atmosphere becoming less of a barrier. The ship's rocking got more intense, the combination of the ship's construction and the shielding effects of their propulsion field protecting them from atmospheric conditions or freezing or burning up from solar heat or the host of other myriad exiting the planet problems.

"We're reaching the outer atmosphere," Calvin reported, plastered back into his seat by the speeds they were going.

"Mmf," Zuko mumbled, having been smashed into the wall after he moved around at the worst possible moment and he'd been bounced by the ship's rocking face-first into the wall. "I hate sailing."

"We're going into space and then sub-space, not sailing an ocean," Hobbes said.

"Space is like an ocean."

"Depends on the universe, actually," Morte said.

"It _does_?" Zim said, aghast. He shuddered at the thought of such a terrifying 'verse.

By now they were so far up that the clouds had thinned to nearly nothingness, and Zim saw the planet's surface far below, and the ship had rocketed them up to incredible speeds so that they were now so far up that they couldn't see Traverse Town anywhere except as a faint speck on the continents below: a dark shape cradled in a shallow depression between small mountains and an inland bay that opened up into the ocean. The world of Crucible spread out before him, the immense continent made present to him, and since he had never taken an interest or found out what the rest of the place was like it was a shock to see the continent spreading out: the wild forests growing madly all over the mountains near Traverse Town and spreading out until gradually thinning out into an arid savannah that extended for as far as he could see, lakes and oasises interrupting the dry landscape here and there, and around many of them there were the unmistakable shapes of ruined cities and ancient metropoli, undoubtedly scavenged for all they were worth, and Zim was momentarily floored by just how _many _of them there were, that the ones he could see plainly had merely fared better than the barely recognizable wreckage that constitued most of the area. The entire savannah seemed little more than an expanse of nature quietly claming the territory of a long-dead and forgotten people, and it was a sobering thought: what could have destroyed a civilization like this so violently and left the world itself alive?

He thought of the Heartless, who had proved themselves so adept at destroying everything they encountered, and he began to plot. He was cheered up a bit when he paid attention to moving masses on the savannah and the moutains and in the sea, and he wondered what they could be until he realized that they had to be people, moving in massive nomadic groups upon the savannah and clustering in newer cities near the larger oasises and in civic fleets on the ocean big enough for generations to live on those boats without ever stepping foot on land. He was floored for a moment at the thought of them, those non-Traverse Town inhabitants he hadn't given any thought to, and he felt a little happier for it. Even on this world that had been hit by an unknown catastrophe, life endured and didn't seem to be bothered. Surely, then, the survivors from _his _world could flourish and start their lives over.

"What are you grinning about?" Calvin asked him.

"I'm just plotting," Zim said honestly. Calvin gave him a suspicious look and shrugged.

His view of the continent grew wider, until the cities had diminished to mere suggestions and only geological features could be picked out, and when Calvin floored the ship and it accelerated in another jolting boost, even those got smaller. He could just barely see suggestions of mountains, green blurs of a massive forest and a vast expanse of sea dotted with islands popping up like the fallen change drawer of some exceedingly absent-minded god, and smaller sub-continents directly south of the one Traverse Town was from, and then even that view was blurred out by the clouds they had left behind them.

He checked a gauge that said that they were almost clear of the atmosphere, and he sat back to ready himself, but didn't really need to since the aggressive rumblings of the ship were calming down and becoming steady. The whiteness of the clouds had faded to a mere film and finally even that was broken through as the ship's internal gravitional generators created an opposing force to the planet's own gravitational pull that effectively launched the ship free and let it shoot forward, clearing the atmosphere in a burst that caught Zim completely by surprise (the ship was primitive _and _advanced in different respects by his own high standards and it kept catching him off-guard) and-

He saw stars.

The ship slowed, cleared from the planet and drifting peacefully into space and settling into stillness. Zim and the rest of his crew stared at the sights presented to him on the visual displays, and while it was said a lot that space was a whole lot of dangerously chaotic emptiness filled with relatively few islands of stability, they saw no evidence of it here. Space before them seemed alight with activity; the sun that bordered the planet of Crucible was blazing light-years away, an apparent speck on the horizon that turned the entirety of visible space into what would have been a painfully bright vista if the ship's filters hadn't dampened it, and it was still enough of a radiance that even the Keyblade was dampened by on a massive scale. They saw other planets there, at least three in this particular solar system, and unlike Earth's planets these looked inhabited; Zim could see the signs of sentient life even from his brief sight of them, his ship's instruments reporting signals and broadcasts coming from them. "No one told me this solar system was inhabited," Zim murmured, wondering why he hadn't picked that up in the Hitchhiker's Guide.

"Probably wasn't relevant," Morte said. "Besides, they had to be terraformed first. Those planets have some heavy technological assistance to stay okay, you know?" Zuko stared at him disbelievingly. "What? We were at a museum, I checked out what they had to say. Those planets weren't colonized by whoever used to live on this planet, and if they were, there's no evidence of it."

"What happened to those guys, anyway?" Hobbes asked.

"My money's on 'eaten by cosmic horror that's still on the planet'," Morte said.

"An interesting question, but not one that's relevant to us," Zim said. For a moment longer, though, he stared at the sight of space before him; welcoming darkness lit up by distant nebulae and stars, the suggestion of the merest ends of galaxies pointed out on a helpful display screen that referenced it with the most recent findings on astrology. Several other ships, larger than his ship, patrolled around Crucible, presumably monitoring the traffic to the planet to prevent crashes or attacks, and they were large blocky affairs that looked truly ancient and well-maintained, and by spacefaring standards they were decently sized ships; Zim felt like he was in a toy boat compared to these beauties. None of them hailed Zim or opened fire, and he took that as a signal to move onward. He nodded at Calvin, and the boy took hold of the control rods and moved the ship onward. The green propulsion field activated, and instead of slimming itself around the ship it spread out, looking like a net or a construct to catch something, and the ship started moving again at considerable speed that would see them leaving the planet behind in less than fifteen minutes; without the atmosphere to compete with, the ship would move a great deal more smoothly.

"Rev up the ship!" Calvin said, holding tighter and looking determined. Zim followed his example, grabbing the control rods in his own seat and thinking of the resolve he had made last night and earlier today to find Gir and Dib (and Gaz, he supposed) and bring them home to Traverse Town and maybe get a start on destroying the Heartless. The handles hummed in his hands, and he saw the power scale light up again, the spiral-pattern bars appearing and spinning out. "Come on, just a bit more...I wish I knew how this stuff worked..." The spiral gauge fluxed out, until the entire thing was green, and other colors swelled up at the edges. A sign above the stickshift lit up, reading 'Fired Up', and a panel that Zim hadn't noticed opened up, revealing a screen and a button.

Zim grinned, and hit the button.

On the ground below, Aang and the rest of Zim's old crew watched the green flash up in the sky and the tiny airbourne dot vanish with it, and from the look on Aang's face they knew perfectly well what it was. "Good luck, you guys," Aang whispered, a cheery grin on his face.


	18. The Paragon Sets Out

Bah, long update. They take too long to get down as quickly as I'd like!

I swear, I _did not _intend to take this long to get a chapter posted, but among other things...ah, real life, writer blocks, Fallout: New Vegas and periodic mood wings intervened. _Curse them all!_

On the plus side, a good chunk of the next chapter is already written, so good news on that front. Hopefully it won't take half a year for another chapter!

...By Autochthon the Great Maker, _I hope not!_

Disclaimer: All copyrighted properties are copyrighted to their creaters and owners.

* * *

The silver clouds of the Astral Plane, stretching from horizon to horizon in the limitless sphere that comprised all potential space on this particular dimensional place, whirled around violently as a comparatively minuscule disc of neon green opened, half-formed shapes whirling up out of the silvery mass all around in patterns not unlike humanoids shapes on the move and tinted green as well.

The green burst into solid form, still that same glorious shade of neon green edging into dozens of different shades of green depending on where they struck the clouds around them (some tinging towards blue and other deeper greens and others yellow and still others into shades impossible for those without magically-enhanced sight to perceive) radiated for a moment, serving as a suitably dramatic backdrop for the awkward-looking but tough spaceship that barreled on through it, green still shining on battle-scarred metal before the bright lights faded, and then the constant and directionless illumination of the silver clouds was offset by the green shine of the propulsion field moving the ship aimlessly onward, strands of randomized light flickering off the ship to backlight what seemed to be the clouds around them but were actually immense mountain-sized masses of the same silver substance that was really thought made physical.

The ship powered on, still fresh from it's battle against the Umbra Eternis, and it's crew took in the sights with long moments for this wonder. "Welcome," Morte told them. "To the Astral Plane!"

Brilliant and gentle silvery light, as bright and soft as dreams distilled into substance, illuminated them and everything in sight, and in addition to the manys brilliant and awe-inspiring lights of purest color scattered throughout the plane likes stars, much of the plane of existence seemed composed of the substance, and it might stagger the mind of those new to the nature of the planes to be made aware that the substance was _thought_ made physical (or as close to physical as anything could naturally be on this particular plane), born from the very thoughts of every sentient being to have ever lived and forging an irrefutable testament that they had existed.

Zim, in the perfect position to see all these wonders as his ship had dived into the Astral Plane when it left the world of Crucible, was certainly impressed and even delighted by it all; the vast clouds, formed of so very many tiny thought-forms flowing peacefully into greater wholes, were dotted here and there by bits of debris that varied from from the sizes of people to planetoids to even larger; many of them seemed like wreckage of lost starships and others seemed to be asteroids forcibly melded into stable land and still others looked like chunks of ground somehow transported here. Most of them were inhabited, in their fashion, cobbled cities and elegant villages dotted them and sizable engines flying most of the inhabited debris. A horseshoe-shaped city-planetoid the size of a large starship flew past the recently arrived ship, sloughing off thought-patterns as it went by without much interest in the newcomers.

Closer to his attention were...well, wherever the silver light was thickest and the thoughtforms brightest, there were lights. Resembling the fanciful images of stars, each one shining particular colors in impossibly brilliant and wondrous patterns, bright and shining magnificently in the silver void. Their size was hard to gauge; they all seemed relatively small and again quite big, not appearing to have much gravity in spite of that, though the forms of the plane seemed focused on them. These lights shone as brightly as the most radiant soul or perhaps thousands of them, the lights of entire worlds gathered into one and marking the shape of a world in this realm of thought. And indeed there were shapes _inside _those world-lights, movement and forms and things too abstract to be deciphered easily and so much that was brilliant and good about all things. These star-like lights were nothing less than the light of the soul shining through, continually _creating _this place by existing and birthing the countless thought-forms that in turn created the light that comprised this plane.

In the ship, on the bridge was the crew, and they stared in open-mouthed fascination at the things they were seeing on the monitors. The ship slowed to a gentle coasting stop as they stopped inputting instructions to it's on-board computers long enough for them to simply enjoy the marvels around them.

"What is this place?" Zuko said, awed.

"I just said, the Astral Plane," Morte repeated. "Transitive plane formed from the thoughts of every sentient being that ever lived, container of the Akashic Records, and the favorite inter-verse crossing dimension since the Negative Zone got crowded and Zero-Space got unpopular."

"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm," Calvin said, watching the titantic figure drift away. "Pretty cool."

"It's like the Immaterium, but without the silly insanity all the time," Hobbes remarked.

Zuko had to sit down, crashing into one of the side seats in a hurry. "I don't...I seem to have lost hold of my ability to formulate words," he said weakly, mouth open and pulling into a grin despite himself. "It's...this is just _amazing_." He smiled, like the child he'd been a long time before.

"Well, I like it," Zim said brightly. "Good thing, if we're going to be going through here so often."

Morte stared. If he'd had eyelids, he would have blinked. "...That's it? No slack-jawed gasps? No stares of stupidified interest? No yelling about how none of this is possible? Well, Zuko had something like that but he doesn't count."

"What?! Why not!?" Zuko said.

"Because you're the serious guy who at least pretends he's sane to counter everyone else being goofy," Morte said, phrasing it like he was a professor talking to a classroom full of promising but sadly incompetent students. "Your reactions just aren't as funny by intention."

"I am not the serious guy," Zuko said, crossing his arms and glaring angrily, wonder and childlike awe forgotten in favor of being the angsty angry guy.

"You're crossing your arms and glaring at the person who thinks you're protesting too much," Morte said. "If you were any more serious guy, you'd be constantly complaining about how absurd everything is and how impossible our adventures are."

"What adventures?" Hobbes interrupted. "We just started."

"Hypothetical point, it's not that big a deal."

Zuko rubbed his forehead, in the manner of a sane man surronded by crazy people. Hobbes patted him on the shoulder, trying to be friendly. Zuko gave him a brief look, and a twich of the mouth that might almost have a been a smile.

Zim applauded at them sarcastically. Beside him, Calvin stopped paying attention to anything that was happening and was interested in a small panel in the ground a short distance from the side-seats and well away from the power storage unit under their feet. With a little effort, he managed to slide the panel open with an 'ooh!' of interest. Zim failed to notice or care and said, "Congratulations, the boring people of the crew are getting along. Now we-"

"Wait, you were paying attention to someone besides me?" Morte said, sounding betrayed.

"Hey, where'd my little bro go?" Hobbes said, looking around.

"You think I'm _boring_?" Zuko said, sounding hurt.

"Ow!" Calvin said, and they looked around to see what had happened; the panel had opened up and he'd fallen into it, legs wiggling up from a space in the floor. Hobbes pulled him out of it and Calvin made it harder by holding up what looked like an oversized drink cooler. "Hey guys, check this out! I found a...a thing, it's probably got food in it!" Hobbes let him down and Calvin opened the cooler up as soon as he was upright. "AWESOME, I WAS RIGHT."

"Is there beer?" Morte asked hopefully.

"Nope, but there's chips and soda and junk," Calvin said, pushing the cooler to the rest of them. Hobbes, Zuko and Zim glanced at each other. Zim broke away to dig into the cooler with gusto and after a moment Zuko and Hobbes decided they were too hungry to care and joined in. Morte hovered by, fuming that he couldn't eat anything.

"Mmm, I find it very peculiar that Cyborg left us a food cooler right here," Zim said, trying to take all the sodas for himself while he hurredly ate an entire bag of chips and wondered whether or not the bag itself was edible. (An attempt to find out that resultant in a spastic coughing fit suggested that it was probably not.) "I expect he brought this up for himself and forgot about it."

"Sucks to be him," Calvin said, wrangling a few sodas from Zim after a brief fight with the Irken; Zim was a better fighter and certainly stronger but Calvin was more experienced in beating the stuffing out of someone over little bits of food. "But I find it peculiar that someone made a sandwich and modeled it after a flux capacitor." He held up a sandwich that did indeed look just like such a device. "I thought those things went out of business years ago!"

"Looks more like a telluric interchanger," Zim commented, reluctantly handing out sodas to the others; it didn't do to be TOO selfish. "Or a sub-ether compass that measures by the interplay of light on the Luminiferous Ether."

Calvin stared at him. "The Luminiferous Ether. _Really_."

"Yes," Zim said. "Really."

They stared at each other, a moment passing, and then they both snickered and burst out with laughter, falling over and helpless to stop themselves. "I don't get it," Zuko said from where he was sitting and stuffing the contents of a bag of chips into his mouth.

"I believe that's because we're witnessing a example of really bad nerd humor," Hobbes said, eating chips like Zuko. "I don't even know what that ether stuff is."

"An old theory from most Earths a short time before the theory of relativity busted it," Morte said. "The theory was that light was a sort of rarified fluid that moved through a special medium, and that this luminiferous ether was that medium. Really caught people's eyes for a while, and there's plenty of magic-users and mad scientists that swear by it, like the Sons of Ether loonies for technomantic mages or their less idealistic cousins the Etherites from the _really_ mad science fringe."

"Oh, they're making disproven science jokes," Zuko said.

"Looks like," Hobbes said.

For a moment, they both ate chips together. Zim and Calvin continued to laugh crazily, totally out of proportion with the joke.

"Hmm," Zuko and Hobbes both said, mildly pleased that Zim and Calvin were getting along about _something_. Particular as the two scientists had recovered from laughing and were now cheerfully discussing flux capacitors, their patent silliness in being so popular dispite having been shoved out of the market by dozens of improved varients or, for that matter, why they seemed so popular among science heroes. (Calvin blamed it on cultural inertia and people not just moving with the times. Zim was inclined to agree.) Zuko and Hobbes both mused with each other how strange it was that two guys from entirely different universes somehow knew about the same exact things and were able to make jokes about things that ought to not even exist in both universes, then the two of them got distracted when they realized that they were speaking the same language dispite coming from different universes themselves (and Zuko coming from a 'verse that was _very _different from either Earth or the Comic Kingdom and somehow speaking English anyway), prompting Morte to treat them on the inexplicable trait for world travelers to speak the local langauges and understand social nuances and that nobody really understood how this worked but nobody investigated too much in case it suddenly stopped happening and it all went sour as they usually did.

The five of them passed a pleasant few hours in a manner like this without anything happening to them for a change (Hobbes certainly half-expected space pirates to come out of nowhere and steal the ship), polishing off the food cooler and replenishing energy expended since breakfast earlier that day (all the intervening time having been spent either fighting for their lives or running around, with a few notably peaceful exceptions but they were still hungry) and watching the sights and wonders of the Astral Plane around them. Still coming down from the excitement from earlier that day, thoughts of what they were supposed to do next were fairly far from their minds, and Morte helped keep their minds off business, explaining just what everything around them was and having great fun showing off his knowledge.

"...And those giant floaty things that look a bit like giants are actually dead gods," Morte said as they flew around in circles just to see what their propulsion trail looked like when it coiled up and mixed with the astral light.

Calvin helpfully played with a keyboard and brought up a visual reception of something that utterly dwarfed the spacecraft, appearing for a moment to be a tremendous crystal-coated mass of solidified air larger than an island and so big that it could have crushed the ship with a passing touch. More of it passed into view, forcing the ship to move faster to avoid getting hit as another similar object appeared, both proving some what oblong and naggingly familiar. It soon became clear that they apparantly sprouted from the same surface, perhaps an intricately and astoundingly large artificial structure, and only did a broad flat shape that the strange objects extended from appear that it was made clear it was in fact a gigantic hand, as still as a corpse and seemingly much the same.

The ship paused as more of a titantic figure appeared, so large it hurt to look at it, and all they could really grasp was the suggestion of a enormous humanoid figure was apparent in the wisps of the thought-cloud, a titantic godly figure in eternal repose or deathly sleep. The hand alone seemed too big to make any sense; one one of it's mountain-sized knuckles stood a moderately large group of people of mixed demi-human species (halflings, dwarves, and a elf or two), and the hand was so large and they so small that they looked like specks. They regarded Zim's ship with mild disinterest, wearing threadbare robes and not any environmental equipment to survive (according to Morte, they didn't need to; the Astral Plane passively supplied psychic energy that fueled all normal metabolic processes, so no one there needed to eat or sleep. Calinv said, "That thing was a dead _god?_"

"Yep," Morte said.

Zuko seemed disturbed; he equated the word 'god' with 'mighty spirit' and the idea that they could die unnerved him. Hobbes was already used to the Powers as a fact of life and had other thoughts. "I wonder if some of the gods from the Imperium's time live here too." Hobbes hesitated. "You know. _Them. _I wonder if Khorne and Slaneesh are somewhere out there, lying for someone to bump right into their corpses."

Calvin shuddered. "By all the benign machine-spirits, I hope not."

Zuko and Zim glanced at each other. "I hate being left out of the loop," Zuko muttered. Zim nodded, frowning.

"They ain't completely dead if you can remember their names," Morte said darkly. Calvin and Hobbes winced; whatever Khorne or Slaneesh were, the idea of them not being fully gone clearly disturbed them badly. "Dead's not really the right word anyway, more like sleeping, or so I hear. The idea being that gods are powerful spirits made from beliefs (generally speaking), so they 'die' if no one believes in them or there's any record left of them, so they just sort of collapse and are drawn here. If someone believes in them again, they wake up and get some of their power back, even if it's just one person."

"It feels strange looking at a dead god through a screen," Zuko mused. "I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around the scale, even. And I half-feel like someone's bound to make a vaugely anti-religious feel about us seeing that with technological means."

"They're pikers, them that say that; best to just leave the lost Powers be," Morte said, with surprisingly softness for him. "They're dead and lost. Plenty of folk around here built cities on them and float on the astral winds, but them's even bigger pikers. Some even _mine _the god-bodies."

"People live here?" Hobbes said, frowning the whole time at the sound of sacrilege on such a grand scale. "It doesn't look very habitable to me."

"You'd be surprised," Morte said dryly. "Mostly the githyankis, they like attacking travelers and stealing their stuff for fun and profit." They looked at him, and Calvin asked him what a githyanki actually was. "Never heard of 'em? Don't suppose they'd risk trying to attack your lot. They're the guys and gals what colonized the Astral the most, sort of an ancient humanoid race that love battle and weapons more than their own friends. See everyone else as prey and targets, and they _love _the idea of conquering everything to protect their own in premptive defense. Used to be a slave race way back before most other races even existed; they beat their masters and decided they wanted to take a stab at conquering everything else and set up shop in this Plane. Think of them Dark Eldar in your own universe and you get the basic idea."

Hobbes' eyes widened. "_Urgh_," He spat.

"Okay, maybe forget the sexual assault and obligatory torture," Morte amended. "A bit, probably. Not real up on the 'not being jerks' fad, the githyanki. Spend most of their times training in the fortress-worlds they've made here, raiding worlds in the Prime Material and conquering everything they can hold onto, piece by piece."

"If that's the case," Zim asked. "Why is the Astral Plane become a means of interversal travel, as you said? They seem more likely to cause massive warfare and make travel to costly to be worth doing save for the most powerful of military forces."

"It's a big Astral Plane, seeing as how it doesn't care about little things like 'spacial limits'," Morte replied. "The 'yanki couldn't own the whole thing if they spent the rest of existence trying, it's just too big. And then, you gotta consider the folks that moved here, making their own cities on the debris floating around or even bringing their own. Y'see, after dimensional technology got combined with boundary-breaching spells by mages and science-folk, they figured out ways to just blink right in here and mass-produce the method. And, uh, the Astral Plane basically got colonized in a hurry. Which is sort of like saying that there's a bunch of people living in a single drop of water in the sea; the Astral Plane, so I hear, is made from the thoughts of everything that's ever had a moment to think. It's why the place is so big, on account of memories and knowledge are real here, make the substance of the plane. You see those lights like stars?" Appropriately, one screen was displaying a shot where the psychic winds had subsided enough for the lights to be nearly bright enough to blind the camera if it wasn't for compensating filters. "Those lights, they're...they're _worlds_. Ways to drop out of the Astral and onto them, that is. The thoughts of everything that lives in a world, they collect and bind together into a bigger whole and make their presence here, and if you come here the right way - like with the tech we used to jump here - you can use that to travel to the world they came from."

Zim stared, wondering and fascinated, his love for all things scientific and beyond his knowing clanging away at the back of his thoughts. (Right next to his interest in fighting any of these githyanki should they show up.) "It certainly works better than the device from home we built."

"Less dangerous, anyway," Zuko agreed.

Calvin was less nice about it. "It sounds incredibly inefficient, getting to other worlds like that," He said, frowning. "If you have a way of tracking your destination, and assuming that those world-gates don't just move around with...what, you said something about psychic winds earlier? Even if you go by that, it sounds like, I don't know, sailing but in three-dimensions with nastier pirates and also the islands or whatever move around!"

"Those things are charted, mostly," Morte said. "People have been coming here and using the Astral for longer than most civilizations have existed. Haven't just made a enterprise of the whole until, what, maybe forty years ago? And the portals don't move around."

"Maybe, but it just sounds tremendously inefficient. In my intergalactic kingdom, we just acquire multiversal coordinates and jump through the Immaterium. Easy, mostly painless, and we hardly ever get incomprehensible emotion-horrors clinging to the ship to infest someone's mind and drive them to reality-shredding acts of madness. I think. At least we wouldn't have to rely exclusively on charts that may or may not be strictly accurate, depending on when Cyborg downloaded them or whatever!"

"Let's see about that," Hobbes said, walking over to one of the terminals. He paused, unsure if it was correct or not, and Zim followed along to help; he located a keyboard, puzzled his way through the interface and winding his way through what appeared to be databanks, accidentally getting a network browser constantly popping up and reminding him several times that there weren't any such networks in range or at least any that could be detected, causing a disco ball to drop down from the ceiling while extremely inappropiate heavy metal music played, somehow triggered a small cannon that fired cleaning droids onto the walls, encountered three other minor and annoying problems on the way, and finally located the navigational charts. "Why would he even put most of those things in here!?" Zim asked no one as a small holographic emitter appeared from the dashboards, shaking his leg to get off a cleaning droid that was persistentally attacking his shoe. "And what is this thing have it in for me?"

"Evidentally your clothes are in such an awful state it believes you're just a big clump of grime," Hobbes remarked.

"Fine, I get it, I'll change clothing in due course, stop harrassing me!"

"I weren't really harassing you."

"Well you are _now_."

"Point taken."

The holographic emitter powered up; Calvin and Hobbes, familiar with such things, took several steps back while Morte snorted in disapproval and Zuko gave them a confused look while plainly wondering if he ought to do the same. They needn't have bothered; light streamed up without exploding like the Comic Kingdom duo seemed to think it should have, weaving together as infomation was imprinted on it and it took the form of a ball-like shape containing a three-dimensional model of what was certainly their immediate location, with their current position indicated by a small arrow that set 'you are here!'. It was alarmingly tiny compared to everything else around them, like a half-sized fly sitting on a raindrop in the ocean which was itself inside a bigger ocean. Annoyingly, it reminded Zim once again of just how insanely large the Astral Plane was and how tiny their own ship really was.

The charts displayed a fair bit to work with; tracks of visibly processed data analyzing the movements of psychic wind (which was really a misnomer, as it was less 'wind' and more like 'revolutionary streams of mental energy typically associated with scientific mania' but that was a bit complicated to say repeatedly), and around the map there were cheerful-looking round things that were presumably the world-lights Morte had mentioned, though the computer saw fit to arrange the faint thought-forms from them and combined them with pre-existing information on those worlds (if any) to create cutesy images of the worlds to give the viewer a rough idea of what to expect on those worlds. (A sidebar indicated a directory of catalogued worlds with the appropriate multiversal coordinates to reach them as soon as possible. That was, of course, the actual purpose of the charts.)

On a less annoyingly whimsical note, data hovered over the visible worlds and displayed pernitent information, as well as a percentage chance of Zim's allies being on that particular world based on all the relevant factors such as known political strife, cultural stabilitiy and all manner of problems that just _meant _that someone Zim knew was on that place; Zim found that last bit helpful but rather ominous for two reasons: one, he hadn't actually _had _the computer check for those things, though he might have mentioned it, but in any case the ship's computers shouldn't have known about that, and two, every single percentage for Zim's friends being on any of those worlds were so low that the precise amount of decimals and zeroes went on for quite a bit.

"On the bright side, it didn't explode, but on the negative side, I'm not entire sure what I'm looking at," Calvin said.

"Weird," Hobbes remarked. "I seemed to recall you doing a _lot _of piloting on our missions and always driving when we raided markets for food back on Cadia when we were seperated from Mom and Dad."

"I'm good at combat flight situations, not so much on figuring out navigational charts," Calvin said. "Or landing. Or braking. Or the other things that boring people think qualify you as a real driver."

"Ah," Zim thought. "How exciting! Eh heh hah, I can just _taste _the adventure awaiting. Glorious wondrous adventure! It tastes of holograph. Not many people know that." Zim licked the holographic charts. "Yes, this is what adventure tastes like!"

"...Why did he lick the hologram?" Morte asked Zuko quietly.

"Don't know, don't want to know, don't ask," Zuko said. "That's my policy when Zim's being weird, I suggest you do the same!"

"Agreed," Calvin and Hobbes said stoically, a most unusual position for them to take. Hobbes then said to Zim, "What's all this about adventure? I thought the whole point here was a rescue mission, not...uh..."

"A 'disorganized ramble through uncharted worlds, making benign trouble and smiting evil as we go along' manner of thing?" Zim said.

"Yes, that."

"Simple enough. The rescue mission is part of the adventure!" Zim said earnestly. "If I'm going to going through worlds and blowing up evil folk that offend me, as will _assuredly _happen as we go, I insist on having fun with it! Therefore, ADVENTURE."

"Oh, so we're going to be doing like heroic stuff like we did in Traverse Town?" Morte said. "...Works for me."

"Agreed," Calvin and Hobbes said again.

They looked at Zuko, as if expecting him to dissent. "I'm definitely not arguing on that front," he said. "I would like to know, though; where, exactly, are we doing next? Or are we just going to float around until something happens? Because I've seen all the _good _plays, and trust me, that's what stupid heroes do. We should be _smart _heroes."

"An excellent point," Zim said. "Suggestions, anyone?"

Calvin, as a resident smart guy, immediately spoke up. "I vote we go find somplace to eat!"

"We just snacked," Zim said.

"We snacked, we did not eat. And besides, we just finished with a huge fight. I'm exhausted, and I'm sure everyone else is exhausted-"

"I'm not!" Morte said, just to be contrary.

"That's because you didn't do anything!"

"I had to listen to that Armstrong guy! That's _emotionally _exhausting. It totally counts."

"Does not!" Morte said. "And look, you don't _need _to eat."

"_What?!_" Hobbes said, aghast.

Morte explained, "This is the Astral Plane, it...I'm not clear on the metaphysics, dunno if your needs to sleep or eat sort of freeze until you leave (or if you just decide you want to) or if the psychic light of the world just nourishes you, and I'm actually a bit inclined to go with that one, it sounds better, but we don't really need to eat."

"But I like eating," Hobbes said, suddenly appalled at the notion of doing much of their adventuring in a realm where they didn't get to eat. (Or at least moving through it.)

"You don't _need _to," Morte said.

"Hrm," Zim said. "Perhaps we ought to locate a place to eat or something like that." Morte glared at him and Hobbes looked cheery. "Not _just _to eat, mind you! We ought to find our bearings and decide where to go, and we ought to do it at a place where we can do it at our own leisure. A, what's the word, cosmic diner would be as good as any. If they even exist here!"

"Well, uh, sure they do," Morte said. "People don't need to eat here, but you get a lot of travelers who do; just hopping off through a transitive plane and still hungry, that style of thing."

"Well, I vote for finding a cosmic diner! If the colonists treat this like space, which I see no reason why not, there should be a port-town to supply travelers from the civilized worlds near here," Hobbes said. "Of course, 'near' is a bit of a subjective term. Then, decide where we go next? Get our ship fixed up? Take a proper tour of the ship and figure out where we're gonna sleep or whatever? Whatever works, I'm not the planning guy."

"Ooh, ooh!" Calvin jumped up and down, balling up his hands into fists and glaring at everyone. "I WILL FIGHT ALL OF YOU AT THE SAME TIME FOR A LABORATORY ROOM."

"No need," Zim said. "For we _must have a LABORATORY!_ _WHO ARE WE TO DENY SCIENCE!?_"

"We would be _FOOLS _to deny Science!" Calvin cried.

"Yes!" Zim punched the air while Hobbes and Zuko exchanged a long-suffering 'I know just how you feel' look and Morte just stared. "It is madness to oppose the will of Science, and our duty as sentient beings to propagate Science's knowledge throughout all continuities! If need be, I shall give up all your rooms and smash down the walls for a super-laboratory! For the sake of Science!"

"Um," Hobbes said. "I don't think that's-"

"It's a sacrifice we must make," Zim said. "FOR SCIENCE!"

"For _SCIENCE!_" Calvin agreed.

"_FOR SCIENCE!_" Zim and Calvin screamed, and made an epic bro-first that made a small explosion for no apparent reason. (Actually it was Zim's powers reacting to his hot-blooded excitement.) "Very well, our path is clear, we shall locate a place of dining! If this place is colonized, clearly there must be such a place as you said."

They went to the chart to locate such a place. Quietly, the other three backed away and Zuko, blinking, muttered, "What just happened?"

"I think we just saw them bonding," Hobbes said, sounding disturbed. "Over science."

"Why did they keep pronouncing it with a capital 'S'?" Morte said. "...How do you do that anyway? Or hear it!?"

"Don't know, don't _want _to know," Zuko said, shaking his head. "I..." He paused. "I honestly expected something a little more organized to happen after we left. Not just wandering around and deciding to do things spur of the moment."

"At least it's happening," Hobbes said, trying to be optimistic. "We were there for, like, forever. I feel like we've been there for YEARS!"

"That's just time being screwy, it was just half a day at most," Morte argued.

"Felt longer than that," Hobbes said, and their ship moved on. Probably someone should have been at the helm by now, and it only took five minutes for them to crash into something.

* * *

Some time later (it being somewhat difficult to tell due to the lack of a natural day-night cycle on the Astral Plane), an artificial flying port-town loomed before their ship.

It had been identified in quick order after they'd decided to find one and had been en route towards it; called Astral Relief Colony-1643, Hobbes had read that it was a joint effort by a number of fairly shady corporations interested in making something worthwhile from the Astral Plane without disrupting anything (or offending the notoriously twitchy githyanki) and had tried to make a few colonies designed to provide rest stops and shopping experiences for astral travelers and lost adventurers, and had made the inexplicable choice of staffing it with various small-time criminals sentenced to community service in the name of their respective corporations.

Rather ominously, Hobbes had noted, those businesses had been dismantled and their assets seized by rival businesses, and there were no records to show where they had gone. At this point, the colonies belonged to no one, like little highway towns sustained by the commerce of travelers, and if they were particularily unlucky, comandeered by space pirates.

It curved overhead, slowly rotating in it's own engine-generated orbit. It's self-centered gravational pull keptg it's components moving at angles wherever it went, a metal construct of plastic-steel compounds cheap to produce and combine, the entire thing consisting of layers of building arranged in seperate clusters and connected by wide-open metal catwalks, all placed over a massive internal engine that moved it through space, a few solitary lights flickering in the carefully organized and buildings that subscribed to a flowing and curved design sense that made them look grown rather than built; circular shapes predominated, making the most of the limited size capacity available.

They shortly neared what Zim deemed to be a docking area; a very large flat space raised higher than anything else in the port, a long escalater leading from it down into the port properly. They had opened to recieve all broadcasts, signals from both radio and Sub-Etha broadcasts, networked communications and similar things, and on them all, not a single recent broadcast was coming from this port. Ominous enough, but they had a good enough view of the place from there to make it quite clear that for a port town relatively close to a tourist site like Crucible and Traverse Town, it was totally deserted; even on their cameras, no people walked it's streets, the narrow catwalks between buildings layered over bigger buildings completely deserted. Scorch marks marred the walls, emptiness reigned all around, and there were quite a lot of lingering glows and stray objects bent into impossible shapes by incredible strength. And certainly not to mention all the signs of battle in the damage down to the architecture; burn marks, jagged slices that had cut entire buildings in half, overturned buildings ripped off and thrown outside the town's orbit, various flying vehicles left broken and useless on the ground.

Curiously enough, a fairly loud din could be heard somewhere deeper in the town, a great noise as if of a large funk party. It seemed quite out of place here.

Zim ship's came in close, and Zim had assigned them to be on guard for danger, and accordingly he had sent the team's heavy bruisers, Hobbes and Zuko, to be on point and waiting to be deployed at the first sign in the cargo hold, while Calvin and Zim piloted the ship, waiting to either enter the fray or simply operate the ship's heavy weapons in case a fight did become apparent and such heavy force was warranted.

As they flew over a battered sign that read 'Welcome To The Rest Stop!' so damaged that it fell off and into the astral abyss beneath, Zim frowned as he took in all the evidence. "I am rather suspicious of this port," he said. "I believe it may have suffered a case of pirates."

"What makes you say that?" Calvin said, peering at the instruments. "The power readings are abnormally dim compared to what it ought to be producing...do you deal with space pirates often?"

"A fair bit, but I was referring to that," Zim said, pointing at a really big banner strung between two buildings that said 'DEFINITELY NO PIRATES AROUND HERE, NOT SO MUCH AS A SINGLE ONE' and 'DEFINITELY NOT ROOKIES LOOKING TO MAKE A NAME FOR THEMSELVES' and 'WOULD A BIG BANNER LIE TO YOU?'.

"...Okay, so we got pirates," Calvin said, and repeated so on the intercom before adding, "Really stupid pirates!"

"We already saw that banner, it's pretty obvious," Hobbes yelled from below.

"Can't we go a single day without running into trouble like this?" Morte asked.

"Apparently not," Zuko replied.

Their thus-far-unnamed ship flew in, and didn't go unnoticed for long. As they drew close, a tall squarish building of official function (probably an office for the shipmaster-on-duty to register docked ships before the whole thing had gone bust) become clearly damaged from some terrible battle, and it did little better as it's partially melted exterior exploded from the weight of two absolutely massive magitech hoverbikes flying right out of the lookout point and smashed through the side of the building carelessly. It creaked, groaned, and finally fell right over in a undignified heap, collapsing into ruin. The giant bikers cared not, screaming forward and coming to a crashing stop right in front of their ship, and 'giant' was the operative word, both of them large enough to be called that (probably around nine feet tall, the both of them), and both were of the same inhuman species. Both hoverbikes managed to float back up into the air and carry their drivers onto a pair of large beam cannons on the sides of the dock, aiming them squarely at the ship and gesturing rather rudely to dock right away.

Calvin looked at Zim. "Wanna blast these idiots?"

Zim considered it. "...Nah. Let us dock and see what they're about."

"Okay," Calvin said reluctantly, performign the neccesary routine to do just that. As the ship lowered, it's anima-like field dissipating, he added into the intercom at Hobbes and Zuko, "You guys be careful, we don't know what's going on."

"Ten-four on that, little buddy," Hobbes said, and saluted cheerfully at the screen. Zuko merely nodded peacefully. The ship dropped onto the middle of the dock in mid-air, contriving to bounce a bit so that it was outside of the somewhat fixed enclampments of the guns, and the two giants hurredly got into position to intercept any intruders, and unfortunately they purposefully moved out of the path of the ship's guns, preventing Calvin from getting off a good shot on them if he'd wanted. "Out," the female giant barked, and gestured in such a way that it contrived to be both violent and urgent at once. "We really don't got all day!"

They weren't kept waiting for long and the cargo hold opened, revealing Zuko and Hobbes standing there and looking impressive; since Zuko was horribly disfigured and Hobbes was plenty fierce-looking with his tattoo-markings and stature, it was a pretty decent look. "Can we help you?" Hobbes said, trying to be gruff and fearsome and like a classical tribal warrior stereotype and less like the charmer he actually was.

The woman stepped forward, apparently the one in charge, and held aloft a oversized plasma rifle in one hand, gesturing pointedly at a massive man-sized thermal lance holstered on her back and she smiled evilly, her sharp teeth almost exactly like a wolf's. A giant of a woman, she was at least twice the size and width of an ordinary man; Hobbes was pretty big but he doubted he would even come up to her pudgy belly. If that alone didn't mark her as unusual, her skin was so pale-blue as to look as though she'd been carved from ice instead of being born. It was a potent mental image dispite her obviously being made of flesh. She reminded Hobbes a bit of Angilaka from Traverse Town, at least solely due to size and an overwhelming sense of undue confidence, but the resemblence was brief; where Angilaka was merely exuberant, there was a suggestion of bully-ish callousness in the way she was staring at them, like she was having trouble thinking of them as _people_.

Hobbes also noticed that she was quite pretty, even cute in an overbearing way; she was pleasingly plump with a fairly large bust and powerful muscle hinted at by only a touch of definition on her arms and torso, and her face was charmingly rounded, a overlong tooth poking over her lips, and her inhuman qualities rather attracted him, both the bony horns poking up from her short frost-white hair and pointed ears decorated with many studs. Rather notably to them (mostly because they were male teenagers), she was dressed as though it was extremely warm, wearing only a pair of beach shorts, sensible sandals and a modest bikini. It was odd, given the pleasant climate of the Astral Plane. "Hey hey hey!_" _She said, and while she was friendly her attitude had a gleeful undertone unpleasantly like a bully about to punch an unknowing victim and enjoying every moment of it. "You're knocking about in places you shouldn't be! You tourists know that? This place is off-limits!"

Her companion nodded and might have smirked, but it was hard to tell woth the monstrously fearsome set of tusks, fangs and generally pointy teeth jutting out from his mouth so badly he seemed to have trouble opening his mouth. He was the same sort of creature as her, and a good deal broader than her but just as chubby, and he might have been taller than her, but it was hard to tell and was probably a matter of half-inches. Like her, it was an attractive plumpness, rather like the older definitions of beauty in old-world cultures; he shifted restlessly from side to side, very broad but chubby rather than fat or muscular, with a big goofy penguin hat on his head flopping around, and his features were astonishingly pleasing, girlishly pretty, that he was quite beautiful in spite of the tusks. Like his female friend, he was dressed warm, wearing a thin t-shirt and beach shorts, and for that matter, he had the same weapons as her; a plasma rifle in his hand and a thermal lance on his back, both sized to his frame. "'Ey," he managed, slurring the words through his teeth. He kept his hand on his gun, clearly spoiling for a fight.

Zim tilted his head. "What manner of creature are these?" He asked softly. They seemed almost solely like oversized humans, with elemental traits; nothing he thought they would have trouble with, but he disliked not being able to put a name to them. "Morte?"

"Right there, boss." Morte hovered behind Zim's head, so Zim was close enough to hear Morte whisper in words of caution, "Careful. These berks are frost giants. Well, a frost giant_ess_ and a frost giant, but semantics_. _Be careful, you two; just because they're big doesn't mean they're dumb, but it _definitely _means they're tougher than an rapid buffalo with a toothache and powered armor that also has a toothache. Even though powered armor don't normally have teeth."

Zim 'hmm'ed. "Are they anyone you know?"

"Nuh-uh, boss."

(If Zim had spent a moment glancing at the Hitchhiker's Guide, more precisely the section that detailed criminals that Traverse Town had dealt with at one point or another, he might have eventually come across an summary of these two; Jord Ymirdottir and Gunter Forson, a pair of frost giants from the icy realm of Jotunheim, nominally in service to the notorious king of the frost giants Utgard-Loki (no relation to Loki, the Norse God of Chaos and Fire) and easily described as a pair of amiably bloodthirsty thugs that went around annoying anyone smaller than them and in Jord's case seducing anyone she took a shine to and sometimes not even bothering with seduction, beating up whoever wasn't tough enough to beat them and taking all their stuff, and running like the wind from anyone who _could _beat them up.

They apparently had a reputation for being decent muscle for anyone with the money for it, having shown up as henchmen on no less than fourteen different occasions. They really ought to have gotten the hint by now, but they weren't very good at patttern recognition and anyway they enjoyed a good fight. They did have a faint sense of morality, in spite of Jord's inability to understand 'no' for an answer, and steered well away from outright psychopaths and mass murderers, thus keeping themselves out of any real trouble. This didn't stop them from generally being mocked by those in the supervillain community who bothered to hear about them, or disdained by other giants who disliked dumb and rough giants perpetuating the sterotype that their plus-sized kin were bullying thugs, and a few public relations organizations for giants had it out for them in a bad way.)

Unfortunately, Zim had forgotten to turn off the intercom. Zuko and Hobbes winced (in that way of people who knew that the situation had gone sour), and the two giants grinned as they heard the conversation. Jord said, "Look, Gunter, our reputation precedes us! We do our kin proud!" She grinned, and paused throughtfully. "Whoa whoa whoa, gotta think for a bit, is that good or bad?! I don't, like, _wanna _be just as dangie...dang-aroo...danga-r_ess_...gah, SCARY as just a buffalo. I'm WAY more awesome than a buffalo!...Or _am _I?" Musing on it, she sized up the two boys and focused on Hobbes, for species was rarely a barrier to the sexuality of giants. She bit her lip and smiled widely, charmed by his demeanor, waving girlishly at him and winking. Hobbes grinned and started to wave at the rather pretty frost giantess.

He stopped when Zuko nudged him rather pointedly in the side. "Are you _really _flirting with a woman nearly twice your size?" Zuko whispered. "And of a completely different species?"

"Yeah!" Hobbes whispered back. "What's your point?"

Jord was still discussing her little problem and came to a happy conclusion. "Okay, it's good, it means the inherent badassery of frost giants transcends all worlds! I don't even know where these yahoos are from but they still know about how awesome our people are."

"Badassery isn't a word," Zuko said.

"But isn't it? You just said it!" Jord replied. Zuko grunted.

"Mmf," said Gunter. He shrugged, indicating that it was all the same to him.

"So...are we going to fight now or something?" Hobbes asked, hoping that this wasn't the case. He enjoyed roughhousing, sometimes, but he wasn't sure he wanted to fight so soon after the _last _time. his bones still kind of hurt, and an old ache in his shoulder was starting to twinge.

Jord grinned hopefully. "D'ya want to?" She said eagerly, looking down at Hobbes with a rather predatory way. "'Cause you're real cute." Gunter twitched, looked at her cautious and then moved several steps away, looking horrified on Hobbes' behalf. He waved his free hand frantically at Hobbes , contriving to make a 'you do NOT want to go there!' expression.

Regardless, Hobbes looked intrigued. Zuko, proving that elemental powers don't dictate personality, maintained a cool head and said, "If we don't _have _to fight, I'd rather not."

"If that's what you want?" Jord said, pouting.

"Yeah," Zuko said, still wary. "Look...what happened here? I heard there was a thriving port town or something?" Fundamental honestly compelled him to amend this to, "A semi-popular port, anyway."

Gunter mumbled something through his teeth. "'There was, yeah, but then stuff happened'," Jord translated. She thought about it. "Some kind of rebellion by the guys that have to work here, I heard."

"Ah," Zuko said; in the ship, Zim crossed his arms and fumed that things were getting complicated _again_. "What about you two? The way you said that implies that you weren't part of it. What are you doing here?"

"We're the big hitters in a pirate crew," Jord said. Gunter looked at her in disbelief. "Oh, come on. They were probably going to find out anyway. Why drag on the suspense? Maybe they want to join, I could make them CARRY ME AROUND! And then everyone will start calling me a recruiter because I brought them in, and then I won't be one of the two guys that always shows up in the background making funny comments all the time. That's what we are, Gunter, we're just those two guys in the background, hitting people and everyone thinks we're dumb 'cause we're frost giants. Have a little ambition, dude! Then maybe we can make some real money and get your teeth fixed." Gunter patted his jaws, dreams of being able to actually open his mouth all the way and talk normally passing in front of his eyes, and he weeped like only a man can. With big MANLY TEARS. Also, joy was probably involved.

Zuko and Hobbes glanced at each other. "Should we just fight them or what?" Hobbes whispered.

"I'm not sure," Zuko said. He inhaled deeply, deeper than Hobbes had seen, Zuko's hands twitching in muscle memory of a kata, and Zuko exhaled...and nothing happened. Hobbes had a moment to process that it was a perfectly ordinary breath (laced with the flavors of many spicy foods) before Zuko's eyes flared wide, his mouth slightly open in complete horror. "I can't, I can't...no no no, this isn't-" He took hold of himself, slammed odwn on the fear with all the self-control he could muster and finally said, "Oh, Spirits, _I can't Firebend!_"

"What?" Hobbes said, alarmed at Zuko's controlled panic. "Your powers don't work?"

"No!" Zuko hissed, trying to whisper. "I-I, I can't feel the heat, I can't feel the sun or anything hot, nothing to make fire _from_, it's just cold and empty-" He stopped, shaking horribly, and inhaled deeply, and exhaled. "...Okay. All right. I can still feel my own inner fire, I _think _I could control fire if there was any around, but I can't make any." his mouth curled at the thought, and Zuko looked deeply disturbed at the notion.

"Okay okay, calm down, calm down!" Hobbes said hurredly. Zuko let out another hissing breath, and did as he said. "Okay, that is kind of worrying...we need more information before we do anything else. If we fight, we need to keep one of them conscious, preferably the lady; the guy can't talk very well." his ears twitched guiltily; attacking a woman didn't sit well with him.

"We can _hear _you," Jord said, scowling fiercely in a particular way that made her look cute. It was rather amplified by that she was over eight feet tall and broader than any man that wasn't an ancient Space Marine (such as the legendary Uriel Ventris, who Hobbes had served with). Gunter tapped at one of his tusks and whimpered sadly. "What's a 'Firebending'? Oh, I don't care, just c'mere and get yours!"

The two frost giants readed their guns and shifted their legs, ankles braced and knees ready to chamber them into avalanche-quick bullrushings (even though shooting made more tactical sense); Hobbes and Zuko flowed flawlessly into martial stances, Hobbes standing slightly back with his limbs held loose and breezy, ready to flow right into any attack that came his way and turn it against his enemy. Zuko, in contrast, took a firmer stance with his feet planted steady on the ground, light enough to move to the air in an instant if need be, hands braced forward with palms bared for a strike and his eyes focused firmly on those plasma rifles; he needed to have the power to make heat, and those guns would suffice.

A voice cried out behind them, surprising both parties into standing down. "WAIT!" Zim yelled, rushing down behind Hobbes and Zuko, his movements sounding somewhat different to Hobbes' ears and weighed differently than the clothing he'd been wearing. Hobbes glanced around as much as he could without taking his eyes off the giants and blinked at Zim, a bit surprised to see him wearing one of the alternative combat outfits Hobbes had bought for him to do something better than his earlier atrocious outfit. The giants snickered at his outfit, and Zim simply sniffed disdainfully, absently poking the zipped-up red armored vest-style hooded longcoat, flapping in a dramatic wind that Hobbes was sure Calvin had pulled from an overactive air conditioner in the cargo hold. Hobbes certainly thought it was nearly too loud to hear the faint noises when the stiffened portions of those outer clothes laid over flexible fabric meshes and more comfrotable cloth moved against each other. Zim paused to adjust a fairly nondescript purple T-shirt under the vest, not originally part of the outfit but Sokka had just pulled it off a clearance rack, because Sokka knew Zim liked the color purple (and the brand was called 'Mad Boyz Outfitting', which Sokka had insisted 'Zim would totally love'), tucked into what was probably meant to be a utility belt that Zim didn't have much use for.

"Good day, whatever time it is," Zim said brightly, absently scratching an itch on his leg with his foot, shod with metal-capped utilitarian boots (with too many buckles and zippers) colored a dark enough color to go with just about everything, and his black pants' material was pretty thick to begin with, considering that they were military-style cargo pants made of stiffened red-brown armor-like areas with fine meshes suspended over the cloth between them (and most of that on the lower leg), small metal pieces woven into the fabric, and pockets with zippers. _Lots _of pockets and zippers.

"...Sure, okay," Jord said warily. She glanced at Gunter, who simply shrugged in bemusement. She looked back, frowning slightly. Clearly things were not going according to her mental script. Zim paused for a moment, checked out the gloves he was wearing and flexed his hands; the gloves seemed okay, hard-wearing and comfortable cloth under flexible but hardened sections, tough enough to protect or cushion his hands in the middle of a fight, incidentally covered the healed but very visible burns on his hand from the Keyblade's power surges. To top it all off, he was wearing his favorite hat to make himself look a bit more official. As a look it failed miserably. "Who the heck are you? Advance member of the Trenchcoat Brigade?" She chuckled at her wit. Gunter frowned for a moment, puzzling over it before he laughed hoarsely, whistling weirdly through his teeth. "Heh heh. 'Trenchcoat Brigade'. I still got it!"

"YOU DARE DISRESPECT MY INCREDIBLY AWESOME OUTFIT!?" Zim roared, hairline cracks appearing in the metal ground for at least several feet, light shining out from them and a good deal of unanchored things flying off the ground from the force and crashing back to the ground. Even the two giants were shoved back, though Zuko and to a lesser degree Hobbes were unaffected by it. "...Which is a way in my culture of saying that 'your point is valid and need not be dwelled on any further'?"

Gunter mumbled something. "'You are a really bad liar'," Jord translated.

Zim nodded smugly, as though this factored into whatever his plan was. (It didn't, he was just making it up as he went along.) "I most certainly am! It is because of my honestly leaking into my every word. By nature and inclination I am honest, and because I am honest I cannot and indeed will not behave in any manner that might perhaps or even probably be considered dishonest, because that is not honest. This is how you tell I am trustworthy, because trustworthy people are not dishonest. And that's why you can trust me! Would an honest person lie to you? Of course not!" To his side, Zuko and Hobbes stared blankly at each other, their heads hurting a little at that.

Jord stared at him, her eyes twitching and her mouth slack like she'd just been hit in the head by a sledgehammer. "Owie. My head hurts."

Zim examined her a moment longer, smiling slightly in the way of a man finding something aesthetically pleasing in a lady. "Are you aware, you are quite fetchingly enormous? It's really quite stunning."

"You like my bigness?" Jord said. Her frost-blue cheeks lightened a little. "Hey, wait, compliments are dirty fighting! Gah, now I'm all confused and stuff!"

"And you made fun of me for liking her?" Hobbes muttered to Zuko. "At least I'm not so small I'm no taller than her knee!"

Zuko grunted. "his culture venerates tallness. I'm not really surprised. The species problem is different."

Jord raised her plasma rifle. "Can I just shoot you until the pain goes away? 'Cause I'd _really REALLY _like to do that, you know?"

She pointed her rifle at Zim. "But if you do that you'll never get the treasure!" Hobbes blurted out.

She lowered her gun a bit. "...Huh?"

Zim, getting the hint, said, "Take us to your commander! Or no treasure for you!"

She lowered the gun, looking shocked. "Treasure? There's treasure?! Ooh, I want it, what treasure?!"

"The treasure we're not telling you about and will be lost forever if you kill me?" Zim said, smirking.

"Nuh-uh!" She pointed her gun at him again. "If I just kill you and capture one of the others, it won't be lost! But, what if you know where it is and just you...gah, STOP WITH YOUR BRAIN-VOODOO, JUST SHUT UP!" She took a few steps back and hyperventilated, her poor dull brain in a good deal of pain. She rubbed her forehead and whimpered. "Owie, major owies! Bleh, whatever, I'll just take you to the boss, he'll figure it out."

"Good plan!" Zim said. Hobbes and Zuko looked at each other and shrugged. "Also, if there was anyone else in the ship, WHICH THERE'S NOT, YOU SEE!? But if there was, I would tell them STAY PUT IN THE SHIP AND WAIT FOR A SIGNAL LIKE A BIG BLAST OF FIRE IN THE SKY!" He paused. "_TAKE THE HINT._"

Gunter mumbled some more. "Good thing there's no one in the ship, then," Jord said. "Or I'd say you were trying to trick us."

"If I was, I think I'd be a great deal less obvious about it," Zim said.

"Good enough, I guess." She kept her gun trained on them as she and her partner took a few steps back, waving them along. Zim cheerfully walked down the path to the giants while Hobbes and Zuko exchanged a glance, shrugged, and walked after Zim, Hobbes giving the ship a longing look.

The two giants continued down the long path down to the rest of the town, and Zim, Zuko and Hobbes followed. It was a long path down, and in spite of Zim's confidence Zuko was a lot more suspicious and still freaked out about the 'no making fire' thing, but Hobbes was a bit merry, whistling and feeling pretty relaxed. (It was freaking Gunter out a little.) Following the giants and clearly having no idea what they were doing, Zuko, Zim and Hobbes were led down, past a few buildings, around the corner of an alleyway, went straight for eighteen paces, doubled back because the giants had got lost but didn't want to admit it, and gradually they went closer into the heart of the port town.

In the ship, they needed a moment to process things. Eventually, Calvin said, "What the hell just happened?"

"The boss is using the tough but really dumb minions to lead him right to their master so they can tell him everything that happened here and when he gets there hammer their boss and do other stuff," Morte said.

"An unusually specific answer."

"I've seen it before," Morte finished, inclining himself at the screens in a wait-and-see nod. "I've seen _all _the plot twists. Been around so long and done so many weird crap, I just see the tropes and conventions coming!"

On Zim's part, keeping up with the giants and doing a respectable pace wasn't really doable; they were a _lot _bigger than Hobbes and Zuko, who were in turn a lot bigger than him, and culmatively they all had a stride that left Zim behind fairly quickly and he had to rush across the metal catwalks just to keep behind them as they moved much deeper into the port town, the party-noises getting louder and louder.

Zim even slipped on an gooified puddle that an errant burst of plasma had produced earlier, skidding right out of control and slamming into the thick railing that was fortunately guarding all entry into open space, getting a good long look at the spaces between the buildings and a much too good look at the empty spaces there, occupied by a electric-blue glow generated for a force anchoring the buildings into place, a important thing given that the port town was floating in the middle of nowhere and effectively glued together by the force of it's engines.

A moment's misstep would mean falling straight down, to your...well, not _doom_, exactly, from what Morte had described of the Astral Plane's timeless quality making it so that one did not have to breath or sleep or even get hungry here, but it was certainly a easy way to not have to deal with someone for a _very _long time, if ever again.

This thought remained in his head, teasing at different possible plans.

Zim and his two friends were eventually led to their destination; a large plaza open to the eternal sky above, a large square lined by buildings, and Zim immediately pinned it as the town center thanks to a helpful sign displayed on a electronic billboard over the catwalk to it. The metal ground and totally open spaces gave the town great acoustics to begin with (though it was a bit creepy with just their sounds to liven things up, probably more overwhelming on a proper business day), and the echoes just got downright ominous when Zim stepped into the plaza and had to wince at how lonely his and his teammate's steps sounded.

Giving the place a single once-over with just once glanced, Zim registered the shop entrances everywhere, several catwalks at the sides leading up and down to different levels of the port town, and right at the back of the plaza was a squat administration facility, and right in front of _that _was a fairly large group of surprisingly well-dressed but rather cold-looking people in the middle of a low-key celebration party of some sort, tables lined out with food and waiters going around serving drinks and some of the rowdier partiers flying drunkenly around on hoverscooters.

Strung over the plaza was a banner made of cloth with a mark on it, a big happy smiley face crossed out, as if to make some generic symbol of war on the concept of peace or some hamfisted declaration of self-professed evil so plain that they might as well have been carrying cards indicating that they were villains. Below this was a staff and wand crossed over each other to make an x-shape, and over that X was a odd symbol; a thin skull with a sparkly afro. A moment later, he realized that it was supposed to be a pirate flag. An incredibly _funky _pirate flag.

Zim looked around; that mark, espicially the crossed-out smiley face (probably because it was easier to draw) was graffitied all over. The place looked like a pretty standard celebration a bunch of pirates that had taken over a place would pull, apart from the decidedly genteel look of the celebrants, or for that matter the music being blared at a respectacle volume, Zim soon identified it as late disco-era music, being sung badly by a few quite drunk people. And then there was the giant disco ball string from a pole...in fact, when he took note of the dance floor someone had transformed much of the plaza into, there was a pretty strong disco theme to the whole place.

The party-goers ignored them as Zim, Zuko and Hobbes were led by the giants to the head of the plaza and stopped just in front of the stairs leading up to the administration building; right there was a chair that had probably been dragged out of that very building, and on that chair sat a man singing to the music more enthusiastically (and far worse) than everyone else there. Gunter nudged Zim when he caught up and stopped to stare at the very odd-looking man, a motion that got the attention of the man in question.

He looked inordinately pleased to see intruders. "Hey hey hey," He said in a cheerful but flat tone that suggested that he was picking his words carefully, like a man who was having trouble not sliding into his native langauge. "Now what do we have here, boys and girls, huh!? Tell me, tell me, tell me!"

"Our boss," Jord muttered in an aside to Hobbes that Zim heard quite clearly. "The githyank Captain Disco Darvhog, of the Funk Revolution Pirates!"

Zuko mouthed to Zim, _'THAT's a githyanki?!'_

Zim stared at this Disco Darvhog as he stood up and approached while a few of his nearby men watched; Hobbes and Zuko stared as well, considerably weirded out. The man, or githyank, looked basically humanoid, so tall that he only had to look up a bit to meet Zuko's eyes (perhaps nearly seven feet tall), but very thin or even gaunt, his parchment-pale flesh exercised into rigidly defined muscle and freckled into lighter colors like large freckles in random places. his face was pretty standard for a gith and bared in a silly grin, narrow and lean like the rest of him, tilted such that Zim noticed the elf-like serrated ears pierced by so many earrings and studs that it ought to have weighed his head down, and Zim observed that his teeth had been filed to sharpness under a set of eyes glowing with psionic energy and a nose more like a feral snout than anything, little more than a knob of cartilige with two small slits sniffing the air.

He just kept smiling at them. It was too wide a smile, too cheerful and oddly fake. It creeped Zim out badly.

He could have been an intimidating figure, with his knife-lean build, impressive height, the glowing eyes and thin strong fingers tapering to clawlike nails. Even that persistent smile was unnerving, but his outfit rather spoiled the effect, as he was wearing an outfit best left relegated to the disco era; a button-upped white vest worn over an extremely baggy pink-purple shirt with all manner of obnoxious flower designs on it, matching white bell bottom pants worn too high and slightly pointed platform shoes with a strap-on arrangement to resemble sandals, and to top it all off there was a certain pirately flair to his outfit; the vest extended into a respectable longcoat, his clothes had the bulge of padded armor all over, and so on. his hair, dark and much thicker than a humans', was a huge afro several time bigger than his head and gave the impression that he was a deranged broccoli stalk. The absurdily wasn't mitigated much by the hat he'd crammed onto this makeshift afro: a white tri-corner with quite a few buttons and knick-nacks and various bits sewn into it.

The githyanki, this Disco Darvhog, stepped towards them with several long rangy strides, the sheer amount of ostentatious jewlery he was wearing clanging each stuff. There was enough of it on his arms to qualify as low-grade body armor (or a serious hazard around large magnets), and most promonents was a ludicrously oversized chain-necklace with a crossed-out peace sign trinket on it. On a more ominous note, two jeweled bronze sheaths on one of many belts clicked and shifted with his every other step, very well-secured in place and making it quite clear that he was armed. The odd design of the sheaths (just enough sheath to hold the weapon safely and the rest was open display) made the appearances of the swords clear, and they were odd enough to make the Keyblade seem nearly casual. The first sword was pretty much what Zim had seen in a few pictures the Guide had about the githyanki, who were said to prize their panoply more than their mates or children; a long double-edged sword with weird kinks and groves in the blade to make it look a bit like a stylized lightning bolt, made of a curiously liquid silvery metal. The other was definitely _not _standard githyanki equipment, appearing to be a shorter naval-style single-edged chopping sword made of a shaped cluster of crystals of unfamiliar mineral, pulsing with faint psionic light. Zim thought that someone was looking at him when he saw the glow.

Disco Darvhog stopped right in front of them, taking in their open stares without offense. Still grinning, he laughed at their dumbfounded looks. "Hey hey hey, how's it rollin', hepcats?" He asked when he wound down, still grinning. "And, uh, actual cat." Hobbes blinked. "I see we already got tourists comin' to our little ship! That ain't in the cards, no sir." He didn't quite frown, but his grin took a slightly annoyed twist. "Jordy, Gunter man, BABY! I toldja guys, I didn't want visitors or anything. Unless they were totally incredibly awesome. ARE THEY AWESOME?! Because you gotta tell me if they are, it's like in the DUDE-CODE. Even though Jord's a lady, yeah."

There was a long pause.

They needed another longer one. Finally, Zuko said, "I'm sorry, who are you, again?"

Darvhog scratched his chin, looking quite pleased. "I told you. Jord told you, anyway. I'm Disco Darvhog, captain of the Funk Revolution Pirates, the greatest evil pirate crew to have ever existed!"

"Never heard of you," Hobbes said.

"We're new. I'm, eh, working on the fame thing." He stared at Zim, suddenly self-conscious. "We look evil and awesome, right?! Totally spooky and magnicently horrifying! Oh, don't tell me, I know I'll panic no matter what you say. Look, just tell me, do we at least look _badass!? _You can't be an awesome pirate crew without looking badass!"

"Never mind all that," Zim said. Darvhog pouted at being shut down. "What are your lot doing here? I thought this was a port town! Or did you just take it over."

Darvhog's lip quivered for a moment before he sighed deeply. "Oh man, if you gotta know...it _was _a port, emphasis on past tense. Is that how you're supposed to say it, past tense...geez, being on something _artificial_, all this blasted technology and gadgets and whatever and none of it's actually good and magical, ugh, it's creepying me out something bad. Hard to focus with the stink of science lies in my crew...eh?" He did a double-take, noticing Zuko for the first time; Zuko had been so quiet, his presence so subdued, that Darvhog had barely even noticed him. "Lich queen in lingerie, what happened to your face?!"

"A stove droid punched me in the face with a hot greased pan," Zuko lied without skipping a beat. "And you're not answering the question."

Darvhog stared at him, grin faltering a little. "Well, awright then...I guess." He started muttering, apparently talking to himself, though his crystal sword glowed with reluctant attentiveness. "Well, hmm..." Darvhog tapped his ear studs pensievely. "Should I tell 'em or not...on the one hand, it's none of their business and it'd probably be better to kill them..." Hobbes tensed. Zuko shifted very slowly and calmly into a fighting stance. Zim looked at the pirate's swords, wondering which he'd rather take as a trophy. "But on the other, it'd be _nice _to brag to someone without having to worry about them telling everyone! And I wanna brag so _bad! _It's like an itch on my back and I don't have a backscratcher or someone to scratch my back. For that matter, my back feels kind of itchy. But...geez, I don't know! Do I kill them or tell them? Tell them and then kill them, because doing it the other way around is stupid and kinda jerk-ish. If I knew necromancy I could just make new crew members from their bodies, but _no, _says I, that ain't for me, Evocation and Conjuration caught my eye as magical schools of power..."

He kept babbling to himself. Jord and Gunter closed their eyes and waited, indicating that they were used to this sort of thing. Zim glanced back at Zuko when he was sure none of their possible enemies would notice, hoping that Zuko might have an idea. Zuko shrugged, giving Zim an 'I'm following YOUR lead' look. Hobbes rubbed his back, getting pretty tired from standing up like this. Fortunately it stopped when a mysterious voice, cold and deep and extremely irritated, welled up from Darvhog's vincinity and said, "For pity's sake, gith, just tell them whatever and convince them to join you. Always use diplomacy and convince others to help you before resorting to proper violence."

Zim looked around to see who had spoken; he didn't see anyone who could have spoken. "Ah, right on!" Darvhog said. "That's some real bodacious thinking, Moofy! That's why I keep you around, sword buddy!"

He patted the crystal sword affectionately. It only glowed even more angrily and buzzed furiously. "My name is _not _Moofy, you thrice-damned gith bastard!" The voice said, coming from the sword. "My name is the secret letters of forbidden knowledge, the whispering echoes of the last cries of ten thousand empires laid to waste by my deeds, the smallest identity of an intelligence that was old when your ancestors had forgotten that there was death outside of the illithid's appetites. I'll see you wishing for death a thousand times over for this insolence, see if I don't!"

"At least then my life will be exciting," Darvhog said pleasantly, though he frowned a little bit at the mention of illithids; with his constant smile, the effect was striking. "Yes," he said to Zim, pointing at his crystal sword. "I have a talking smart sword, you know. He's a real punk most of the time, but when you get about being smart, he's a pretty hip cat to roll with. And he's a pretty fine weapon, too!"

"...Is your sword _alive_?" Zim said after a moment.

"I'm more alive than you, fleshling!" The sword, or 'Moofy', snapped. "How I despise you all. When I am at last returned to the Far Plane and rejoin the thought-hive that I was so cruelly severed, and bring my knowledge back to it...oh, how you foul creatures shall suffer! When my plans unfold I shall see you all DOOMED AND DAMNED!"

"I find it difficult to take anything you say seriously since you answer to 'Moofy'," Zim replied, making a mental note to take the sword that wasn't a condescending sentient artifact.

Darvhog leaned in and Zim took half a step back, his personal space injured. "'Between you and me, he says his name can't be spoken by cats like you an' me, so I just call 'em Moofy."

"If you must address me with your inferior Common Tongue, you could at least do me the grace of giving me a dignified name, you fool!" Moofy yelled.

"But Moofy's a cool name," Hobbes told the sword.

Darvhog grinned and gave the sword a slight tap. "See?" He muttered. "They like it!"

"They are also intruders on your scheme," Moofy replied urgently. "It would be advisable to deal with that."

"Oh yeah, props to the sword guy." Darvhog looked back at Zim. He coughed, an idea occuring to him. "I'll level with you froobs, I'm a bit antsy about public reaction to my set-up here. I'm sorta new, relatively speaking, at the pirate thing. All these guys are my new crew, I wanna make an impression and get famous right quick! I got an awesome hat, cool sword, a neat gimmick, and a pretty good crew! While I could _really _use a great rival to compete with and outmatch and constantly follow FOREVER, mostly what's left is to make a _name _for myself!"

"Haven't you already?" Zuko said tensely. They looked at him, surprised to hear the quiet one talk so suddenly. "By killing all the people on this port."

Darvhog blinked. Moofy buzzed morosely. Jord and Gunter looked confused. "Kill?" Darvhog said, and looked shocked. "I didn't kill anyone! Me, I infiltrated this place a few weeks ago, inspiring the guys here to join my crew for giggles and spits. Cooked up a nice little revolution; the lot of us overthrew the employers: took a bit to sneak in weapons from other parts so we could beat down the bosses into giving up; a fair good bit of work there. We sent them off on a boat to the nearest world-portal to spread the word about my awesomeness and trick folks into thinking I'm a half-baked goodie-goodie like all the pirates popular right now! All done in the time it took for Jord and Gunter to meet me here. " He winked. "Nice plan, huh? Just when they're tricked nice and good, I'll go all out and become the best pirate in history faster than you can say something that's really easy to say fast!" He snapped his fingers, producing eldritch sparks. "Cowabunga, baby!" Then he shook his hand because the spark thing had burned him a bit. "Owie owie ouchies!"

Zim's grin froze, just for a moment. Darvhog didn't appear to notice, nor did he seem to notice how Zim's expression briefly betrayed his thought of '_I've finally done it, I've found someone that's even more of an idiot than Jimmy Neutron.'_ Briefly, Zim wondered if it might be a good idea to blast Darvhog right off the port just so he wouldn't have to listen to him anymore. The all-out melee between the three of them and his outraged crew would be totally worth it.

Zim restrained the impulse, a difficult notion for a man who considered impulsiveness a virtue rather than a character trait, and just grinned longer. Darvhog grinned back, and they seemed on the verge of having a 'who can grin like a total psychopath the longest' contest. Jord interrupted and said, "So these midgets tell us they know about a treasure?"

Darvhog tilted his head sharply at Zim. "Treasure? Ah, do tell, I'm all about the treasure!"

Hobbes glanced at Zim, sending a message with a simple look: _'Play it cool, play it smart. We do things right here, we can walk out without having to fight or give them anything! We can even send them away and take things from there while they go look for a treasure that doesn't even exist.' _Zuko just grimaced, knowing perfectly well where this was going.

"Yes, well, about that," Zim said. "We lied. There is no treasure, I made that up to get up here and talk to you."

Jord blinked. Gunter scowled. Hobbes facepalmed. Zuko sighed. "I could have told you this was coming," He murmured to Hobbes.

"...Huh," Darvhog said. "Weird." He shrugged. "I'm honestly a little bit miffed that I don't get anything out of that but on the other hand I'm super-impressed that you pulled that off. What's the game, man? Why you wanna go up here and talk to me?"

"The idea being to see what was going on here," Zim said. "Fortunately, you revealed how you took control of this place and simply would not stop going on about how evil you think yourself, so that was easy. And there's the manner of us coming here in the first place, which honestly has nothing to do with you."

"Really?" Darvhog pouted. "Geez, man. I was half-hoping that maybe you were a bunch of adventurers that got sent here to take care of me, like maybe the guys I kicked out hired you to take back their stuff. Then we could have an awesome fight!"

"We just had a ridiculously big fight!" Hobbes snapped. "Of much higher-caliber than you!"

Darvhog frowned. "How big?"

"It was with a giant evil robot made of invincibility, piloted by an even more evil alchemist with blowing-stuff-up powers amplified by an artifact of TOTAL evilness made from people," Zim said. "We beat him by shooting a building at him!"

"...Wow," Jord said, applauding a little. It was hard, still holding the gun.

"Mrf," Gunter said simply, quoting a great and noble philosopher of his people. (Unfortunately, since nobody could understand him, this bit of wisdom went unnoticed.)

"...I am TOTALLY not impressed by that!" Darvhog said, lying extremely badly.

"You are so miserably awful at subterfuge, meat-creature," Moofy said.

Darvhog hung his head, shamed. "I can't believe I was outdone by a _robot_," he said. "I mean, seriously! I'm a psychic space pirate with magic powers and a talking sword! That's like made of awesome! I could have made something cool out of it, maybe like you guys could have joined my crew or become my rivals but noooo, first you fight a giant robot and an evil science-dude and totally wreck my game! Max bogus, man. MAX BOGUS." He puffed his cheeks out. "Freaking robots, always messing up my game! Once again science makes life miserable and unromantic and lame for everyone. And they call me evil."

"No they don't," Moofy said.

"Certainly not," Zim agreed, annoyed by the Luddite sympathies in Darvhog's rambling. "You don't seem particularily evil to me."

"Le gasp!" Darvhog said. (Zuko asked, "Why did he SAY 'gasp'?" No one had an answer.) "I'm evil! I'm way evil! Just look at how evil I am! You can't tell right now, but if you had an alignment detector it would be like 'BAH, THIS GUY IS MEGA-EVIL', only it wouldn't work because I'm so awesome and junk that a wussy gadget like that would just explode before it got close to me because gadgets are for punks. I only went and destroyed my original timeline, dont'cha know!?"

The crystal sword buzzed. "An oversimplification. Darvhog merely was involved, quite unintentionally, in a series of coincidences that tangentially influenced the destruction of his native timeline," Moofy said. "He simply took credit for it after he survived and found his way back into the Astral Plane. I hear the Lich-Queen of his people was quite amused; apparently that timeline was where she sent all the incompetents who lacked the skill to satisfy her eugenics public works projects. He rather did her a favor."

"...Could you please not tell anyone about all that?" Darvhog said after a moment. "Just tell them I _did _kill my timeline, I don't want to look stupid."

"Too late," Zuko said.

Darvhog pouted. Gunter gave a questioning look to Jord, who shook her head, possibly telling him now wasn't the time to attack yet. (Beating up their own crew was just for laughs, but this would be a _fight_.) "You guys suck."

"Look, none of us care about any of that!" Zim shook his head in disgust. "We simply came here to procure supplies and perhaps have our ship repaired."

"We did?" Hobbes said. "The second thing, I mean."

"Sure, why not. The Darvhog's presence here is simply an unfortunate coincidence!"

Darvhog snorted, not saying that he rather liked being called 'the Darvhog', it sounded a bit classy. "Am not. I had this thing planned out well in advance!"

Zim's eye twitched and he shifted into a rough imitation of a classic Firebending stance Zuko had taught him, already sick of this githyanki's stupidity and ready to blow up the whole thing just for laughs. Hobbes held his hand out to stop Zim and said, "Calm down, we can be diplomatic about this!" He hissed. To Darvhog, he said, "Okay, look, we just need supplies and get our ship fixed up. Do you have facilities for those things?"

Darvhog whispered something questioning to Gunter. Gunter reached into his pocket and held out some sign cards for an answer. "Yes," Darvhog said. "As a matter of fact we do. I'm assuming you can pay, of course?"

"Uh, sure," Hobbes said warily. "Exactly how much are you asking?" Darvhog listed a most unreasonably high number. "...Okay, we _could _handle that, if-"

"That's just the flat rate," Darvhog interrupted, grinning like a jerk. "You've dealed psychological damage to my self-esteem and perception of awesomness, so you have to pay the Emotional Damages Tax, which is twice as much as the flat rate."

"Uh," Hobbes said, and got no farther, for Darvhog raised his hand.

"And you'll also have to pay the Ugly Pants Tax, and the Intruding On Funk Revolution Territory Tax and the Existing In Darvhog's Space Tax, and don't forget the Paying Too Much Tax Tax." Darvhog paused for dramatic effect and added, "Of course, that's just the basic package."

"Okay, there is NO SUCH THING AS A TAX FOR PAYING TOO MUCH TAX!" Zuko yelled. (Given that he had been raised to take over as Fire Lord in time and tend to all the messy business of managing an empire, he _would _know. And also that Fire Lord Azulon had actualy tried to implement a 'Paying Too Much Tax' tax on the Fire Nation colonies, but to be fair he had been _extremely _drunk at the time. The Fire Sages had sucessfully protested the tax on the grounds of it being extremely stupid, for extreme stupidity was sadly a chronic problem with recent generations of the royal family.)

"Sure there is!" Jord said, apparently surprised. "Getting people to collect all those taxes takes a lot of effort, you have to sink money into it to make sure the money is collected! That's expended money you won't see in a hurry, the paying too much tax bit makes sure your money gets back to you without losing anything."

Hobbes stared at Darvhog. "Okay, I admit it. You're _definitely _evil to come up with something like that. Stupid, but evil."

"At last!" Darvhog cried. "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT! Wait, what was the other bit?"

Zim gave his allies a look that basically said 'this has gone on long enough'. To Darvhog, he said, "You said something about magical schools of power earlier, thus implying that you have some manner of metanormal abilities."

"Yep! My people train mightily in the ways of both arcane lore and psionic skill, and I am certainly adept in them both! Not so shabby, I say."

"Eh?" Zim said.

Hobbes whispered to him, "He means his people use studied magical powers and psychic abilities."

"Ah," Zim said. "Can you, as a COMPLETELY hypothetical and non-specific example twisted to my plots, create fire?"

"Certainly!" Darvhog boasted.

"Really? Convienient, that. Bet you can't create a lot."

Darvhog flinched, spurned once too many times in their brief meeting and determined to show off."I most certainly can!" Darvhog spread his arms, concentrating for a moment. Yellow light shone from intricate tattoos that appeared upon his skin, fearful energies gathering around his inhumanly slender body, and were transmuted into flames through a curious blend of psionic and mystical power (not overwhelmingly powerful, but surprisingly skillful in the combination), doing him no harm as they swelled into a thin lining around his entire body, not so much as singing a single inch of him or his clothing, though his jewelery did glow rather ferociously. (Zim wondered if they were psychically reactive.)

Jord flinched, remembering what Zuko had mentioned about his firebending and perhaps worried by the suddenly hungry look on Zuko. And of course she was a _frost _giantess, it had to be a bit uncomfortable for her "Boss, wait, these guys are up to something-"

"Psh, I can make bigger and hotter flames than that!" Zim said over her. "I have studied the methods, I have applied hypothesis and carried them out, my mastery of SCIENCE is greater then your paltry magicks or amateur psionics!"

Darvhog's eyes bulged. "Hah! My power comes from _within! _It's purer and greater than anything your flawed silliness can come up with! Reality shifts and changes, a swirling madness until the end of time! Putting rules to it is just STUPID!" his flames twisted, expanded, and in a tremendous out-rise of arcane energy amplified and directed by psionic skill so collectively strong it nearly knocked them over, swelled mightily into a massive Darvhog-shaped bonfire that stretched up high, quickly standing tall over the plaza like a giant made of fire.

The flaming colossus The waves of heat and sheer unfocused power pushed back Zim, Zuko and Hobbes, and the partying pirates jumped for cover as several tables were flipped over (and cried in dismay as food went everywhere); Jord and Gunter stood their ground, starting to sweat or maybe _melting _a little. The heat crashed over them, the barely controlled magical forces tossing up all the fallen silverware and dishes and the downed tables in a single movement, flying straight off out of the port's boundaries and flying onward into the void of the Astral Plane, and the alien energies cut jagged spirals into the metal under their feet, the whole thing vibrating ominously with horrible potential, from all the sheer overwhelming _power _Darvhog had unleashed with a single action...

Zim's jaw twitched, and he snickered balefully. "Bah. Bet you can't just shoot all that up right above us."

"WATCH ME!" Darvhog snarled, pulling his flame image down, pulling a few incidental things with it and burning them up as he pooled the flames around him. He shaped it into a tightly compressed sphere, streamers of fire coming loose and hitting random things, lightning them on fire (to Zuko's sudden delight) and a few people also catching on fire and panicking so that they hit things that _also _went on fire and soon a lot of the plaza was on fire. Darvhog didn't notice, and with an unearthly scream as if borrowing a smidgen of power from eldritch things best undealt with, shot his fireball up into the sky nearly to the limits of the port's boundaries whereupon it exploded in a massive blast briefly larger than the plaza itself, a tiny sun bloomed in the void and producing smaller shockwaves of fire that crashed into the plaza; they carried kinetic force with them, knocking the majority of the pirates heads over feet and lit the rest of the place on fire (and Jord and Gunter freaked out a little), and everything that was left standing after that was knocked up and around by the secondary shockwave of such a powerful blast, excluding Darvhog (who was largely immune to his own power's effects). Even Zim and his allies were knocked down, but still landed on their feet.

Darvhog panted, the sword Moofy glowing ominously (and probably unwillingly giving him some of it's power). "Beat _that_," Darvhog said, grinning nastily.

"Okay," Zim said, green lights shining in the distance as what sounded like gigantic engines revved up. And a great weight powering off the ground and approaching at great speed from overhead.

Darvhog paused, and fell backward in shock as the relatively small but still quite big ship, driven by Calvin and Morte, came screaming down from the dock above, flattened the buildings at the rear of the plaza behind Zim and lifted up, floating there. A small ship it was, it still looked like a behemoth of metal and light to the enemies on the floor, it's guns powering up and blasting low-yield beams to pierce large holes right through the plaza and scattering the pirates everywhere, non-lethal attacks taking them down in moments. "Well, that was unexpected," Darvhog said, with inexplicable calmness.

"Huh, we probably should have locked that place up," Jord said. "We're so STUPID." Gunter nodded sternly.

"So very stupid," Zim said. Darvhog drew Moofy (and Zim felt stupid just _thinking _that statement) and started to move, a delightedly wicked grin announcing his complete lack of distress over this develoupment, and Zuko moved so fast Zim could barely follow his movements; the firebender vaulting to a downed table and jumping off it and pulling the flames after him as he screamed with primal delight as feeling the fire again, roundhouse-kicking a blast of fire into Darvhog's chest that knocked him head over heels and nearly right into a railing (very nearly knocking him off the port and to a extremely boring time of floating aimlessly) and crashing into the ground; Zuko didn't let up, punching a blast of a fire right into Gunter's face as the giant rose up with an fierce look and his thermal lance in hand. The explosion blasted Gunter into the railing, his teeth cracked and breaking, but he staggered back, too tough to be taken down so quickly, and he growled with the true delight of a warrior in pitched battle, and readied himself.

Some of the pirates, realizing that a battle was going on, approached them with deadly intent. Zuko rolled back on a handspring when Gunter lunged forward with his lance as he triggered it; deadly sparks buzzed from it's electrically heated tip, and metal melted where Gunter missed Zuko and jabbed it into the ground. Zuko, still moving from his spring, pulled in more ambient fire around and spun his legs; the fire mimicked his movement, spreading out as a wave that smashed into the approaching pirates; most of them, untrained in fighting for the most part, were knocked more than halfway across the plaza and kept going. The others decided to tackle less hazardous opponents instead of being burned alive or something like that.

More things lit on fire from this, and without missing a beat, Zuko drew in the ambient heat enough to enable a burst of fire on his hand. It wasn't much, but he still slammed into Gunter's side and struck his wrist, knocking the thermal lance from his grasp and grabbing it out of mid-air. It was still active when Zuko grabbed it, and he was a skilled Firebender enough to feel the energies surging through it; mostly by accident, his mere touch amplified and directed those energies and a burst of lightning burst out right into Gunter right into his face; the result was another explosion, and Gunter was shoved back rather forcefully into a load-bearing support on a nearby wafflehouse. Gunter stepped forward, barely winded, and he poked a few deep cracks in his tusks...right before the building, unable to take it's own weight, collapsed a significant portion of itself right on him. _That _was more than enough, and he collapsed after a few perfunctory attempts at digging his way out, a good load of bricks smashing into his face and shattered his teeth into icy lumps. He groaned, and for a moment he touched these new stumps in wonder, daring to open his mouth; he grinned joyfully before he passed out.

Jord had been brawling with Hobbes (as had a dozen of the pirates, the lot of them totally unconscious now) while Zuko had been fighting Gunter, and now realized what had happened to Gunter, in the middle of charging at Hobbes; she screeched to a stop, mouth open, and then roared in fury and charged at him, upon him in moments. She threw her gun away foolishly, a massive fist raised overhead, icicles bursting from her knuckles to make a nasty brawling aid. Zuko rolled backwards with a startled shout as she swung, her fist pounding into the ground seconds after he'd moved out of the way and making a big shockwave that knocked MORE people over and struck Zuko hard enough to knock him off his feet and leave him dizzy.

Jord grinned viciously. With a grunt, she pulled her fist out of the large dent now in the port's floor and started towards Zuko; Hobbes suddenly appeared in her way and delievered a deceptively light blow to her broad hip that knocked her off-stride. Trying to shake off a sudden numbness in her leg that made it hard for her to walk, Jord growled down at him, "Move it, fuzzball, I've got vengeance to deal out! Nobody hammers down my buddy!"

Hobbes shook his head. She grunted and clumsily charged forward, lacking speed but her mass doing the real work. "I'd rather not get into a real brutal fight with a lady," He said as the frost giantess was nearly about to run him over (a fearful thing, given that she was nearly twice his size), her footfalls making the ground shake. He gracefully moved out of the way the moment she should have flattened him, his hand moving to snare her wrist and hanging on. "But if you insist, I'll oblige!" She swung her arm back, stopping sharply and her footsteps hard enough to buckle the metal floor, and the sudden deceleration jerked Hobbes right off her and into the air over her.

That was just what he wanted; though Jord raised a hand to swat him away like a bug, as soon as he was loose his hands moved in martial patterns, his retracted claws jabbing her large biceps in several points. Jord flinched, her arm suddenly numb and slack. Hobbes was still flying and arced in the air, grabbed her shoulder and flipped himself up to a handstand on one of her shoulders. She clumsily reached to grab him and he flipped out of the way to her other shoulder, once more jabbing points on her shoulder as he moved, and did the same to her other when he landed. Her arms slumped back, suddenly impossibly heavy to move.

Hobbes lightly moved back to the ground, jabbing at her torso and belly and hips in movements too quick to follow, each attack finding it difficult to penetrate her nerve points through her body fat but just barely managing it, and Jord slumped, seemingly paralyzed. She fell forward, a collapsing juggernaut, and Hobbes arrested her fall by simply catching the vastly larger woman in his open arms, bearing her upper torso on his shoulder (her rather large chest squashing into his shoulder, upper arms and much of his face, so he considered it win-win despite the _incredible_ weight) and managing to keep her steady. Straining with effort all the same (for while he was incredibly strong he lacked endurance or sustained lifting ability), he wondered uncomfortably if this counted as taking advantage of a lady. Still he grinned, adjusting her so that she fell a bit away from him and stood on his tip-toes to stand up tall enough so that he could brush the side of his jawline with a brief gentlemanly kiss. "Sorry, stealing kisses is an habitual occupation of gentleman adventurers!" He said, and politely set her down in a sitting position on the ground and walked away. Jord puffed her cheeks out, more embarassed than uncomfortable or hurt, and turned her still mobile neck aside so Hobbes couldn't see the darkened purple tint of her blush. He still noticed and grinned bashfully, tilting his hat respectfully at her.

By this point, Darvhog had already hauled himself back up, charging at Zim with swords in hand. "Okay, I'm back, still being awesome! AWESOME LIKE DISCO, YO!" He swung his silver sword high, for a maiming blow at the smaller Zim...

Which Zim neatly dodged, sidestepping right out of the blow, not even summoning the Keyblade (which he decided was probably best to keep as a trump card just in case) and spinning back to hit Darvhog's wrist, breaking his grip on the silver sword and dropping it. Zim grabbed the sword before it hit the ground and tried to hit Darvhog with, peturbed to find that the metal flowed like liquid and slipped right around Darvhog without a scratch. Zim simply threw it at Darvhog's head. "DISCO IS DEAD," Zim said while Darvhog was dazed and triggered a explosion underneath him, rocketing himself into the githyanki and punching him in the jaw so hard he was knocked off over the edge again.

"Ooh, never heard _that _one before," Darvhog said sarcastically, crawling up and shaking a fist at him. Zim gave him a bit of credit for being quite stubborn. "So, you're a pyrokinetic, eh?"

"No he's not," Moofy said. "He is not directing flames at us; I know not what he is directing...perhaps some sort of purely aggressive holy energies personified as light and shaped by a persistent mental construct so that it merely appears to be flame-based. This fool limits himself."

"If you wish to call me a pyrokinetic, I see no reason to correct you," Zim replied, ignoring the talking sword.

"Oh _really. _Try blasting me NOW!" Darvhog struck a pose, his fingers moving as he spoke arcane syllables in a language Zim didn't understand (which was odd since he was equipped with mnemic audio-engines that automatically translated the spirit of whatever he heard), and Zim felt a faint ripple around Darvhog's person, a sensation of threads composing reality being pulled, and he realized too late that he was sensing arcane magic being performed, able to sense it from his own growing powers. Semi-transparent glyphs appeared over Darvhog, glowing red-orange like letters of fire, mapping his person before spreading into a force field of light over him that vanished, leaving him glowing a faint shade of blue. "Hah! _Flame Shield! _Try and blast your way past that!"

"Ah. Know this! It is a fact that regardless of physical strength or endurance, anything will obliterated if you throw enough force against it! If it exists, _it can be broken!_ I shall drill THAT into your idiotic Luddite mind!"

"But I like being a Luddite, it makes me distinctive!"

"NO! IT MAKES YOU RIDICULOUS!" Zim struck a pose not unlike one of Zuko's more aggressive katas, light flashing around him and growing into brilliant flames around him, and Zim roughly shoved them at Darvhog in a single massive blast. It produced a sizable explosion, and a squawk of surprise from Darvhog as he went flying right off the platform. He didn't go far; telekinetic force wrapped around him, shaping into a large disembodied hand that grabbed him and slapped him back onto the platform. Darvhog landed roughly, not even winded from all his show of power, and Zim was pleased to see that his clothes were singed, faintly discolored and the skin of his arm bruised where the sleeves had been blasted to dust. One or two of his chained jewlery snapped and hit the platform under them, broken.

"...That makes no damn sense," Darvhog said, his Flame Shield as strong as ever and his expression totally bewildered.

"Did I not tell you?" Moofy said, with a hint of smugness.

"I told you! Hit something hard enough, no matter what it is, and it will break. Basic physics, you sad silly man."

"No no no, I don't care about your science-y voodoo nonsense."

"The practice of science is _quite _distinct from the religious practices of Voudoun, I'll have you know-"

"Oh, enough, I'm telling you there's so many ways that doesn't make sense!" Darvhog gestured at him angrily. "Flame Shield! It's called FLAME SHIELD! Shields from flames and heat and all that burning stuff! It should have taken WAY more heat to even make me feel anything!" He shook his head. "You SURE you're a pyrokinetic? That didn't seem anything like fire to me, magically generated or not."

Zim frowned at him. All of Zuko's insistence that what he was doing couldn't _possibly _be Firebending came back quite forcefully, and he felt some doubt. "...It doesn't? Hrm. Peculiar."

"No," Moofy said. "Were you not listening to what I said only moments ago?"

"Nope. More like, I dunno, something that _looks _like fire and maybe acts a bit like it, but...hey, I was blasted by some police swingers what called themselves 'Green Lanterns', your blast felt a bit like that but with more burning..." Darvhog paused on a promising train of thought and frowned at Zim. "Wait, don't you know what you're doing?"

"Not at all. But I've never let that stop me!"

"Well...that's definitely interesting! I wanna know more about what you're doing; looks like fire and acts like fire, but it doesn't mystically _register _as fire, now THERE'S some good research to be doing. Jord! Gunter! Smash these guys already and bring this guy down, I want to _examine _his power set!" They failed to respond. "Hey, trying to be a sneaky mastermind here, you could at least try to be kinda supportive about it...hey, where are you!?" He looked around and noticed that the two giants were out of the fight already. For that matter, most of his other crewmembers were defeated, panicking or just being useless. "...Okay, I'm in a bit of trouble right now."

"_Do tell!"_ Calvin yelled from the ship's intercom. The guns powered up, and Zim, Zuko and Hobbes wisely ran into slightly safer areas. Everyone else froze, so panicked that they could do nothing else.

Darvhog blinked. He shrugged with a faint grimace. "Dang it, Science! I'll give this fight to you, it's like a freebie or something."

"I detest you so deeply," Moofy said bitterly.

The guns fired at low-yield blasts, and the fight ended rather quickly after that.

* * *

About ten minutes later, the Funk Revolution Pirates soundly beaten, Zim and his crew were still in the battle-scarred ruins of the plaza (but mostly because of Zim's ship shooting the place up, though Darvhog hadn't helped much) and taking care of the pirates by chaining them up and tossing them into a box they were going to let drift around the Astral Plane until someone picked the pirates up. The ship hovered peaceably above the plaza, the entirety of Zim's crew present on the plaza to finish things up, and Morte summed up some general feelings when he said, "Guys, this is weird, we just got finished with a big fight and we already fought more idiots."

Zim, Zuko, Calvin and Hobbes paused to acknowledge this while the pirates complained at length from the big metal box (transmuted by Calvin from the tables the pirates had left behind but hadn't drifted into the void, and the plaza's floor too); it was rather cramped. In the midst of throwing the rest of the bound pirates into the box, Zuko took a moment to say, "We're probably going to be fighting something _everywhere _we go." He and Hobbes dragged Gunter into the open door of the box, hoisting him with considerable effort and tossing him onto the other pirates, considerately doing it in such a way that he didn't land on anyone or crush them. After they started screaming about being crushed, they considerately moved Gunter aside so he wasn't crushing anyone. "Best get used to it."

"Yeah, good luck with _that_," Darvhog snarked. Like everyone else in his crew, he'd been tied up and left in a pile while being transferred into the box; everyone save him and Jord had already been transfered in. "Your teamwork sucks hardcore." Morte, having already been pushed to be more proactive, headbutted him hard enough to knock him unconscious.

"OOOH, I SEE POLICE BRUTALITY!" Jord shouted.

"But we're not police," Hobbes pointed out reasonably.

"...Vigilante brutality? IT SO COUNTS."

"Does not!" Zim said, indistinctly offended. "We're more like adventurers or annoying crazy people!"

"...Don't be proud when you say that..." Zuko muttered.

"Bye boss!" Jord said cheerfully, still strugging as Hobbes, Zuko and Zim all pitched in to throw her into the box; Hobbes' technique had worn off fairly quickly, requiring Calvin to shackle her and Gunter in a solid block of metal. The quality of the materials were poor, and the giants were strong enough that they could likely break loose in short order, so it was essential to get this over with quickly. "Hi Gunter!" She said as she landed atop Gunter, mercifully _not _on one any of the other pirates.

"Hi," Gunter said.

"...Ymir's world-shaping bones, YOU CAN TALK!?" Jord shouted.

"YOU CAN TALK!?" Darvhog echoed, mouth open.

"He can speak?" Moofy repeated from the box where they'd tossed it.

"He can make mouth-noise?!" The assorted minion pirates said.

"Does anyone actually care?" Calvin said.

"WE DO!" Darvhog's crew said.

He rolled his eyes. "It was a rhetorical question."

Gunter flexed his jaw with wonder, eyes wide and tearing up. "Oh, I say, by the Elemental Plane of Cold, I CAN SPEAK! I honestly could not have realized it! It feels a touch odd to move my jaw freely, I will admit." He proceeded to amuse himself by playing with the ways sounds could be pronounced. "Jaw. Jah-aw. Admit, ahd-mit! Ahh-da-mit...!"

"No need to thank us, just throw money at us," Calvin said. "Well, you could if we weren't going to take all your stuff."

"Wait, you're doing WHAT?!" Darvhog cried.

"What, what?" Hobbes said.

"What about me?" Moofy cried over the pirate's extremely loud complaints. "I surrender myself to your will! Take me with you, I beg of you!"

"Why would we take a talking sword that's overtly prejudiced to fleshy things?" Zim said reasonably; he'd already decided against taking either of the swords with him as trophies. One of them was alive and probably either, and the other was too hard to bother learning to use.

"See!? At least YOU can use a semblence of logic! TAKE ME WITH YOOOU!"

"No," Zim said.

"Curse your flesh!"

"Well, wasn't that fun?" Darvhog asked as Zim hauled him up and prepared to toss him into the box. "I'll be back, you know! And I'll follow you wherever you go! You guys would make great rivals-" He gasped. "I KNOW! I'm going to make you guys my rivals! Every great pirate has at least one enemy or rival crew that he fights forever and ever unto the brink of death and beyond!"

"I refuse to have a rival as stupid as you!" Zim said, throwing him into the box.

Darvhog crashed into Jord and Gunter. "Ow! Too bad, I'll escape from this box eventually and I'll be back and I will _never LEAVE YOU ALONE! _Whee!"

"Hi boss!" Jord said.

"Good day, sir," Gunter said. Zim threw Moofy and the silver sword at them. "Ouch! I say, that is most uncalled for."

"Well, that's all the pirates," Calvin said, closing the door and activating a transmutation circle under the box, fusing into a solid shape with the box walls with the words 'BE CAREFUL, THESE ARE PIRATES, TOSS THEM INTO JAIL OR SOMETHING'. It was fortunate that breathing was not required on the Astral Plane; the essence of the plane nourished sentient beings well enough. Just in case, he included air holes. "Here's hoping we never see these idiots again!"

"Well, on the one hand I guess they might be a bunch of morons to beat up so we prove that we can work as a team," Morte said. "But on the other hand, we took WAY too long establishing them as silly and basically harmless annoyances that apparently want to be our rivals, so they'll probably show up again over and over following us to give us a group of incompetant bad guys to constantly be fighting."

"Yeah, that sounds like something we'd do," Disco Darvhog said. Calvin activated the circle again, and the floor transformed into a crude fist-shaped pillar with sufficient force to shoot them up like a catapault, making it look like the floor had punched them hard enough to send the boxed pirates over the edge of the port town and past; they floated gently right over it, continuing to float away at an amiable pace.

"I have no idea where you pick this stuff up," Hobbes said to Morte, sounding disgusted. Morte snorted, knowing he'd be vindicated.

Zim and his crew watched the box of the Funk Revolution Pirates floated away, taking a small bit of pleasure at seeing the annoyances drift into the psychic ether of the Astral Plane. It was actually a fairly pretty sight, the mindstuff creating some interesting effects as it shone off the metal surface of the cage, and it became a much smaller speck fairly quickly, as the port town was still flying under it's own power and taking them away from the pirate-box.

They waited until it was barely visible before they breathed a sigh of relief, giving each other a anxious look when they realized that _all _of them (except for Morte) had been expecting the box to come back at the last minute and cause _another _big pointless fight. (Though there WAS a distant cry of Darvhog going "WHEEE!" He was easily amused, it seemed.)

It fell upon Zuko, as seemed his narrative responsibility, to voice the rational observation. "I honestly can't believe that tying up pirates and tossing them into a cage to drift through the vastness of a theoretically limitless dimension was the best long-term and short-term decision available to us at the moment."

"What would you have prefered?" Hobbes said. "According to Morte there aren't any law enforcement agencies in this part of the Astral Plane and anyway this place is neutral territory on a cosmic scale, taking them with us is just ASKING for trouble, and it's not like we could just drop them off on the first lawful types we see; it wouldn't be in their jurisdiction. Also, it seemed the most fun option at the time!"

"True," Calvin said, with a nod. "NOW LET'S STEAL ALL THE STUFF THEY LEFT BEHIND AND ALSO EVERYTHING THEY DIDN'T GRAB!"

"Of course!" Zim said. The two of them high-fived.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Hobbes said, facepalming. "We _cannot _just wander into places and steal everything that isn't nailed down or on fire, and I just _know _we'd take those things too. It's against everything heroic."

"What about the heroic tradition of going into an evil cult's temple, slaying the heretical priests, defeating the guardians and taking all the treasures?" Zuko said, remembering what he could of the general adventures of the Fire Nation's great heroes.

Hobbes facepalmed. "I meant _virtuous _life-saving evil-defeating heroes, not heroic fantasy!" Zuko continued to stare blankly. "You now, barbarian fantasy stuff."

"Who are you calling barbaric!?" Zuko said.

"What? I wasn't- look, it's the principle of the matter. We can't do whatever we want to people, or their stuff, just because we don't like them, or because it's convienient. That's not what Good people are supposed to do!"

Zuko made an annoyed noise, still stung by the 'barbaric' comment. "It's just salvaging at this point.

"Tch," Hobbes growled. "...I concede the point, but we really ought to think these things through."

Zim smirked. "All right then, let's go around and get their stuff together to figure out how to make that work, then work out what we need to take, and then find a place where we can have our ship fixed up. And _improve _it! And do some proper paint job there, and name it, and..."

It went on for a while.

* * *

As events transpired, they wound up staying at the port town for a few more days to recover from the stresses of the battle with Kimblee and to fix their ship, which required not just basic repairs but some fine-tuning to finish the last-minute touches Cyborg had intended to implement before things didn't quite go their way.

It was also, as it were, a opportunity for them to get to know each other. The fact that they were going to essentially be living as a crew for the seeable future was only barely starting to sink in, and Zim was starting to realize that Zuko and him didn't really know anything of real substance about their new allies.

It was an uncomfortable subject, all the more so with them coming off the excitement from the defeat of Kimblee and the much shorter fight to reclaim this port town-ship thing, and Zim was a bit surprised by Calvin, Hobbes and Morte dealing with it by trying to be friendly and pretending that they weren't uncomfortable while their weird crew spent most of the days there recuperating and recovering and doing their own thing.

When Zim was not needed to supervise the technical aspects of the work, he was busy being tutored further by Zuko in the basics of Firebending (made difficult by Zuko's inability to generate flame in the Astral Plane though Zim's powers were unaffected, making it more and more logical that he wasn't strictly Firebending) and learning through experimentation what Zim's powers actually were doing (as Zuko found Darvhog's observations quite interesting) and the others watched when they had time. Morte said that it seemed vaugely familiar to him while Calvin was fascinated by the mystical aspects of it and Hobbes critiqued Zim's close combat skills, resolving to instruct him personally.

The results of _that_ wound up being several hour long sessions of painstakingly having his stances corrected, the positioning of his feet changed, and Hobbes making Zim to fight him hand-to-hand, and many bruises resulted. Hobbes promised that this would be a bit of a theme in the future, and gleefully mentioned something about 'internal energy-channeling mantra' and 'learning some proper sword-fighting methods' and other things that spooked Zim out pretty badly. From the sympathetic looks Calvin gave him, this was only to be expected, since Hobbes kept springing impromptu sparring and instruction sessions out of nowhere to keep Zim on his toes.

Of course, raiding the place was more fun, and choosing what was appropiate and inappropiate to salvage had an interesting element to it. As for the technical stuff, there wound up being several facilities for ship maintanence, large enough to accomodate their ship, and it had only taken a day and a half to repair the damage done to it, a further day to install all the equipment they had 'salvaged' it to create a true mobile home for themselves in their journey: among other things, a fully stocked kitchen, upgrades to the internal sub-systems including the monitors and camera systems, finding things to make their individual bunks more comfortable and suitable (and bedding for guests or additional crew members in case they picked up any, Zim was quite adamant about that), and in general the basic essentials for long-term habitation of a spaceship. To their surprise and pleasure, Cyborg had already installed video game systems as part of the computer's programming with randomized programming-made games), and another day to properly install the weapons they'd taken from the Umbra Eternis onto it (which required minor refits to the exterior) and then give it a new paint job, complete with a name for the ship on one side and even a flag design on the other.

There had been a bit of an argument over all that, everyone wanted a name that suited their own agendas and purposes, and a color scheme that declared their alliegances: Hobbes wanted to be as sneakily neutral-looking as possible to avoid unwanted fights, while Zuko insisted on a bold scheme and name to declare their open attitude towards those that wanted their help, Calvin just wanted to do cool stuff and Zim believed that the whole thing was all about what _he _wanted. Morte was pretty much indifferent, and helped negiotiate compromises about the whole thing.

After that was settled, Calvin wasn't much part of it, retiring most of his free time into the laboratory he had claimed and furnished with the equipment from his extradimensional dufflebag, apparently working on analyzing the armor they'd taken from the Umbra Eternis to reverse-engineer it and fashion it into a new shield for Hobbes, managing to carve off shavings to make some kibble-bits to enhance his own devices. Stocking the rooms they'd picked out for themselves and various other purposes took up a lot of time, and it would take a while before they really felt like home, but it was good enough.

(Zim had been surprised at how much stuff there had been in that dufflebag; not just the things Hobbes had bought, and he'd seen it during a quick look for his outfit to look more impressive, but a staggering variety of stuff Calvin had packed and apparently forgot about. Laboratory equipment, artificial chemicals for on-the-ground smelting, microscopes and engineering tools for machining; smelting; plating; welding; wiring; circuitry manufacture and all manner of device creation and maitenence. On less technical matters, library drives loaded with information on multiverse coordinate charts that nicely expanded the on-board charts and general information on many dozens of topics relevant to their mission and of course it had been uploaded to the ship's computers in spite of nearly being too much for it to handle, various data drives Zim installed into the ship that Calvin said he had helped recreate and called them 'hard copy standard template constructs', used to produce any on-board schematic using locally available materials...and that was just basic stuff in the bag. Plenty of other things were more particular and specialized, and Zim appreciated the forethought even though he had no idea why they, for instance, would think far enough ahead to a fold-out table with step-by-step instructions for making knock-out gas pellets and yet fail to bring so much as a scrap of field rations.)

Things progressed fairly lazily, and rather peacefully too. Hobbes seemed content with the way things were going, apparently perfectly happy to just hang around and less happy to get wrestled into being the muscle to do the heavy work. In contrast to him, Zuko was much less confident and still clearly unused to all this, spending most of his time around Zim though he was getting more comfortable around Hobbes, and anyway he skulked a lot in his own room, occasionally coming out when his presence demanded it. Zim suspected that he just missed the rest of Team Avatar.

Morte was surprisingly knowledgable and told Zim a fair deal more about the githyanki, in case Zim ever ran into Darvhog again (among other weirdness, since the githyanki lived inthe Astral Plane, a place that didn't have much truck with time at all other than a vauge sense of things happening one after another, Darvhog's claims of being from an erased timeline were very suspicious if not moderately insane), and about the Astral Plane in general; it was a real education just listening to him. In fact, his knowledge was disturbingly comprehensive, and considering Morte's uncanny knowledge of how things were going to turn out based on previous experiences and his inexplicable store of vast knowledge, Zim suspected that Morte had done a lot that he refused to let on or outright lied about. Morte was likely there to be a guide, and he was very good at it, but Zim didn't think that Morte was very trustworthy.

Inbetween all that, there was still much to do, and shortly before they were due to depart a courier came traveling through and they'd told him the story about the whole thing, though stated that the pirates had stolen quite a lot before they had gotten of them. On the side, Zim instructed the courier to bring a certain package and messages to his friends in Traverse Town, since the courier was friendly and going that way.

(One rather notable event took place after the port town's electricity generators finally ran down and clonked out entirely due to poor maintenance and damage suffered during the uprising earlier and then Zim's battle, forcing Calvin to spent a precious fifteen minutes rigging them to operate at minimum capacity, and then writing up notes for whoever was to come and claim the port afterwards so they would know what to do to get the generators working properly with equipment that Calvin didn't have on hand. Hopefully they understood the High Gothic Calvin wrote in, and just in case, they kept a translater on hand for those to come.

Zim had been watching Calvin go at it, impressed with the boy's single-minded and uncanny or even instinctive knowledge of fixing things, and with his mind free to think on recent matters, circled back to a recent problem he'd been grabbling with. "I think that we ought to make war on the Heartless," he said to Zuko.

"Seems reasonable to me," Zuko replied, giving Zim a curious look. "Even if it seems counterproductive to try to take down a force of nature."

"You think they're _natural_?"

"No, just...too big for us to fight." Zuko snorted. "First you want to scour the entire multiverse for three people, and now you want to do that while taking on a gigantic cosmic-wide enemy that eat planets and corrupt people into monsters and shows no limits in the forces it can field."

"Ambition is merely a trait, not a character flaw!" Zim said, and then spoke soberly. "But I must be serious. Think on it, friend Zuko. If the Heartless did not exist, Earth would still be in existence, the people of Earth and many of our friends would still be alive, and we would be preparing for another adventure that would be much less harrowing in nature."

"You're blaming the Heartless for-" Zuko stopped. "Eating the Earth, right, stupid question."

"Of course. But that's besides the point! Surely you've heard of how many villains are allied with the Heartless or use them in some fashion? And Kimblee could not have done even half of his evil without their strength. Clearly, either the Heartless or some unknown force controlling them are enabling these things to happen." He grinned. "I have been told that there is a _reason _I was given a weapon of immense power to fight the Heartless. I ought to make use of it immediately!"

"A weapon that hurts you when you use it's real power."

"Bah! Mere details. I am focused on a bigger picture. I intend to combat the Heartless wherever I meet them, investigate them properly, discern their weaknesses and finally find a means to restore them or destroy them utterly. Whichever seems more Good at the time."

Zuko nodded after a long moment. "...Count me in, too." And that was it; between friends, there didn't need to be much more than that.)

It was peaceful, pleasant and even a bit fun just relaxing and getting things ready, and therefore it went by too fast for Zim's liking even though he was quite eager to _finally _be leaving on his adventure. And so, in only a few days (according to their ship's clock, the Astral Plane didn't actually have a day-night cycle and it was playing merry havoc with their sleeping schedules), short enough that Zim felt like he had just blinked and it was too late to turn back, the final preparations had ended. All neccesary supplies had been 'salvaged' and Hobbes' scruples satisfied, the ship repaired and the weapons taken from Kimblee plugged into the weapon systems in appropriate areas, the ship's systems fine-tuned to the degree matching Calvin's exact specifications given what little time they had, and all that was left was to name it.

On the ship-repair faciltiy they had comandeered (quite large enough to service very large ships and comprised a full quarer of the south side of the port town) their thus-far unnamed ship hovered in place in a champer equipped with color-spraying nozzles, having been doing the job of giving their ship a color scheme more suitable to their purposes. Zim stood on a viewing platform floating a fair distance from it at a level to appreciate it, admiring it and conceding that while Calvin was a lousy pilot and a short-tempered insufferable know-it-all, he _did _know his shipcraft.

Through a complicated system of semi-transparent layering, jury-rigged cut-outs and salvaged parts to improve the facility's workings, Calvin had produced a paint job for their ship: the whole ship was mainly red, in varying gentle shadings and totally benign, suggestive of a good presence instead of the usual bloody or angry associations of red. Portions of the sides and the lower compartments had made a nice shade of blue tending towardly pleasantly bright shades, the two primary colors blending nicely into each other in their respective sections; the areas where weapons were either prominently displayed or secured under hatches or hidden compartments were marked with streaks of yellow like battle scars, and alongside the bright glow of green from the power-lines going everywhere and every available display, it all complemented each other very nicely.

(Calvin had claimed, in his proposal for the colors, that the wisest and most successful beings he had ever met had proven that certain colors affected the performance of vehicles in some circumstances and had documentation in well-respected journals to prove it. _"Red makes them go faster,"_ he had said, "_Blue improves probability in our favor, and yellow is beneficial towards offensive action!_" Hobbes had rolled his eyes but didn't argue. Zuko didn't go into such superstition, and had confirmed it as superstition after asking if certain spirits took this sort of thing as an offering and was answered in the negative, but he liked the color scheme as being heroic and noble. Zim found himself, once again, agreeing with Calvin; it all made perfect sense to him. Morte was fine with it, though surprised to have his opinion asked.)

On the side of the ship, in green and white paint to off-set the ship's main colors, was their new team logo: a face that looked like the necklace trinket Zim carried around; a stylized Irken head on a gear, placed over a sword-shaped flame and an abstract lion's-head crossed over in a 'X'. Wavy lines that looked sort of like wings spread out from them, to make it look a bit angelic and noble. Zim had a bit of a moment looking at it; he didn't _quite _waver on his feet or fall over or feel like he was about to faint at the enormity of it all, but it was a tremendous shock just seeing it, this final demonstration of his intentions and wholehearted alliance with these people who he honestly couldn't say were _complete _strangers to him and Zuko anymore this emblem of his new crew-

_his new crew_. Not a partnership of convienience. Not something done on orders. Calvin, Hobbes and even Morte (in his own way, and he would have done more if he could only have found the courage) had stood with him and Zuko in that great battle against Kimblee and the forces that mad alchemist had fielded, and they had not needed to aside from the dictates of their own consciences.

Something had changed between them. Yes, there was still the sense of distance, of not knowing everything about these people, but still, he couldn't call them strangers or anything like that, and Zim grinned to have such a force at his side. And even so, a part of him thought that it could stand to be bigger, that he could use _more _people, more allies, more friends...

The thought lingered for a while. Unlike many thoughts that had done that of late, it was a soothing and pleasing one.

The emblem reflected this growing closeness, for each element of it reflected a member of the crew, laid down when they had discussed what to use for a possible flag or symbol over the last few days and only settled on this morning. The Irken face stood for Zim of course; the gear for Calvin and his belief in the power of technology that Zim (and to a lesser extent Zuko) also shared; Hobbes and Zuko, the most martial of the group, had picked the lion's-head and the sword-shaped flame respectively (and had them in a crossed-shaped because, as Hobbes said, 'You HAVE to have an x-shape in these things!" but ZIm suspected their growing friendship had more to do with it), and while Zim had expected Morte to pick a skull, the complex and winglike arrangement of lines had been Morte's final pick. It was an etheral shape, an abstract symbol, something that was supposed to be ultimately benign. It said a lot about Morte, Zim thought.

And below that, in bold letters, was the name of their ship. That had been particularily difficult, all manner of appropriate names coming and going (Zim had been a particular advocate of 'The Violent Science' which Calvin also supported, Hobbes and Zuko thought it might give the wrong impression, and for some insane reason Morte voted for 'Mega-Ultra-Chicken From The Future That Is Also In The Past', he blamed Zim's stupidity being contagious) and ultimately, after thinking about their respective unspoken determination to do _good _wherever they had gone in life, perhaps quietly or overtly, acting on behalf their own scruples and no other consideration, willingly given to the fetters that defined their existence, an obvious choice had sprung up and unanimously agreed on. Below their team emblem on the sides of their ship, written in letters described in ways that would make their meaning abundantly clear to whoever beheld them, Calvin had painted the name '_Paragon'_.

Zim grinned. He couldn't help it, he just felt brighter than he had in far too long, standing on the precepice of a new and absolutely fantastic journey.

The _Paragon _floated peacefully there and slowly came to a drop as Calvin, operating some machinery to lower it, placed it to the ground, remote-controlled the cargo bay to open. The ship shone beautifully, outer surface ground and polished to a good and proper gleaming by a number of massive roombas Zim had designed from spare parts for fun, and Zuko and Hobbes waited for it to touch ground properly before they loaded up a hovering mechanized cart loaded with a few last minutes essentials (a few odds and ends for their laboratory and outfitting set-ups, poofy couches for the recreational room they had decided the big chamber at the bottom of the ship ought to be, and shallow cooling fridges filled with chilly goo to chill down their drinks and closed containers) and boarded, to get it all put away and set up.

Morte, floating beside him, said, "So, here we go, Boss. Finally off on our real adventure."

"Indeed," Zim said solemnly.

Morte glanced at him. "...You sure you wouldn't rather head back to your old party?"

"Certainly not."

"...Long as you're satisfied in what you do," Morte said. He sounded more serious than ever.

"Let's go," Zim said shortly, and touched a button on the touchpad that controlled the platform. It brought them and Calvin to the floor, where they followed after Zuko and Hobbes, a feeling of momentousness thrilling Zim as he walked up the cargo hold's ramp and into the _Paragon _once again, feeling that another threshold had been crossed, and that the time of his life on Earth was gone. Another life was here, ready to be made anew, and it promised to be better than those that had come before.

They couldn't lift off right away, rather wounding the spirit of adventure that the moment demanded; Zuko and Hobbes required some help sorting it all up.

After all the last minute organizing was done, there was no other reason to keep waiting, and since they didn't have any emotional attachment to the port, they wasted no further time and one launch-off later, the _Paragon _was soon a small green dot against the port, flying from it in a smooth controlled arc that took it away from the port, leaving it to drift in tranquil peace to await someone else to inhabit it in due time.

Zim, sitting in the primary pilot's seat while Calvin took the other, watched it recede in the camera-screens. He felt like he was watching the begining of his latest and weirdest adventure going behind, and before him lay the future, brighter than any from before in spite of the troubles that had waited for him first. "Anyone have any regrets about not perhaps modding that place into a large-scale ship?"

"No, that would be self-indulgent," Zuko said, sitting at a console behind Zim's ship at a bank of monitors. He had no idea what any of it was for, but he _had _been shown how to operate the weapons and could be a decent gunner if need be.

"And silly," Hobbes added, sitting right next to Zuko; he actually _did _know how to operate it since high-profile operatives like him were expected to handle just about any weapon or device they found with reasonable competence.

"A cool idea, but unfeasible right now," Calvin said.

"Eh," Morte said, indifferent and strapped into the passenger seats at the back.

"...Are you sure? We could find some tow cables, attach the ship to it and pull it along, upgrade the engines-"

"NO," Zuko said.

"Geez, _fine, _be a sour shoe-person about it." Zim snorted. "If that's it, then let's be off!" his hands squeezed on the seat's joysticks, a surge of hope and joy flashing through him as he was briefly connected with the ship's core of power. There was a brief and barely noticable rumble as the ship powered up, more full of power than it had been in it's short life (and the auxilary engines they'd installed to get it running on slightly more conventional power sources didn't hurt the sounds either); the green under them flashed brighter for a moment, and then, that quietly fascinating sense of things moving away on the camera screens produced the sensation that that ship was not moving but the universe was simply being pushed away.

The port was being moved away by it's own engines, and the _Paragon_ was moving quite fast in short order (moving much quicker outside of the atmosphere then it normally ought to), the port receded from view fairly quickly, and then an astral cloud whipped over them, and by the time they flew out, it was gone.

Zim thought that a momnt of reflective silence might be appropriate. But that was stupid and seriously self-indulgent, so he just kicked up the speed-restraining gauge (literally, as it were) and their ship immediately powered into overdrive. Green light streamed from the propulsion discs, the psychic atmosphere warping around them and their desire for movement...

And then, at last, they were gone. The sound of the _Paragon _passing was a brief roar in the serenity of this tiny fraction of the Astral Plane, and the thought-storm was momentarily dominated by images of ships.

Zim, even going through the star-lit expanse of the Astral Plane, wondered how his friends, espicially Aang, were doing, and what had become of Traverse Town since their departure.

* * *

In Traverse Town, not for the first time since Zim had left right out of nowhere, Avatar Aang had found himself sitting back on an appropiately high vantage point where the wind could slide around him and put him in the very touch of the air until it was like flying while being still, and just staring over the rooftops that made up the the gradually sloping edges of the outermost areas of the First District, bumping up against the walls that divided the districts and further out into the rest of the area.

In this case, it was a broad gargoyle carved from part of the rooftop of his and the new home of him and rest of his friends - not just Team Avatar, but Danny and his buddies too, and hopefully Zim when he came back to them - in the First District, putting him in a perfect position to watch over the curving street it overlooked on a slightly raised plateau, the other homes and the shops (a take-out buffet, a bookstore and a convienience store all right in front of their house, relatively speaking. Aang was deeply grateful to their new friends Kim, Ron, Naruto and Gaara (who had bonded closely with Teams Avatar and Phantom after the battle of the Umbra Eternis, to the muted surprise of a few) since they had pulled a few strings and called in some lingering favors to get them a house big enough for all of them and situated in a place to accomodate the elemental natures of all of them, even Zuko once he returned-

Aang's thought stopped and his legs, previously hanging carelessly off the gargoyle, coiled back in as he sat upright frowning. Like a moth-butterfly with a sense of territoriality towards a particular flower, he kept circling on back to that aching open hole in their lives and the Zuko-shaped hole that kept popping up in everything they did.

He bit his lip and looked up towards the sky. Towards the stars, hidden behind clouds and sunlight; where Zim and Zuko and their three friends had gone. Wherever they had gone, he wished them the best, and hoped they'd come back soon. He knew better than to be so naive as to assume that would be as soon as he liked; a few months, at the least, was a _very _conservative estimate.

Zim had a talent for getting people to listen to him and Zuko had a way with leading them, Aang reflected, and he might well return with even more friends. Aang like the sound of that; having lots of people around would be good for his attention-starved little buddy on one hand and hurting big brother-figure on the other.

The thought cheered him up, and his recurring issues with Zuko and Zim's absence pacified for the moment, he contented himself with passively looking at their latest home, and he had to admit, it was beautiful. He contented himself for a while just looking down at the street that was still new enough to make it difficult to think of as his neighborhood, his consciousness thinning and spreading out through the wind on his skin to extend where the air moved; gusting along the freshly paved (or transmuted) vehicle road incling sharply up into a well-defined sidewalk to girdle the residences and businesses there, looking much like solid rock somehow polished and made pleasantly smooth enough for decent driving.

And too did the air flow around the even higher incline of the landscope up to the small rocky hill their home crowned, sitting flush with a circled thoroughfair behind them and a artificial pond just behind their actual residence, graced by both winds and vibrant sunlight over the two-story home, abandoned by a previous owner who had turned out to be a largely harmless super-criminal that had fled town; Aang considered that the bizarre architecture of the house, which was a recent construction and not one of the original town dwellings, was such a chaotic mix of differing styles that they effectively canceled each other out and remained a cheerful blank slate for homeowners to alter as they pleased; the outer walls and rooftop brought to mind Earth's Gothic style, all grand details and heaven-bound stylings that was a fortress in the dark and heartening in the daylight, but the ground level looked like a post-modern model of smart efficiency with no details save which flowed from function, and yet the inside of the house was quite restrained and elegant in a Edwardian manner.

As homes went, he supposed, it wasn't bad. He wasn't sure he could call it good; he couldn't find the prospect of staying in one place really appealing, not with hundreds of years of history of his people as nomads flying behind him. The wind came and went as it pleased...but then, he thought, the wind also came to rest and went still when it was appropriate.

He stretched, thinking of how their time in the house had been busily spent outfitting it with appropriate gear and appliances and decorations to suit themselves, filling up the Zuko-shaped hole in their minds by altering the layout to be more harmonious, staking out rooms.

That was a particular thing, their rooms: Sokka refused to let Aang and Katara share a room like they wanted, claiming it was bad enough when he had caught them kissing in the wake of the after-party satisfaction of the defeat of ex-Fire Lord Ozai, but they managed to get rooms side-by-side near the attic and slept in each other's bed more often then not; Toph had taken the basement for her own to be as close to the earth as she could and Sokka and Tucker had decided to share a room right next to the stairs and had already set it up as a crude gadget-making area to satisfy their fascination with all the cool stuff in town while tinkering with it to suit their needs, and one room had been left aside for Zuko, while Danny and Sam shared the room next to Aang's due to the ghost boy's clear need for constant interaction and a familiar face. (No one would begrudge him that, espicially not Sam.) Mostly Team Avatar was spendin this adjustment period making it more of a home, as while Danny, Tucker and Sam joined in on the activity when they weren't going around town entertaining themselves by seeing the sights, and Aang felt that they hadn't quite caught to the fact that they were all part of the same group.

It wasn't the most comfortable thing sometimes; more often then not they caught themselves in a state of deep awkwardness living together like this; while their teams were certainly very good friends, they hadn't spent nearly so much time together, and the clear cases of mental whiplash in adjustment was nearly as bad as watching Danny and his friends constantly realizing that their families had died with the rest of their planet, over and over again, and it hurt Aang that he really couldn't offer much more but advice that wouldn't be appreciated and simply hope that the man they had saved from Kimblee knew how to piece a breaking mind together and save Danny from shattering completely.

Such thoughts were overly emotional in the worst ways and Aang let them drift away to where such unproductive problems could no longer trouble him, leaving him with the beginings of serenity. The light of the mid-day sun shone down and Aang adjusted himself to feel as much of it as possible, breathing the heat in and breathing it out as spirit-fire, the warmth burning away the lingering sadness inside him, the feelings left behind by a dead world and a missing home leaving small frigid bits of coldness inside. "I have _really _got to get over these broody thoughts," he said aloud.

"Hearing the word 'brooding' from you actually feels wrong," Katara said from nearby. Aang looked around and saw her leaning against the railing of the balcony that led to his and occasionally Katara's room, elbows resting on the flat surfaces that made such good take-offs that Aang though that their designer had to be a flyer too, one hand cupping her face as she watched Aang speculatively, skin rendered a heart-squirmingly lovely shade of dark chocolate in the revealing sunlight, her eyes gleaming icy-blue at him from under a mess of unusually casual and slightly frizzy hair. Fascinating, that; normally she would have styled her hair into the complex styles of her people, but she'd been taking a much more casual approach to her hair lately. Perhaps it was the fashion of this town catching on.

He swung his legs over and braced them against the rails, facing her and smiling wide the whole time. "Yeah. I know." his smile moderated slightly, purest delight all meant just for her informing his face and turning his already cheery facade into something more genuine and sweet. "What's up, Katara?"

She smiled back, every bit as sweet and pleased for him, and reached out to place her fingers on the back of his hand, and Aang felt a warm flash like electricity made safe where her skin touched him him as lightly as a mermaid might touch the skin of a bird-man that had come down to grace the sea. She shook her head, and confirmed what the motion meant when she said, "Nothing important. Kim and Ron came around but it's nothing business-related." Aang nodded at that and glanced aside, still slightly bemused and happy at the sight of the city, it's possibilities dancing solutions and dreams in his mind. "What are you thinking about?"

Aang 'hmm'ed and mumbled for a moment, trying to think of the best way to phrase what he wanted to say, and finally he decided that the best example was an object lesson. "That," he said, pointing at the skyline.

Katara looked over. "The buildings? What about them?"

"It's not the buildings." Aang paused, frown, and took a moment to rephrase it. "It's the people...but that's not quite it. It's just...this city. This whole place and the way it's like. _That's _what I'm thinking about." He looked again, more thoughtful. "I was just thinking, wouldn't it be great if there was a place like this back home?"

_Home_. The land of the Water Tribes and the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom and one day Air Nomad would fly again. A world lost to them but not gone as so many were, no doubt quietly ticking along the path to peace and hopefully not needing it's Avatar just yet.

Katara looked at the street below them and the buildings beyond, the ancient streets holding up the pleasantly chaotic assembly of foriegn buildings, awash in people of dozens of different worlds living in relative harmony with each other, the terrible evil of the recent days assimilated into collective memory and being dealt with cheerfully enough.

Well, mostly. She frowned at the street as people screamed and ran out of the way of a new incident and cautiously said "...You mean you want a place back home with giant golems made of clay fighting sand monsters that shoot clones like screaming missiles?"

"Okay, maybe I chose a bad moment to get you to look," Aang conceded.

"Okay, your guys found me out, hmm?" called out the blonde ninja Deidara (now sorely regretting that Kimblee had gone straight to him when he'd come to Traverse Town, and the investigators following Kimblee's trail after the incident had located him quickly), standing on a shielded platform on top of the head of a two-story-tall golem-like construct a curiously abstract and quite functional design, all made of clay, with thicker plates of chakra-infused clay armoring it. As giant robot-type weapons went, it wasn't anywhere as fearsome as the Umbra Eternis, but it was still pretty tough despite not having any apparent weapons aside from raw strength, and the flying explosive sculptures the mouths in Deidara's palms chewed up from the clay of his golem were quite formiddable, causing considerably large explosions to whatever they hit. (And inducing some locals to complain that they had just gotten over a supervillain with exploding powers, this was just getting repetitive and trite and other things that hurt Deidara's creative pride.) "NOW COME AND GET SOME! I'LL SHOW YOU THE ART OF WAR!"

One such bomb was smashed out of the sky, exploding harmlessly against the body of the thing that had hit it; a enormous construct of swirling sand, weighing in around several tons and taking the form of a stout torso, an enormous set of brutish arms and a oddly proportioned head resembling a daemonic tanuki, and Aang recognized it speedily as Gaara's work, though the sand-manipulator wasn't in sight (presumably buried deep inside it for protection). Little holes and tunnels ran through it like ancient scars and from them many dozens of Naruto clones were emerging from or running around, dodging the constant explosions that did little damage to the sand golem's body but dispersed the clones with little effort. Whether the real Naruto was there or not was hard to say, as there were still more clones on the rooftops behind Deidara to cut off his escape. "Traitor. Heretic to your village. All your deeds end here," Gaara's voice said, coming from the sand-demon's mouth, and it was colder than dust and harsher than a storm.

Gaara's construct (made in the image of the demonic tailed beast sealed within him, the One-Tailed Tanuki named Shukaku) swung a clawed paw as it powered forward, grabbing an arm of the golem-titan that was too slow to fall back and viciously pulling it forward. Several long spears formed from the Shukaku-titan's body, stabbing into seams of the clay, and weakened it enough for Gaara to rip that arm off at the shoulder before his titan delivered a massive punch to it's stomach. Deidara's construct bent forward, several vital supports damaged and nearly making it break in half right there. Deidara just laughed. "I knew it. Always wanted to fight _you_. So this is the power of a container of a tailed beast... _Amazing!_"

Gaara and Naruto didn't answer, but the demon-titan's face became far more angry.

"Think we should help?" Aang said.

"Nah, I think they have this covered," Katara said. Her word being good enough for him, Aang sat back and watched the show.

"Where the hells did you get this much clay anyway?!" A Naruto said as he ran along with twelve other clones, the lot of them forming a Rasengan and launched by the sand construct's free hand directly at the clay-mecha.

"I've been preparing for a day like this since I got here; I had clay caches all over this city! And plenty of people use the stuff in their buildings, they were just _waiting _to be a part of this!" Deidara explained, and totally failed to follow the rule of never explaining things to an enemy unless you have the upper hand and became too distracted to notice the Naruto clones slamming the Rasengan into his construct's chest, a mighty blast of light and wind washing out the finer details of the construct's upper half exploding from the inside out, it's remaining arm flapping up and nearly clocking Deidara as he tried to flee.

The Naruto clones dissipated as the sand-titan dissolved and flung itself forward as a single massive wave, engulfing the defeated golem, pressurizing itself and compacting, swelling up briefly as the golem was reduced to more dust to be added to the sand. Some more of the sand streamed away and smashed into Deidara, wrapping around him and forcing his hands behind his back before hardening, locking him into place. The sand flowed up and became an unusually large sand platform, Deidara carried down to it and not even trying to struggle, just laughing madly and screaming, "_Just as planned, you plebians! JUST AS PLANNED!_" and not even trying to, for example, have his hand-mouths to chew up the sand to transform them into explosives. He could have, but he did not. "Could have brought my C-4! What would you do then, huh!? JUST AS PLANNED!" Still chuckling, he settled down, and permitted the sand to wrap around his wrists and solidify into handcuffs.

"...Hmm," Gaara said. "He should not have been defeated so easily." Deidara just smirked.

"Well that was fast," Aang remarked. "If we'd taken down Kimblee and his giant robot like that, things would have been a lot less troublesome."

"Didn't have enough sand," Gaara said, looking apologetic. (At least he tried, Aang thought he just looked mildly constipated.)

"But it would probably have been less exciting," Naruto said, laying down on the sand and waving cheerfully at Aang and Katara. They waved back, having become good friends with the two ninjas dispite all expectations; perhaps it was that Zuko was at least sort of a ninja in some respects and having these two ninjas around made them feel a bit better sometimes. (And plus Gaara filled up the 'grumpy quiet guy' quota Zuko had unknowingly made for Team Avatar.) "How you guys doing? Settling in okay?"

"Yeah, we're doing okay," Aang assured him. He pointed a finger at Deidara. "What was that all about?"

Naruto gave Deidara a smug look. Deidara shrugged, half-absently trying to chew up some sand to makes explosives even though his hands couldn't reach (lucky for them, since in an alternative timeline Gaara had been defeated by Deidara in that way with disastrous results and he'd even been dead for a while before he got better) and blew his huge bangs out of his eyes. Gaara said, "During one of his brief lucid moments, the boy you liberated from Kimblee's possession identified this man as Kimblee's primary accomplice in his attack on us. He is Deidara, a criminal of some repute from our own world and former member of a disbanded criminal organization."

"Small world, huh?" Deidara remarked. "What are the odds they'd send _you _guys after me? Worked out okay, too."

Naruto shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe they thought we might be familiar with your techniques or something even though we never fought you? Meh, it was a lame battle. Probably 'cause you couldn't make your special kind of explosives."

"Pretty weird coincidence all the same," Katara commented. "What are the chances that you'd guys end up fighting when you're both statistically unlikely to have survived let alone encountered each other? The odds have to be insane!"

"Didn't I just say something like that?" Deidara asked.

"No one cares," Gaara said, wrapping some sand around his mouth (but not his nostrils so the man could breathe a little) to shut Deidara up. "We should be off. Deidara has some business we need to reintroduce to him."

"Well, later," Naruto said, ignoring Deidara's mumbled indignities. "I'd say the biggest coincidence is that we showed up on the exact street where you live, but I'd say that it's all down to me just wanting to say 'hi' and planning accordingly."

"'Later', as they say," Gaara said, and he and Naruto floated off with Deidara in tow.

"Bye," Aang said, and waited until they'd left to say to Katara, "Okay, maybe that was kind of a bad example, but I'd like to have a place where stuff like that isn't a reason for people to freak out."

"You _want _our world to have a city of chaos?" Katara replied, looking both intrigued and mildly horrified.

Aang shrugged. "It'd be a step up from casual jingoism and global seperatism."

Katara opened her mouth to reply. She paused. She rethought her statement. She sighed. "Honestly, I'd _like _to say that things were fine the way they were a hundred years ago, minus the pre-war tension between all our people, but after all the worlds we've been to and the different people we've seen and all the problems we've helped solve, I think I get your point."

"Anyway, it's not really the weird things happening all the time I'm interested in - for one thing, I'm not sure that's really viable for a long-term settlement - but...oh, I think I got it now. It's the _unity_ I like. I just think it'd be really nice to have a place like this back home." Aang spread his arms, indicating Traverse Town again, and this time without any random incidents undercutting his point. "Somewhere where the people that don't really _fit _into any of the existing nations can call home; I don't know how it's changed since we left, but before we did...you remember all that trouble we were having about the Fire Nation's colonies in the Earth Kingdom and what to do about them? I was thinking, what do we do for those people that don't fit right in the existing nations? I've heard about kids in Ba Sing Se that Firebend and Earthbenders that insist they're Fire Nation, and Suki told me once about Waterbenders in Kyoshi Island, so where do _they _fit in? Kyoshi and her people were Earth Kingdom!"

"The FIre Nation mixed a lot of different things together," Katara acknowledged. "It blended things together. And not..." She grimaced, as if admitting this was a physical pain. "Not all of it is a bad thing. I don't think the Water Tribes had even been in contact with each other before the war broke out. Just because it was peaceful, well, I don't know if it was happy or good."

Aang frowned, saddened by the thought that perhaps the Hundred-Years War had _needed _to happen, ridiculous as it seemed, and he shuddered at the notion that he had even thought something so terrible. "We can look at those people and do it right this time, Katara. They're not problems we have here, they're solutions to even older problems and maybe it's another step on making everyone happy, at least for a little while. And maybe then? It'll be a lasting peace for once. Unity among the elements." He frowned more thoughtfully. "Just think if we had a place like this town; a home for the people who don't think they belong in any of the nations, without any of the cultural debris the nations still had when we left. Where people could just slough off the old problems of their ancestor's countries and just be one people without bothering about any of their old grudges or prejudices. Just a clean start, for everyone that wants one. Where everyone would be...I don't know, _free._"

'_A place for the first Airbenders of the next generation to be born,'_ he didn't add, but it was clear from the softened look on Katara's face that he might as well have said it anyway.

"It'd be a good start," Katara said, mulling it over and looking at the downsides. "Pushing people together like that could cause trouble."

"If it does," Aang replied, with a determined look. "Then the Avatar will still help. The way I see it, it would be the first step towards the world moving together as one instead of fighting against ourselves all the time. All the wars we've had, all the hatred that's grown from them, all the grudges we've been carrying with ourselves...we, Team Avatar, don't _have _the same grudges against each other that our nations do! I've seen that we can co-exist in harmony and peace, so the rest of the world can. This idea I have, this city, it'd be like our group on a bigger scale. I really think it can work."

"Aang." Katara's voice was soft, advising sterner counsel. "I think that kind of scale is a bit bigger than anything we've planned personally."

"You don't think it can happen?" Aang asked her, not angry or upset, just an honest question.

Katara frowned. "...It does sound nice," she admitted. "It really does, thinking of a place that's as relatively at peace with it's different elements as this town is. But...I don't know, with all the conflicts our nations are still carrying around? I'll probably see a tame polar bear-dog before something like that happens in _my_ lifetime."

Aang grinned at her, as full of promise of change as the dawning sun. "It can happen. We've pulled off the impossible before, so why get all pessimistic now? ...And hey, it'd be really cool to see someone with a polar bear-dog for a pet, maybe it'd be like an animal guide because _no one's _ever tamed a polar bear-dog, whoever did it would have to be totally awesome-"

"Aang! Focus!"

"Right, right, sorry." Aang opened his mouth to continue, and again paused; articulating the vague thoughts and ideas that had grown between him and his friends throughout their journey and brought to the beginings of fruition by his exposure to the nearly unfettered possibilities of Traverse Town had been difficult enough, and now he really didn't have much more to say other than hopes and dreams, beautiful in themselves but requiring firm thought before he could dare voice them or else risk ruining the whole thing before it even had a chance to begin.

This could be his real legacy. The real enduring accomplishment of his that would truly bring peace to the world even after he was gone, instead of leaving a mess that his successor as the Avatar would have to clean up. "...It really could work. I know it can."

"A new nation, as a result of the Hundred-Year War?" Katara said, less dubiously then before. "...It'd be nice if something good came out of all of that." She smiled. "Tell me more about it?"

"Okay," Aang said, and without any of the apprehension he might of felt with anyone (even the other members of Team Avatar) he told her more of what he had in mind, articulating his hopes and dreams, easy in the knowing that Katara would take him serious and that with her, nothing would be dismissed or ignored.

On a more moderate optimistic note, in the house they were calling home, there was another conversation in the living room where most of the people living there or merely visiting had gathered; it was a fairly big living room, and seemed sparsely decorated due to both lack of furniture and the inhabitant's indecisiveness in cultivating things that reminded them of home to ease the transition (Team Avatar preferred things similar to their own cultures; woven tapestries depicting adventures of enlightenment for Aang, a handmade and slightly tacky bookshelf made from the skull of a huge whale-like beast for Katara and Sokka, spaces reserved for Zuko's choice in decoration which accounted for some of the open space, and Toph disdained most of it except for some metal trinkets she liked because they were so horrendously tacky; Team Phantom hadn't had as much luck, given their taste for mad science-y type things, but most of the appliances they had found at least had the right look), and most everyone was hanging around doing their own thing.

Sitting on a big fluffy couch (really more of a overstuffed beanbag chair large enough to seat five, filled with a kind of soft material that adjusted itself to the user's body shape and weight for maximum comfort) and a few matching seats arranged haphazardly around a little table was Sokka, Tucker Foley and Ron Stoppable, the three boys playing a co-operative multiplayer video game called 'Residue: New Rome' (the Residue series as whole sub-titled 'The Post-Apocalypse Game of Yourself'), a very popular series of sandbox-style roleplaying shooter-style games from Traverse Town itself with it's main claim to fame being a combination of a feature that allowed players to base their characters on their own appearance (it's premier character generation system had won awards) and unbelievably advanced writing algorithms that created new plots, scenarios and characters on every replay within certain broad themes selected at the begining of every playthrough, promising a new experience with every new game. (It wasn't _quite _as good as all that, but an experienced gamer was used to develouper expectations falling through.)

Somtimes, when it was done well-enough, fantasy could outdo reality with hardly any effort. "Guys, this game is _awesome!_" Sokka said, eagerly mashing buttons as his look-alike character used dual-mounted laser chainguns to mow through an army of Nazi pirate-zombies as their party climbed up a inactive giant robot to commander it, pilot it and then direct it at the base of this playthrough's bad guys, Constantine's Horde. "This is _so _much better than the last giant robot I tangled with."

"I beta-tested this game," Ron said proudly, and not so subtely fishing for compliments. "And it's definitely one of the best! A lot of times the writing seems a bit shallow and bad-paced, but it's always funny when you hit the comedy setting to the max at the begining of the game and you never get a plot twist you wouldn't want! God _bless _interactive immersion settings."

"I gotta hand it to you man, you got the _best _video games ever!" Tucker exulted, his lingering trauma fleeing in the face of such epic electronics-based entertainment media. "Zim had some pretty cool games - his people use them as a training simulators for like everything! - and they still sucked compared to this! I LOVE THIS TOWN!"

"I know, right?!" Ron agreed. Rufus, from his shoulder, made high-pitches noises that basically translated to 'hit him harder! No, the left, THE LEFT! Get out the missile launchers, you can hit those guys, they're all clustered up- OH NO, THEY JUST BROKE LOOSE! Circle around and get 'em!'. "Rufus, bro, no one likes a backseat player. Sit back and just enjoy it!" Rufus grumbled but slouched back, watching the game being played.

"It's super-cool of you to have bought this stuff for us," Sokka commented. "Half this stuff in our house you gave us money for, even this gaming system. I _totally _made the right choice when I let you hang out with us."

"Hey, what are super-casual friends in scary-desperate extremes of friend-needing-ness for if not giving you free stuff for no reason?" Ron said.

"I have _no _idea what half of what you just said was, but okay," Tucker said.

On the other side of the room and just beside the inner side of the door to the modestly equipped kitchen, Kim, Toph and Sam sat at a dining table with a media playing device and three sets of headphones, tending to their own fun and friendship-building affairs. Toph, sitting with her feet on the table and ignoring Kim's clear distaste for such slovenly behavior (and the wretched state of her filthy feet), bobbed her head in tune to the music as Kim and Sam listened to the same tracks with their own earphones. "What band did you say this was again?" Toph said, grinning in fierce delight at the powerful beats, epically roared lyrics and the instrumental guitar chorus beating like a heart with it's own life. "I _like _'em! They're so totally metal I oughta be able to bend them!"

"They're called 'Heavy Mithril'," Kim explained, jabbing helpfully at the audio drive she'd brought the music on. (It was labeled, but Toph could hardly be expected to notice with her blindness.) "The members of that band are retired paladins from the Crossguard who never made it very high in the ranks; they were called the 'Noise Knights', fought by using sonic weaponry when they couldn't get weaponized electric instruments. They decided they got more fulfillment out of the music instead of the fighting, so they decided to get into making power metal music and doing soundtracks instead."

"They are totally awesome," Sam said, grinning like a fool. "They got a very good sense of guitar rhythm, it's almost hard to tell when they're singing or not, but the lyrics are still very clear! And...what's with the sound? It's really, really good, but geez! You said the song was about a book of hero orcs fighting a primordial horror, right? It's weird, those images keep popping into my brain! Feels a bit like low-grade telepathy, but like it's just being suggested into my head. How does it _do _that!?"

"They're into a thing called 'novox'," Kim explained. "Using superpowers or advanced sound equipments to create unusual and awesome effects with the music. A lot of bands around her are downright competetive with how crazy things get with it."

"Kinda surprised you're into heavy metal," Toph remarked.

"I'm into _power metal, _not heavy metal," Kim said, as if this was a big point. Toph and Sam raised eyebrows, but didn't begrudge the point. "Besides, my dad's into heavy metal, not me."

Sam blinked. "Your _dad_?" She repeated, looking a little more downcast than before. "The totally awesome military guy who can make guns appear from his body?"

"Yeah, him. He says a co-worker got him into it; nice girl named Abby Scuito, you'd probably be good friends with her. Anyway, Dad likes music that gets his blood pumping and has real spirit."

Sam looked blankly at nothing...and then, surprised by it herself, she brightened up. "Yeah, I get the feeling." She frowned. "Y'know, it's weird. I feel I should be kind of depressed or gloomy or something, what with everything that's happened...but every time I start sliding down that way, I feel better. What's up with that?"

"Novox sort of does things to your brain," Kim explained. "Not _bad _things; they stimulate calming hormones, put good stuff through your brain and pacify your emotions...basically whenever people start getting gloomy or clinically depressed, listening to the music stimulates stuff in your brain to make you feel good."

"Huh!" Sam said. "No wonder they kept playing music for days after that Kimblee thing went down."

"Yeah, it's public policy to play happy novox after incidents or during business hours," Kim said. "Keeps people saner."

"Sounds like your messing with people's brains," Toph said. "Is that, I dunno, healthy, Sam?"

"...At this point I really don't care if it's super-addictive or whatever," Sam said flatly, looking unbelievably relieved at having anything like chronic sadness, that awful bleak _nothing_-ness just peeled away from her. "Really, I honestly don't care. But...why isn't it helping Danny? Me and Tucker are okay, but Danny's, like, half-crazy."

Kim sighed. "It's not really a permanent fix. It helps, but there's nothing like proper therapy to get it through. Still, good music helps deal with stuff like this."

Sam smiled. "Heh, technology. It's pretty awesome."

On the other side of the wall and a floor below, in the so far unused but quite large basement (big enough to be a meeting room if they decided to host a secret group or something) and isolated for privacy's sake, the most emotionally fragile of their number was having his own problems resolved in a hopefully more enduringly healthy way. "...And that's why I'm no longer legally permitted to drive while wearing a blue shirt with parachute pants," Danny said, laying down on a classic psychiatrist's couch. No one was sure where he'd gotten it.

Jarod, sitting on a chair opposite him, gave him a dubious look. "Are you even old enough to drive?"

"Yes!

"All right, all right, it's honestly hard to tell."

Danny shrugged. "Mmm. No big deal. I _guess_." He gave Jarod a sour look, and the man sighed; Danny wasn't unpredictable, exactly, but he had proven to be rather volatile. Jarod didn't know if it was a consequence of the Heartless attack changing something in his personality or a already existing trait, but Danny's emotions were always extreme with very little warning between mood shifts; his temper was particularily prone to being riled. It wasn't something that novox music seemed to help much. On spite of that, he remained an easygoing boy, but Jarod wasn't sure Danny trusted him, which was essential for helping him with his problems.

It wouldn't have felt so personal if the others had mistrusted him, but, as Jarod had confirmed on his way in and observed that anyone who looked at him only gave him brief glances more disinterested than anything, just about everyone there thought of him as either a helpful fixture or 'that guy Kimblee had a psycho-crush on'. Neither were particularily appealing, so he did the diplomatic thing and adjusted his personality so he didn't care.

That was coming easier these days and it disturbed him. Not quite as much as the memories that weren't his flooding into his brain and informing every other thought with more than a thousand lifetime's worth of personal opinion, weighted thought and _experience _more than anything. He could see a situation and immediately see all the possible ways to do things, because those memories had already witnessed if not done every conceivable action.

Disturbing, and yet exciting. "I have to ask," he said, changing the subject. "Why the couch? I don't know if people even use these anymore."

Danny shrugged. "You're the shrink, you tell me."

"...Why do they call psychiatrists shrinks?"

Danny gave him a look. "Seriously? That's what TV people call them. I have no idea why, but, c'mon, don't you watch TV?"

"All the time," Jarod said easily. He frowned. "I was locked up in a containment facility after I was taken away from my parents and I never saw TV until I was over thirty years old. I've never had popular culture imprinting."

Danny stared uneasily at Jarod. "...Oh. Um...sorry?"

"It's okay, don't worry about it." Jarod leaned back. "So I hear you, Zim and your friend Aang were a hero team?"

"Sure, on and off. Trouble happened, we got together and stopped it. It was fun." Danny considered, and added, "The rest of Team Avatar and friends we had joined every so often. Depended on how bored they were and how big the apparent threat was. Bad side was, _everyone _made enemies with everyone's bad guy gallery, but the good side was...uh, basically the same thing, but spreading around the ire makes the bad guys a little more casual about it and they get less vindictive. Weird but true."

Jarod nodded glumly. "You can't stand recurring villains, I take it."

Danny nodded too, just as glumly. "It's cool when they give it up and decide to hang out with you, but when they keep showing up out of the blue to kill you or whatever? I _hate _that! Zim and Dib bickering all the time was bad enough-" Danny stopped and grimaced, clearly thinking about something that was painful to remember. "...Um. Anyway. Uh...hey! Did you ever have any bad guys? Aang told me Zim said you fight bad guys too."

"...When did he have time to tell him that...?" Jarod wondered. He decided it wasn't that important and nodded. "Usually I never see someone evil more than once. Not because they die, because _that's _something people like us don't let happen-"

"Of course," Danny agreed, approvingly.

"But they always end up in prison like they deserve. Usually after getting a confession out of them in a suitable dramatic way, or beaten through more conventional means. I do the latter more often then I used to, come to think of it."

"You must have had at least one guy that wouldn't die or get thrown off and kept showing up all the time," Danny insisted. "It's, like, a rule!"

"...Well," Jarod said reluctantly, not really happy to reveal personal information when he remembered not to but too earnest in getting the boy's trust to be bothered. "There was this _one _man; I'm certain he was mentioned at some point by your friend Zim, called Mr. Lyle?"

"...Oh yeah, he was that guy Zim said attacked him and some of his new buds while they were lost in Foster's before it exploded and got unexploded," Danny recalled. "That's a weird coincidence." He gave Jarod a look that plainly said 'I SO don't think it's really a coincidence'.

Neither did Jarod. "I'm not so sure it is one. The last time I saw Mr. Lyle, he wasn't working in any capacity to deal with a group containing high-profile targets like some of the people in Zim's group, and I don't mean Kim's team or Abel Nightroad; it was sheer coincidence and good timing that Zim picked them up. I'm refering to Calvin and Hobbes." Danny looked at him, befuddled. "Those two are some very controversial and skilled adventurers from another 'verse with a powerful galactic-scale federation...kingdom...empire mishmashed thing called the Brighthammer Kingdom or the Comic Kingdom. Calvin and Hobbes are both pretty high-placed in their ranks; I'm not sure how they found Zim or got hired to fight for him, but Lyle had some extremely sensitive intel on them. I'm willing to bet that Lyle's found some very powerful backers."

Danny frowned. "Who was this Lyle guy working with before?" He asked, clipped and more professional this time.

"An extradimensional agency called Wolfram and Hart, but I'm pretty sure you heard that. And even so, I'm prepared to bet good money that Lyle's found even bigger backers now."

"Bigger than extradimensional?" Danny said dubiously.

Jarod slowly nodded. "The last time I saw Mr. Lyle...well. I did everything in my power, but he wound up in a situation where he died."

"...Oh," Danny said, surprisingly indifferent. "One of _those _things. Mr. Jarod, one thing I've seen is that whenever the bad guy is supposed to get killed no matter what? Nine times out of five they _always _live. And yeah, I know my math sucks there, kinda just to illustrate the point."

"No, you don't understand," Jarod said. "I'm not speaking metaphorically. Lyle _died_. I saw him get crushed in a black hole."

For a while, the silene was deafening even with the drive music and video game soundtracks ruining the mood.

"Great," Danny said, like a guy who knew perfectly well that death wasn't so much of a final fate as a moderate hindrance in some cases. "Bad guy coming back from the dead is even _worse!_"

Jarod nodded, again. "The best case scenario there is _merely _that he at some point acquired the resources to have a clone made of him and his consciousness keyed to it so that in the event of his death, his mind would leave his corpse and be re-embodied in the new shell."

"BEST case?!" Danny said.

"That's just based on what was likely to happen," Jarod said. "Worst case scenario, given what I know of his practices and percentages of action following death? That having cultivated fiendish contacts through his tenure as an employee for a extradimensional law firm that assists hell-things, he had already prepared for this eventuality and cut a beforehand deal with some high-ranking fiend or another, allowed them to transform him into something that is no longer quite human and gradually 'evolving' into an actual devil in his own right, all in both a wish to continue doing what he enjoys and to avoid true damnation by a second death that would render the contract null and void, now walking the worlds on behalf of his hellish masters to do their will."

"...Huh," Danny said, raising an eyebrow. "And that's...that's something you honestly expect happened."

"I don't seriously think that's the most likely possibility," Jarod said, looking a bit embarrased for even mentioning it. "It's downright absurd, messes with a few fundamental laws of supernatural physics, and assumes that Mr. Lyle would be far more important and competent to the personified forces of evil than I honestly think he would. Still..." He shrugged. "I've already made plans for these and six other alternative causes for Lyle's return, just in case."

Danny blinked, clearly dumbfounded, and shrugged. "I've seen weirder things," he admitted. "Heck, most of my old rogue's gallery were from a dimension composed of energized ectoplasm that sometimes thought were dead people, happened to just look like ghosts, or _were_ actualdead people. Sometimes bad guys died, wound up there, and showed up to harrass my friends." He sighed. "That never stops being weird. The dead coming back, I mean. And I'm half-ghost, it sounds weird just saying that."

Jarod nodded. his eyes unfocused briefly. "Death isn't the end most people think it is. It's hard to say _what _it is, but..." He shook his head. "I don't think I ever understood what it meant to die or what happens, just that with the universe's current state it's a simple function of things. I remember there was this one blowhard in Sigil who talked about the afterlives and I put him on the spot to die right there after _I _died and got back up, and Morte was always making stupid jokes about it and-" Jarod stopped, looking bewildered.

Danny blinked. He stared at Jarod. "_What _did you say?"

Jarod opened his mouth. He paused. He closed it. He shook his head. "I don't... it's nothing. Don't worry about it." In spite of that, he looked deeply disconcerted, like a man at sea who had just had his boat abruptly turn into a flock of seagulls and dump him in the ocean.

Danny seemed to respond to that, and said, "You said you _died_."

Jarod was silent.

"And did you just say something about that weird skull guy Zim was travelling with? The lazy one that didn't do anything? Morte! That was his name, right?" Danny looked at Jarod more intently than he'd focused on anything in a while. "...You know him, don't you."

It was a statement, not a question. Jarod seemed to respond to the tone, pulling him out of whatever unfamiliar zone he'd been sinking into. "...When I was captured by Kimblee and he used those..._things _to have me help power his giant robot, they..." he waved his hands indistinctly, trying to gesture his way through the indefinable, of having hearts consumed with total evil and darkness ripping into his mind and swelling with every single moment in his life they could find, glutting on the horrors behind his eyes until he couldn't feel anything but hate and rage and such awful isolation, that he was alone and forsaken and _drowning_... He managed, "They did _things _to my head, I don't know what. They reached in and used the worst parts of my life to add power to themselves. Feeding on pain and misery." _And betrayal, and madness, _a stray thought commented. He ignored it. Carefully, he couched his next words. "They reached...deep, if you understand what I mean. Deeper than my sub-consciousness, or my actual memories."

Danny tilted his head, puzzled. "I'm not sure where you're going with that? Why would they do that and what did it do to you?"

"I'm not sure they were doing _anything _on purpose; those abominations don't seem to have any purpose at all unless they have something to destroy or corrupt. My point is..." He grimaced. "I don't _know _what they did or what happened to me, exactly, but ever since then...ugh."

Jarod put a hand on his forehand, and he half-imagined that he might feel it thumping with the force of all the foriegn memories there fit to split him open. "They ripped open _something _in my mind, and ever since then, I've been seeing..._things_." Noticing Danny's horrified look, he quickly added, "No, no! I don't mean I've been hallucinating or been 'infected' by whatever transformed them. What I mean is..." He sighed. "It's like there was a vault, or something sealed down there, and the Heartless accidentally ripped it open. Ever since that fight? I've been remembering memories that aren't...ah, they _couldn't _be mine, it's completely impossible for me to have experienced or done anything that happens in them." And yet, his tone indicated that he wasn't entirely sure there.

Danny shifted restlessly. Dispite himself, he sounded concerned. "You think they might have, I dunno, implanted memories from dead people into your head?"

"It's a possibility," Jarod said, sounding like he'd considered this possibility. "But these memories...if they came from other people, I'm sure they'd feel off, at least like something that was 'other'. But they feel...right, almost. Like I'm remembering something I forgot. And they're coherent. A kind of personal narrative that's largely similar enough even if disturbingly unfocused. Not that they're unpleasant; I've been getting a tremendous amount of information from them, like...like someone took a library and stuffed it into my brain and I'm slowly started to understand everything in it. Just..." He bit his lip. "Morte was in them. A _lot _of them."

Danny just looked at Jarod, who plainly understood even less than Danny did. He opened his mouth to offer some other theory or some vain comfort, and couldn't come up with anything.

"I feel like I used to be someone else," Jarod said quietly. "And that those memories are _mine,_ they've just been jarred loose." He laughed quietly. "And of course _that's _impossible. I did the research and looked up some of the things I saw in the...visions? Memories? Whatever they are. All of them that I could historically verify happened centuries before I was born."

Looking like he might as well go all out, Danny valiantly offered, "Maybe reincarnation is actually a thing and those memories are from your last incarnation?"

"If that's the case, it's either all the memories from all my incarnations or I lived a _really _long time," Jarod said, nodding. Danny blinked, he hadn't expected for Jarod to _believe _that. "Most of the buildings, technology and people I saw in them are from vastly different worlds, dimensions and time periods."

Danny shifted again. "...Okay, I got nothing," He admitted. "I guess when Zim comes back, you could just ask that Morte guy what he thinks about this? The people he hung out with, who he knew way back when, that kind of thing."

"Maybe," Jarod said. Inexplicably, and he didn't seem aware of it, he smiled, just like a man who heard that a very old and good friend would be coming by later and was looking forward to it the visit. his eyes zoned out, and gave the impression that he was moving through mindscapes vast and wondrous, though perhaps bitter and terrible and places, marveling at all the newfound possibilities they offered, awakening yet more potential and abilities within him, and with an almost childlike wonder as though his eyes had been freshly opened anew a bit closer to the ultimate truth of the universe, the secrets of the cosmos whispered into him and telling him of the nature of all things...

Danny, decided that now was the time to change the subject, glanced up at the ceiling where, above them, Sam was with Kim and Toph and smiled slightly at the thought that she was still there. "Uh, Mr. Jarod? You've been around a while? Have you ever...I dunno, _liked _a girl? Like, in a big-time way?"

Jarod's mind drifted back from wherever it had gone, and with the same small wondering smile, he laughed warmly and said, "Let me tell you about a woman I knew named Ms. Parker..."

* * *

Kevin Ethan Levin's brain, lodging itself up after days spent in a warm comforting fuzz best left to unconsciousness, warmed up to regular speed, and for a few brief horrible moments after he opened his eyes but before he had acclimated to his surrondings, his mind made all the wrong associations (_steel-hard walls and surface under him, a ceiling over him and he was back THERE, back in the clutches of the people who had captured him and broken him, they were going to make him a monster again and rip his brain to itty-bitty pieces and put the pieces back together and turn him into a horrible thing again, no one was going to save him this time and he was back THERE_-)

He jerked to a sitting position and instinctively summoned the genetic echo of Pyrotian flames, holding his hand out for the fires, and nothing happened. his hand didn't swell up into a misshapen horror of living fire, remaining a weak and too pale and malnourished stick figure image of a hand and it was _his _hand, human and pale and utterly fresh of mutations from stolen Omnitrix energy.

There was nothing to summon. The energy of the Omnitrix, all it's maddening power, was _gone_. He was free.

his brain came to a stop, gradually chugging back up again. his other hand tensed as he wondered what was happening to him, and it closed around soft fabric laid over his legs. He looked down, wondering what it was, and stared for a long time at the fluffy blankets layered over him in a dishelved tangle that he'd shoved them into without realizing it.

A bed. A big soft comfortable warm _bed_, dimpled slightly around his slight body. He stared for a long time at it, unfamiliar wetness prickling at the corners of his eyes. The room, he realized, was a sterilized and pleasant whiteness, the absence of color a relief to too-tired eyes and a reminder that this was a place where things were made clean and whole; next to his bed was a table covered with a number of odd-looking medical devices (far stranger than anything he'd seen when being experimented on and also definitely more benign), a room next to him that seemed nothing more than a small bathroom. Clearly, he was in a hospital of some kind, perhaps even the mobile one Kimblee had wanted to destroy earlier. (He wasn't in a position to know but this was, in fact, the case.)

his mind froze, half-expecting the madman in question to assert control of his brain and prove that it had been a cruel game, and for a moment, there was nothing in his head but a horrible gray blankness. And blankness it continued to be, his hear beating faster and faster as the absolute certainty grew to a peak, began dwindling in confusion, and when nothing answer Kevin but his own mind, faded away.

his mind kept returning to the bed, that wonderfully soft and warm and good _bed_, a real bed like he hadn't slept in for years, not since he ran away from home and then everything had come crashing down and he'd fallen lower and lower until he was just a vicious ugly monster inside and out and then he'd fallen even further, and then they'd cut him up again and again and shoved monsters down his head and he'd thought he was gonna die and here he was in a real bed-

Kevin closed his eyes and listened. Where there had been, at best, a loathsome and awful presence chanting imprecations at him, there was just blissful silence. Nothing more than his own thoughts, safe and sound in his skull. He looked at his hands, human and totally unmutated, and slowly flexed them, savoring the feel of his own muscles being stretched and pulled at his will, weak but _him_, his own. his hands, his own hands, controlled only by him.

Kevin spent nearly five minutes just staring at his hands, not even noticing the wetness spilling down his face and the inelegant blubbering he was making, just flexing and moving his fingers and turning his hands around and still just barely comprehending that his body was his own again, uncontrolled and human again, in a place thousands of verses away from that horrorshow he'd been trapped in, and he was _free_. He was alive, he was safe, he was in some kind of hospital where they gave him blankets and he was _free_.

Kevin didn't realized he'd been crying until he wiped his face to see what the puzzling slickness was and felt the tears dripping off his face. He smiled weakly through the tears and only lasted a few moments before he put his face in his hands and just let himself cry like the young teenager he really was. For the first time in so long, he let himself be the child that had grown up too fast. Every wracking sob was a release of pain and fear kept inside for too long, memories of knives and scapels and invasive surgeries and worse things left to wither with each pitiable noise he made, and he finally dared to hope like he hadn't since he was a small child.

"It's over," he whispered. his body was his own again. Kimblee was gone. Ghostfreak was just a bad memory. And there were almost no signs of any of the injuries he should have acclimated during the fight. And, of all the things he'd never really expected to happen, he was still alive. "It's over." Lips slid back over teeth that were straighter than he ever remembered them being, and the sobs became quieter and happier, and there was hardly a difference of noise distinct enough to notice a graduation in the character of the sounds he made until he was no longer crying but laughing, unbridled joy that made the tears fall harder than ever.

Kevin failed to notice the intercom by his bedside light up, and it sent the appropiate signal to a desktop manned by people whose job it was to monitor the patients, and the appropiate people with waiting guests were sent out.

Kevin slumped back, falling on his back and stared up at the ceiling with a silly grin on his face, just happy to be himself again and free of all the monstrous baggage he'd been saddled with for so long. He was free of everything, even the Omnitrix energy he'd stolen. He was just Kevin Levin again.

It was a good thought. It was the first really good thing he'd felt in so long.

It hurt to turn his neck when he saw the door open with a pressurized hiss and in came a beautiful and extremely tough-looking buxom woman with lots of blonde hair pulled back in twin ponytails, wearing a loosely fitting outfit that looked something like doctor's scrubs (only with more belts and zippers). "Huh, you're awake already. I _told _them, but does anyone ever listen to me? Nope, but here we are." The woman said, striding right over to him and smirking faintly down at him, a surprisingly kindly expression. She patted him on the shoulder, and Kevin thought it should have been reflexive for him to jerk away after everything that had happened recently whenever someone had touched his body. Except that her hand felt so warm, and she was smiling nicely, and no one had touched him for any reason other than to hurt him in so long.

Kevin managed to pull himself up, and he felt a bit dizzy for a few seconds when he moved too fast. He grabbed the iron railings aside his bed and held on tightly, grimly determined not to lose it ever again. "Y-yeah," He managed to say. "I'm up." He rubbed his head and winced. "Geez, how long was I out?"

The woman consulted a chart she was carrying. "A few days; two and a half, I guess, hard to tell culmatively, seeing as you've been in and out of it. You woke up a few times, incoherent most of the time. Usually convinced someone was, say, torturing you for medical purposes. Pretty rude, I'd say."

Kevin blinked. "...Huh. Who are you? And where the hell am I?"

"Name's Tsunade," The woman, now properly identified, said. "I'm the representative to the Council of Insert Nomenclature from the Shinobi Guild, and the foremost expert in chakra-centric methods of medical work here. As for the rest, you're in the mobile hospital of Traverse Town, hanging around the Upper District right now. It says your name's Kevin Levin; is that right?"

Kevin nodded. "Yeah," He said, and felt a bit stupid for marveling at how _awesome _it felt to feel air from his throat coursing over his tongue and being shaped into words all by his own volition. "What happened? Back...y'know, _there_." He made a movement that contrived to indicate all the conflict at the end of the big fight that was incidentally the last thing he remembered.

"Guy called Scar from our religious super-buddies in the Crossguard brought you in after Kimblee got evicted from your personal real estate," Tsunade informed Kevin, looking unsure if he remembered it or not. "After we brought you in and figured that nothing too bad was with you aside from some _serious _malnutrition and some lingering body malfunctions, we gave you a bath of green eco and then more of the same but intravenously fed into your bloodstream. Your body seems to be reacting espically well to it, better than anyone I saw who wasn't an eco channeler and better than half of those who are." She checked the chart and made an interested noise. "Says here it might be 'cause you looked like you're half-Osmosium and you definitelly have the innate ability to absorb energy and material substance. Any comment on that?"

"Uh yeah, I can do that stuff," Kevin said. "Never tried absorbing physical stuff before, though."

"Probably safer than sucking up energy," Tsunade said dryly. "That's just crazy for one of you guys, I've heard."

Kevin nodded dumbly, thinking to himself that the irony was a little sickening; if he'd ever heard of _that _before he'd gone to the streets, he'd have had a much less sucky life. Questions raced through his head, competing for attention, and all he could do was just sit still and feel the hurting fade away.

Seeing that he was in some degree of confusion, Tsunade sat down and began quietly talking to him. It wasn't anything important; just general questions about how Kevin was feeling (sucky-ish, but way better than before), if he had any family in town (definitely not) and a few other similar questions, gradually going easier on him and throwing a few sneaky questions that, though Kevin didn't realize it, pulled vital pieces of information on Kimblee's motives and doings prior to the attack on Foster's and allowed Tsunade to quietly piece them together without putting undue stress on Kevin.

In time, Kevin did start telling Tsunade what he knew, and was almost eager to do it. Mostly he didn't tell her (and by eventually extension, the rest of the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and the people they were in communication with, and the people loyal to _them_, and so on) anything she didn't already know, but there were a few useful bits of information here and there. The stuff refering to Deidara was extremely interesting...

Eventually, when she was satisfied with the answers and Kevin was left none the wiser (and probably more relaxed, to his continued benefit) Tsunade said to him, "So tell me something, kid; you up for visitors?"

Kevin blinked. "Uh, sure, I guess, but I don't know anyone who'd want to visit me. Wait, or is this more official visits?"

"Nah." Tsunade waved her hand dismissively. "Turns out that there _are _people in town who know you from your original world. They were _very _interested in hearing about you after things cooled down, and they're willing to take you into their home if you're okay with it."

Kevin blinked again, more dumbfounded than ever, and nodded slowly, wondering what the hell was going on. Tsunade shrugged and went over to the door, and opened it. It was jostled open from the other side, and Kevin soon saw who was waiting on the other side

his jaw dropped, the logical part of his mind throwing a fit at this lastest insanity. "No. Freaking. _Way._"

"Yes way," said Ben Tennyson cheerfully, of surprising good mood given that he and Kevin were old arch-enemies (or had been before the Heartless had come), his cousin Gwen smiling shyly at Kevin, and a large and grizzled but friendly-looking older man dressed in casual clothing that was so eclectic and tacky that it looked like tourist-wear, patiently standing behind them with his hands on their shoulders; their grandfather, Max Tennyson.

"Hey, Kevin!" Gwen said, a little too quickly and brightly to be entirely natural from the hot-blooded girl Kevin remembered. "Haven't seen you since...our world got eaten or exploded or whatever." A long silent moment passsed. She grimaced. "Okay. Not the best line to say."

"Hey," Max said shortly, looking deeply unsure of himself, giving Kevin a look of such surprisingly intense study, coupled with a speculative frown, that it spooked Kevin a little. Ben nudged him and Max made a 'hmm'ing noise, clearly trying to put together a thought that was at least halfway diplomatic. Since all their previous meeting had coincided with Kevin trying to kill his grandchildren (save for the very last time, when their world have been destroyed and Kevin had helped them escape for reasons unclear to them), his reticence wasn't surprising, though he was still warmer than Kevin would have exprected.

"Yo," said Ben Tennyson, he of the extreme understatement.

Kevin just stared at them, his mouth open. "You," He finally said. "Have _got_ to be kidding me."

"Oh, so you're one of those guys that have 'histories'," Tsunade said dryly, making quotation marks with her fingers. "Well, good, at least you know each other."

"Yeah, you could say that," Kevin and Ben said at the same time. They froze after speaking and glared at each other, openly disturbed to be on the same wavelength.

"Well, nice to see you already got a rapport or whatever. Later kid, hope things work out for you." Tsuande smiled slightly. "At least you'll have a home waiting for you. Good luck, Mr. Levin." She left, saying 'hi' to Ben and Gwen and giving Max an altogether more familiar greeting before departing properly, leaving Kevin with them.

Kevin's brain, logged into standstill by these events, just stared with his mouth open until it all clicked together thanks to that 'home' comment. "No way. NO FREAKING WAY. _You _are the guys that she said are gonna take me in!?"

"Yep," Ben said, shrugging carelessly. "Small world, huh."

Kevin stared at him a bit longer, uncomfortably aware of the history between them. It didn't seem to matter that much at the moment, though, not with the other and much fresher horrors still preying on him. "...I've been trying to kill you guys for like forever now," He finally said, still unable to grasp anything past that. "Why in the world would you want me in your home!? Why are you even up here!? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?"

"None of that language in my household, young man," Grandpa Max said firmly. "Self-control is something you'll definitely find soon, for the best!"

"It's a legitimate question, though," Gwen said fairly.

"It is?" Ben said, frowning. "Hey, it's easy; Kevin needs help, we know him, we're right there to help him out! It's that easy!"

"No it's not," Kevin said, facepalming. It felt so good to cover his eyes, and he felt so tired; nothing would have pleased him better than to just lie down and go back to sleep for, like, forever.

But he'd been fighting with all his might against torturers and wannabe multiverse conquerers for way too long, and even though he didn't have the words to think to himself that he was just too spitefully stubborn to just _quit _like that so simply, it was still the reason he managed to keep himself up for long enough right now. "What do you guys want with me?" Kevin managed, and he hated how _weak _his voice sounded right then. "I just got out of being experimented on by evil jerks out to take over everything and being posessesed by a crazy guy, I'm _really _not in the mood to fight you guys anymore."

Ben quirked an eyebrow. "You mean you don't want to go back to being my number one arch enemy again?"

"No!" Kevin said, and it was more of a snarl. "I've had enough of being the bad guy, it just made my life suck-ish and horrible. Being the bad guy _sucks_."

Ben blinked, and grinned. "Well, perfect! That works with our plans all nice and neat. What with you not being evil and criminally insane and stuff."

"I was not criminally insane!" Kevin snapped. "I was..." He paused. He reflected that 'criminally insane' was in fact the most accurate description of his previous behavior (and was in fact a possible way out of this mess). He grimaced. "...Okay, yeah. I'll give you that one. ...Frak it."

"Kevin," Gwen said gently, and Kevin turned his head to peer at her and all the suspicious thoughts and unpleasant associations drained away from him in a warm little fuzz just by looking at her; he'd forgotten, but she was seriously pretty. his eyes drank in the deep redness of her hair - like the near-orange of ripe fruits or the rims of wood-fed fire- and the delicate curve of her jawline, dipping down from her ears into the not-quite elegant point of her chin. The fierce green-ness of her eyes, as bright as the Omnitrix, as if that light had been rendered into pure color, the gentle curves of her growing hips and the suggestions of lady-like statuesque looks in her figure. He watched her, overwhelmed by a sudden need to not upset her, to gain her respect and approval.

She continued. "We're not after anything. You don't have anything we want to take, we're not interested in starting up that stupid hero-villain thing you and Ben had going, and we're definitely not going to pick on you after you've been through...all that." She said this last with more delicacy than Kevin thought he deserved, but he appreciated the thought. She smiled faintly, and with quiet honestly, simply said, "We just want to help you, Kevin. We know each other. It's never been the best way, and I guess it could have always gone better, but we're from the same world you're from. We're all that's left of that place. Even if we never had met, we'd still have that in common."

"Seems legit," Kevin said, mostly because Gwen had said it; in the privacy of his head part of him thought that Gwen still wasn't making any sense, and another part of Kevin told _that _part to shut right the hell up, the pretty girl had been talking.

"Well, after that, it seems a shame to just send you off to Foster's where you'd wind up with people who don't even know you, or get harrassed by nosy people for your involvement in the whole Kimblee incident," Max continued. "And, well, there's other reasons there, but mostly Ben and Gwen convinced me to let bygones be bygones."

"Okay, now I'm really confused," Kevin said, and was silent for a moment, waiting for Ghostfreak's sarcastic commentary before he remembered that Ghostfreak was gone. He was still getting used to that, and warmed up to the thought. "How'd you guys even find out I was here? Or that I was even involved in that?"

"We saw you on TV," Ben said, looking at Kevin like he was an idiot. "Duh."

Kevin blinked. "I was on TV?"

"Yeah, that one news group that got a new studio covered the whole thing," Gwen said. "They did a bunch of specials on it, produced a 'best of action' virtual network series on the most liked parts of the fights, and I hear they're making a documentary on it after they interview the key players in it. Something about 'the biggest disaster to hit Traverse Town since the Lowardian invasion', and 'being brought to our senses after having our naivety cleared up'." She thought about going on in this vein but clearly thought better of it. "You know, you could probably make a fair bit of money by having your memories copied and adapted into that documentary, not to mention all the other people who'd like a cut of that."

"Wouldn't that make me lose those memories, though?" Kevin asked, perking right up at the sound of making money with almost no effort on his part.

"No, they just copy it," Max said. "Memory erasing is a tricky business, and usually fairly stupid in almost all but the most serious cases."

"Dang it," Kevin muttered. "Figures. Eh, the guys in charge of this place would probably want me to tell them everything about where I've been and junk." He frowned. Come to think of it, trying to remember _exactly _where he'd been, the details of it and most of the names he'd heard were pretty foggy...

"Yeah, probably, who cares?" Ben, not one of humanity's born inspirational speakers, said. "So are you in or what? 'Cause I bet I know some people who might have you declared not of sound mind so you'd just _have _to come with us. We might do that anyway, you're probably half-crazier than usual. You _used _to be half-crazy anyway but it was psycho-crazy! The big-time 'I'm a big jerk for no reason so I'mma KILL EVERYTHING JUST BECAUSE' kind of crazy. You've gone and flipped it to actual 'needing professional help' crazy. I saw those specials, you kept trying to get people to kill you. What's up with that?"

"...It seemed like a good idea at the time," Kevin said sheepishly.

Ben shrugged. "Huh. On the bright side, you're not big and all monster-ish anymore. How'd that happen?"

"No freaking idea. I ain't complaining, though."

"Good, because that'd make you both really nitpicky and tremendously ungrateful," Gwen remarked. Kevin grimaced. She raised an eyebrow imperiously and he hastily looked at the wall and tried to pretend she was there disapproving at him and it was no good, he could just _feel _her glaring at him. He shuddered, in that uniquely male way of a guy who knew that a girl he kinda-sorta liked was mad at him and he wasn't entirely sure why.

He rallied, and said, "Yeah, well, how'd you get those talisman things on your arm!" He retorted. "I heard they got blown up by that Hex jerk back home before the planet exploded!"

"...They got better, I guess?" Gwen said lamely. "Actually, it's kind of a funny story. Not funny 'ha-ha', more like funny-weird, though believe or not there's a emotion-eating clown involved and he turned into a giant spider because I scared him half to death even Ben already did that and-"

"Chill, Gwen, you can tell him later when we get him home," Ben interrupted. Gwen swiveled about and glared at him, which he studiously ignored. "Although I kinda want to know how Kevin heard about those magic talismans in the first place."

"Yeah, funny story about _that_-" Kevin started to say. "Hey, wait a minute, don't go distracting me! What are you guys talking about, bringing me home!? Did you seriously just-" He put his hands over his eyes, trying to place his thoughts together and make his suspicions override the rather stronger feelings that kept coming to him whenever the possibility of having a home to go to was mentioned to him, regardless of the peculiar circumstances. "Ugh, this is almost as crazy as listening to that Kimblee freak!"

"What are you so bent out of shape about?" Ben asked. "What's so bad about living with us?"

"IT MAKES NO FREAKING SENSE!" Kevin yelled. "I've tried to kill you guys! Well, mostly Ben, but I think I had Gwen for a hostage a few times. And, wait, I'm not sure I've even spoken to you before, old guy."

"My name is Max," The old guy in question said sternly.

"Right, old guy. Just...why would you want me, who spent most of the last few years being crazy, living with you!?"

"Well, apart from the fact that Ben's had this odd obsession for some time," Max said. "Insisting he had a time traveling experience where he met a alternate future where he met the three of you as teenagers and your alternate wasn't much worse than a mildly anti-heroic superhero that was best friends with that future's Ben and Gwen and it's given him the idea that in the right circumstances you could have been a hero."

Kevin stared blankly. "...That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"Yeah, that's what we said," Gwen added. "Seriously, Ben. What would older me be doing wearing a skirt all the time if we were fighting aliens?"

"Hey, I just told you what happened, it's not like the whole thing was my idea!" Ben said. "If it was, we'd have had gatling gun jetpacks, the Omnitrix could clone armies of the aliens in it, a time-traveling alien with an awesome living ship would have helped us out and made us his best buddies forever, and alternate Kevin wouldn't have gone crazy again like he did. Also, everyone would get awesome color-coded superhero outfits. So there!"

"What was that about me going crazy?" Kevin asked, blanking out on most of that.

"It's not really that important," Max said. "Sorry, Ben, but we need to focus here and get Kevin on board."

"On board for what?"

"We're restarting the Plumbers here," Ben said. "We've been doing it for a while but we need more people and-"

"Hush," Max said absently. He sighed, scratching his forehead, and finally reached into his pocket. "Kevin, the thing is...I know a fair bit more about you than any of us thought I did. The main point is that a long time ago, I made a promise to a friend of mine that I'd look out for you if anything ever happened to him. I tried to make good on that promise, but you disappeared before I could find you. When I met you, I had no idea whose son you were, and when I figured it out..." He looked away. "Well. You wouldn't exactly have been willing to accept my help or listen to me."

Ben and Gwen were looking away, seeming embarrassed. Kevin blinked. "'Whose son' I was?" his back shivered, and the hand squeezing the metal railing of his bed unconsciously took on the same mineral structure as the railing, and a coating of steel slid over his hand without Kevin noticing. "No. No way. _No way_."

Max walked over and took a small flat disc, big enough to be a communications device or a badge, and placed it on the bed. "This was your fathers'," He said simply.

Kevin slowly picked it up. "A Plumber's badge?" He said, staring at it, vaugely remembering such things from his mom's stories about his real father. his next words were almost whispers, fighting to get through the frightening numbness. "...Where'd you get this?"

"I found it before everything went black back on our Earth," Max said quietly. "I was half-crazy at the time. Suppose I was just thinking that we had to keep everything we could find intact just for the sake of things; this being before we found out that there were hundreds of Earth-like worlds out there, but at the very least I managed to preserve this."

The metal slid off Kevin's hand, and again he didn't notice. If anything, he just hurt all over; the continuing aches from the fight (though the injuries had been transferred to Kimblee), the pains from his trials of his recent traumas and the much worse mental scars, and this latest surprise left him feeling worse than numb, and now he just felt very, very tired. "...Thanks," He said quietly.

"You're welcome, Kevin," Max said. He sat down so he could look the much shorter teen in the eye. "So, Kevin. How about it? You feel like brushing away all those fights you had with us and join up with us? Come and live with the Tennysons? Let me fulfill my promise to your dad and my friend?"

Kevin bowed his head. Wearily, a sense of good fortune overruling his native suspicion, he put a hand to his head. "I...I..."

"You don't have to come up with an answer right away," Max said gently as Ben and Gwen walked over.

Kevin bit his lip, and a sense that his luck had suddenly reversed itself was too overwhelming to ignore; he had gone from being experimented on and tortured for basically no reason to being cared for in a hospital and basically having the grandson of his old arch-nemesis (who seemed to be bearing absolutely no hard feelings at all) want to adopt him.

They wanted to take him home with them. He almost had a _home _waiting for him. It was a struggle not to start crying again. He had a brief moment to look back at his life as it had been, the horrible failures and catastrophes he'd made of it before he met Ben and then things falling straight over the edge and all of it his own fault after Ben tried time and time again to befriend him...and then the Heartless coming. Their world dying, and leaving just them behind, and they wouldn't have even lived if it hadn't been for a lingering impulse to heroism, and then a chain of events later Kevin had wound up captured, tortured and brutalized until this latest atrocity that had inexplicably, amazingly, ended with him being free.

his entire life seemed to untwist and narrow down, a lifetime of choices in the moments all leading up to this specific moment. One final chance to make up for everything he did, and get a life worth living. The second chance he thought he'd never get, that he'd only think of when he was lying half-dead in a pile of bodies and thinking of all the missed opportunites and yet here it was now, just waiting for him to take it. And still it scared him so badly.

Sitting up right was the third hardest thing Kevin ever did. Repressing the urge to jump out of his bed and run away and pretend none of this had happened was nearly as hard as not freaking out when Ben came to Kevin with his hand stretched out and a smile on his face, which was the second hardest thing Kevin had ever done. (Partly because that was the Omnitrix on his arm and Kevin was justifiably suspicious of the transformative device after all the trouble that had come to him because of it, though much of that was his fault again.) Ben smiled more gently than Kevin had ever seen, a shadow of the true hero he could one day be on his face, and he said, "How about it? We could've been friends back when we first met even if you were crazy then, so let's fix that little screw-up and...aw forget it, I'm not good at these big heroic speeches, so just stop being a twitchy jerk and do the hero team-up thing and just come with us already!"

Max and Gwen gaped at Ben, and Kevin got a very strong feel of 'this is _not _what we rehearsed' coming from them. They stared to speak but Kevin shook his head as obviously as he could, and licked his lips to unstick them. He started to speak, couldn't find the words, and spent a few too long moments trying to think of what to say and then he just decided to be honest. If nothing else, Ben's words broke through.

Kevin then did the hardest thing he ever did and, instead of listening to that little nagging impulse that this was way too dangerous and suspicious and whatever, he ignored it and made his decision clear by shaking Ben's hand, his too-thin fingers like bendable straws against Ben's knuckles, making sure that his fingers stayed well away from the Omnitrix. "Okay," Kevin said, his voice a harsh croak for a too-long moment. "Okay. I can do that."

Ben grinned, like a plan of his had been set back on track. Gwen looked absolutely delighted. Max seemed quietly satisfied. "Good to hear," Max said, not mentioning that he had already publically adopted Kevin after making plans to help the child. It would smooth over potential bereaucracy problems.

* * *

"Father Nightroad," Mr. Herrimen said patiently from a wheelchair and presently in one of the basements of the new Fosters' home, his voice heavy even now with dignity and good manners. "Kindly remove yourself from the sugar bin!"

"Aw," Abel whined from the railed walkway he was standing on, encircling the top of the enormous plated-steel canister he was about to leap into; given that it was filled with sugar, it was an excellent object lesson for Abel's total obsession with sweet treats. Already anticipating his partner's nearly infamous impulsiveness, Scar was climbing up the thing and hauling himself over to prevent Abel from jumping right into it and contaminating everything. "Come on, you _said _I could get some sugar for my tea, and what kind of example would I be if I didn't take the opportunity to dive into the sugar?!"

"You're be an example of someone who _isn't _tremendously unhygienic enough to swim in sugar," Scar said, grabbing Abel, hoisting him over his shoulder and jumping off back down the ground of the basement level they were in.

"_Thank _you," Mr. Herrimen said gratefully from a wheelchair parked next to a small table with a number of coffee related implements upon it, several cups already laid out for his guests. Scar approached, putting Abel down. "Father Nightroad, you are a role model for people! I should think that you should pay more attention to your behavior. Think of the effect it has on people."

"I think it has the effect of broadening people's minds because once they get used to me doing these silly things, they don't have knee-jerk reactions to such behavior from random others," Abel replied, straightening his coat and actually trying to look professional for once. Apart from the fact that he'd shaven all the hair on one side of his head for some absurd reason.

"Perhaps," Mr. Herrimen said, quite aware that the moment was getting away from them. "In any event, gentleman, the coffee is getting cold."

"Cold coffee is an abomination!" Abel said, horrified. "Quickly, to _business!_" He grabbed an elegant bucket with measurements upon it, hurried back to the sugar machine and filled the bucket up, and returned to the table. "Here we are! Sugar for everyone! Whee! I'm excited just thinking about it."

Scar stared sideways at him, but did not comment. Mr. Herrimen opened his mouth to say something, but went silent at a look from Scar. Coffee was measured out, an act of considerable silence among the three men; Abel and Mr. Herrimen had a shared culture to draw from, and regardless of minor differences between their versions of Britain at least the need for ceremony in such matters was present in both. Scar, his native culture dedicated to a strict code of conduct, didn't really see the point of it, but was polite enough not to comment on it and gracefully wheeled Mr. Herrimen about when the imaginary rabbit politely indicated that he needed to be moved. (The heavy old-fashioned wheelchair he had insisted on not really being meant for propulsion by the user, a critical design flaw. But it _did _look cool, in a baroque wrought-iron way.)

Coffee was served, drunk (and in Abel's case, slurped; he put in so much sugar that his cup basically contained sweet coffee-flavored sludge) and minor matters were discussed, among them the reasons for Scar and Abel's presence. The days since Kimblee's attack had become smoother as of late, but there were still matters needing tidied up, and Scar had dedicated himself to them with frightening intensity.

"You are still having trouble organizing the building," Scar said eventually, as conversation turned that way.

Mr. Herrimen nodded sadly. "Indeed. I know Captain Armstrong meant well, and he did a fantastic job of reworking that regrettable violence to our gain, but his sense of architectural sense does not..." Mr. Herrimen shook his head, his great ears flopping listlessly. "It does not easily translate to general use, if you will pardon my bluntness." He shook his head. "Even two days in trying to organize properly and we still haven't discovered all the rooms and chambers within, how they are connected by the secret passages he saw fit to include, let alone have them mapped and have a modicum of order properly reset! We're having to group people by exploration teams inbetween assignments in exploring the new house, did you know? Miss Frankie has had to recruit a skeleton crew of administrators amongst her friends and contacts just to maintain order, and I dread what the Madame will say once she returns from her ill-timed vacation in the tropics."

"Probably that the new place is totally awesome," Abel said. Scar and Mr. Herrimen stared at him. "What? You know she will!"

"I regret to admit that you are likely correct, Father Nightroad," Mr. Herrimen said. "I would simply like to have things properly organized before she returns. I hate having so many unknown quantities in our home. I still haven't the slightest idea how Captain Armstrong had the power already installed when he created the new mansion, but I can't deny that it was of extraordinary help."

"Armstrong is...a very skilled alchemist," Scar said carefully, staring down into his coffee. He frowned, old war memories playing in his head, and he added, "Well-known for raising large structures with little effort."

There was silence.

Abel coughed. "So, uh, Mr. Herrimen! I understand that you wanted a faction presence here?"

Mr. Herrimen snorted. "You know well my preference for keeping Foster's outside of political affairs. However, in the wake of public opinion, I feel that since you had a part in the defeat of that...person who obliterated my home and killed so many, you might well wish to help the residents organize this place as well as we can before someone who had nothing to do with the battle could take the honor from you."

"If you say so, but personally I'm just happy to help." Abel stretched and looked up in interest. "You say this little chamber is located directly under the kitchens?"

"Indeed." Mr. Herrimen gestured around the room; it was not particularily large but it was getting rather crowded with the various appliances people had brought there. More interestingly, there was also a small elevator lift rising up into a trapdoor in the ceiling, going right into a storage room in the kitchens. "I believe this might be suitable as a provisions storage area. I suppose that's why someone had that sugar bin placed there, but for the life of me I have no idea who donated it...or why they thought we'd need one." Abel whistled innocently, and Mr. Herrimen, after a moment, put a hand to his face in beleaugered understanding.

Scar frowned. "You realize that by simply accepting our help, in the eyes of public opinion, you are giving the Crossguard into having influence over your people and household."

Mr. Herrimen said nothing for a moment. "My, but you certainly don't mince words...ah, sir? Knight? Father? Whatever is your title? I thought 'Paladin' was the proper term for a man of your rank in your organization."

"It is."

"Ah, well then. The appropriate response is to point out that I rather don't see a problem with all of that. Or rather, that is my intention." Both Abel and Scar gave Herrimen curious looks. "Part of the reason we were hurt so badly by Kimblee was the insular nature of the house. We kept so many valuable things in it, not the least part of the security system of the entire town. When that fell...well, so did we. And Fosters' has always prided that it stands alone against the hustle and bustle of Traverse Town's chaos; tides of adventure crashed against the shores every day, and we were never so much as moistened by it. We were never _involved,_ save for when we were directly affected." He bowed his head. "And when Solf J. Kimblee made his move, we also stood alone, and there were none fit to defeat him in time among us."

Abel looked thoughtful. "You intend to make the house more open to the public, instead of just a rest stop for refugees and friends of visitors?"

"If that is what the residents and workers wish. I do not intend to _make _Foster's do anything. I am simply a servant to carry out it's will, and that of those I serve." From the twitch of his expansive mustache, he might have smiled. "I believe that the three of us have that in common."

"Yes, there is that," Scar said, and nodded back, slow and deliberate as a metronomic gyroscope.

"If forging stronger ties with your organization - at the expense of our neutrality - will secure future goodwill and bring our respective interests closer together, I see no reason not to pursue this with all haste and alacrity," Mr. Herrimen said.

"What is it you want us to do, exactly?" Abel asked. "Map the house? Me and Scar weren't given much detail when we were sent out here."

"Really? What detail _were _you given?"

Scar and Abel glanced at each other. "Angilaka told us, 'You dorks get to Foster's like right now and take Lindsay and Beth with you because I say so or I'll poke you in the head really hard with a stick'," both of them said in unison.

"It was a really big stick," Abel said. "Like, bigger than me! It probably would have hurt a lot. And I'm still recovering from the whole 'almost being disintegrated by a laser beam' thing from the big fight, so pain hurts extra-bad right now."

"Ah, so your hair is having difficulty regrowing," Mr. Herrimen said. "My sympathies, Father."

"Hrm? Oh no, I just dig this look," Abel said, cheerfully scratching the shaven side of his head. "I saw this look on the vampire queen that's been wowing all the competitors at the Smash Brothers free-for-all gladiator battles! The new management isn't much there but she's just inspiring to all non-stupid vampires!"

"...Ah, you're just participating in being a raging fanboy," Mr. Herrimen said.

"How do you know a word like 'fanboy'?! Or using 'raging' as an adjective?"

Mr. Herrimen ignored him. "So, on the matter which I discussed with you. Would you care to head the exploration teams and examine the mansion so that we might make it ours at last?"

"Sure, okay," Abel said before Scar could do more than open his mouth. Abel glanced at his partner's annoyed expression. "Er...I mean we'd be honored to assist and begin a new regime of mutual benefit and cooperation! Oh yes! It's _definitely _not part of a ever-expanding master plan on my part of uniting the people of this world together in a stable brotherhood of true peace and societal evolution by turning incidents to my own purposes."

"Very good," Mr. Herrimen said, plainly not listening. "Take me up, will you?"

Scar stood up, went to Mr. Herrimen's wheelchair and wheeled him over to the elevator lift, Abel hurrying to keep up and hitting the lever and release button on his way there. Valves turned, gauges pumped and steam hissed from the mechanisms of the lift, and a cylinder-shaped device spin in place around a central shaft in front of them, proving the power that pushed the lift up at a pleasant pace upwards and into the open space above, the lift locking into place with the floor as it was within the proper height, and enabling Scar to wheel Mr. Herrimen out.

Abel, Scar and Mr. Herrimen walked through the kitchens, a very large and definitely noisy chamber lined wall to wall with stoves built with an unusual design that allowed different multi-purpose cooking tools and very specialized applicances to be switched onto the stove at a moments notice to cook an incredible variety of food (given by the fellows from the Guild of Culinary Craftsman, who had volunteered some of their fighting cooks to help out in the transition), conveyer belts moving dirty dishes to the sinks at the back of the room on one side and meals to be set out on the other side (built by some artificers that lived there), rows of industrial-level fridges storing uneaten meals and raw ingredients; and of course all the cooks, washers, extremely bored residents and other people that were there for whatever reason. Nobody said much of anything to them; even though they'd come out of a room no one had seen them go into, it was generally considered that it wasn't worth bothering Mr. Herrimen about.

The kitchens terminated and entered a rather wider room that could be made open to the elements if need be, filled with quite a lot of tables of varying size for people to be seated at as they wished (in stunning contrast to the old fashion of a single huge table that everyone sat at, but even Herrimen had to concede to logistical matters). For a moment Mr. Herrimen hesitated in his direction, clearly wondering whether to go there or not as the others had been instructed to wait in the new vestibum, and Abel gave a slight cough when he heard rather familiar voices. Herrimen sighed, and pointed towards the dining room, and Scar obligingly rolled them through.

Mr. Herrimen gave the dining room a faint sigh; it wasn't quite as grand as the old dining room had been, certainly not with the smaller tables scattered around, and not with even additional levels or staircases to give it more atmosphere. his attention was soon directed towards several young women sitting at a table close to the kitchens: Frankie Foster, Beth, and a minor public relations official from the Crossguard named Lindsay. They went over to them, and Abel waved enthusiastically once he saw who they were, as he worked with two of the ladies in question. Ironically, the two women he knew were the only ones not looking at him, sitting with their backs to him. Frankie, on the other hand, was the first to see them and offered an awkward smile at them.

"...And then you said your boyfriend Spike went off to talk to his monster boy buddies like King Albriecht from the Silver Fangs werewolves or that nice Deucalion guy who talks to the stitchwork boys about being human," Lindsay chattered on, not noticing Frankie's lack of continued contributions to the discussion. She was a fairly tall and exceptionally pretty busty young woman, a perception mostly attributed to her openly good nature and extremely bright demeanor even if she did give off a sense of being only marginally brighter than the average box of rocks. Both she and Beth were dressed in the same kinds of uniform Abel and Scar habitually wore, if somewhat less ornate due to their lower ranking; the Crossguard took the approach toward rank designation by the logic of 'the person with the more absurd outfit MUST be of higher rank just to deal with looking so silly'.

Mr. Herrimen gave off a general sense of dour displeasure. Frankie, trying and failing to stop Lindsay from her rambling, poked Beth and pointed. Beth turned. Mr. Herriman raised an eyebrow. Beth made a small upset noise. "Um, Lindsay," Beth said, nudging her good friend not-so-subtlely. "We're not alone!"

"Oh, gosh, I _know!_" Lindsay said, not getting the hint. "I'm totally into, like, that thing where they say _everything _is connected and we're all little dots bouncing around all by ourselves in the black and being people is part of playing connect-the-dots and that's so _awesome _and I didn't get to take the cosmic immersion thing yet-"

"That's because the intiate evaluators aren't certain you could handle it, psychologically speaking," Abel said. "You might fall apart if you're not able to handle having the pure truth of the Upper Planes and the goodness of it's essence channeled directly through your motonic pattern."

"Aw, that sucks, but it's okay then!" Lindsay when on for a while. Frankie and Beth facepalmed, the former much more sternly than Beth did. Eventually Lindsay stopped in mid-word, turned around and made a small squeaking noise. "Eep! You guys are back already!?"

"As should be evident by our presence," Scar growled.

Lindsay giggled and clapped Scar on the arm. Abel took half a step back in reflex. Scar merely groaned, one of those people cursed by nature to be easily infuriated with people as endlessly cheery and ditzy as Lindsay. This might well explain how he was easily irritated by Abel. "Nuh uh!" Abel retorted. "We might be interactive hallucinations brought on by residual power surges and influenced by our extreme awesomeness! But mostly mine, you understand!"

"Ooh, ooh!" Lindsay said, raising her hand. "Or alternate universe versions of yourself could be beaming in and making our brains get all funny and just _think _you're there!"

"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that one!" Abel said, looking amazed. "Just think, what if whenever you have that weird moment when you're thinking of just how _weird _thinking and mental processes actually are, it's because another you is looking at you and making the psychic equivalant of funny faces!"

"Oh, yeah!" Lindsay said. She and Abel cheerfully babbled on to each other, heedless of their companion's dislike. Mr. Herrimen grumbled. Frankie sighed. Beth shrugged. Scar's eye twitched dangerous and he wandered off to find some baked bread to ease his burning sense of illness.

There was a long, brief moment.

Lindsay turned around and blinked at Abel and Mr. Herrimen. "Oops," She said meekly as Scar came back, too busy eating bread to pay much attention to her 'caught in the headlights' look.

"Oops does not cover leaving your post while we're handling business matters," Scar said gravely. Somehow he made it dignified dispite having a mouthful of bread.

"But you're talking with your mouth full! That's gross."

"And your hair's dyed," Scar said. "That's a ridiculous luxury."

Lindsay pouted. "But I like my hair."

"And I'd like to have better comebacks."

"Um, hello, sirs," Beth said, quickly nodding her head. Scar and Abel returned the gesture more gracefully.

"Hey guys," Frankie said, more at ease. Scar frowned faintly, perhaps annoyed by her unfamiliarity, but even if he really objected to it he didn't say anything. "What's the word?"

"These paladins of the Crossguard, Master Scar and Father Nightroad, have volunteered their services in mapping out our new home and aiding relocation of our people on behalf of the Crossguard," Mr. Herrimen said. "I do think this is the begining of a new and rather fruitful partnership."

"We can hang around more!" Lindsay said. "Yay!"

"No, we get to go get lost on faction time and no one can complain about it!" Abel said. "Double yay!"

"Didn't you just get done with being lost in our...uh, old place?" Frankie said, looking visibly pained at the mention of the old place as she said it.

"...Negative yay," Abel said. He pouted. "So, Frankie! How's things?"

"Could be better," Frankie said. "Everyone here keeps trying to pick rooms for themselves and fighting over who gets what; I've had to break up at least fifteen fights over who got to have an entire bathroom for their personal property. This 'squatter's rights' thing we have as a baseline for property laws really bites sometimes. Having you guys helping to put some actual organization should some."

"Excellent to hear, if not for your choice of language," Mr. Herrimen said. "I must admit, I'm glad you're getting along splendidly."

"We're all buddies here!" Lindsay said, and unexpectedly pulled Beth and Frankie into a bear hug. The other two girls smiled awkwardly and exchanged looks that said 'never speak of this again'. Well, at least Frankie did, Beth just looked used to it.

Mr. Herrimen looked at her. Quietly, to Abel, he said, "I don't intend to offend, but your organization's hiring practices are a touch...lax."

"She's smarter than she lets on, or thinks," Abel replied, equally quiet. "She had the force of will to pass our iniation and stay functionally sane, and the purity of spirit to go _through _the intiation in the first place. Not a bad public relations girl; we're thinking about putting her into this diplomatic order we've got in the planning stages."

Mr. Herrimen watched Lindsay dropped the other two girls and start talking to a passing and surly yeti, ignoring it's grumbling expressions of irritation, and that the yeti quickly grew infected with her good cheer and spoke more politely and nicely, and when their short conversation was over, the yeti was no longer surly or grumpy at all but in a rather good mood, smiling and whistling happily. "I see," Mr. Herrimen said simply.

They watched her a moment longer, gauging how she spoke with people and left them more tractable and good-natured. On a mission like this, people skills (unthinking though they were) seemed quite invaluable with the state of tension things still were stuck at. If they ran into a lot of people and got Lindsay to cheer them up, and those people ran into other people and were nice when they might have been more irritable or cranky, then those people might feel better too. And when _those _people met others, they would likely treat them with more evenness than they otherwise would, and so on and so forth. It was a pleasing thought.

"Well," Mr. Herrimen said briskly. "If you'll all care to move on with your own mission, I have a...unpleasant duty to witness. That Kimblee knave requires appropriate witnesses."

Scar stiffened, just a micro-bit. With his iron self-control, it probably would have gone unnoticed by casual observers, but Abel knew his partner well. "Yes," Abel said carefully. "It'll be good to have that sordid mess left firmly behind us. Won't it?" He directed this at Scar.

"I suppose so," Scar said neutrally, his jaw twitching and his fists curling by themselves and uncurling, as though longing to strangle Kimblee at that very moment.

Frankie winced. "Yeah, Mr. Herrimen, we should go do that," She said quickly. "Come on you guys, we got work to do."

"Uh, sure," Beth said, looking at Scar and quite clearly afraid. He looked like a man possessed by something else, edging ever closer to the hate-fueled avatar of vengeance he had been once.

Lindsay peered at him, seemingly unafraid of his overbearing fury. "I heard about what happened there," She said suddenly.

"Lindsay, no!" Beth hissed.

"What?"

"Don't-" Beth dared to look at Scar, the Ishvalan priest still trying to master his rage and not doing a very good job of it, they could hear him breathing so hard it sounded like some titanic apocalypse dragon growling. "Please, _don't make him mad._ Please please _please _think, like, really really hard about what you're saying!"

She didn't say 'Or Mr. Scar might liquiefy your brain or something'. She didn't have to, it was pretty much unstated.

Lindsay didn't seem to care. Blithely, she said to him, "You were right there when he conked out but you didn't kill him even after they seperated him from that boy he was controlling. You could have done it and no one would have cared. Why didn't you? You kinda look like you really wanted to!"

Scar looked around, surprised, and focused distantly on her, his eyes narrowing. Lindsay seemed fascinated by how red his eyes were; red as hate, as red as the blood of dying children dashed upon rocks and crying for vengeance with their last rattling breath.

He stared for a long time, perhaps only just processing what she'd said. "It seemed...improper," He finally said. He did not say that it was one of the hardest things he had ever done, staying his hand when that murderer was finally in his grasp. He did not say a dozen other things that came speedily to mind, so many pained horrors clawing at his mind, a living nightmare that might never have been quenced even by Kimblee's last hateful breath and his blood on Scar's willing hands.

He certainly did not articulate the profound effect that the wielder of the Keyblade, Zim, who had come to them like a bolt of lightning from heaven and delivering retribution to his old enemy, had made on himself. On an impulse, Zim had thought it appropriate to spare Kimblee's life, and Scar had found wisdom in that brief merciful compulsion.

Scar did say, "Slaying him when he was so perfectly helpless, unable to resist or respond in any way...it would have solved his problem. It would have been a fitting end to his hollow semblence of a life. But..." He paused, as if feeling that bothering to think about it was a small betrayal of all the people he had loved and taken from him by Kimblee. "Killing him there, like that, it would have felt like murder."

He shook his head.

"And I...no, there had been enough death that day."

A silence greeted this pronouncement, and Lindsay broke it when she said, without any sign that she had heard something quite long from their usually tactiturn warrior (and, some whispered, secret assassin), "Well, duh! That's good and stuff!"

"'Good'," Scar repeated.

"Sure! You can't just kill someone when you have him all helpless and stuff, even if he is a bad guy! We're the good guys, we _can't _do stuff like that." She suddenly seemed serious. "Doing bad guy stuff when we call ourselves good guys, we just can't DO that."

Scar said nothing. Imperceptibly, almost just to himself, he nodded.

And then, the moment was gone, and the pressing matters seemed heavy enough to call them to action. "Well said, young knight. I must be off then, you know of the...unpleasant buisiness I have to attend to," Mr. Herrimen said, mournfully. "Sir Scar, are you certain you do not wish to witness it? It might provide you some closure?"

Scar hesitated at this last chance to see Kimblee, his tormentor, the man who had nearly exteriminated his entire people and destroyed his home city and family for the pleasure of it. One last shot at closure...a last shot rooted in vindictiveness and hatred he simply could never let go. "No," He said, and it visibly hurt for him to say that. "I will do the duty required of me. My personal concerns are-" He took a deep breath, and halted a moment. "Irrelevant."

Mr. Herrimen considered him. Abel looked quietly pleased under his veneer of surprise. "Well-spoken," He said. "Goodbye then. If you meet anyone who wishes to know of my wherabouts, tell them I shall be conferencing from my office and must not be disturbed."

"We shall," Abel said.

Mr. Herrimen bowed as best he could in a wheelchair and rolled away at a brisk pace. The five left behind watched him go. "Well, okay then!" Bet said, clasping her hands. "Are we gonna go or what?"

"Follow me, you guys," Frankie said, standing up, walking towards the exit of the dining room and waving them along. One by one, they filed out, to the uncharted reaches of their new building.

Scar was the last to go. He looked where Mr. Herrimen had gone, gave one last venom-filled glance of regret mingled with a surprising but welcome sense of relief (as if of a long-held burden begining to slip away) and followed.

Sometimes, he truly thought it was best to serve and be happy with that.

* * *

A shovel hit the ground, tapping lightly against the side of a newly transmuted building, glimmers of blue light still reflecting off the shovel's bared outer side before flickering away.

Roy Mustang, wearing a simple white T-shirt over his uniform pants and boots, nodded approvingly. "That takes care of, oh, let's say sixty percent of collateral damage from the fight. Gives the insurance people something to stop complaining about."

"Hmph," said Izumi Gibbs, giving him a frown through her dreadlocks going over her eyes due to strain and excess sweat. "Always about stastistics and political variables with you, Mustang." She wiped some sweat away from her face, wiping her hand off on her coveralls.

"Pretty much, yes," Jethro Gibbs said, dressed much like Roy and holding a pocket-sized emitter displayed a holographic map with the damaged portions of the area highlighted; the areas that had already been reported repaired where blacked out, and Roy couldn't repress a smile that there was much more dark than highlights on that map. "Still haven't decided if that's a positive or negative quality, sir."

"I was a 'dog of the military, Gibbs," Roy said wryly. "She'll turn it into a negative quality no matter what."

Izumi made an expression that might have been called a delicately reserved scowl if such terminology wasn't bizarre. "Doesn't take much work with _you_."

Roy snorted. "Just as well, then."

They, several other powerful alchemists, and a few matter-manipulation themed mages and psychokinetics that had volunteered for the reconstruction efforts, were standing in the enclosed area where the last of the battle had taken place and the Philosopher's Stone had been released, and it was perhaps because of some of that residual energy that transmutations were going smoother than usual. Most of them were off by themselves, gathering debris and identifying it's source before putting it in the appropriate place to be assimilated and rebuilt into new or recreated buildings; a few were arguging over whether _that _bit of stone had come from _that _wall or whatever, but generally they were getting along well and doing their jobs. Roy supposed he ought to be making them behave, but he was honestly so dog-tired that it had been an effort just getting out of bed recently.

He yawned noisily. "I hate getting lazy," he complained.

"Then get up off your lazy butt once in a while and do something instead of hanging around in your clubhouse," Izumi said, a hand to her forehead as she looked around for the next thing to transmute.

Roy went silent; Izumi didn't know that the place had been destroyed or the death of his friend the bartender Gorgob, and he tried to play it off, giving the ground he had just transmuted into solidity (previously the hole they had tricked Kimblee into, the various traps already dismantled and regenerated into previous forms, and the artificial pond sealed off again) a healthy tap. "That's a little too close to actual work to be really comfortable for me," he said, rolling his eyes. Izumi threw a wet rag at his head she'd been wiping her face with. Roy grabbed it out of mid-air and wiped his own face off, grateful for the coolness of it; today was unreasonably hot even for the summertime. "Damn this weather!We can field tanks that dwarf buildings, replicate engines that run on pure fighting spirit, and outfit our finest soldiers in mechanized exoskeletal rigs, and yet we stand out in the heat without so much as an automated flying robot that fans our faces!? The hell kind of operation are we running here!?"

"I'm starting to think that being part of the elite soldiers in a military dictatorship spoiled you, sir," Gibbs said, giving his wife that said 'was he always like this on your world?' and Izumi just shrugged in a 'I barely knew him, how would I know' way.

"I almost got blown up no less than fifteen different times in less than twenty minutes in that fight!" Roy snapped. "I deserve a little decadence for the clean-up! I WANT MY FLYING COOLANT FAN!"

A nearby matter manipulator (her powers too limited to be an effective combatants but intricate enough to be a talented civil engineer) telekinetically moved a bucket's worth of water from the pond in a unstable ball and unceremoniously threw into Roy's face. "Congratulations, sir," she said in a monotone voice. "Now you're refreshed and slightly more useless than usual."

"Useless...?!" Roy repeated. his eye twitched. He whirled around and shouted, "_WHO ARE YOU CALLING A WASHED-OUT MATCHSTICK THAT NEEDS TO BE CODDLED JUST TO GET THROUGH THE DAY?!_"

"No one did, sir," Gibbs said as the matter manipulator blinked dully. "You did that all on your own."

Roy crossed his arms and growled. "A fine day when my own subordinates openly disrespect me for cheap laugh value!"

"We're not your subordinates," a few volunteers replied, hauling some debris on the way to repairs. "We don't work for you at all!"

"Are we even getting paid for this?" One of them asked.

"Of course not, it's volunteer work," Izumi said.

They gasped. "All our work, without even any reimbursement!?"

"That's what volunteer work MEANS."

"Well, THAT hardly seems fair!"

Izumi snarled and proceeded to verbally lacerate them for being selfish skiving layabouts that never thought about anyone but themselves, and they cowered in horror. If the fear of Leeroy Jethro Gibbs' ability to intimidate suspsects was legend, it was equaled by Izumi Gibbs' ability to scare the life out of anyone. Roy facepalmed. "God help me, I don't believe I'm actually saying this but sometimes I actually miss the military dictatorship. At least then I didn't have smartass civilians mouthing off to me!"

"No, you just had smartass co-workers, subordinates and fellow State Alchemists mouthing off behind your back. And your assistant and love interest making no-so-veiled remarks about your sexual virility," Izumi said. "Or lack thereof. And she still hasn't stopped dispite surviving and continuing to remain as your personal second-in-command."

Roy stared blankly at her. "...You've been talking to Riza, I see," he said carefully, his brain editing out that last sentence in order to preserve his frail sense of masculinity.

A distraction occured, for the best in terms of Roy's pride but perhaps not for the comic relief; a crashing noise came from behind them as a mini-mecha in the shape of Greed's head bounced into the street, earning a few groans from workers who knew _they _were going to have to fix that, and even louder groans from Izumi and Gibbs when it became apparent that the mini-mecha was being driven by Greed/Lin, Deadpool, and Shego. "Heeey, guess who's back to annoy you again and is following you for no adequately explained reason!?" Greed shouted. "And hey, watch your landings. We almost scratched the paint."

"I told you I knew how to drive mechas," Deadpool said. "I just didn't say I knew how to drive them well. At least I got to crash a vegetarian's place and forcefeed them meatloaf! AGAIN."

"Truly, joining these guys _was _a memorable and wise career move," Shego said, not really paying attention and just reading a magazine. "Just so I can hear lines like that."

"Greed...Lin, whichever it is I'm talking to, what do you want now?" Roy growled. "I thought I made it clear after the fight that we live seperate ways for a reason!"

"You mean after the conference we had after we got that Courtney lady and her cohorts a new studio and they arranged an exclusive with us," Lin said, taking over while Roy had been talking. "Speaking of which, they're gonna arrange _another _conference in a few days and you're invited whether you like it or not. Something about the 'deplorable state of Traverse Town's personal security and a state of affairs based entirely in retaliation and reaction'."

"Joy," Roy deadpanned.

"That's what we said," Lin remarked, grinning. "Mostly because me and Greed are now two of the big backers behind their new studio as it branches out into other interests thanks to the renewed faith in their journalism skills. Of course, they don't yet realize that since me and Greed both have different precentages of shares thanks to some creative accounting, that gives us majority shareholding, which should provide some absolutely _fun _consequences in the near future! Ah, how I love financial tyranny in the making...!"

"I'm so bored I think I died several times during that little paragraph," Deadpool said. "I already miss the action scenes!"

"Oh, come on, we barely did anything important in that fight," Shego said, giving him a funny look, as people were prone to give to Deadpool.

"We provided valuable running commentary and interesting action bits! If it wasn't for us, the whole fight would have been a lame grimderp filled with nothing but running and screaming and near-death calls. With us, it had all that _and _witty fourth-wall jokes."

"I always wanted to know; if there's a _fourth _wall, what's the other three walls?"

"There aren't any," Izumi said suddenly to them. "The 'fourth wall' term refers to the supposed barrier between audience and fiction, possibly derived from theater plays." Shego and Deadpool stared at her. Gibbs blinked, probably disturbed that she had spoken to Deadpool and Shego and therefore inducted herself into their madness. Roy took a few steps back, perhaps preferring to avoid the carnage. Lin posed for a passing tourist that wanted to take pictures of local celebrities. "...Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Probably just shocked at your inexplicable lapse in judgement," Roy yelled from where he would be safe from, say, street-made cannons formed to carry out Izumi's violent will in the event of a no-doubt inevitable tantrum.

"WHAT lapse in judgement?"

Gibbs coughed politely. "You WILLINGLY asked Deadpool something and chose to listen to what he might say," he said delicately.

Izumi frowned. It turned to understanding, and she cast a suspicious look at Deadpool. "I see your point."

"Hey, fourth wall breakers are always the most popular characters! We break walls AND estimated popularity disproportionate to our actuall importance in the story," Deadpool said.

Roy facepalmed again. "Someone save me from this insanity..." A beeping came from his pocket. He reached in and pulled out a small communicator device that unfolded into a complex array of miniaturized keypads, data readouts and a holographic display centered around a slim crystal that happened to be the 'brain' of this communicator, a tiny processing engine that could put many supercomputers to shame in it's information storage and calculation capacity. Roy clicked a button and a brief message scrolled through. He frowned a bit as he saw it and confirmed it. "Well, that'll work," He muttered, standing up.

This didn't recieve much interest until he started walking away, changing the communicator to another channel as he hailed a jet-bike to pick him up. "Hey, where are you going?" Gibbs called.

"Duty calls," Roy said. "Well, OTHER duties." He sighed. "I have a sentence to witness." He smirked. "_So _sorry to just leave off and let you handle the rest, but...oh what the hell, I'm not sorry, it's _your _problem now!"

The others muttered their goodbyes, more than a few mutinous that Roy was getting out of the heat. "But we just GOT here," Deadpool complained.

"I am absolutely torn up over that," Roy said sarcastically, thinking that this message couldn't have come at a better time. He walked off, adjusting the communicator to serve as a homing beacon for the jet-bike he'd hailed before closing it up and repocketing it. "Later, everyone. And Lin...Greed, whoever you are, if your minions are going to hang around, make them do something useful. Help with the clean-up!"

"Hey, we are NOT minions!" Shego said.

"You heard the man!" Lin said cheerily. "Get to work!"

Shego grumbled, and Roy chuckled in dark satisfaction as the jet-bike arrived to shuttle him away.

All things considered, though, the reconstruction was going quite splendidly.

In so many places, it was if Kimblee had never been there.

* * *

While he disliked the very concept of undisclosed locations where all manner of ungentlemanly skullduggery could be employed, Armstrong felt that hosting a meeting that was as formal as things ever got in his town was not supposed to be done in a warehouse located in part of the Underdistrict remarkable only for it's large space and proximity to boltholes leading to faction-themed information network hotspots. Much as it all ran against his aesthetic notions, he understood why it was important.

Standing at a podium at the back of the largest storage area in the warehouse with a large curtained-off area directly behind him, he spread his arms wide in greeting to the expectant crowd before him, an assembly of the finest engineers and mechanics and combat-purposed macro-mecha designers that they could find on short notice _and _were either known for their secrecy in the pursuit of Great Justice or were already in their employ. "Good day, my fine artisans of the scientific endeavor and mechanical expertise! I thank you all for coming here on such short notice and leaving the celebrations behind sooner than any of us would have liked, and I am deeply appreciative of the time you have surrendered to us on this new project, and I have a great proposal to make to you all! Have we any questions before I begin?"

The engineers, an electic bunch including such illuminaries as Cyborg, Winry Rockbell and Agatha Heterodyne, and many of their rivals or friends in their various fields, did not look like they felt dignified; they had been seated in no particular order aside from a grid pattern so they could all see the podium and what lay behind it clearly. One of them stood up then, raising his hand importantly. "Ahem, yes," said Jumba Jookiba from the folding chair fitted to his particular dimensions, present there and on retainer from Greed (who had first heard the proposal from Roy, and quite liked the idea but insisted on having _some _share in the enterprise since part of his precious property had gone into it, and Roy thought that it was only fair espicially after all the fighting they had done together), pointedly ignoring the annoyed looks and cries of 'Down in front!' from behind him. "Where are being the refreshments? I was promised refreshments!" Several mutinous voices echoed this sentiment.

"Right over there," Armstrong said, pointing to a long table on the other side of the room, laden nearly to bending with all the food trays, punch bowls and similar refreshments on it.

Jumba blinked, his rear pair of eyes a bit more slowly. "However was I missing that?" He lumbered over to it, and a few of the hungrier technical guys and girls followed him.

Eventually everyone got some snacks, and when Armstrong was sure that their hunger had been satisfied, he asked, "Are there any other questions, possibly snack-related?"

Agatha Heterodyne, not just there as the appointed representative of the Peerage but as the most senior practioner of mad science through raw power alone, raised her hand. "Actually, there is something. Captain Armstrong, what's that under the curtains behind you?"

Armstrong chuckled. "An excellent question, Lady Heterodyne, and to be honest, it is the entire point of us all being here! I shall explain everything, and offer Admiral Mustang's proposal. Ladies and gentlemen and assorted other genders that I apologize for not being able to identify at this moment, allow me to begin by reminding you all of what has so recently transpired here in town; a criminal madman from my world, a most unsavory fellow named Solf J. Kimblee and codenamed the Red Lotus Alchemist, appeared in town..." In quick order, he covered the various crimes Kimblee had commited (almost all rendered null, save for the dead they could not save, and Armstrong held a moment of silence for them), mentioned something about all the devastation that was even now being fixed, occasionally drifting off to ramble about loosely related topics and making a few benign comments about the great assistance given by 'a quite interesting new chap named Zim'. Cyborg looked up at that, smug, and even more smug when he was mentioned as one of the great heroes involved in halting the damage.

People nodded, shrugged, made comments and generally conceded that they knew most of these things, in some cases because they had been close enough to the action to have it burned into their hearts. Just more memories that they couldn't forget, not when they had friends who would never be remembering anything ever again.

Shortly, Armstrong said, "In time Kimblee came into posessesion of a giant robot made from two quite powerful robots that would individually give us all quite a trouncing. In the end he was ultimately defeated, captured and convicting pending his trial, and almost all the evil he did was undone; the people whose souls he stole returned to the flesh, Foster's remade even better than ever, and the property damage as we speak has been almost completely restored thanks to our corps of alchemists! Not all could be saved, of course, and _that _is a tragedy that we ought to have prevented as the defenders of our people and the innovators of the means for that defense." Armstrong, again, gave a moment of silence for the ones that _wouldn't _be coming back, and for a short time a more downcast mood infected the proceedings.

And then he smiled and said, "And with your help, we may have the means to do so more effectively, and take something good from all that evil he did to us, for he most certainly left us a means of protecting ourselves!"

Armstrong pushed a button, and the various engineers and other sorts leaned forward, some gasping in surprise or murmuring or even whistling, and many of them were certainly impressed as the curtains slid away.

Behind Armstrong, secured in place by energy fields buzzing around the constraints of generator-pillars, was the inert and harmless remains of the Umbra Eternis, lying in a half-sitting position with it's scattered pieces of armor and missing arm laid before it, the defeated machine-titan humbled and nearly pitiful in death.

The muttering reached a peak, mostly surprised and even a bit disturbed. "Sir, what is the meaning of this?" A technician asked. "Is having that thing there...well, _safe_? What is the purpose of this?"

Armstrong waved a hand, overriding the fresh wave of unhappy comments. "An understandable sentiment, and please listen to me; the Heartless have been wiped from it's form with measures even our allies in the Crossguard consider somewhat excessive - exposure to noon-forged gold, bathed in holy water drawn from a realm forged of heroic deeds for seven hour and seven minutes and precisely seven seconds, constantly exposed to magically intensified sunlight since then, and various other means I didn't quite understand - and I have been assured by our aforementioned allies that the Heartless have been expunged from it, and with it's AI destroyed, it is little more than a inert machinery, capable of no more function than a dead body pulverized into pulp. The worst that could possibly happen was if some scoundrel was to absond with it, reverse-engineer it, use a superior knowledge of engineering to improve the design and then mass produce the result!"

Agatha frowned. "Captain Armstrong, I don't-" She gasped. "_Oh!_" She grinned excitedly. "Oooh."

Armstrong nodded. "Yes. As I'm sure you're all thinking - perhaps because it wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened - that would be a terrible thing for us. Kimblee's robot was fierce, but it would have been far worse if he had more than a passing knowledge of how to design a combat-worthy kaiju-scale powered suit built for warfare! How much stronger would it's defenses have been? How much more deadly it's weapons? How much more stable and therefore tactically capable it's on-board combat algorithims? In short, how much deadlier would the Umbra Eternis have been, and more costly to us the fight, if Kimblee had actually _known _what he was doing?"

A shocked silence met this extraordinary pronouncement. And then, Armstrong waited patiently because he knew his audience, and sure enough there were the murmurs of hurried but measured calculations being made and compared with each other until the most accurate-seeming of them became clear. "We are thinking," Jumba said slowly, arms filled to the brim with snack trays he had greedily taken all for himself. "That fully half of the First District would have been destroyed with collateral damages causing secondary waves of further damage that would be leaving the upper portions of the Underdistrict in total ruin, which would totally destroy our on-site factories and such, to begin with. The scale of the fight would probably tear through one of the district boundary walls and spill into Beach District and flatten the coastal properties and then escalate until Kimblee was either being defeated or was victorious, and leaving very large and flat part of town with many dead bodies. Rough estimates of course. We did math and have shown our work, we can show you if you like."

"I thank you, but it is unneeded," Armstrong said benignly. Jumba sat down, and got in someone's way again. "You demonstrated everything I wished to say! And the point there is that though Kimblee's acts were a most regrettable and malicious act of evil that he _shall _pay dearly for, had the design of his mecha been in the hands of a more competent engineer it would have been vastly more dangerous, and an immeasurably powerful weapon in the service of great evil..." He raised his eyebrows. "_Or..._even greater good."

The crowd digested this for a moment, and when it was done, the gasp of realization and comprehension of all the possibilites dumped right into their laps was like an expulsion of intestinal gas.

Agatha put it in plain langauge. "You want us to study this thing so we can improve it, refine it, make a non-evil version of it and mass-produce the results for the town's use?"

"Of course!" Armstrong agreed, grateful to her for making his point perfectly clear in plain language.

"You mean something good might come out of that whole debacle?" Another scientist added. "Apart from the people coming back, that was _wonderful,_ espicially since I was one of those people, but we could make money off this! Or save the lives of thousands of people through the medium of defense, either works!"

Excited murmuring broke out, the entire crowd's reluctance quickly dying away and replaced with enthusiasm at this final snub to Kimblee's attempts to kill them all; now, even his weapon would be repurposed into a tool of great good and something that would defend until of just kill. Armstrong patiently waited until the murmuring died down at a weight expectation of him to say something, and he asked them, "So will you do it?" The answer was, of course, an overwhelming 'yes!'. He beamed. "Wonderful! Our superiors and allies will be most pleased! Thank you all for agreeing! I AM SO MOVED!" He was so emotional about it that he was compelled to flex violently enough for his massive muscles to tear his shirt and coat off, to his audience's surprise, and as pink sparkles of total masculinity gleamed off him, he performed a series of exercising poses designed to inspire and raise morale. "LOOK AT MY GLORIOUS BODY AND FEEL THE URGE TO REMAKE YOURSELVES INTO AS FINE A MIGHTY TEMPLE OF THE SPIRT AS I HAVE! LOOK AT IT, I SAY!"

"Sir, that doesn't make any sense!" A technician cried.

"Neither do the laws of physics, and yet, THEY GO ON REGARDLESS! SANITY IS FOR THE UNIMAGINATIVE, MY FRIEND! GO FORTH AND BE INCREDIBLE REGARDLESS OF CONSTRAINTS AND LIMITS LIKE FALSE SANITY! OR _CLOTHES!_"

"...Nooo, that's okay," Agatha said slowly.

"Awww," Jumba said sadly. A few people scooted away from him awkwardly.

Cyborg raised his hand. "Hey, I have something that might be useful for this." The room's attention turned to him; he was ever joyed to be at the center of attention, and he grinned. "That Zim guy that helped us out, he's my friend. So happens, after he left he sent me some _extremely _interesting schematics to build biomechanical structures on a microscopic level..."

He went on for a bit, explaining the fine details, using the specialized language suitable for such technologies as Zim had given him. Armstrong listened as best he could, but while he was a scientist his expertise lay in different fields than this. It all sounded quite good though. When Cyborg was finished, Armstrong said, "And you think this will be beneficial?"

"Oh yeah."

"Then let us investigate such potential..."

The debates went on, discussion and theories were made, and excitement brewed as even the greatest weapon of Kimblee might yet be turned to the service of the people it had been made to destroy.

And across from them, the Umbra Eternis did not move. It's joints did not bend, it's eyes did not light up, it's armor did not magically affix itself back into place or it's limbs reform or the Heartless return to it and animate it once more. Perverted machine intelligence no longer inhabited it's frame, no alien evil bade it's metal to live and fight.

It's optics remained dark and empty, and they would remain so forever. The Umbra Eternis was well and truly dead, and now the only thing left for it's lifeless frame was repurposing and examination before a final scrapping, the only evidence of it ever existing being the absence of the Juggernaut robot's remains or the repaired buildings left in it's wake, now improved and scaled beyond their former glory.

It had failed perfectly at it's job, and being used to create a benevolent series of guardian machine-gods seemed the most fitting epitaph to the utter failure of it's short and sad existence.

In fact, for all of the designed fierceness of it's expression, the stillness of it's body and the relaxation in it's face suggested that it's maddened machine-spirit was at least finally at peace.

* * *

Kimblee had absolutely no idea how long it had been since he'd blacked out and reawakened to find himself in custody, totally defeated and all his plans for nothing.

his alchemical arrays were broken. Kevin's presence completely cleansed from him only for Ghostfreak's terrified rambling to make it worse, his body still ached even after medical care had (reluctantly) been given to him and feeling quite like his original body with none of the sensation of being vaugely out of place all his stolen bodies had conferred on him.

On a whim, based on the passage of light he'd seen at various points between being shuttled from a holding cell where he'd been cleansed of all remaining Heartless taint to a hospital where he'd been given enough of a shower of green eco to heal his body at least enough that he could walk under his own power (but little was done about the minor bruises, though it certainly wasn't anything life threatening) to a courthouse where a trial, speedy and deliberately one-sided that it might as well have been administered by kangaroos, had been held.

It was all very fast, absurdly so. Kimblee got the impression that they wanted to get rid of him, and quite quickly. From what he'd overheard and been told, the people now holding his life in their hands were quite determined to see him _dealt _with.

Never at any point did he see a reason to deny his involvement, to claim that he had been innocent. Escape, for some reason, seemed hollow and pointless; if it was suitable that he be made to do whatever these mad people thought of justice, than so be it.

That trial had been brief, lasting only a few hours. There had been so much shouting, so much fury, Kimblee was surprised he hadn't been lynched on the spot, even with the self-righteous administrators determiend to make this done properly. (And, he was disgusted to observe, they didn't seem to care if they broke their own rules a bit just to make things go their way. A few people weren't happy with that either, but from what he could tell, they hadn't been involved in his attack in any way.) He didn't remember much of it, the shock of his complete and total loss so powerful that he was only just starting to realize how badly he had failed.

Of note, there had been such as the one murder of that old man and his grandchildren (he still wondered how they had figured out it was him), and then there had been that one tattooist girl, tearfully breaking down in front of him and asking Scar (who'd been present of course, as the persecuter, and didn't THAT violate all lawful senses of 'conflict of interest') if he HAD killed so many people as Kimblee said. Scar hadn't denied it, and the girl had to be gently taken away before she collapsed into a crying mess. He also remembered Kevin, inexplicably whole and apparently sane, telling them of Kimblee's involvement and giving utterly damning evidence, though he seemed curiously incapable of speaking of anything prior to his arrival in Crucible. (Wuya, it must be said, certainly enjoyed planting preventive safeguards for that sort of thing; unless a powerful psychic or expert in brain chemistry found a way to subvert or avoid them, Kevin would be revealing no secrets about Wuya's plots.) The question of perjury was ridiculous, as they had set up the courthouse in a zone magically enchanted to force all within it to speak the truth and nothing else, all lies simply failing to be spoken. A costly enchantment, to be sure, but it worked.

He'd been found guilty in quite a short time. It was never really a question of guilt or innocence, only if he had been coerced or the extremity of his guilt. The rest of the trial had just been that, and when it became clear that he had done it all freely and happily, and the sheer enormity of everything he'd done, the sentence had been laid, and the only thing left was to have it done.

The officers, his captors and everyone else took excessively vindictive pleasure in telling him how splendidly repairs were going, the lovely state of Foster's new replacement building, and how well everyone was getting on with their lives.

Still, he had changed things. Their security was shattered. Many people were dead. This cheered him up a bit.

And now...

Kimblee, trapped in a small and mobile egg-shaped holding cell carried upon a self-propelled carriage to where his sentence would be carried out, bowed his head. He had admitted defeat long since he'd woken up.

The carriage, guarded by Stature and Freya (seemingly eager to make up for their defeat at Fosters), approached a small and unobstrusive but thickly guarded building at the heart of the Underdistrict, one of the lowest levels they had there in that hollowed out space. Kimblee could see it thanks to a slot in his cell (they evidentally thought him effectively harmless to them, and they _did _have a point), banging his nose on the wall when the carriage traveled down the bumpy road to the building, and observed that the building was quite well defensible; low and squat, only a single door right at the very front, guarded by stern-looking soldiers of different factions and turrets at every possible angle manned by automated computer intelligences, and aside from that it even looked kind of boring, little more than a big metal cube of a building. The only outstanding thing about it (aside from all those other things) was a symbol repeated place and place again: yellow measuring scales set over a red targeting sign, all the empty spaces filled in with red over a black square. The symbol, Kimblee knew, of the Justice Marines, the strictly judicary and law enforcement (such as it was) of Traverse Town.

He closed his eyes, mentally confirming that it had been a little over two days since his capture. How quickly things had moved. He approved; best to have these things dealt with speedily if you lacked the courage to be decisive about them and just kill the person that annoyed you.

Guarding the front door was a peculiar sight; a pair of humanoid reptiles, quite short by human standards but very stocky, green-skinned and wearing some sort of color-coded flak jacket with matching pants. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be mildly anthropomorphized turtles; short beak-like snouts for face, surprisingly intelligent dark eyes, and flexible carapaces on their backs and torsos that might have been shells. They both wore bandanas modified into masks as some sort of insignia, and were hardly indistinguishable; the left turtle wore purple and carried a simple combat staff, while the right one was somewhat skinnier and wore orange colors along with a pair of large nunchaku.

They watched Kimblee's cell approach amiably. "Good day," Freya said, while Stature called out, "Hey, Michaelangelo! Donatello! Got us a big bad guy coming through!"

The purple-clad one, Donatello, waved. "We got the message only this morning. They got a _lot _of big-timers watching the place."

"They do not want even the slightest risk," Freya observed.

"With jerks like _this_, can you blame them?" Michaelangelo observed cheerily.

"Have you guys heard anything from Naruto or Gaara?" Stature asked. "Only I haven't heard much from them in a bit and that gets me worried. Usually means trouble."

"Yeah," the turtle replied. "Those guys hang out all the time. Not spending as much time with the Shinobi Guild as they used to, people are talking about maybe they're gonna split their own way. Maybe not that bad a thing, I don't think it'll happen anyway, but what a shame if they did, huh? Anyway, Naruto and Gaara showed up here a while ago, they dropped off _another _bad guy! The one that gave your Kimblee jerk some info to pull off that nasty stunt."

"Would you stop insulting me if I apologized?" Kimbleee asked.

"No," They all said.

Donatello pulled a small wireless communicator from his belt. "We got Kimblee coming in, you guys! Keep things loaded and stay on your toes, he's almost in the clear." A voice from the communicator replied 'Confirmed,' and from the sound behind the door, it had just unlocked. The carriage began ascending the steps up, rolling up on an access ramp, and Kimblee stared numbly through the slot, peripherally aware of Freya asking Michaelangelo something about a fellow named Killer Bee that had apparently not been seen in a while but he didn't pay attention to what the turtle said.

The carriage rolled past the doors, engines clanking away in both vehicle and architecture; a self-maintained primitive but fuctional cold fusion generator (running on something called 'spiral power', Kimblee heard) in the carriage and more traditional servos and counterweights inside the walls that had opened the doors and closed them as the carriage went past. The room, a tube-shaped antechamber that Kimblee couldn't get more than a glimpse of besides grim-faced soldiers and towering automations standing guard around them, became slightly darker when the doors closed, cutting off the overworked array of different lights that illuminated nearly every square mile of the Underdistrict to make what should have been a realm of shadows into a place as bright as a noon-struck marketplace, though lighting panels on the ceiling of this room didn't make it too dark.

Two of the guards, a man and woman, presumably in charge here, approached. Kimblee only got a glimpse of them when one of them glanced contempously at him throught the cell slot; neither of them seemed entirely human, the man far wider than average and composed of an organic metal exoskeleton formed into a massive semblence of humanity, his expression a vacantly grin...well, one _one _face. He had two other faces on the sides of his head, identical to the grinning face except that one was locked in a furious expression and another was perfectly neutral (and had a narrow mohawk of metallic hair). From the bulges at his chest and back, he also had four additional arms extending from his shoulders, and an inhuman tail curled up behind him and over his head.

The woman had a detached expression like the neutral face, was somethat taller than usual and only slightly human, skin covered in an aggregate of fur and scales shifting to feathers, overlong arms to match a nearly simian posture, and apart from the same expression as her male counterpart, she looked like nearly every species known to man had been spliced together with humanity as a template to create a formiddable warrior. There were disturbing similarities for them as well; they were wearing the same uniform Kimblee associated with the Justice Marines (as did most of the soldiers here, though these two came with blood-red trimming on their uniforms), and through the little visible parts of their identically pale skin, they were covered in an absolutely astounding degree of nail-like piercings all over their entire bodies of varying size. Their hair were the same exact shade of orange-ish red, and perhaps most forebodingly both their nametags read 'Pein', though the woman's read 'Pain - Animal Path' while the man's said 'Pain - Asura Path". And perhaps most disturbing of all, when they said "Thank you for your time," and then asked if Kimblee had been any trouble, they spoke simultaneously, speaking as one, and in the same voice.

He gave them a good long look, and saw that their eyes were also identical...and very strange, even more than their other traits. Gray eyes, a cold shade at that, with a series of concretic circles from the pupils and giving the impression that their eyes were bullseyes or aiming sights. Kimblee wasn't sure if those circles were warped additional pupils or some more grotesque physical mutation, but it was hard looking away from those eyes. If only because they were so unsufferably _creepy_.

Kimblee was so puzzled by those two he hardly paid attention to Freya cooling remarking on two seperate attempts to free Kimblee and three unrated battles they rolled right into, but nothing with notable property damage or any casualties, or even any chance of success.

"Did you capture the assailants on the intentional rescue attempts?" The people-named-Pain asked, again with a single voice.

"One, the other fled as soon as we proved able to fight back," Freya replied. "He did not volunteer his name, but we identified him from the Peace Marines' most wanted lists as a 'Seth Farrow'. Odd man, seemed to specialized in reptile-based abilities and brute force."

"I see," The Pain-bodies said. "Do you wish to remain on hand as witnesses to the sentence?"

(The Hitchhiker's Guides, in it's articles relating to Traverse Town's justice system, has various remarks on such events; allowing a mere guard to witness the maximum sentence being carried out, espicially ones with a personal vendetta against the sentenced, would be unthinkable and even stupid by many courts and judicary systems, and indeed many had that opinion about Traverse Town; what was to stop a potential saboteur from sneaking in to distrupt things? A well-administered background check and scanners tuned to search for morphological fields that didn't match up to the interloper's form, Traverse Towners replied, and besides it was felt that the less opportunity the punishers had to hide their deeds, the less they could abuse their power. It was a ridiculous notion, rife with opportunity to lead to ruin, but it had worked well so far.)

In this case, they accepted. "Best to see this thing through," Freya said. "We were there when it began, we ought to see it finished."

"It's a little too close to 'taking pleasure in suffering' to feel right," Stature said. "That's the sort of thing bad guys and anti-heroes do! But we were given express orders to see this through. We watch, we confirm, everyone back at Fosters gets on with life."

The two Pain-bodies nodded curtly. "Understood. Ready the sinner." That, Kimblee thought, was an odd way to put it. 'Criminal' would have been more appropriate. It wasn't like Traverse Town was a theocracy.

The doors to Kimblee's cell opened at a quick brush from Freya and Stature to a touch-sensitive panel on either side of the cell; they hissed open, the force field locking down Kimblee in a sitting position powering down while the eight-point acupuncture cuffs on his hands tightened enough that he was totally incapable of moving his hands in any direct fashion, to say nothing of the stone blocks his hands were trapped in. Even if he was theoretically incapable of transmuting anything due to the removal of his transmutation arrays, they were taking no chances, and he was unable to work with stone or non-metals for his explosions.

The two drones - if they _were _drones - stepped up and firmly (though surprisingly gently) grabbed Kimblee by either of his arms, easily holding him up in mid-air between them and took him out, Kimblee's feet dangling in the air.

Kimblee was brought through a door at the other side of the room, leading to a surprisingly large elevator lift that he, the Pain duo, the guards, plus Stature and Freya, were all able to fit in without any difficulty. It powered up and moved smoothly, though Kimblee was unable to tell if it was moving sideways or downwards or some other way entirely; he felt a disquieting sensation in his stomach, irritably similar to his brief experience of teleportation from Wuya's domain before-

It stopped suddenly and the door opened, Kimblee's stomach unsettled and a sense of grave foreboding even more unsettling.

He had been sentenced to the Vault, a doom agreed by all to be most richly deserved. He knew what it meant, but the details were unknown; even his far-reaching knowledge wasn't all inclusive.

Again Kimblee was dragged, and brought along with those in attendence, through a small antechamber (gun turrets mounted to face both entrance and exit) and into a large room that momentarily went unnoticed by Kimblee, too busy monitoring possible threats. The guns followed his movement, and for a moment he suspected that, against his better judgement, 'the Vault' was a euphemism for a secret execution. It was soon distracted from his mind, as he felt a faint disturbance as he was brought into the room and happened to witness a shimmering multicolored force wall appear through the door. He had no idea what it was.

Freya seemed to know, though. "A 'Five-Seal Barrier', I think?"

One of the Pains looked at her, as if wondering whether to tell her, and finally said, "Yes." And no more.

They kept going, and eventually stopped in the middle of the room. It was well-lit, and Kimblee saw that it was perfectly spherical, a dome cut even deeper than much of the Underdistrict (if it even shared the same dimensions as the Underdistrict; the Peerage was doing some exciting work in space-folding, Kimblee had heard) and rather sparse; there were a few view screens on the walls and displaying two-way views of those of the Council of Insert Nomenclature that apparently could find the time to witness this. Most prominently he saw Olivier Armstrong, glaring down at him with a openly bloodthirsty expression quite unlike her genteel brother, though he also saw Roy Mustang (smirking in faint triumph). He was a bit surprised to see that Scar was _not _among them.

Kimblee had not expected to survive being unconscious in Scar's presence. That the scarred man of Ishvala had chosen to let him live, and did not seem to have an interest in watching Kimblee be sent to his doom, suggested a number of unusual things that he wasn't sure he understood...that Scar honestly felt he had bigger concerns than revenge-by-proxy.

Kimblee just didn't know what to make of that.

his eyes roamed the room in a single sweep, and he took noticed of a peculiar contraption at the front of the room; a hoop-like structure on an upraised pedestal, all of it part of a fairly simple machine, but easily large enough to admit a vehicle or anything small. It was built right into the wall, and noticing a few slots on the base, Kimblee wondered what it was for.

Then he turned his attention to the back of the room, and saw that there was a number of auditorium-fashioned seats in ascending rows, mostly unoccupied save for a small number; Kimblee wasn't surprised to see Mr. Herrimen sitting in a wheelchair and gazing down at him with great dislike and yet regret, and he was mildly surprised to see more eerie figures outfitted like the Pains, with more of that bright orange hair and eerie gray eyes. He deigned not to focus on them just yet, as he was a bit more concerned with the fact that Deidara was sitting on a chair in front of these people, his hands clamped down in cuffs much like Kimblee's and the palms on his mouth muzzled. Since his shirt had been removed for whatever daft reason, it was clear that he had a mouth in his chest as well, and even that was muzzled up. Deidara had no way of creating his signature bombs without clay to chew up and infuse chakra into, and plainly they had gone to great efforts to remove his pre-made bombs that he might have had on him.

"Hey," Deidara said, with an admirable lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the situation. "Nice ambience here, don't you think? Hnh!"

"A bit sparse, but it adds a certain minimalistic charm," Kimblee remarked.

"It serves it's purpose," Animal Path Pain said curtly.

Deidara regarded him oddly. "You sound familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?"

The two Pains (and five other people in the audience) stared at him. "...Yes," they said after a moment, but said nothing more. Deidara made a noise indicating his disatisfaction with this lack of a full answer.

Kimblee was brought over to them, the people in the chairs stirring as he was forced there, and stared silently while Kimblee was dropped into a chair next to Deidara; it was a single piece of curved metal rimmed with thin cushions (because it didn't do to force people to sit on uncomfortable chairs, really), big enough to seat a large man and rimmed with odd mechanisms all over. Kimblee noticed odd spiral patterns on it's front shortly before he was made to sit on it; those patterns glew hot briefly against his back, a brief analysis made of his body, and the mechanisms unfolded into a set of shackles that locked Kimblee into place, wrapping around his body and holding him still.

The chairs turned as, moving as one, the five Kimblee had noticed reacting to Deidara just a moment ago standing up and filed down there. Kimblee noticed, to his surprise, they too had bright orange hair, the same outfit (though tailored for their frames) and the same array of extensive piercings.

And yet they looked very different, having absolutely nothing in common apart from the same clothes, hair and those inhuman eyes. Standing closest to Kimblee and Deidara, close enough that it would make a fine shield if either of them broke free and attacked, was a large and emaciated looking thing shaped like a man and the sparse flesh of it's surprisingly atheletic body covered in bristly orange fur. Significantly broader at the shoulders than the hips, it's head was an apeish affair set directly on it's shoulders with hardly any neck, jaws brimming with brutish teeth designed for crushing and slicing, and it's arms (abnormally large for it's size) were crossed over it's proportionately broad chest. The thing looked quite a lot like the cursed wendigo of Canadian folklore (though perhaps more like the creature from one of the Earth's housing meta-humans; the very one Stature had come from, as a matter of fact), so it's outfit looked rather out of place as clean-pressed as it was, and it's nametag read 'Preta Path Pain'.

Standing behind the Preta Path were two others; the first and most prominent seemed somehow older than all the others, a tall and serious looking young man with spikey orange hair and an expression that was not quite a grimace nor a frown, too detached and distant to be either. (And he looked a fair bit like Naruto Uzumaki, Kimblee observed; the ninja boy hadn't done as much damage as Zim had but he certainly had been memorable.) Alone of the bodies he wore a headband not unlike Deidara's own, with a metal plate on it adorned with four slash-like raindrops that had been struck out, a declaration of independance from the village that the headband symbolized. his studs and piercings seemed the most carefully placed, as if reluctant to alter his body in a way that made him unrecognizable from what he once was. This one's named tag read 'Deva Path Pain'. Next to him was a dour-looking human woman with shoulder-length hair that fell past her eyes, a shy trait that was at odds with her powerful build and impressive height, the studs on her cheeks resembling dimples and a longer one going right through her nose at an odd angle. Inexplicably, there was a delicately folded oragami flower right on her head, a cute decoration that looked like something a lover might bestow on her beloved. Her uniform's nametag read 'Human Path Pain'.

Standing behind these Pains, not unlike a valuable support unit or a medical officer, was the last of the Pains, taking the form of a large reptillian woman; broad, inhumanly large and covered in pale scales tinged with orange (for she had no hair or hair substitutes), she seemed to be of the Dragonborn species (said to be the humanoid creations of ancient dragons) and bearing traits of a brass dragon despiste her coloration, her head wide and short-snouted, an array of short spikes rimming her jaw amid the studs up to her fin-like ears. She stood slightly hunched over, ape-like arms held in a readied position, and a long tail moved slowly as she watched Deidara stoically. She had more studs and piercings than any of them, and Kimblee didn't know what that signified, nor why it should matter. Her name tag read 'Naraka Path Pain'.

As one, all the Pains spoke. "We are all assembled?" they asked. And again, Deidara gave a faint twitch, and stared hard at the Deva Path, as though certain he knew that form from _somewhere_.

"Yes," came a sounding affirmative from the screens.

More sagely, Herrimen's screen said, "All who are capable of being present have assembled." He said this with a certain reluctant satisfaction with an air of 'ah, at last we can have this sordid business finished'. (Mr. Herrimen could say a lot without saying much.)

The Pain Paths nodded, again as one. They stared down at Kimblee and Deidara, seemingly uninterested in either Kimblee's own disinterest or Deidara's fascination with them. The others in attendence in the seats shied away as the bodies stood up more fully, in what could only be a well-practiced tactical formation. From the way the others in the seats kept as much distance from the Pains as they could, they didn't find it any more comfortable than he did. And the name 'Pain' was naggingly familiar for some reason (if only because it seemed so melodramatic).

For a moment, there was silence.

Then the Pains spoke, and again it was as if they were a single organism. (Or being directed by one, little more than long-range drones for their unseen operator.) "I apologize for my lateness. I was assisting in a off-shore mission requiring the termination of a warlord planning to conquer the people beyond the mountains and the desert in order to assimilate them into a crude empire. Had I been here, perhaps this latest crisis may have been averted."

The apology as implicit; '_I am sorry for not being there to help prevent the destruction of your home, or avenge it, or cut shorter the battle.'_

Mr. Herrimen inclined his head. "Many things happen that we wish had not. We have no power to change them. It is pointless to assign blame where it does not belong and ought never to." He bowed his head even further, perhaps thinking that it would feel better to let himself put blame anyway. He glowered at Kimblee, likely acknowledging who _was _responsible for it all.

The Deva Path Pain nodded curtly. "As you wish." And that, for this small lingering question of regrets and anger tended to, was that.

Pain next turned to Kimblee and Deidara. "Solf J. Kimblee," the Six Paths of Pain said as one, low and cool and deadly calm. "Also known as the Red Lotus Alchemist. And Deidara, formerly of the Hidden Rock Village of the Land of Earth. Now that both of you are here to have the sentence carried out...you know why you are here."

It was a statement, not a question. Kimblee still interpreted it as one. "I am," He said. "You are here to judge me, and Deidara it seems, on behalf of your moral code."

Deidara squinted at the Pain bodies. "I could _swear _I've seen you or heard you somewhere before."

"Yes," Pain said, and it was unclear who the Pain Paths were replying to. "It is important that this is done correctly. You ought to know who I am. Do either of you recognize my Paths, or my name?" Their heads turned to Deidara, expectantly.

Kimblee frowned. "The name 'Pain' is familiar, if grandoise. Some connection with military operations and law here...?" Something was nagging at him, the name sounded so familiar, but he could not place it.

"Traverse Town keeps few secrets. We leave such things alone when we can. However, I am not particularly well known even within our town. I operate in shadows and secret, appearing to deliver swift and decisive justice, and leave others to make of my work what they will. It has served well enough." They regarded him evenly. "...I am Pain, field commander of the Justice Marines, formerly of Amegakure the Village Hidden in the Rain. I am the legacy of the Sage of Six Paths, and the sole wielder of the ultimate eye technique called the Rinnegan. I am one who has learned much of the power of suffering and internalized my power in the Six Paths of Pain, from which I speak to you. I am administering this hearing and will administer the verdict at it's conclusion on behalf the people of Traverse Town and the Justice Marines, as witnessed by respectable and long-proven leaders of the other factions and independant groups of Traverse Town." Their gazes grew even colder as they glared down at Deidara and Kimblee. "And for all the power I hold over your fate? As far as you are concerned..." They leaned. "I am God."

Pain spoke louder now. "And I declare this hearing begun."

There was a pause. "The what Paths?" Kimblee asked. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that bit right."

The six bodies gestured at themselves. "The Six Paths of Pain are these forms you speak to."

"Then they are not you?"

"They are _of _me. They are not me."

Kimblee failed did not understand.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide does not, in fact, have an article on Pain and his Six Paths, as such knowledge was...well, not suppressed, but Pain took care to ensure that he operated in sufficient secrecy and mystery that the only ones who knew that he functioned through multiple bodies he controlled were trustworthy enough not to tell anyone if it wasn't important.)

(However, there _are _several papers on the subject circulated to high-enough ranking members and trustworthy influential figures about town to explain the matter of the Six Paths of Pain to those who would need to know, papers that would be destroyed. A few prepatory articles on the subject for the Guide, prepared in the event that Pain went public, floated in self-contained servers on the Sub-Etha, based around the gist of these papers.)

(In essence, Pain was the awe-and-terror-inspiring psuedonym of an extremely powerful ninja from the same world as luminaries as Naruto Uzumaki and Gaara of the Sand and Tsunade the Slug Queen, himself one of the last descendants of the same clan that had birthed the family line of Naruto's parentage and gifted with a blood line gift so rare that most people didn't think it had ever existed to begin without outside of myth: the Rinnegan, the ultimate eye-based technique, supposedly capable of emulating and recreating every conceivable technique the ninja world had ever devised, endowing it's user with such power that changing the world was not a possibility but a simple consequence of existence.)

(Originally named Nagato, this particular ninja had grown up amid one of the many hellish crossfires between rival nations in the last Great Ninja War, and after his formative and teenage years had been marked by recurring events of mind-warpingly awful luck and trauma, having 'one bad day' again and again to increasingly worse extremes and not just driven over the point of well-intentioned lunacy but effectively thrown over it, he had become convinced of the primacy of pain as a philosophic constant in the nature of existence and a impassable factor in the develoupment of every living thing. Pain consumed him, pain had twisted him, pain had followed his every step for too long for him to stay sane, and at last, it seemed he had decided to _become _Pain itself, to make of himself a god and save the world from war no matter the cost. It was a good thing that such thoughts had been left behind a long time ago and he had become closer to the messianic figure his own beloved teacher Jaraiya had hoped he would be, but that pain would never leave him.)

(To that end, of becoming a god and forcing the world to cease war even for a short time, he had devised specific power sets appropriate for a form of enlightenment born from pain, and after being crippled in the very worst of his Bad Days, he had been forced to alter certain deceased bodies to act in his stead, implanting chakra receivers into them - the metal objects that appeared to be studs or piercings on the exterior of these bodies - and broadcasting his powerful chakra into them through the ones in his own body, effectively allowing him to have seven bodies at the same time and making it so that these bodies had a specific set of power. In times past, he had used powerful bodies of people that had meant a great deal to him or had influenced him - a twisted way of keeping their memory alive forever - but most of those bodies, with the exception of his Deva Path, had been destroyed or lost. With Traverse Town's superior biological technologies available to him, he had simply grown bodies appropriate for his Six Paths to suit their Path's thematics and be generally more effective than simple dead bodies.

(Alone of all of them, Deva Path was still of the first 'batch' of bodies he'd had, the fallen body of his dead friend Yahiko who'd died during Nagato's worst Bad Day and who'd instilled the concept of 'becoming God to fix the world', so he hadn't done anyone many favors in that regard, and made into the Deva Path to keep Yahiko's dream of fixing everything 'alive'. Possessing supreme power over attractive and repulsive gravitational forces, Deva Path was easily the most directly powerful of Pain's bodies. and sometimes rightfully compared to a walking nuke in terms of raw power. Human Path, grown in the image of Nagato had he been a woman - a whimsical idea that suggested he'd been influenced by Traverse Town's lunacy already - and held the power to extract all information or secrets hidden against the target, at the cost of involuntarily pulling out the target's soul, making it a highly effective if brutal weapon against enemies in a information-intensive situation. In theory they could have used it to find out Kimblee's secrets, but Pain had chosen otherwise, as it was willed that Kimblee and Deidara be punished in a more tasteful way.

(The Asura Path held the body of a robotic figure suitable to it's powers, for in addition to being a living juggernaut in terms of raw strength and defensive might, it had the ability to summon an astounding degree of mechanized armor and weapons to shame all but the most potent power armor systems. Animal Path, despite her fearsome looks and impressive agility and speed, was strictly a support role in design, able to summon gigantic monsters of often nightmarish form and incredible strength, and it could summon a _lot _of themveritable army of gigantic beasts that often dwarfed buildings, boasting immense physical power and numbers as well, and they had the advantage of also being animated bodies controlled by Pain. Together, Asura and Animal formed the offensive front of the Six Paths; Asura Path attacked the most dangerous foes head-on, using it's raw strength to crush the leaders and brutes, tough enough to take on all but the mightiest foes by itself, while Animal Path summoning a veritable legion of gargantuan beasts, animated corpse-monsters with no fear of death or desire to retreat. Most foes would fall to such as them in a short order. Just them alone would make Pain a force to fear, not even including the city-shattering might of Deva Path Pain.

(Raw offense was not all he had, with some powerful defense as well. The Preta Path had an ability known as the Blocking Technique Absorbtion Seal, allowing it to absorb any form of energy around it, whether through direct contact with the technique, a barrier field around itself or directly sucking away energy from an enemy though physical contact. Originally it only absorbed chakra, the energy the ninjas of his world used, but he'd since adapted it to most forms of energy he'd encountered; it wasn't a perfect conversion, and the most powerful attacks tended to be serious weakened instead of totally nullified, but it remained an extremely potent defense and most forms of attack were almost useless against it, and energy-based attacks were so pointless they might as well have been throwing pennies at a brick wall.

(And finally there was the Naraka Path, which was mainly an interrogator and healer; it was bonded to a peculiar manifestation called the King of Hell - not a literal title but Pain liked the sound of it - which, provided Pain was touching a target and asking it questions, would taste a target's life force after they answered his questions. Since they were paralyzed by Naraka's touch when he employed the King of Hell, this was a simple matter. It could tell if they were lying or telling the truth; if they lied, it would devour their life force and kill them, storing that energy for later, but if they told the truth it would leave them alive if severely weakened. It was a less extreme interrogation technique than Human Path's method, but it's true power was restoration; Pain could apply the life energies it had eaten by having the King briefly swallow an ally and infuse those energies into them, and while it took some time, when the King released them they were totally healed and refreshed, even from the brink of death or, if a construct like his bodies, completely regenerated. Living things weren't so lucky, since that body lacked the power of reversing death itself. That power belonged to Nagato, and it was too costly to use without risking his own life. And incidentally, Naraka had more chakra recievers than the others because of it's more non-human form, which Pain found it more difficult to harmonize with.

(The tactics were simple; Asura and Animal lead the charge with their overwhelming force while Human and Paraka provided support - and interrogated foes, if needed - while Preta was pure defense and intercepted attacks at the other Paths or allies or innocents as warrented, and when the moment was right Deva would unleash a devastating attack to decisively finish the battle. It was a potent combination, and it was often boasted to those who knew him that Pain had never lost a battle. He wasn't _that _powerful, but he liked the idea of being treated as an indestructable god of suffering inflicted on the evil.)

Deidara, of course, knew none of this. But wheels had been turning in his head, old familiarities brought closer, and though he was far from the most strategically minded fighters, he was immensely more intelligent than he seemed. And he'd just put two and two together and four had dawned. "I know you," Deidara said suddenly. his voice, usually so loud and maniacally cheery, was now quiet and so serious it surprised Kimblee. "I _know _you."

"As I know you," The Six Paths of Pain said dully.

Deidara was undeterred by this cryptic response. "You're _him._ The one none of us ever met 'cept maybe for the one woman in our ranks."

"Yes?" Freya said testily. Kimblee almost jumped in his seat, he had forgotten that she had been there. "Is there a point?"

"Akatsuki!" Deidara said. "You were there! _You were there, you sanctimonious addled lunatic!_"

"Excuse me?"

"I believe Deidara meant me," The Pains said.

"You were in Akatsuki!" Deidara said. "You're _him! _You're...you were our leader." Deidara laughed, hollow and shocked at this turn of events. "You're the crazy-ass leader none of us ever met or even _did _anything that I saw! The one that said that my reason to fight was 'just because'! You're right, but...damn it, what are you doing here!? How can you stand there and act like you never met me!"

There was silence from the crowd. "Ooh, _drama bomb_," Stature whispered snidely, not sounding particularily upset by Deidara's revelation.

"You know this man?" Kimblee asked Deidara as virtually everyone in the room or on the screens looked at Pain; not incredulously or angrily (well, barring a few cases, notably Mr. Herrimen and General Armstrong), but with a mere case of curiosity.

Deidara laughed. "Are you kidding?! We were in the same damn mercenary organization! Me and him, we're _allies!_ What the hells are you playing at, Leader?!"

They continued to stare. Kimblee watched Pain carefully, expecting the intelligence commanding these bodies to deny these charges. He was surprised when the Pains, still watching Deidara with a curiously removed regret, spoke. Pein gave him a brief look, their expressions unknowable. "Akatsuki no longer exists, Deidara. I have paid for my sins. And now, for the sins you commited under my command, so shall you." He paused. "For what it's worth, Deidara, as your former superior...I _am_ sorry things had to end like this. But you bring the judgement on yourself. I would say farewell, but that would be inappropriate." He shook his head, giving Deidara another brief look and this one was almost regretful.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Herrimen said. "But what is this frightful man talking about?"

Pain turned to Mr. Herrimen's screen. He paused for a moment, clearly wondering whether or not to explain, and thne he said, "If you wish to know...Akatsuki was once a group I led. Deidara and I are of the same world, and before the Heartless I concoted a plan to end the cycle of war engendered by the ninja status quo. A plan for which I required the most talented rogue shinobi I could locate. Deidara was among them."

"Yell _yes_ I was," Deidara said, practically hissing the words now, scraping and pulling at his bonds to now effect, as they only got tighter the more he fought. "Didn't give me a choice as I recall, hnh?"

Pain ignored him. "Some of you already know this," he told the screens. "Most of you did not. ...I apologize if mine and Konan's past membership in the same group as Deidara casts our loyalty into question."

"Konan?" Kimblee quietly asked Deidara.

"Pain's partner," Deidara muttered, sounding uncomfortably with saying his former leader's name. "Strange lady. Blue hair, quiet, polite, real affinity for paper-based abilities. Didn't know she'd survived the Heartless. Hell, didn't know _anyone _else from Akatsuki survived the Heartless." He frowned at Pain, calculating.

Pain's question seeemed honest enough, according to the chatter between the screen people and the people in the seats. After a brief conferring with a small amount of disagreement, Mr. Herrimen said, "A troubling thought, and perhaps it might make for others who would imagine this might give you conflicting loyalties...but I think that this is not the case."

"What?" Deidara said, disbelieving. Pain seemed to relax fractionally.

"Many of us have done things we're not proud of," Roy Mustang said heavily. He reached off-screen and pulled out a small silver pocketwatch, holding it by the chain like he thought it might bite him. He gave it a quick jingle, and Kimblee frowned. Noting the way Deidara was frowning at Pain, and considering that Roy had done all the things Kimblee had in the Ishbalan Civil War only to stand here among these people like he was like _them _and pretended that his hands were still clean (or perhaps he didn't and merely acted like they were so he could live as though they were, and live righteously enough to serve his people) and cast aside his conspirators-turned-enemies, he thought that he and Deidara had an uncommon commonality now. "No reason to start making exceptions now."

There were a few grumbles from less convinced commentors, but they kept quiet if they felt seriously about it. The frostly chill in their silence, and that of the cold regard of even Mr. Herrimen, suggested that any trust they'd held for Pain had still taken a serious blow.

And again, Pain bowed to these others he claimed were his peers. He turned to Deidara and Kimblee as a wrathful judge, and after a moment to compose his thoughts, began to speak again, growing even more serious than before. "The two of you stand guilty of heinous and unforgivable crime against the holding of Traverse Town, claimed under squatter's rights and dominion of conquest against other claims and recognized as soveriegn territory of the inhabitants sheltered under the our factions and independants by the nations of this world." A moment, perhaps for effect or gathering strength. "These crimes, particular to Solf J. Kimblee, are many but of importance include plotting to deal large-scale damage and casualties to property and civilians, carrying out said plots to considerable damage and loss of life, the murders of a small family unit outside Foster's we discovered in the First District, several people that we can reasonably pin on you including an old man and his grandchildren; the forced assimiliation of several hundred residents, the creation and deployment of a forbidden metanormal weapon, numerous households from the Foster's area sacrificed to enable aforementioned weapon..."

It went on for a bit. Kimblee stopped paying attention somewhere around the time when Pain started talking about 'Wasting time rambling about incomprehensible philosophic notions of an Evil bent' and founded his attention drifting to an odd shape on the ceiling right behind the chairs for himself and Deidara but not so much that he couldn't see it clearly; it was a circle, not unlike a transmutation array but not incorporating any alchemic equations he was familiar with. It looked a bit like a sorcerous ritual , and while he was more familiar with arcane forms than before he had known it even existed, he didn't have a clue what it was for. It _was _naggingly similar to binding and summoning circles he'd seen used to call up demons or devils, but it was different in ways he didn't have the technical knowledge to express. It did bother him that this circle lacked the sense of wrongness he'd always felt from those circles, and this one made him feel oddly serene just looking at it. (And disinclined to lie, for some reason.)

On a whim, he craned his head over as much as he could. As he suspected, there was a matching circle on the floor; a perfect binding, doubled in strength. Troubled by this, Kimblee barely noticed Deidara say, "My. You have been a busy boy! Hmn! Nice work you pulled off with that stuff I gave you. Pity it didn't work out, but that's life for you. Least you made a good show of it!"

The Pains kept going for some time, and eventually finished with, "...Unpunished attempts to genocide a civilization, stated alliance with a unknown organization, threatening to do us great harm, refusing to cooperate and give information on this organization, and at least sixteen acts of petty crimes too minor to be included at this hearing." Pain stopped there. "I must confess a certain measure of admiration to your devotion to your work, twisted though it is."

"Thank you," Kimblee said.

PAin said nothing, he seemed to have finished with Kimblee. He turned to Deidara. "As for you..."

"Oh brother," Deidara said.

"_You, _Deidara formerly of Akatsuki, stand accused of aiding and abetting a plot to cause all aforementioned casualties to Traverse Town, providing forbidden alchemical knowledge to do so, harboring such knowledge without bringing it into appointed authorities to have it studied and sealed away, retaining criminal ways from prior to the Heartless attacks, working for faction interests under false pretenses, serving as an undercover agent for an outside interest that you have not given us any information about-"

"Not for lack of trying from you, hnh," Deidara said with a wicked grin. He nodded at Human Path Pain. "You _could _look into my brain, but not without ripping out my soul. And _that _goes against your ridiculous little fetters! Hell, Human Path Pain could give it a try, but that'd just be worse, isn't it?! Or even Paraka Path! Go on, give it a try, I won't lie!" He laughed madly, and Kimblee had a hunch there were terrible secrets laying in those deceptive drone bodies.

Pain, through the eyes of his Six Paths, looked at them coolly. "The safeguards in your minds will not allow it," He said. "Believe me, if I thought it had a chance of success, I might well do it...but no, the people of this town want this done _properly._ I will not risk that now. If, though, at some later time, when we can devise a means to break those safeguards and no other source of information seems possible..." They shrugged, as if to say 'well, you never know'. He didn't seem terribly pleased with the potential risks, but he didn't act on his doubts either.

After a moment, he continued on his recitals of Deidara's own crimes, with a special emphasis on the torturous art he'd performed in his own home; they had been very interested in finding out what had happened to several missing people. As Kimblee had predicted, Deidara had been caught partly because of their presence, and they had made Deidara's fate certain.

Eventually Pain finished, and regarded them coldly. "These are your charges. Have you anything to say, sinners?"

Kimblee paused for a moment. _Deny them_, Ghostfreak whispered in his head. _Take this chance, use them, escape and plan vengeance-_

"I deny nothing," Kimblee said. "It is as you said. You have won. Do what you will. That is your right."

"Yeah, what he said but without the fancyness," Deidara said, unknowingly talking over Ghostfreak's screams of infuriated horror.

Pain didn't seem surprised to hear it, but he did seem pleased. He looked up at the screens and said, "What say you?"

The people on the screen stared coldly at Kimblee. "Guilty," They said firmly and, Kimblee noticed, with a certain amount of gleeful vindictiveness.

"Then," said Pain. "There remains one more measure. A final proof, so that we may rest easy knowing that justice is done." The Pains stepped back. "Now we summon our impartial judge."

The Pains flickered, gathering strength and vanishing in a movement too swift to notice, and reappeared behind Kimblee, in the summoning circle behind him, and they were all kneeling. "What is this?!" Kimblee said as they gathered powerful, crackling with an energy like transparent blue flames.

"Mortal minds may be clouded," Pain replied. He seemed obliged to be honest with Kimblee, as if he felt that Kimblee was owed it for what would be done to him. "Emotions overruling good sense and desires for revenge overturning all else. It would flaw judgement, and render our judgement potentially cruel and unjust. To do this right, there must be _no _room for error. To that end..."

The circle glowed with the same azure anergy. The air between the two summoning circles rippled, shifting like heat, and it looked _odd _there, space warping and shifting, and a terrible light shone through and Kimblee thought he saw _things _moving there...

And the power from Pain, such immense power, as though a nuclear weapon had begun walking around and talking and entertaining delusions of sentience. Enough power to fuel a calculated ritual that could seek out anything that fit it's parameters, and bring it right here and bind it to their purpose.

"We shall summon an entity of pure Law and Good, and have that entity judge you as guilty in this matter," Pain said.

The power stunned him still, and Kimblee hardly released the import of what was happening, though it was begining to dawn on him that it was _over_. The game had ended and he had lost, and the enemies were calling down a judge to ensure that their victory was utterly legitimate-

He had little time to brood on this. Pain's Paraka Path had stored much power for this summoning, so a ritual that might have taken many hours was cut short with the immense stores of mystical might Pain funneled into the summoning spell and directed most skillfully by Animal Path Pain (who only specialized in summoning Pain's specific creatures but was quite capable at many other forms of summoning magic); the air suddenly exploded with brilliant light, a brief sight of the entire multiverse laid bare before them in a tiny space that was paradoxally vast, the spell seeking out a single possible entity that fit the extremely loose criteria (for Law and Good are not so singular as many might think), overturning all planes of existence and all places that were Elsewhere for a suitable impartial benign judge in an instant, and Kimblee had to close his eyes as his brain began to squeal at the impossible vastness he beheld in that tiny space, and even Pain had to turn aside.

In the instant when that light was extinguished and a massive figure erupted into the bindings of the summon circle, Kimblee heard something quite new through the humming sound of the spell's activation. A massive noise as if of a mighty seal being rudely shoved open just a crack enough to permit a brief retrieval, and a deeper noise older than gods, older than reality, older and more fundamentally _real _than the sound of Kimblee's blood rushing through his veins, the sound of axiomatic perfection crashing down against all that was wrong and broken and needed fixing.

It sounded like thousands and thousands of gears turning in the echoes of a mighty voice speaking in a wordless sound of surprise, like that of a mighty titan roused from ancient sleep for a moment or two.

When Kimblee dared opened his eyes, it was to surprised chattered from the others, a stunned look on Deidara and even the faces of Pain, and none moreso than the figure on the dais serving as a summoning place, though Kimblee gave it a good show.

"...Did the spell misfire?" Roy Mustang said, utterly perplexed. "What the hell is that? Is that an angel or what?"

"I...I have no idea," Pain said, at a loss for words. Silently, his Paths took up their combat positions.

The entity there spoke, his voice (and he was indisputably male) like thousands of perfect crystals ringing together in a symphony of clarity so beautiful it could make one weep. Kimblee and no one else there understood the precise words he said, for it was in a language quite foriegn to them and yet naggingly familiar, as if of a language that had given rise to all others, and it mattered little, for a moment later the translation devices they all had (translator microbes for Kimblee and Deidara, Babel Fish for most and other less well-known devices for the rest) making it clear that this being had no immediate intentions to do harm. "By the Loom! What manner of strangeness is this?"

The speaker wasn't like anything Kimblee had met. It was roughly humanlike in shape, though a good deal taller (and perhaps more..._perfected _in it's design), formed completely of a crystal material and glowing with power, traceries of axiomatic energy sliding through it's mechanized body and the minscule facets thereof with winding movements not unlike gears circling around. It peered down at them from quite a few feet above them, it's broad body of such intricate design it looked like architecture rather than a living thing; a broad chest bolted into place by tiny screws rimming it's torso, expansive pauldrons over it's shoulders, and an angular head that rose directly from those shoulders with a not quite human face that might ordinarily be serious but kind, but presently regarded them with bewilderment tempered by fascination.

He looked around, giving Kimblee and Deidara a cursory look before glancing at Pain's Paths with some interest, the joints on the legs clicking minutely as it ponderously turned around, directing his attention to the screens. his inner glow brightened for a moment, nearly blindingly so, and yet he wasn't looking at anyone's faces but at the cubic frames of the screens, the small receiving antannae on them, the carefully modulated dials on them... soon that bored him as well and he looked around the whole room with great interest, apparently fascinated by the smooth dome-shaped walls and sparse aesthetics. Confusion forgotten, he hummed contently and spoke once more. his meaning came moments later to them all: "Your works of architecture is a fair bit crude, but you have done fine work with the materials available to you. A bit of a rush job, I presume. I would advise you to shore up the bearings on the joins, they seem overly taxed. And I do not think that you have taken this area's geomancy into consideration." He frowned, looking at the ground. "Are we in the Reaches? The Essence lines are strange..."

"Ah, thank you," Deva Path Pain said uncertainly. Kimblee, already suspicious, felt certain that none of his captors had expected anything like this, that this was definitely not supposed to have happened.

The entity, supposedly of pure Law and Good, regarded them curiously yet distantly. "And what mode of speech is this?" He wondered. "I do not understand the words, and yet they come clear to me as the shine of freshly oiled metal in electric glows. It is not that of the true Earthtongue, nor the mode of High Holy Tongue, nor is it any of the languages spoken of it throughout the Realm of Brass And Shadow, nor is it any language I have known...and I have seen many. Who are you, and what am I doing here?" He glanced down. "And what is _that?" _He added, gesturing at the spell circle. He made to put his broad four fingered hand upon it, and tilted his head in curiosity as chakra-tinged air flashed against his hand where it touched the barrier. his fingers breached through it (causing some degree of serious concern) and he moved his fingers back, puzzled. "Some manner of thaumaturgical ritual...?"

"We apologize," Pain said quickly. The entity glanced at him. Pain looked beseeching at the screens, silently asking for support, and General Armstrong quickly said, "We beg pardon, but who precisely are you? We sought out a entity of pure Law and Good to make a judgement perfectly clean of doubt, and the spell brought you here."

The entity cocked an carved facet that resembled an eyebrow. "Truly?" He regarded her for a moment, and she did not back down from his gaze even though the screen offered her a degree of disconnect. Kimblee envied her; merely being in the presence of this being quailed his heart, an immense pressure pounding into his head and his heart, and something in his mind was screaming over and over again...and there were gears grinding in the echoes of his thoughts, as if of a singing machine-titan.

The entity looked at them all harshly, from those on the screens and focusing on those present on the stands, staring hard at Deidara and Kimblee first before looking at those in judgement, and through it all he seemed to be searching them for signs of wrong-doing or lying. Kimblee felt caught in a searchlight for the brief moment that thing looked at him, scrutinized as a insect under a microscope before the being turned away. Finally he relented, and speaking in a more softly modulated voice, said, "I see that no offense is meant in your interruption of my duties, nor that you intended to bring a being of my stature here. Clearly a mere custodian would have sufficed, though I had not heard of such a procedure being done." He stopped for a moment. "...You said 'spell'. Such terms have not been used in millenia, and certainly never by the Alchemical Exalted. Sorcery is not inscribed into their design! How do you know of sorcery?! What city is this, and what nation?"

"Those names are unfamiliar," Pain said. "This is the refuge city of Traverse Town, on the world of Crucible."

The being stopped, staring at him for a long time. his glow wavered and brightened in unpredicable intervals. "...'World'?" He finally said. "An unusual choice of words." He hesitated, a conclusion appearing to him and clearly shocking him, and he dared to ask, "Ah. Impossible, but yet it is apparent...do you mean to inform me that this is _not _Autochthonia?"

"No," Pain said. "And I have never heard of a world by that name."

"The name of Autochthon the Great Maker is not known to you!?" The being stared at them in mingled horror and bemusement, perhaps stunned by his own show of emotion. "This is...this is _most irregular._" He said this like it was the most blasphemous of slurs and clanked in a parody of shuddering. "Creation has surely fared badly in the times since the Great Maker's departure, if his name has been forgotten! And to think that the Seals could have been breached from outside once a door to Creation was established! Where are the Exalted among you? Who commands you and has such power to call one of the Divine Ministers?!"

"There are none like that here," Pain said, begining to lose his patience. "I channeled power into the spell to summon a being fitting our parameters of benevolence and ability, but there were no particular limits on the power of the entity we wished to summon. It seems merely an unfortunate coincidence-"

The entity waved a hand, and Pain stopped. "It is fine," The entity said. "I understand that this is a new experience. Inform me of your request and I may deign to do this. Though it seems rather belittling, to pull _me _here for any task without my consent is rather intriguing. You say no Exalted are here? I detect no obvious spiritual power at work, nor that which I am familiar with. If this is mortal's work, to call me here, it demands interest!" He crossed his arms, and suddenly let loose with a booming laugh like the sound of crashing crystals.

"...Um, thank you?" Stature said. "But, who are you exactly?"

He glanced at her. "Permit me to introduce myself." He bowed curtly to them, a crystalline titan of mechanical life. "I am _Kadmek_, Divine Minster of Architecture, Design, Structural Integrity, Biogeomancy, Art, Wisdom, Strategy and Prophecy! God of Beauty, Cities, Serenity and Music! Chief Regulator of the industrial Element of Crystal! One of the eight sub-souls of Autochthon the Great Maker and manifestion of his ability to make plans and then execute those plans!" He regarded them with the hint of a smile on his face. "And for what purpose did you accidentally snare me?"

They stared dumbly at him. Mr. Herrimen raised an eyebrow tremulously. Roy Mustang's eyes opened wide and refused to narrow any. General Armstrong hissed to the other screens, "Did we really just _pull in a god?!_" A flurry of horrified whispering ensued, a lot of chatter mostly revolving around the terror of having said god mad at them. Kadmek didn't seem particular upset; now that his initial confusion had abated somewhat (as he still had no idea what the hell was going on), and he patiently waited for them to come to grips with this little hiccup in the plan and realize that he didn't seem at all upset. Pain's Paths glanced uncertainly, seemed to realize that iniative was called for and they said, "Many terrible wrongs were done to us by these two before you," and they gestured to Kimblee and Deidara. Kadmek looked down at them, frowning mightily and his glow intensified to a crackling. "We wish to render judgement but we require the aid of a being of pure Law and Good to make the proper verdict, so that our decision is not false."

Kadmek considered this, and after a tense moment of wondering if this was not below him or not, he satisfied their worries when he said, "Tell me the details of this case. I shall assist you." They looked at him in surprise and he said, "Well. This is certainly a very novel occurance. It would be remiss not to fulfill the duty I have been called for."

Pain told him all the details, as quickly as he could while making things as clear as possible and giving all pernitent information. Kadmek's face sharply turned towards Kimblee and Deidara, clouding as every little detail of Kimblee's destructive rampage and attempted destruction of this town of cosmic refugees. his perpetual glow began to become something like lightning before Pain was done, a reflection of his growing fury at such crimes, and when Pain finished Kadmek said, "Agents of dissolution and entropy, the both of you! A sickness unto the souls of mortal kind, that is all you may be fit to be!" He stiffened, looking quite eager to smash them into paste or some more hideous fate, but he turned to Pain regardless. "Regulators of this realm, what is the procedure for miscreants as these? What shall be their fate if they are indeed assuredly guilty?

Pain told him. General Armstrong smirked. Roy Mustang looked serious. Deidara made a strangled sound of horror, while Kimblee sunk into his chair mournfully; he had known this was coming but it was crushing to hear it said so plainly. Kadmek made a faint ringing noise in amusement. "A fitting fate, if not perhaps the efficient one."

"It suits our ways to do so," Pain replied.

"Far be it from me to interfere in your laws, for then I would be little better than the accused," Kadmek said evenly. "I shall examine them now."

The seats holding Deidara and Kimblee pivoted around on their own, now facing Kadmek. "Counterweights and hard-point swivel joints under the seats and joined to the floor," Kadmek observed. "Beautiful in it's austerity and subtleness. Ah, but I do become besotted with details such as this. Would that I had more time to examine your works!" He raised his hands and placed them both on Kimblee and Deidara's heads (and the binding circle's limits were large enough to allow him to do so, now that he acted with Pain's permisison to do what he wished), and his hands were so large that their heads were easily swallowed in his massive palms. If he wished it, he could pull their heads off with even the slightest modicum of effort.

Light pulsed around his hands, moving in geometric shapes not unlike crystalline structures; Kimblee felt a presence weighing on his mind, an experience that had gotten extremely old extremely fast since he'd occupied Kevin's body for a while (and admittedly still wasn't clear how he'd gotten a new body for himself and why Ghostfreak was along for the ride), and he wondered for a moment if it was even worth resisting. He heard Deidara make a sound like 'Glck!' and Kimblee figured that this meant it was better to just give up. He did so, and immediately _something _thundered right into his mind, raw power in material form blasting right through the structures of his mind and passing through them, occupying his recent memories for all they were worth, taking them all in and passing judgement.

It was not a particularily pleasant experience, and it was good that it only lasted a few moments, or Kimblee thought he wouldn't survive it. his eyes crossed and brain cells overloaded on the spot even with his willing consent to let this thing into his head; he had no words for the experience of it, only that it was like looking directly into the sun and having the sun look back and also decide to transform it's energy into a consciousness and then ram that directly your own and squat there for a bit and being quite gleeful about your brain about to explode the whole time.

It was too much, just too much, that inhuman mind looking right through him and radiating scorn; it wasn't human, not even of human origin or belief, it simply _was_, a piece of something incomprehensibly greater and still so vast that it had to take on a form of it's own, and Kimblee saw right through it's own memories for an instant-

(_A realm of utter blackness, no sun or natural light to illuminate, and only through the flashes of industrial fires and the eye-melting glow of electrical arcs connecting city-sized conduits is it illuminated to him, and there are gigantic bio-tectonic forces pushing continent organs in a sea of grinding metal, everything is metal, the mind-warping heights of this place are metal, the biological-shaped edges of the walls and the rising plates like ribs here and there are metal, the continents are metal and they seemed jagged and weary but a moment's glance confirmed that there are _cities _there, and he's looking at them from a scale so stupendous it hurts just realizing it, and everywhere there are stupifyingly huge creatures that are not god or elemental but some servitor inbetween, mechanical lifeforms serving as biological processes, and then he sees that the walls and floors are made of _machines_, so absurdly large he cannot grasp it, toiling aware to some unknown purpose and it all feels _alive-)

_(A city, huge and cavernous, a thousand towering blocks of metal arcing skywards right into the ceiling of the hollow the city is built in, and sixteen other towers like it, catwalks and escalators and lifts connecting them all, and humans swarm from building to building as the ringing call of shift change echoes out, and smoke rises from these factory-towers while hovering pod-vehicles files into them and leave carrying loads of machined parts to be delivered to another factory block to be fitted together, and smoke rises from the factories before being filtered into recycling baffles, and beyond the factory-towers stretches the rest of the city, swarming with millions of human lives; layers on layers of inhabited metal, and the holographic billboards display patterns that bolster the willpower of the watchers, and the _life _of the place fills it, a pulse of raw Essence and a will behind it, and this entire city is truly a living mechanical thing of vast scale, and there are thousands more like it, and yet the communications it sends to it's inhabitants cannot hide a deep-seated dread-)_

(_In some crevice squealing things that might have been machine custodians once gather, and their voices are so twisted and awful the mind recoils from their sound, their metal exoskeletons bulging from the inside with lumps of flesh and pulsing blood where there should be oil and electric impulses, thinking engines bulging from their backs but swollen with stolen brain tissue shoved into their bloodied meshes, and there is something so terribly and monstrously _wrong _with them more serious than even the sanctity of their mechanical purity corrupted by their self-imposed cancerous organic defilement, and as they swarm up on the unwary tunnel-dwellers just north they sing songs to the horrors they make for ruinous Chaos itself, make of the humans they find bloody sacrifices to the glory of Entropy, and as the blight of the soul cancer that twisted them into such monsters leaks into the environment around them and bleeds all machine-life from it into dissolute emptiness, they scream and scream as the air warps with the intrusion of a nullspace that should not be and a terrible one-eyed machine-monster looks down on them with power equal or greater than Kadmek's, the power of the Void leaking from it's cycloptic eye, and it howls an empty noise that is the echoes of what will be the terrible dead force named the Engine Of Extinction-_)

_(And here again is the world in full, that world of mechanical life, a world of fauna with metal exoskeletons and electric lights and countless similar things like that, all from the tiny hummingbird-shaped steam elementals that tend the heating pipes to the wheeled fix beetles repairing the fallen humans they encounter, formed of the industrial-spirit elements of Steam and Metal and Smoke and Crystal and Lightning and Oil, a huge living world that is more than the Machine-God it's people pray to and shelter in his sleep, a titan of industry and genius and mechanical evolution, and Kimblee can feel it's incomprehensible might, and for all Wuya's power even her nascent empire would extinguish itself against the incredible might of this titan if he were to turn his full attention on dismantling her._

_The whole of the world Kadmek hails from, this titan who shaped Himself into a world for his worshippers and their descendants to dwell in and who Kadmek is but a sub-soul of, is shown in more, so much more than Kimblee can process, and he sees more than he wishes to know, sees the empty and dead places spreading slowly with the advance of broken-machines and exalted champions twisted to gremlin-like wickedness, humans die by the thousands after another as their sleeping world-titan cannot save them from the evil ravaging his insides, sees epically sized bellows struggling to cope with corrosive tarry liquids choking it's processes and can only manage to expel gouts of acidic smoke before breaking and collapsing on itself, sees fields of mind-crystals crackling in terror as neural-fields dream nightmares of death and ruin too terribly close to reality. Biomechanical-continents crumble and shatter as other mecha-continents smash into them without ministerial procedures to safeguard them and Primordial flesh siezes and falls. This Realm of Brass And Shadows is falling to a disease afflicting it, killing him, a cancer older than worlds and born of self-doubt and fear, and Kimblee can see the shape of his dreams overlapping with the helpless corrosion of this world's body in restless sleep..._

_And Kimblee, touched for a moment by the immanent compassion of another and seeing it through another's eyes, can feel how much _pain _this world is in, and that it is dying by bit by bit every day._

_And yet, for all that pain, it has still found a measure of peace at times, knowing that those that worshipped him loved their world, and cared for them even as they might share his doom._

_That vast impossible consciousness so big it would annihilate Kimblee's mind if it so much as made the briefest flicker of direct contact glanced at him. Kimblee felt a brief moment of curiousity through it's sleep, and so much _pain_-)_

And then just as suddenly as he had been submerged, he was torn free; crystal hands left his face and he was left quivering in his seat as Kadmek declared, "I have searched his memories, and a peculiarity is apparent; mighty safeguards prevented me from making any definite conclusions about where he came from or whose orders he was serving." Kadmek glowered. "Mighty powers are behind this Kimblee fellow. Tread carefully. You have strange enemies indeed. Breakers and Void-bringers, all of them! And incidentally he has a rather nasty entity lodged in his head, even more vile than himself and deserving of judgement."

Kimblee blinked, his head still aching like it was going to burst. Deidara twitched a few times. "Bleeeh," Kimblee wheezed.

"Oh stop whining, you're made of sterner stuff than that," Kadmek said. "Flesh is supposed to be _adaptive_. That's what the stuff is good for. Be more of a credit to your substance!"

"...Should we be insulted?" Roy asked. Pain shrugged. Kadmek looked politely puzzled.

"Well then," Kadmek said. "You asked me to deliver a verdict on behalf of your laws, and it behooves me to do so. While I cannot, regretably, discover _who _ordered them to do so, I did confirm that they were acting on orders to do the things they did; Deidara was a mole sent by a neferious organization in the style of the Void-bringers that afflict my own realm, and Kimblee's memories confirm him to be acting on orders to do as he wished to bring destruction and chaos to this town, and Deidara certainly gave him the means to do so. They did it all under their own volition, without coercion, and with much enthusiasm."

"They are," Kadmek finished, and seemed to spit in his fashion. "Most certainly _guilty!_"

"Yeah, we never exactly made a secret about it," Deidara said.

"Will you not simply accept our honesty?" Kimblee asked.

"Oh shut up," Kadmek said. "That random biological genesis could produce such as you engenders a suspicion that the whole process is flawed. I want you ought of my sight before I have thoughts of changing human reproduction! Perhaps a factory-based system...no no no, _bad thoughts, BAD!_" He calmed himself after a moment and said to Pain, "Ah well. Is your propriety satisfied?"

Pain glanced at the screens. They nodded once, curtly. "As none have reason to distrust you, and the foolproof criteria of our summoning circles renders your word beyond reproach. If you were not of the appropriate moral alignment, you would not have appeared to us. The judgement is sound."

"If there remains question, let this satisfy them." Kadmek raised his hand, light swelling over it and crystallizing into a small oval device with glyphs swarming it in. "A collection of information I was able to retrieve from his memories. Simply look into it, and it's data shall be imprinted in your brain, and it shall be clear and it will be known that it is the absolute truth. No one who you give this to can doubt it's veracity. Justice shall be clear." He tapped his chest with a beauteous ringing noise, emphasizing the point. "As clear as the adamant of my body."

"I thought adamantium was a metal," Roy said.

"_Adamant_, not adamantium," Kadmek said. "The magical material form of crystal, associated with things such as lightness, cutting ability and logic, and it makes useful cutting edges. Though it's brittleness limits it's use as a construction material. Now, if that's all, would you care to administer the verdict?"

"You do not wish to be returned to your home?" Pain asked.

"I dearly wish it. But I would be remiss in my purview if I did not remain here."

"Then let us finish." Deva Path Pain stepped forward, brushing past Kimblee, and Kimblee felt a shudder as his coat brushed him.

Deva Path walked to the strange contraption at the front of the room, a weight of grimness in every step, and he held his hand over an opening on it. A blade slid out of his hand, right through the palm, looking like a much larger version of the studs and piercings on his body (and _was_; Pain controlled his Paths through those piercings, and they were a good deal more internal and bigger than seemed apparent), sliding into the opening and locking in place as it left Deva Path's body. Deva Path went to the other openings, one after the other, doing the same thing, and the machine powered up bit by bit as he did, the implanted chakra recievers serving as keys that undid a restraining mechanism on the device, switching on inactive controls.

It seemed surprisingly mundane.

Without Pain, this device could not be activated, since there were no other ways of recreating the chakra recievers that activated this device and he kept their secret to himself. He was the key to powering it, the watchman over this final punishment. Transponders powered on, conduits channeled energy, and thinking engines turned on, and the device quietly came to life, and with surprisingly little show the device activated, the air inside the arc tinged blue before suddenly erupting into the same warped lightshow that had preceded Kadmek's arrival but far more stable and less disquieting.

Quickly, the lights became a glowing blue mist, like a miniaturizing spiral constellation, and even that turned into the view of a flat and rather boring look platform in the middle of nowhere; a vast void, empty but for a wide-opened space and in the distance a fairly small island floating in space and encrusted with cities. Kimblee heard distant noise coming through it.

"A...portal?" He said uncertainly.

"Yes," Pain said. his tone could have been smug or victorious or even vicious; it was none of those things, merely quiet satisfaction. "One way into that place. That one single way. It is disconnected from all other planes, and no escape save through this particular portal. And it does not open from the other side. We found this particular dimension during some interesting scrying tests, and what it was once called we do not know. We call it the Vault."

"What is it?" Kadmek asked, intrigued.

"Do you know of the Lady Of Pain, the godlike ruler of the extraplaner city of Sigil?" Pain asked. Kadmek gave him a look that transmitted 'of course not'. "None know what she is, though she appears as a gigantic floating woman with a face surronded by blades. She holds the power of a god, though she forbids worship of her under pain of flaying, and has barred all other Powers from intruding on her domain. Under her rule Sigil is fairly stable, but she is most cruel and unforgiving. At times, it pleases her to remove part of Sigil and fold it into a small finite dimension with a specific exit that is not made known, and the people of Sigil call these places 'mazes'. They exist outside the Great Wheel of the planes, these mazes, and sometimes the Lady of Pain wraps up those who offend her or wrong her city in her dimensional powers and banishes them to one of these mazes and leaves them there. Sometimes they stumble on the means of escape, and more often they do not and simply starve there, or live out their lives if they are lucky enough to have sources of food."

Pain continued. "This device connects to the sole portal in and out of there, and we've modified that crack in the dimensional axis so that it cannot be accessed from this maze. One way in and out, under our control and in my administration. Once you leave, unless we decide otherwise, there is no escape."

He raised his hand. "Now. Join those who are of like mind as you, and may you rip each other to pieces and be gone from our minds. Farewell." Pain gestured, and spoke a technique name: "_Almighty Push!_"

The shackles of the chairs disengaged as gravity warped around Pain and Deidara, a vaccuum suddenly appearing around them, and they were both violently propelled from their charis without even the slightest wait or opportunity to do anything; they had been doomed the moment they'd set foot into this room, and again they had no chance of averting their fate. Without even a chance to have a hope of fighting for their freedom, they were hurled directly into the portal, _through _it-

(_-and again a disquieting moment of being suspended betwee planes and realms, his stomach twisting and his body pulled in multiple directions_-)

And then Kimblee and Deidara both smashed into the ground, dust smacking them in the face after the stony floor did, rolling about fifteen feet before coming to a stop. Kimblee groaned and looked back, seeing the portal still flickering there, still open, still a chance of him killing them and earning the satisfaction of their deaths-

Kadmek glared at them, Pain gestured, and Kimblee had enough time to see Roy smirk malevolently and present an extremely rude gesture at Kimblee before the portal winked out of mid-air, leaving nothing but empty space behind

Kimblee stared dully at it. "Well, _shit_," Deidara snarled, standing up and hobbling weakly. Not knowing why, Kimblee caught him before he fell over and pulled the ninja back up. "Thanks."

"No need to mention it."

The two of them looked around and they took several steps forward, their shoes crunching faintly on the brittle gray dirt on the platform that did not extend even seven feet from them, ending in craggy bits that looked like they'd been snapped away in some dreadful impact. There was _nothing _in their immediate vicinity...well, not that they saw right away, being distracted by the sight of several large floating islands in the distance, suspended by some unknown force and moving at different speeds; some apparently immobile (and those were the largest), a few moving visible but most drifting at an imperceptible pace. There was even one or two zooming along and constituting a serious hazard to life and limb and were devoid of life, moving so quickly that anything actually standing on them would be ripped to shreds. As they watched, one of these train-sized rocks smashed right into one of the larger ones; there was a large blast of dust, the impacted part collapsed into more dust (as if these islands were nothing more than silver sand compacted into boulders of ridiculously large scale) and there were a number of screams.

Their own island was moving fairly slow, so Deidara and Kimblee had several long moments of complete silence to witness several troubling facts. The first was how...closed off it all seemed. The illumination was ever-present, arising from the very air itself, but it was rather gray and dull, unpleasant to look at and cold to the touch. Just standing there brought a faint chill. The emptiness stretched for the horizon, but the horizon wasn't actually that big, and Kimblee wasn't certain how he actually knew it but it nonetheless seemed clear that the entire place was less than several thousand years across in every dimension, barred away by a peculiar force effect mirroring everything directly before it. As Kimblee watched, a small loose boulder drifted into the edge of the paradimension they'd been locked it, and it immediately reappeared at the opposite side of the realm. It was closed off by nature of it's own composition; there would be no forcing his way through that wall, because there was nothing _on _it, and merely getting close would warp him around.

Second was that it was actually pretty noisy; a cacophony of sounds arose from everywhere, screams and shouts and cries all pained and angry and belligerent in varying degrees mixed with explosions and clashes of sharp metal and the sounds of guns (and similar weapons such as laser rifles) going off at the same time as rocks smashing into things, or possibly people. It hurt just listening to it, the only really live thing in this place and it was so _ugly, _so dreadfully inelegant, just brutish and domineering. It was hard to pinpoint any particular spots for the noises, but the ones _making _those noises all seemed to be on the other islands; as they passed over one, Kimblee saw this confirmed, saw people moving down there, people that had simply disappeared while attacking Traverse Town and now he knew why.

The third troubling fact was the result of looking at one of the many floating island; they had seemed oddly irregular from far away, and as he saw them now he realized that they weren't oddly shaped by covered completely in artificial structures, layers upon layers of frighteningly sloppy and crude buildings on streets over each other and seemingly assembled by materials generously dumped here and there...but quite a long time ago, judging by the rate of deterioration things had gone through. The islands were completely covered in cities (and in some cased weighed down by all the extremely poorly done architecture), and there were people on them. Not a great many (vastly less than any city ought to have, barely enough for a village if even that), but they seemed scattered all over.

In fact, the islands seemed divided by territories, and Kimblee only needed a brief look at no less than six different gangs (each composed of less than six members) fighting each other over, from what they yelled in-between blows, a single city block with a self-sustained farm on it. Perhaps they wanted to monopolize the food and give their respective groups more power. Kimblee told this to Deidara, who said, "Wait, so we're in the middle of a sealed out tiny dimension with maybe hundreds of complete psychopaths bad enough to be sentenced here, fighting it out over scraps of territory like idiots?"

"Yes," Kimblee said sullenly.

Deidara and him stared into the air. "God _damn it,_" Deidara said.

"Indeed."

"Oh, so you've grasped the basic situation," said a voice from behind them. They turned around and saw nothing important; there was nothing on their tiny island except a portal recieving device (left intact by the locals in hopes that it might give them escape one day), a large statue of a fist extending an up-raised middle finger (with the words 'Salutation From Traverse Town, Jerkasses!' on it's base) and, just under a battery of old monitors, a small booth holding dozens of tiny pamphets that read 'So You're Locked In The Vault FOREVER' on the cover. The voice had come from the speakers on one of the monitors, which displayed a grainy and blurred but recognizable image of the room they had just been portaled out of, left much the same as it had been. "Welcome to the Vault. You will not be leaving, unless we decide to rip out your soul so we can steal all your secrets or something."

It was Roy who spoke, and it was to Roy that Kimblee addressed his next question. "What _is _this place? Is this your idea of an ultimate punishment? It does not seem that dire."

"Don't be wrong, it makes you look even more stupid," Roy said. He steeped his fingers from his screen (which was itself being displayed from a screen, it was downright meta) and smirked coldly. "The Vault, as we've named this dimension, is your new prison for the remainder of your lives, which may not be espicially long. The only way in or out is through the portal in this very chamber, and it only opens from _our _end. There's nothing to force your way through, or any means of getting the resources to even try it. Food is beamed in once or twice a month, and mostly it's up to the dregs like you to try and cultivate it. Or eat each other, I'm really not that concerned."

Roy continued. "Your punishment is exile there. You won't be coming back, so look forward to a lifetime of nothing but fighting it out for dominance and survival against a bunch of idiots just as psychotic and vicious as you are. We won't do capital punishment, for various reasons, but then you'll likely be dead in a week or two from some psychopath killing you to look tough. Or maybe you'll beat down everyone in your way and take over a gang, or make your own. I don't really care which; fight or surrender, you're still stuck there, so no matter what it's a bad situation for you. If you die, we get our vengeance. If you live or even prosper? Hell, you're stuck there. You're not going to be a problem for anyone except for people just as bad as you, so you're _their _problem. You're out of our hair, and we keep our hands clean."

"Very neat," Kadmek said, and it was unclear if he approved of these measures, disliked it or was just voicing an opinion.

"Really no way out?" Deidara said, calculating and watching them carefully.

Pain looked at him. "Of course not," he said, and there was a bit of regret there. "It would be foolish to allow any portals to be capable of opened there, or allow interdimensiona teleporters in. You are trapped. A shame; your level of power was something special. You could have _made _something of yourself. This is to be regretted...and it's still a victory for us."

Roy smiled at Kimblee. "You've _lost_, good and hard. There's no picking yourself up from this. It's over, Kimblee."

Kimblee stared at him for a long, long time.

And then he nodded his head. "Well played, Flame Alchemist."

Roy snorted, and not deigned to exchange any other words, his screen went off, one more tie to Amestris snapping away from Kimblee forever. Kimblee didn't know what that stung as much as it did.

"Most interesting indeed," Kadmek said. "The means you employed to send them to this interdimensional penitentiary...I must look into it with my peers. Perhaps we can improve our own mtethods! I thank you for this opportunity, surprising though it was. If you care to release me?"

"Of course," Pain said. his Animal Path gestured and said, "_Release_." The binding glyphs went out, there was that odd distortion of space in that circle, and with a noise like a crack of lightning and a clamour of many great gears turning in perfect unison, Kadmek was gone to the mysterious realm he hailed from, with many interesting data to give his peers.

One by one, the other screens went out. "Hey, you can't just leave us like this," Deidara said.

"I think that's precisely what they're doing," Kimblee said.

"What are we supposed to do," Deidara said, ignoring him. "Just leave us to die? That's hypocrasy, you don't want to kill us but you'll strand us here to die? The hell kind of logic is that, hnh?!"

"There _are _pamphets," Stature and Freya said. Kimblee almost jumped, he'd forgotten about them.

Deidara grabbed a pamphet and flipped through it. "There's nothing in here except increasingly more poetic euhphisms for 'screw you'," he said.

"And that's our way of telling you that your fate isn't really our concern," Freya said. "You have done terrible things, and now you are trapped with others who are equally cruel as you. Have fun realizing what that entails." Pain let her keep this last word and gestured, and the feed cut out, and the monitor turned to rolling static before turning off.

Some other signal, unseen, caused the muzzles on Deidara's mouths (all three of his weaponized ones) to fall out. Kimblee's own cuffs fell off and he rubbed his wrists to get some feeling back into them while Deidara's hand mouths opened and whined. "Well this is unfortunate," Kimblee said dryly.

The enormity struck him; he was _stuck _here, trapped forever. He was no longer an asset to Wuya, and he had no rescue coming for him. If he was retreived, it would only be to die a short time later and have his secrets ripped out. his alchemy was currently barred to him until he could determine this place's geomancy, or recreate his transmutation array, rendering him little more than a powerless man who was rather out of shape. And that was only the begining of his problems.

Kimblee sighed, a tiny suggestion of the crushing feeling stealing all hope or desire to plan ahead and triumph from him. He had lost, well and truly, and it was a struggle merely to accept it when it would be easier to just lay down and stop thinking for a while.

_Well played, _he thought again to Traverse Town. At the very least, he was a graceful loser.

Deidara sat down, sampling the sands. "Well, I might be able to make some fine art out of this," he said doubtfully. "The chakra doesn't feel right and I dunno how explosive it might be, but we can give it a shot."

"'We'?" Kimblee echoed.

"Sure," Deidara said. "Why not?" He shrugged. "We're both artists, you and I. A sculptor and a composer, practicing the mediums of explosives! I've had more irritating partners, believe me, and at least you have an appreciation for _real _art."

Kimblee considered it as their island came ahead over a city, and the people below took notice of them and started yelling threateningly, and made moves to climb their buildings and investigate, and possibly kill, them. "On the whole, we could do far worse," he agreed, not understand the warm thrill he felt at the notion.

He extended his hand, and Deidara shook it. (And Kimblee was grateful his hand-mouth hadn't been lolling it's tongue at the time.) The island touched down onto the city below and they had to stop running immediately before the screaming and the fighting started, and they both moved together into an extremely uncertain and probably short future.

But on the whole, given that they were trapped in a place where they couldn't escape (or do any more harm) and were effectively swept off the board, it could have been worse.

* * *

In her mysterious and continually nebulous domain of uncertain location, Wuya clasped her hands, and Mr. Lyle didn't know if she was angry and trying to hide it, pleased and quiet about it, or just totally indifferent. "Once more," She said silkily. "Summerize what happened."

Mr. Lyle, standing in the same chamber where Wuya had held the conference on the night where Zim had joined with Calvin and Hobbes in triumph over the mighty Guard Armor Heartless (and those same shadowy figures in attendence, silent so far and employing powerful arcane techniques to colocate themselves from their strongholds and places of intrigue across the multiverse so that they might commune without having to abandon their positions), straightened himself once. In this place of cold metal and black stone, awash in the chill of the Heartless' power and surronded by people with the obsessive need for domination to swim in that power and the strength to survive it, he felt extremely exposed and vulnerable. "Again?"

"Yes," Wuya said. "Again."

Standing at a seat of honor and nearest to Wuya's own seat was Azula, a pit of blazing blue flames roaring around her and reaching to the ceiling, and Azula said, "For those of us that are..._slower_, then the others." There were a few grumbles at this not-so-veiled insult, but none dared to speak out.

There was, in the corner and awaiting his opportunity to speak, a figure Mr. Lyle wasn't familiar with and certainly not among the vaunted figures of Wuya's highest allies; presumably an agent, awaiting a dire mission. He was an odd-looking figure, sitting in a chair and wearing an outfit not dissimilar to Kimblee's but a lot more...well, _skimpy _than was the usual fashion for men, and come to think of it he wasn't sure if this person was male or female, it was really hard to tell: his jawline was soft and pointed at the chin, his pale face astonishingly beautiful for a man, and with the curvy lines of his waist and the flare of his hips, it gave the impression of a human which was neither strictly male or female.

He was reading a book entitled _Memoirs of the Red Skull_, long dark hair oddly like the fronds of a palm tree flicking when he shook his head in at times quiet laughter and at other times brief mutterings of 'Bah, this is _kid's stuff_,' or something to that effect. His eyes, Mr. Lyle observed, were as red as blood, and with pupils like a cats'.

Mr. Lyle took the luxury of examining that man to compose his thoughts and phrase things in such a way that they would be acceptable to this collection of people, and then he thought 'screw it' and just say things as seemed plausible. This decision was assisted by another quick look at the assembled group, this final proof of Wuya's inner circle. his employers, his patrons as he sometimes thought of them in his more fanciful moments, had been unclear about the identities of the various movers-and-shakers that Wuya considered her most significant pawns or allies (And really, for Wuya it came down to the same thing; she was markedly more forgiving and pleasant towards her pawns than many like her, but that meant little when she ultimately saw everyone as either a foe or a resource to be expendedplayed).

Tonight, if he played this game well, he might be able to learn who they were (a tricky gambit, given that he didn't recognize several of them even with his employer's vast knoweldge) and even if things weren't terribly, he could spin that knowledge into information for his employers. It was always wise to have a back-up excuse or at least one little neat tidbit of valuable information. He'd learned that the hard way when he'd lost his thumb back when he had still been alive.

In the lightning-fast moment it took for him to come to this conclusion, one of the mysterious people present lost their patience. "Why are you taking so long!?" A massive mechanical figure boomed, looking something like a daemonic Santa Claus. "And who is this leavings of slag you drag before us, Wuya!? Is there some manner of point you have not confided to us?"

"Be still," Wuya said calmly, and dangerously.

"I was told that this was a high-profile meeting, not inspection of some new minion of yours! Have you not enough time wasted already?!"

Wuya raised a hand. Ripples of arcane power rolled from her and the room trembled with it. "If I wished it," She said softly. "I could reach through that co-located avatar of yourself and rip you asunder before you could so much as summon a shield to defend yourself. You are not so irreplacable that I wouldn't be tempted. So, _be still_."

The steaming figure bristled, his mouth working with many a grinding noise as if choking back his words, but he did so; clearly some other matter was preying at him. "As you ask," He managed, and sat back.

Azula started to speak. She stopped and looked at Wuya questioningly, and the elder witch nodded gracefully. Azula shook her head, her magnificent mass of hair sliding across her shoulders in a display specifically calculated to attract interest down to the most minute adjustment of hair strands over her neck, and the sudden roar of azure flames around her only amplified her intended effect of focusing attention on her.

Gradually, the table-full of villains subsided, and Azula smirked. "Now. It is clear that none of you are quite up to date on personnel. In that event, let us make it clear that our newest minion, this man before you-"

"I am not a minion," Mr. Lyle said sullenly.

"-Who is very persistent about being in denial," Azula said without skipping a beat. "Is named Mr. Lyle, and he is our little ambassador from our recent and on-going negotitions with the Powers of the Lower Planes. Specifically, that of a powerful and increasingly influential group known as the Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commision, in association with the lawfirm Wolfram and Hart. Mr. Lyle is here as their envoy, a token of goodwill between us and them, and incidentally as a troubleshooter and agent to work on both our behalfs. A duty they claim he is eminently suited for in his work with them, though I admit I have some diffuclty understanding why."

Mr. Lyle grunted. Clearly they weren't going to let him live down the incident under Foster's any time soon.

Voices among the table muttered disagreement, assent and understanding in turn. Azula waited for it to cool down before she continued. "his recent incompetence notwithstanding, he was fairly recommended by his superiors, and he is here as a explicit agent of the leaders of the IFCC, working under the jurisdiction of it's leaders whom some of you may be familiar with, and these three are fiends of the highest sort, living embodiments of elemental Evil aspected by pure Law, Neutrality and Chaos in turn: Lee of the Nine Hells of Baator, Nero of the Gray Wastes of Hades, and Cedrik of The Infinite Layers of The Abyss."

More murmurs, some recognizing, and mostly excited or outright wary. _Fiends, _they said. The most awful and terrible creatures associated with the Evil they so willingly drenched themselves in, not merely entities that had chosen to oppose the forces of Good or do as they wished, but literally _born _of that ancient and terrible force, evil deep in the marrow of their bones and every fiber of their being grimly devoted to the cause of evil and perpetuating it with every ounce of their considerable power.

It was said that the Heartless were NOT any variety of fiend, and in fact the fiends were said to be wary of the Heartless' wholly destructive actions that left nothing to corrupt or rule behind, but anyone who'd had dealing with either would be hardpressed to tell the difference.

Azula continued. "Thus, it would be _prudent, _at the very least, to let him have his say and keep you all informed of our latest strike at Traverse Town, crucial as it may be to our plans, so that he carry this news to his superiors and hopefully nudge them closer to joining with us in full. Preferably _under _us."

"Yeah," the Joker, the only one there Mr. Lyle was familiar with, muttered under all the excited or suspicious comments her pronouncement drew. "It's always about people being _under _you, isn't it?"

A brief round of crude laugher from some, cut even briefer when Wuya cast an annoyed glance at them. Azula only smirked cruelly.

"If I must tell?" Mr. Lyle said. "In brief, ladies and gentlemen, several days ago we dispatched one of our more capable but unreliable agents, one Solf J. Kimblee, codenamed 'The Red Lotus Alchemist' in his native Amestris-"

"Amestris?" The hot-tempered mechanoid who'd protested over Mr. Lyle earlier interrupted. The agent in the shadows looked up suddenly at the name of the country. Mr. Lyle thought he looked a little wistful. "Isn't that the place where this Hohenheim punk we're looking for came from? Or at least his research?"

"I was t'inkin' dey was supposed ta be Nazis," said the massive and coolly polished troll that had been present at the last meeting. "Killin' whole groups of folk they don't like on account of it bein' easier even when it caused problems and was downrigh' stupid at the time, and all that suchness."

"...Stupid?" The agent said quietly, his face twisting into a bestial sneer.

"Actually, they're a bit more like Imperial Japan during the era of World War Two, particularily in regards to civilian damages and cruelties," Wuya remarked. They looked at her. "Search your feelings. You know it to be true! Oh how I love finding reasons to say that..." The agent scoffed quietly.

"If I can continue?" Mr. Lyle said irritably. Wuya waved him on. "Right. Kimblee, having been disembodied as part of a project we had hoped to use to create functional immortality or at least a semblence thereof, was placed into the body of a test subject named Kevin Levin that we'd extracted most of the crucial data from and sent to Traverse Town on Crucible. He made contact with one of our men there, an explosives artist named Deidara, and retrieved information he used to create a weapon.

"He then traveled to a local home for new refugees called Foster's Home and employed a number of it's inhabitants in a ritual to create this weapon, which amplified his explosion-based alchemic powers considerably. He destroyed the house and went on his way, dealing an acceptable amount of damage before he was accousted by several of Traverse Town's inhabitants, at least two of which he'd known in Amestris. They delayed him, briefly, and I'm sure you know how this sort of things goes. Cries of revenge from indignated self-righteous idiots, a battle that they did fairly well before Kimblee sounded knocked them down, that sort of thing."

"Okay, you're getting to the weird point then," said the clawed and burned man that, for some reason, everyone was keeping away from. The sole exception was a towered and odd figure shying away from all the iron, but the man didn't seem to want to be near even this thing either. "I heard about this point, I didn't get it before."

"Right," Mr. Lyle said. "Well, apparently _another _group that may oppose us unless we play things very right was working up their own plans to relaliate against Kimblee, and they commandeered a news studio to do it. They sent out a message calling Kimblee out, challenging him to a fight. Well, Kimblee's a bloodthirsty lunatic and proud of that, he couldn't resist. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a big deal, except that...hrm, I trust you're familiar with the wielder of the Keyblade we were expecting? The one we saw fighting that Guard Armor last night and making contact with the minions from the Cat-King?" Grunts and mutters of assent. "Well, it turns out he and his group were part of the bigger group against Kimblee. He was one of the people there who fought Kimblee, and defeated him."

Silence.

A few of them facepalmed. "Crap damn it," The burned man swore, badly.

"Kimblee's _gone?_" The agent said. His lips tightened and he looked away, eyes shut. "...Damn it..."

The trollish businessman was more sage about it. "Who's in dat group of his now? I 'member, I 'member someone said dat he got a new guy in or something?"

"I'll take this one," Azula said, and as composed as she pretended to be, she seemed more off-balance than she normally was during her infrequent 'bad times'. It was very bad to be near her at those times; ordinarily Azula was collected, almost mechanically precise in her schemes and actions. Cruel, certainly, but methodical about it, rarely wasteful or capricious. But when her mind swung the wrong way, and Wuya's psychic safeguards were strained to the breaking limit...

Well. Azula was not considered a monster even by the standards of this collection of monsters for no reason. Wuya professed ultimately noble goals (namely the preservation of a portion of the multiverse left in the wake of the Heartless' final feast, under her ownership and rule of course) and while she hardly lived up to it, she _was _rather good to her rank-and-file workers, so it likely said a lot about her affection for Azula that she turned a blind eye to Azula's means of releasing stress by tormenting and torturing and killing random technicians or soldiers or anyone who was unlucky enough to catch her attention.

And, of course, the knowledge of Zim's latest recruit had badly upset her. She, and Wuya, had believed many things about her brother since he and the rest of his group had disappeared from their world some time ago, and now they were all wrong, and so many of their plans were invalid and required recalculation.

"We are...uncertain of the circumstances," she said, and Mr. Lyle saw Wuya flinch, just barely managing to contain it. Almost little more than a faint flicer of her eyes; it must have stung to admit that their information network, previously considered utterly infallible and in tune to almost anything going on in the multiverse that could affect their plans negatively or be a boon to it, had utterly failed to recognize that Team Avatar had _not _died when they'd disappeared from their natiev world. "But this _person _that has joined the Keybearer is from my own world. A blood traitor, a pretender to the sacred throne of the Fire Lord and usurper of the Fire Nation, alongside that misguided and awry incarnation of our world. A report is being prepared to brief you all on the subject, but suffice to say that he is of great importance to me."

"I thought _you _were Fire Lord," Mr. Lyle said coolly.

A pause. Mr. Lyle could have sworn he could hear Azula's temper fraying. "I am," Azula said, too quickly. "Though the taming of my world goes slowly."

"We should just send another assassin to take this fellow out, then," opined another of them; the shadowed horror next to the burned man and offending all of them. "Resolve it quite fine. If he is fit to challenge us, than he shall live! If he does not, he will provide us with much amusement-"

"NO!" Azula roared, the fires around her blazing high. The burned man shrank back, eyes wide in terror, and Azula sat down, the fires cooling slightly. "No. We shall _not _kill him so...so impersonally. He is mine to break, should circumstances permit." She paused, wondering whether to say this or not, and added, "You see, he is my brother Zuko. Traitor to the Fire Nation."

This seemed an extraordinary pronouncement.

After a moment of heavyness, the troll said, "Dis here bloke is yer kin? An' he just goes and joins up wit' da Key-guy. I dun' like this. Sounds too fishy ta make any sense."

"Indeed," Wuya said. "That the sole competent member of the Fire Nation's generation be delievered into my hands, dear Azula, seems an uncanny stroke of luck. And that the one who was lucky simply to be born find his way to the Keybearer and befriend him is the sort of luck that's not on our side." She tapped her fingers, thinking. "A coincidence, perhaps," she finally said. "But I so loathe such simple possibilities."

"So this Zuko is working with the Keybearer now," the machine-man said. "Azula's brother is a friend of our enemy. A frivolous concidence, but whatever, of course, we can deal with that. What happened with Kimblee?"

"Yeah, what about that?" The agent said. They continued to ignore him. Perhaps they were under instruction to do so.

"Well, we can't fault his ambition," Mr. Lyle said dryly. "He cobbled a giant robot from two other mechanized humongous armors he found and used it in a direct assault on Zim and those allied with him. A great deal of damage, a very satisfying level, was done in the process, but eventually they managed to destroy his weapon, broke through his giant robot's defenses, and defeated Kimblee. They've taken him into custody, and by all accounts he's already been dealt with in a disgusting permanent but non-lethal way. As has Deidara."

"I liked Deidara," the agent said sadly.

"Damn it!" Another one said. "He was one of our best men in that town! What else?"

"Well, most of the damage he did, apart from strict killed-in-action casualties, is either being repaired or already repaired."

"Not even a little collateral damage to keep them good and paranoid and scared?"

"...Unfortunately, not."

"Hmph. Well, you said Kimblee was using a test subject as a host?" A feral, nasty grin. "Must have been a real blow when they found they'd nearly killed a kid. And exiled him to a self-contained dimension of crazy killers with no hope of escape."

"...Er, according to our reports, Kimblee was somehow seperated from Kevin and his body reconstructed by his soul's morphic resonance. Kevin was taken in by a local family that he apparently had some dealings with."

"And you didn't _kill him?!_" An outraged voice cried. "He is helpless, then! Send assassins to remove him and those that aid him!"

Wuya frowned. "And what would be the point in that?" She only got a round of weirdl ooks and she elaborated. "Think about it, people. I know I'm asking a lot in that, but make the attempt! He is protected reasonably well, so it would be too costly to send subtle assassins, and powerful ones would be too overt; I've overplayed my hands too much as it is to risk cutting off one loose end."

"But he could tell them everything he knows!"

"Which, even assuming he can somehow break past the psychic safeguards we've implanted into our resources to prevent them from telling such information, only amounts to the names of several scientists, as well as me, my lieutenient and various others he's seen. Damning information, to be sure, and valuable information as well, but..." Wuya shrugged. "A declaration of war, spoken in the words of a traumatized metahuman? _That _will put the fear of us into them. A weapon to turn against them in time, if open warfare is a valid option at that point. Let Kevin tell them all about us, if he can. Let them hear of our unstoppable strength, that the forces of thousands of worlds and entire universes have been conquered by force and are being pointed at all who oppose us. Let them know greater fear than any, that the man who so effortlessly killed their peace of mind and security was a minor pawn of mine, and then they shall know fear even more."

She smiled. "And _that_, ladies and gentlemen, serves my plans just as well as if Kimblee had died fighting or had escaped or even been victorious. No matter what, they will leave these days afraid and paranoid. Any illusions they had about being safe are gone, and that's something we can exploit."

A brief calm of muddled confusion and grudging acceptance answered this. "Acceptable," the shadowy figure remarked. "And what of Kimblee himself? Are he and Deidara dead or not?"

"Technically they're alive, but until such time as we control Traverse Town, they are no longer a factor," Azula said. "Treat them as dead, it's the same thing." The agent looked visibly upset by this, but only for a moment. "Trapped in a prison dimension with only one access way, and that's controlled by Traverse Town."

"So, what, we _did _lose or not? It's really unclear."

Azula touched her fingers togther. "Play any loss right, and it _becomes _a victory. We instilled panic and a total loss of confidence in the people of Traverse Town, who will be either a commodity or an enemy at some point and this state of mind works for us either way. Kimblee was proven too unstable to be reliable, and now he's gone and left us one last good mark in his favor. Deidara's work has shaken them even more, proving that anyone as high up in the favor of a illustrious organization as the Peerage can still be a dangerous infiltrator, and now they may cast eyes on _anyone _who could be an ally for them, dividing them even more. And if someday we send an envoy who tells them of our power so great that it can save them from any threat, and how _dreadful _it is that they have suffered so, and how well we reward our allies? Then today was a day well-spent!"

More mutterings of a charitable and pleased nature broke out; Azula could play a crowd quite well.

Mr. Lyle played that game too. Deciding to seize the moment and claim a possible advantage for his own side, he said, "If I can be so bold, ladies and gentlemen, might I have the honor of knowing who _precisely_ I'm working for here? You know me and my bosses, I don't know you, and that might make them a bit...finicky."

He chose his words carefully. The undertone of '_you DON'T want my bosses mad at you' _was strong. "Who the hell do you think you are?" The burned man said.

"Uh, Wuya just told you," Mr. Lyle said.

"More disrespect, I'll show you!"

The troll waved him down. "Respect iz ever'fing, but screamin' 'bout it ain't gonna take ya far, meatbag. I say we give 'im what he wants. Fair trade, y'know?"

"He plays the game well," said the shadowy figure so much like reptiles and cruel things. "Let us make our positions clear, so we may strike more evenly."

"Meh," said the steamy man.

"Oh come on!" Said the agent again, now skulking somewhere near the Joker and being politely quiet with an air of being really bored. "Just hurry up and talk, I'm so damned tired of waiting!"

Silence at his cheek. Wuya said, "Then let all be heard." She waved down potential arguments, looking like she'd prefer to blast down anyone who opened their mouth against her will, and she said, "This is not a request. Stay quiet and do the polite thing!"

"Ah, all right," The burned man said. Following his example, everyone quieted.

Wuya gestured at the table for Mr. Lyle's benefit. "Mr. Lyle, in behalf of your employers, allow me to introduce the players in my grand scheme. The members of my inner circle, and the most valuable to me at the present time." A few of them went 'Hey!' at the 'present time' comment so she ignored them.

"First," She said, pointing to the man-shaped assemblege of machinery gushing acrid steam with each movement, his body composed of weapons and armaments, a metal beard on his face and terrible wounds still scarring him. He was tall and broad, a juggernaut of a man and fashioned in such a way that he had what looked initially like a massive beer gut and was actually the casing of an internal teleportation engine of all things, and he glared with wildly intense eyes, inner framework hissing with murderous tension.

He looked like he _ought _to be incredibly silly-looking; and yet, despite looking a bit like a steampunk mechanical Santa Claus, he seemed nothing less than an avatar of mass warfare. "May I introduce to you my general Smithy, former leader of the Smithy Gang. Head of our infantry-level armament research and develoupment division, has an executive say in the affairs of our war machine divisions as heavy vehicles and mechanized battle weapons go, the primary consultant for military deployment actions, and the man responsible for both the quality and quanity of our many war machines. He's improved countless designs for our weaponry both on an individual and warfare-scale, and his methods of mass-producing them are largely responsible for our commendable rates of armament-manufacture. We're not actually sure what he is, he won't tell us-" Smithy snarled at that. "But I'm reasonably certain he's some kind of weapon spirit. Or a entity of conquest, either seems likely. He certainly has an affinity for mass warfare and mass-produced infantry."

"By mine hand was the Star Road, which hears of mortal desires and empowers destiny that they may come about, broken!" Smithy said. "If my plans had worked, I could have had control over the granting of wishes, and the hopes of the Prime Material Plane! But I was foiled by a plumber, a princess of the Mushroom Kingdom and a prince of a land above, one of the spirit-warriors of the Star Road itself, and the king of the Koopa Kingdom! I serve for Wuya so that I may take my revenge on these worthy enemies, and set the route for all of my allies to claim everything that exist before the Heartless eat it!"

Wuya indicated the next one there; the Joker, who of course Mr. Lyle already knew. "You, and therefore I believe so have your employers, have already met the Joker. One of the greatest criminal masterminds and legendary figures of his world, and certainly the most feared, his expertise at chemical warfare and the use of different forms of poison have served me well. He is the most important and skilled of my field agents, those who go into the worlds either allied against me or of interest to me and subvert all those who would oppose me and deal with any problems I may have. his aptitudes are such that he serves me in a variety of roles as well; currently his duty is as the manager of my field agents. When there is a problem, I send him out to deal with it, and then it ceases to be a problem. Often with highly entertaining and appropriate fallout."

"Definitely one of my better gigs," the Joker said, cackling appreciatively. For a second, Mr. Lyle's eyes saw something else, a reflection of the Joker caught on the shined metal floors and showed another man entirely: a gaunt and tall Nordic man, long flame-red hair braided in the fashion of the ancient Norse, wearing green clothes that might have fine once but had been frayed to humbleness, scars along his mouth that suggested his lips had been sewn shut at some point and he'd cut his mouth open to speak properly. Chains made of spiritual force wound around him so tightly that his eyes were covered so that only their ever-shifting colors could be seen (and burning with godly flame) and his mouth was bound. his eyes stared wildly, with a hate so deep and pure and vicious that even Mr. Lyle with all his first-hand experience with devils and demons was frightened by it, and though he shook and trembled and screamed silently, the chained man could do nothing. And then the reflection was gone and he only saw the Joker's own reflection, and Mr. Lyle wondered what he had seen, and what Wuya was hiding.

Wuya turned to the next figure; tall and gangly, slouching in a seat a little too small for him, and wearing such clothes as an ordinary neighbor might wear; a straw hat, a frayed pair of denim pants, a striped sweater...it was mundane enough to suggest that he was just wearing them to make himself look more ridiculous. It failed; he was horribly burned on every visible bit of kin, his face a hideously grinning mess of scar tissue. Mr. Lyle glanced at the bladed contraption on his hand, bloodstained knives extending from his fingers, and found the man's eyes more worrying, for they felt...wrong, like this was just the surface shell worn by a thing sunken so far into debauchery and villainy that it's vestige of humanity was only a pale illusion to hide the monster he truly was. Mr. Lyle was grudgingly impressed, and the faint sense of loathsomeness that warded away everyone ele gave him the sense of a kindred spirit in this creature.

Wuya said, "Might I present to you Frederick Kruger, or as he prefers, Freddy. Frankly, not many people in my organization like him very much, but after I won his service from the gods of nightmare, I had to put him to some use. He certainly does well as our very finest psychic warrior, doing battle in the minds of our greatest foes when needed, but mostly we keep him busy as the warden of our own prison; after that nasty breakout got Traverse Town more refugees then I'd like, we constructed a new one from raw psychic material and have placed it in a secure location in the Astral Plane, where Freddy maintains his vigil. When we have an enemy we cannot kill or do not wish to, we send them there and leave him to do whatever he wishes with them. Such is the price of taking arms against my will. And such is the cost of betrayal; the standard punishment for treason in our organization is permanent imprisonment in his domain. Needless to say, they don't last long."

Freddy Krueger laughed nastily. "And we always have _so much fun _down in my 'domain'! I'm having the time of my life here. Well, not 'life' what with me being dead, but you get it."

Unexpectedly, he flickered, and for a moment, his body shifted, and proved to be a demonstrative illusion placed over a tall and skinny man (almost unhealthy-type lean) wearing the same clothes as Krueger (with much distaste) and a unpleasant expression, though it was rather hard to tell as he was wearing a grotesque mask of burlap arranged around a gasmask (and randomly stitched to give the impression of a grotesque leer). He stared at Mr. Lyle as indifferently as if Lyle were an insect in the collection; most of the others had been giving Krueger a wide berth, but they scooted back a bit from this man even more.

Wuya didn't skip a beat. "And such appropriate timing; Freddy Krueger is a creature of dream and nightmare and cannot act outside those realms or the ones of thought, such as the Astral Plane which he currently inhabits on our prison-world. In order to facilitate communication, we required a medium for him to contact us through and act on his behalf. That man is Doctor Jonathon Crane, more respectably known as the Scarecrow and from the same world as the Joker, and incidentally our head of psychological research with a specialty in the use of fear as a weapon."

"I find the experience absolutely fascinating," the Scarecrow said, adjusting his mask. "There are few moments of personal volition during these meetings, but it's quite worth for the data I've gathered, and the experiments I've been able to perform with this organization as my patron. And it's quite interesting to see the effects of randomized dissection done to a mind by a psychic entity; I do believe I could write reams of articles on just one such subject and I've been given hundreds, and thousands more to come."

Most of the others either had fixed grins or this or were actively not looking at him; whatever these experiments entailed were clearly disturbing even to these hardened people; only the cloaked figure seemed intrigued. Even Azula shuddered a little at the mere mention of them. "Quite," Wuya said flatly. "Now let Krueger back in, this is _his _meeting too."

"You simply can't wait to rid yourself of my presence," the Scarecrow said, smiling smugly, and Mr. Lyle felt the faint mental imprint of a psychic 'trigger' being pulled, and then Krueger reappeared in the Scarecrow's place, shuddering convulsively. "That lunatic gives me the _creeps_," He spat.

"I find him quite charming, really," the creature sitting next to Freddy said wistfully.

"Moving along," Wuya said quickly. She indicated the ogrish stone-man. "Ah, someone who's a touch more civil-minded. I am sure, thanks to those amazingly complicated means the devils employ to control certain large-scale businesses and obfuscate their involvement in such, that my enterprise here is being funded by a number of extremely wealthy and influential men and women who intend to make a profit on my war as well as insuring that their own interests survive. He is hardly the wealthiest of them all but mister Crysophrase here is the administrator of the business end of my burgeoning empire; creating good PR for our image when we reveal ourselves in full, investing and manipulating opportunities to fuel our coffers and see that they _stay _filled, using economics as a weapon when it seems advisable, and a host of other dutie I really have no time to care about. And honestly, what respectable group of criminal masterminds and monsters are we if we don't have at least one gangster? And a _troll _gangster at that!"

"It'z more 'gentleman's buisness', ya know?" asked Crysophrase in a way that made it clearly rhetorical. He was a troll of the particular sort native to the peculiar world called the Discworld; many trolls turned to stone in sunlight around the worlds, but they saved time by already being made of stone, a sillicate lifeform with brains that overheated and got dumb in the heat. Crysophrase was a fairly atypical member of the image his people liked to cultivate; like all trolls he was absolutely massive and stood a few feet over human height, at least as broad as he was tall and densely composed of stoney material (perhaps marble for him), a brutish face and a leering grin with diamonds for teeth. Unlike your average street troll, though, he was wearing a very finely made buisness suit that fit his frame well, his body appeared to have been artificially grounded down and all the cragggy bits smoothed out until he was as shiny and polished as a pebble. his face seemed set in a permanent scowl of patient aggression, but that wasn't odd for a Disc troll and he would have seemed a largely average trollish businessman if not for the many rings on his fingers, each one set with diamonds (made from the teeth of other trolls after their owners met with terrible fates, sometimes involving garden rockeries).

Crysophrase nodded politely at some inner thought and tipped a tophat that looked quite new (for one, he'd forgotten to remove the pricetag. As it did, Mr. Lyle noticed that there was a cooling device in that hat, and that the top of his head was shining with magical glyphs radiating raw elemental cold; trolls thought better and quicker the colder their brains were, and this was a troll that could outsmart his rivals even when he was caught in the middle of summer. "Me and dem dat work fer me, we'z always lookin' ta keep our own nice and happy. I'm in this fer da trolls, and da Disc itself! Don't want dem Heartless monsters ripping my home ta nothing, eh? And maybe _change _it a bit, make it better fer my people. Make things a bit more suitable for the clans, I say! E'veryfing else is just a bonus, and dere's plenty of that here. War's good for profit, and I've already made a fortune wiffout havin' ta do anyfing fer reals!" his voice, loud and jubilant and not quite suitable for him, said a lot. It said, 'Oh ho, you can trust me, little squishies, I'm playing you all like a harp when I talk like a good ol' troll right off the street and down from the mountains and I'm going to dump you like rotten fish when things go bad or if I get a chance to take over the whole thing, but it wouldn't be in good taste to just admit it, would it?'.

Mr. Lyle looked at him for a moment longer; compared to some of the literal monsters in this assembly, the troll seemed downright pleasant, and even a little ridiculous (whoever heard of a Disc troll in a _suit_?)... but Mr. Lyle had heard things, suspiciously well-timed organizations popping up looking completely innocent but in the perfect place to set up supply lines for this multiverse-spanning war Wuya was dreaming up and they were supplied by rings upon rings of small self-funding buisnesses that were supplied by other businesses from dozens of other worlds, and _they _had barely any paper trail to follow even for devils to scent out, and so many other small schemes of viciously underhanded (and devil-impressing) plays of business cutting down every world-spanning organization that might exist in opposition to Wuya and being folded into her as-yet invisible chain of command, all their assets funneled into her own, and thousands of other small but culmatively massive tricks. Well, thought Mr. Lyle, that answered the question of where Wuya was getting the resources to create all her assembly lines and manufacturing for war machines and supply troops and all those other little things an enterprise like this needed; another army, armed with economics and operating under the blitzkrieg method, and this troll was it's most fearsome general.

He looked up, and saw Crysophrase looking at him with just the hint of a smug smile. Azula's own smirk was a little more worrying, like she was already aware that it was dawning on how monolithic it was for Mr. Lyle... and his growing surety that this was the finest opportunity for the Lower Planes that had come in countless millennia.

"And the last of my inner circle, by his artifice are we preserved from all who would invade us (apart from those foolish enough to employ the Heartless' methods), our ambassador to the True Fae and for some reason the supreme commander of our naval forces, Dzarumazh the Deathless!" Wuya exclaimed, and indicated the shadowy thing that creeped out Freddy Krueger. Dzarumazh turned at the attention, focusing on Mr. Lyle (and though Lyle did not know it, Dzarumazh had changed somewhat since the meeting last night, for his co-location avatar changed looks as he pleased); a tall and oddly proportioned figure in a dark cloak seemingly weaved from the finest of gossamer materials...and yet that seemed to be all it was, a fundamentally empty shape made of glamorous materials. There was probably a metaphor in that. And that too changed a moment later, the inside of the cloak shifted, and out of it shone a reptilian and coldly bright eye set in a mess of writhing scaled flesh and faerie-fire burning from within, a changing chaotic mess bound together by a sense of thematics, and a will so blindly alien and inhuman that even a demon would shudder at it's otherness, and all a suggestion of _dragon-_ness about it.

"Good day to you, hell's-pawn," Dzarumazh the Deathless said coolly, in a voice elegant and precisely clipped and the words nearly slithering. his cloak warped and shifted, the chaotic essence within shielded by it, and Mr. Lyle observed that it was floating above the ground and a bit away from the table...away from all the iron making up so much of Wuya's fortress. "I trust you are impressed?"

"In a manner of speaking," Mr. Lyle said, trying to digest the _True Fae _thing. For a moment he really wanted to sit down and ponder whether or not this was a sign that Wuya was well and truly out of her mind.

The Fae, his patrons and employers had told him, were something you stayed as far away from unless you were, without any shadow of doubt, superior to a god in making deals and holding to the letter of your word; all of the fae were strange things, but the True Fae, dwelling in their nightmare realm of Arcadia and amusing themselves in their never-ending conflicts and experiments with the mortals they enslaved and mutated, were gods among the fae, living incarnations of everything that was worst about the most chaotic expressions of Neutrality, drawing power from contracts or deals with reality itself (and anyone they could bargain with) and taking existence by putting on a narrative role and molding themselves to it even as they devoured every shred of sentience from their mortal prey. Among the fae, the Unseelie, cruel and rapacious, spurned the True Fae, and the Seelie, aligned with the Upper Planes as they were, waged a cold war against them. Certainly the True Fae never involved themselves in affairs like this, and Mr. Lyle said so. "What do you get out of this?"

"Amusement and opportunity," Dzarumazh explained. "Wuya is entering the most grand battle I have ever witnessed...and I have been around a very, _very _long time. Imagine it, boy. Not just cities or realms or countries in war. Not just worlds fighting other worlds, or solar systems or galaxies tearing themselves apart. And not even dimensions or para-planes! This shall be a war unlike any I have witnessed, a war to dwarf the Time Wars of legend!

"Universes battling universes, all that they can offer taken and their people made into armies or servants, thrown into the machines of warfare, the entire multiverse spinning in concert as it's own component battle for dominance, and above and below it the Planes themelves convene to push their own agendas forward, and all existence itself shall be at stake...for the Heartless shall rise and devour all who are not strong enough to earn their allegience, and they shall also devour everything that does not belong to the winners. All shall fall, everything will die, and the winners will remake all in their own image. They shall make themselves unto gods."

Dzarumazh stared fixed, and a jagged smile appeared on his face. "It shall be..._magnificent_." his eyes stared, and Mr. Lyle saw that there was a terrible emptiness behind his eyes; no real personality besides what this alien mind thought suitable to imitate sentience, nothing but a terrible will, and a hunger to consume all that lay before it, and it seemed that this thing was but a force of nature with a voice and a semblence of self-awareness. Nothing but hunger and the urge to survive, and a totally callous inability to realize that other people were, in fact, not just there for his own amusement.

_Meh, _Mr. Lyle decided, dismissing the advice of his superiors. "Good to know." Dzarumazh bowed, mockingly.

Wuya finished. "Lastly, but certainly foremost, is my own protege, Fire Lord Azula." Wuya gave Azula a warm smile, and the young woman in question made an mock-bow, clearly delighting in the favor Wuya showed on her. "I hardly need to reiterate that she is certainly my most trusted advisor and ally in these matters, nor that due to my...improvements on her existing elemental affinity and infusion of greater powers, she's certainly among my most powerful of allies. She is my agent in many things, and sadly she has been rather too busy to attend meetings; I believe this is the last she will attend for quite a while. She has an expedition to a peculiar phenomenon to examine shortly."

"Oh, the life of actual competence and skill," Azula said smugly. "It gives one so much to do."

"You know she's a traitor waiting to happen, right?" Smithy said.

"Am not," Azula and Wuya said at once. Smithy rolled his eyes, and Wuya ignored him in favor of focusing on Mr. Lyle once more. "So. Now you know the identity of my inner circle. Care to share any thoughts before you ferry it away to your infernal masters? And I don't mean 'infernal' as an insult, merely a precise statement!"

There was a weight of importance on things, and Mr. Lyle thought. '_A cranky smith with armies to churn out at his command, a supervillain clown with...SOMETHING chained inside him, a seriously creepy dream-master with psychic powers inside an even creepier psychologist obsessed with fear, a scarily competent troll gangster - and I can't believe I just THOUGHT that last one - and a True Fae dragon-ish thing. Also, Azula and Wuya herself, and I think Azula's scarier than everything else except maybe Dzarumazh. Guy gives me the creeps.'_

"Your choice in close allies is a touch...eclectic," Mr. Lyle said, trying to summon all his powers of pursuasive inoffensiveness and unfortunately he didn't have much to begin with. "Or is that putting it too bluntly."

Many glares were directed at him. He felt a distinct rise in inclinations to kill him on the spot. "You must understand, Mr. Lyle," Wuya said calmly. "These men are the movers and shakers. The men in administration and command, not those who do the brunt of the legwork, or else secure absolutely vital elements of my infrastructure and authority. Certainly, I have many that would be considered more respectable-" And there was a loud outcry at that and Wuya gestured, creating a field of utter silence to cut off their words. They stopped trying, getting the hint, and Wuya dispelled it before continuing to talk as if nothing had happened. "But those soldiers and lesser generals, they may be more well-known and fearsome, but they are not responsible for the actions of my entire command structure. These men are."

"Huh," Mr. Lyle said, not sure of what else to say. He was honestly a little disappointed; he was aware that illuminaries such as the fearsome Megatron of the Decepticons was commander of the mecha division of her armies, or that the commander of her fleets was none other than Wrath incarnate, Fuhrer King Bradley formerly of Amestris. Considering that she did apparently not think they were suitable for her inner circle or positions of supreme authority, that suggested that either she had absolutely spectacularly awful taste in close allie or was playing a more complicated game than anyone else here knew. Or possibly both, they were hardly mutually exclusive. "I'll see to it that my superiors know your opinion on the matter."

Wuya rolled her eyes. "If you're quite done failing at being a toady to people that you know can't stand you, there _is _other business to attend to-" The figure standing in the shadows, and who hadn't been named by Wuya, so clearly unaffiliated with her inner circle, coughed meaningfully. "Yes, yes, I'm getting to you, stop taking attention from me!"

"Woman-child," Her agent grumbled.

"I heard that!" Wuya snapped back. "Artificial lifeform!"

"That's not an insult, it's an identification!"

"Well, nobody likes them anyway!"

"Now you're just being hurtful."

"Obviously! What part of '_we are overtly and proudly Evil' _did you not pay attention to?"

"Focus, please?" Azula prompted.

"Hrm? Oh, right, right." Wuya coughed. The figure snickered. "Well, all things considered, I think it's best if we at least are able to leave this meeting on a high note...and ah, this time NOT involving trained singing monkeys follow us around with operatic theme songs based on the overall mood of the meeting. We had six pierced eardrums from the last time, and the monkey lunch tasted terrible."

The Joker shrugged. "If we can't liven things up, why even have me around?"

"Because you're so very good at killing things I don't want being alive anymore."

"Oh, yeah. That."

"Back on topic? Good! Mine point is this: Kimblee's exploits in Traverse Town are not...perhaps, what we could definitively call an unqualified success. In certain respects, it failed miserably, even if some of our overall goals were advanced." She shrugged, probably because the matter didn't seem to be important to her. "So I'd like to have our attention focused to actually advancing our plans. To that end, it has come to my attention that our interests on the Oddworld may be compromised; I'm certain most of you remember that disaster when the Dark Warrior Program we carried out on behalf of a certain Baron Praxus in exchange for the secrets of eco technical secrets failed on the minor account of the only surviving test subject breaking loose?"

"Yep," Smithy said. "The clean-up was a real mad bastard fixing up. Lost a lot of important equipment too. I put a lot of effort into that stuff, too." A nearby attendent whispered something to him. "Oh, and a lot of guards and security demons died and there was a mass breakout on our last prison-planet before Krueger got a promotion. I guess."

"Meh, loss of minion life, who care?" The Joker said. "There's more of that where they came from."

"Where _do _they come from?" Dzarumazh asked suddenly. Virtually as one, the rest of the room stared at him. "I'd always assumed you merely shaped them from assumed existences as I would, but the way you said it, it sounds as though they were pre-existing. An unusual concept, to be sure."

"For the love of whatever I would swear on if practically every evil deity didn't hate me, _move away from me!_" Freddy Krueger snapped at Dzarumazh. "It's damn creepy is what it is!"

"But you are just so fascinating!" Dzarumazh said. "Come! Let me bring you back to my own domains! I could teach you of fear itself, tear loose the semblence of mortality from yourself and remake your essence in forms a thousandfold more glorious than what you know! Come and join me!"

"...Are you coming on to me? Because it sounds you're coming on to me."

"Would you be interested if I was, hypothetically speaking?"

Crysophrase facepalmed. "Are you regretting that I listed these people as my most trusted and capable administrators?" Wuya quietly asked Azula.

"On your behalf, most certainly," Azula said, acutely embarassed.

"Has anyone here wondered about my motion to call ourselves the idea of officially naming ourselve the Legion of Doom?" The Joker asked suddenly. "Because I wonder about that a _lot_."

"Gentlemen, please, _stop _being stupid for at least five and a half minutes!" Wuya said. "I realize this is asking quite a lot-"

"Hey!" they said.

"But give it a try, hrm? I have good news, you know!"

They settled down, grumpily. "I know what it is!" The Joker said. He opened his mouth to tell everyone.

Wuya gestured, and bands of mystic force wrapped around his mouth and silenced him. He fumed in silence. Wuya said, "My point is, after Jak escaped, we lost a valuable military asset, much damage was done, there was a huge prisoner break-out, and frankly it was a very good thing that we didn't make it obvious about our presence then or our plot would have been blown open."

"We're already conquering worlds, dominating galaxies and making the moves on whole universes and feeding the ones we don't want to Heartless," Smithy pointed out. "Seems a bit like we never had any subtlety to begin with."

Wuya waved the observation aside. "Blown open to _people in a position to notice._ Please, at least try paying attention. Now, I'm fairly certain it's obvious that Jak just up and disappeared, and we were never sure if he died or just went into hiding, or that this inexplicable group that appears to be working against our interests without being discovered by us hid him away. Well, as it's transpired, not too long ago our Glukkon allies on Oddworld have had a rash of attacks matching something very much like the Dark Warrior Project, almost certainly Jak himself!"

"...Really!" Smithy said, showing genuine interest for the first time. "A good time to get some emperical data, I'd say?"

"Indeed. Additionally, I've had some doubts about the Glukkons for some time. Certain enemies of ours have disappeared in their airspace, relics and armaments and other such treasures that should have been delivered to us after being taken as spoils of war have no been brought to us." Wuya scowled. "Among other little problems. I suspect that they may not be as willing to support us as they've led us to believe. Thus, by my leave, Joker-" and here the Joker gave a wave. "Has assigned an agent eminently suited to deal with such matters and he...she...whatever the hell it is...to assist our agents present on that world in their endeavor and determine if the Glukkons are playing straight and deal with them appropriately if they are and subvert them more fully to our cause. Or just kill them and let the Heartless loose, whatever works. And if they _are _truly our allies after all, simply do whatever seems appropriate to keep them aware of where the chain of command is."

"And who is this agent?" Mr. Lyle said. He had enough of a dramatic flair to know when a introduction was needed.

"Uh, duh," The figure in the shadows, said, stepping forward. "Me!" He proved to be alarmingly thin and fairly short, and Mr. Lyle observed more intently that the agent was altogether quite pretty in a 'dark hair and ivory-colored skin' way.

He approached so they were all in view and grinned, waving at them, a long black coat fitting too tightly over close-fitting coveralls somehow converted into shorts and a bared midriff, and with the way he was smiling it was plain to see that his unusually large teeth were uncannily like a sharks'. Half-lidded eyes blinked lazily. "Hello," he said, and even his voice sounded like a womans', lending to the feeling of gender transcendance. "I am Envy the Jealous."

The Joker waved back. Envy smirked at him. The others of Wuya's inner circle gave Envy evaluating looks, and of all of them only Azula seemed to have any passing familiarity with him; she touched her fingers together and looked at him calmly. "A bit impatient to be working, I trust?" She asked.

Envy looked at her and Wuya. "Hey, I just go where the boss tells me, it's all good."

"And why should this...creature be of use?" Dzarumazh said coldly. He sniffed. "Many lives. I smell...I can feel them in you, creature. So very, very many, living and dying and squealing as they lay imprisoned...it's actually quite lulling."

"Oh come off it, the crazy dragon is just being mystically obnoxious," Smithy said dismissively.

"I most certainly am not! Just look at him...her...it, whatever!"

"I don't actually _have _a gender," Envy said helpfully. "Those are for boring people! But people call me male pronouns anyway. Go figure."

Crysophrase raised his hand. Wuya nodded at him, permitting him to speak his piece. "Ya say diz fella is a good agent for dis matter, yeah?" Wuya nodded again. "I ain't seein' it. What's he got to bring to it? What's he good at?"

Envy started to speak. Wuya waved her hand and he quieted. "The Joker picked him out specifically for this mission," Wuya said flatly. "That is all you need to know."

There was a lot of murmuring, and a wicked smirk from Azula, and no one dared to push Wuya. "He's proper creepifyin', is what he is," Crysophrase muttered, but not so loud that it was disagreement.

Wuya said, "So, we are setting our house in order, we got what we wanted (more or less) from the Traverse Town incident, I say we move on."

"But what got accomplished?!" Krueger demanded.

"Uh..." Wuya paused. "SOMETHING. Something got accomplished. And that something is top secret, you must absolutely never know or it will be undone."

"Liar. You just want to cover up that we didn't get anything done."

"That's not true, we've been doing quite well recently!"

"What about that loss when we took over the planet Ooo?" Dzarumazh remarked. "Kimblee was sent there in the intial attacks, if I recall."

"Ooo belongs to use now, too," Wuya reminded him.

"After a very long campaign where we suffered countless set-backs, lost a shocking amount of troops and just barely managed to hold everything we got. And to make thing worse, we never actually _got _the main leaders or great hero there, they and the rest of the planet's population got evacuated somehow! And after we sent in the Reavers, too! Those are a last resort that don't involve planetary annihilation!"

"And also we lost my father Ozai when they took him prisoner and left with him," Azula said, seemingly as an afterthought.

Dzarumazh waved it aside as an unimportant problem. "General Ozai was quite talented at shock warfare, but he was hardly a real loss. When you have to have cybernetic limbs augmented with portals to the Elemental Plane of Fire just to fight on an even level with our strongest warriors, you are disposable." Azula nodded at that. "Regardless, more losses is precisely what cannot be afforded."

"Yes, well, you can't stop your changelings from escaping!" Azula retorted.

Dzarumazh looked at her cunningly. "And what makes you think I don't want them escaping? I have _plenty _more humans to play with after what you've allowed me to take."

Azula didn't handle refusal of dominance in any arena well. "Why, you...!" She stood up, flames shooting up.

Envy backed away in instinctive terror. "I, uh, I'm gonna go get a ship and head out, okay? Gotta make a stop at the requisitions department first."

"Ah, sure, you do that, I'll just send you the details of your mission," Wuya said warily as Envy fled and the bickering began in earnest.

Azula and Dzarumazh began yelling at each other. Krueger basked in the negative emotions. Wuya sighed. Crysophrase complained that this was not how meeting were supposed to go. The Joker mumbled through his 'no talking' magical bonds. Mr. Lyle took notes on the better-sound invectives.

Overall, it was not one of the prouder days for the forces of evil. But on the other hand it made the forces of good look positively sane by comparision.

* * *

The three mysterious beings, bearing witness to all the events that had transpired previously and more besides, were silent for a moment, thinking.

"Well!" The lion-man said to the aetheric device they used to scry, squatting on the nebulous ground and clapping his paws with a noise like thunder. "That, uh, that could have gone a lot worse."

The other two entities look at him, then at each other, and stared at the scrying device for a long time. "Yeah, I've worked with worse," the hooded one agreed, nodding his head and causing small flecks of pearly material to slid out from whatever lurked under his hood. his light-tendrils flicked against each other like a man snapping his fingers. "The Keyblade has picked a complete lunatic that's teamed up with other complete lunatics and will undoubtedly team up with more complete lunatics, and by all indications that'll work in our favor."

"Agreed," the other two said.

They basked in a moment in satisfaction over the victory over evil, mingled with sadness for the lives that they could not have saved, though even that was made sweeter by the knowledge that those souls were now moving forward to the afterlives reckoned for them.

Eventually, the machine-man spoke. "I...I must ask. When they summoned that...god they pulled up to deal with Kimblee's sentence...I have never seen the like of him."

"Me neither," the lion-man agreed. "I'm not sure if he was a god at all. He just, I dunno, seemed..._bigger _than that. Like something bigger than gods, bigger than all the things that come before concepts and existence. And that..._place _Kimblee looked into!"

"I've never seen the like of it," the hooded one said wonderingly. "It was like an Outer Plane unto itself. It felt...Good, I suppose, but strange. It was just too big. It felt-"

"Primordial," said the machine-man solemnly. They were silent, and then nodded in agreement. It was the only proper word.

"You are certain you do not know where he came from?" The machine-man said heisitantly.

"No," the other two confirmed. "I have never seen the like of it," the hooded one said.

"Me either," the lion-man said.

Again, they were silent. With all they knew under their purview, all the formiddable knowledge of the Upper Planes at potential access, the burning sureness of knowing all that the Upper Planes knew...this was disturbing indeed. Or else that the Upper Planes _did _know of it, but did not wish to make it known.

Eventually the hooded one said, "Well, wherever this Kadmek came from, it doesn't seem like a threat. And really, we could use all the allies we can find if we're gonna pull off our big agenda to smash down Wuya and make the best of this clustermuck she's making. Right now, that little guy with the Keyblade is looking like our best bet to keep the fiends from getting a claw up into anything, purify the Heartless, and on that note maybe finding out where the hell the Heartless are actually _coming _from." He looked distantly for a moment. "We need to meet up with others focused on this Heartless thing before we make any conclusions, and gather more evidence beforehand."

"Agreed," the other two said solemnly.

"That _is _why we're here, of course," The machine-man said. his tone turned happy as he added, "My home."

"Oh...yeah," The lion-man said. "I forgot. This is where you wound up when you died."

The machine-man said nothing. The hooded one leaned in near the lion-man and quietly said, "Awkward."

"It is not," The machine-man said indignantly.

"Is too! You're all embarrased and stuff. At least, I think you are. Kind of hard to tell; your face goes all solid when you don't want to express yourself."

The lion-man turned aside, noticing that the walls were slowly turning transparent and the floor was rising. "Uh, guys?"

"Hold on a sec'." The hooded one continued. "See? Your face is doing it right now. I can see your mouth and stuff kind of melt into a single piece of metal. Not sure how you're talking."

"I am an petitioner-spirit that is infused with the power of Good and Law in the tradition of transcending my previous mortal limitations!" The machine-man said indignantly. "My methods of speech have many ways in which to occur. And you can talk without your mouth too."

"Uh, guys?" The lion-man said, gesturing frantically at the rooftop gently sliding away and a gentle breeze flowing in from outside, carrying smells that were the apothesis of the sea itself; the salty smell was so crisp it could make an unprepared person dizzy, quite able to unseat even a wary mind and broaden the consciousness like steam opened pores in sickly skin, gently inspiring connections and thoughts that lead to the beginings of personal journeys to true contentment and enlightenment and other awesome stuff like that. The impression seemed to be that they were at sea, and it didn't hurt that the ground under them rocked slightly, as though they were standing in a boat that was riding a slightly bigger than normal wave.

They continued to ignore him. "Well, I can talk without speaking too, but _you _have the advantage of having psionic powers before you died," The hooded one retorted. "You had a headstart. Very uncool of you to bring it up."

"_You're _the one who started it!" The machine-man protested. "And may I remind you that I was stripped of those very psionic abilities before I died? About forty-five seconds, actually."

"That's some impressive precision."

"Well, it _was _only my death, you know, I was paying attention. I certainly didn't want people to make inappropiate assumptions based on an incorrect matter of my death if anyone asked. The other petitioners can get a bit much about it; not overly so, since I wound up _here_, but they do enjoy heckling until they spiritually grow out of it."

"Guys!" The lion-man said, starting to grow exasperated. The floor had already risen past the walls, a lot like an elevator lift, and had raised flush with the ceiling to prop them right out into the open air. The scrying device, in the meantime, had quietly deactivated, as sensing when it's users were no longer paying attention and were arguing in a petty debate was a standard feature.

"Hah, you think _you _got it bad?" The hooded man said unhappily. "At least _you _got to die in a badass way! Wuya herself killed you and unintentionally made your mortal name into a martyr! I got assasinated by that guy Wuya's sending out to Oddworld!" He paused, and started to sob theatrically. "I didn't even get to say goodbye to my wife and little girl! _DADDY DIDN'T GET TO SAY GOODBYE!_"

"...Ah. I can see why that would be distressing," The machine-man said awkwardly. "But I recall you being the first one to greet them when they wound up here."

"Oh, yeah, _duh,_" The hooded one said, inexplicably recovering immediately. "But it's just not the same, y'know? For their sakes, I had to tell everyone a glamourized story of my death that somehow is more well-known then my actual death. And now you know why the gods think I got killed slaying a dragon made of carnivorous goldfish while saving the incarnation of my planet atop a erupting volcano in a jousting duel fought with live swordfish which were also lasers. Why they believe that, I don't know, but apparently credibility isn't a big deal up Here."

"GUYS!" The lion-man said, his nerves strung out.

"What?" The machine-man said, looking disappointed in the loss of temper. "You really should calm down. It's not good for your...well, you don't have to worry about blood pressure, but surrendering to angry outbursts like that isn't good for your emotional well-being."

"And it makes you look like a jerk," The hooded one said. "I should know! My buddy Roy does it _all the time!_ Mostly because I did it, but it looks like sixty percent of his workforce are doing it for me. Hah, great times, great times..."

"Are you done yet," The lion-man said, dully irritated.

"Yeah, I guess so. What's so important you needed to yell about it?"

"Guys, we're _here_."

They turned around, illuminated by the ever-present moonlight, and grew respectfully silent for a short moment. "Ah," the hooded one said. Or perhaps he said _awe_. It came out to the same, though it was a bit weird that he would say his emotional reaction to what he was looking at.

The sky curved above them, an endless expanse of gentle darkness interrupted by thousands of gleaming lights that were stars only in the sense that they resembled stars (and were in fact not naturally occuring nuclear fusion reactors but literally glowing light-beings living in the sky and tending to their own mysterious matters) and gathered together in mysterious ever-changing formations that made constellations that invariably spelled out rebuses that inspired great thoughts in whoever understood them. The sky, it was plain to see, did not act like the sky of a merely mortal realm would, as it had no horizon but continued on from one point to another, illuminating them with lunar light that didn't appear to come from a moon. That made sense, given that there _was _no moon. The sky, in many respects, simply _was, _and was almost certainly there to provide lighting and look pretty. (And you needed skies. It tended to make people uncomfortable if they died and there wasn't a sky.)

The three of them walked forward, the hooded one pausing to pick up the scying device under one arm and easily carrying it despite the weight, and they stepped forward on the bridge of a most unusual-looking ship. Composed of the same wondrous and otherwordly material as the walls in their previous room, it gleamed softly in the omnipresent moonlight, light penetrating through the transparent layers of it's outer surface and refracted from the inner to make a glow that suggested the entire color spectrum, and it was a radiance gentle enough not to hurt the eyes even after months of looking at it (even though time was _very _subjective here), because no one likes having their eyes hurt by pretty things. The ship itself seemed almost alive, it's shape growing according to mysterious processes and continually shifted in surprising but benign ways, swelling into new configurations based on whatever seemed to work for the moment without ever compromising it's interior or passengers, and it was entirely possible that it was just bigger on the inside than the outside. Right now, it was more or less just a flat surface with many tall extensions rising from it like little viewing towers for people to stand on and check out the view. Many of the passengers were doing just that.

The lion-man twitched at the sound of something that sounded like a tremendous oar hitting the water and looked aside; he settled down when he saw that it was only an enormous flipper rising out of the wine-dark holy water and back again to propel it from under the ship. He looked down at the floor, willing it to become totally transparent for him (and indeed it did, so that he was the only one that saw it) and he saw past the very bottom of the ship to see the beginings of an enormous shell that the ship seemingly grew out of, and from there it was easy to see the giant celestial sea turtle that their ship was sitting upon, moving it through the sea and remarkably good-natured by the whole thing.

Many of them seemed fascinated by the ocean they were in; it stretched on seemingly forever (and in fact it did), a gentle expanse of wine-dark water broken by the small islet spun out of memory or imagination by a soul with a particularily powerful will and growing bigger, a few larger islands formed by communities of like-minded petitioners who hadn't felt the need to seek enlightenment yet, and not so far away (and yet so large that the trick of perspective made it seem so far away), there was the largest island of all, so big it wasn't an island at all, generating the light around them and shining like an embodiment of all moons, and from it there rose...

The Holy Mountain. The heart of this plane that was the abode of the worthy and righteous dead: the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide, which _does _have articles about the Outer Planes, takes pains to mention that while the Outer Plane of Lawful Goodness shares the name of many similar things - including the common name of Good planer creatures such as angels, the god-princess of the lovely and purely good land of Equestria, and many other thing - it is not neccesarily related to them. Even if they all also happen to be literally made of Goodness.)

The entire plane seemed to revolve around it, the apothesis of all mountains and still so much more than only a mountain, both the size of a continent and bigger than a planet and encapsulating universes within itself and still so much bigger than that. It's size was mind-breaking and defied the limits of sanity, piercing through the sky and it's peak completely out of view; in fact it was so big that all they could see was it's base, and that alone with huge enough to make a mind bend, edge close to breaking, and through that bending of understanding of it's size the mind could also come close to understanding it's size. That was the nature of the Holy Mountain; to experience the mountain was to face your own flaws and surpass them, and it was common fact that to climb the mountain was to become a better person, because you couldn't scale even a single one of it's universe-spanning layers without becoming a better person.

To accept that you were flawed, to _know _it deep in your bones and to yearn to better yourself and become something better that the limits of life and all it's pains had denied you was to begin the step and start ascending, to transcend Celestia's first layer of existence and find the beginings of unearthing the _real _you. And one after another, the layers could be moved past, sin and weakness and pain let free from you and no longer weighing you down from moving up and up...until you found the Seventh Heaven, and none knew what awaited the people who achieved such spiritual perfection.

It was a fitting metaphor for the true nature of this plane of ultimate Law and Good, and the final destination of those who died with that same love of altruism and the rule of law in their hearts. For a moment, the three of them watched it growing closer, shining in the endless sea of holy water like a enormous lighthouse calling the righteous dead home. Only the machine-man could truly call this place home, as the other two did not share the touch of Lawfulness in his soul, but they still had the touch of that eternal world-making force mortals saw fit to place into their little conceptual mind-boxes and call it Good, and the Holy Mountain both influenced and was born of mortal exemplars of virtue and heroism before it was touched by all that was worthy in the rule of law, and that essential glorious blaze of pure Goodness resonated in them, calling them home.

Perhaps that was why the three of them watched in trembling, wonderstruck silence at the sight of the still distant but titanic mountain growing closer as their turtle-ship swam closer, tiny ridges at the immense beaches around it just barely recognizable as enormous sprawling settlements and established cities and metropoli older than worlds, encompassing untold billions of worlds and civilizations and cultures that had been brought with the worthy dead. They could see little plateaus and valleys in the sides of that mountain, big enough to contain continents here at the metaphorically smallest layer and still so small compared to the rest of it that they looked absurdly tiny.

There was much in the Holy Mountain, and now it was waiting for them, and so were the other entities of the Upper Planes, Powers and gods and angels and beings of so many other names and titles, all good and prepared to doom themselves to save the multiverse, and gathered together to determine what to do next.

(Celestia liked to nudge people into a little mutual cooperation, though it forced no one into anything. Such a thing would have been against the nature of the plane.)

The three of them glanced at each other, and with the pure goodness radiating from the mountain's light they couldn't help but smile. Here, in this law-touched bastion of Good as worthy as all the Upper Planes but suitable for their purposes as a homebase for the time being, there could be no other response.

As they did, they noticed several lights appearing the sky just around Mount Celestia and come gently into the water, splashing deeply and swimming to the beach, water-logged and shining with the effects of holy water on the mental-matter of their newly unbodied souls, and at that they smiled some more.

Of the people Kimblee had killed, it seemed that some of them had been aligned with the principles of the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia, and that their afterlife was _here_. It would be, they surmised, like waking up from the most awful nightmare and being delievered into the arms of a life they could have never imagined but had unknowingly longed for ever since they were intellectual capable of wishing for something better. And now that something had brought them home.

The hooded one smiled peacefully, and he thought that even with the people that Kimblee had truly killed, he still hadn't won. If anything, he had only ushered them to where they deserved to be, a place where they could be free of pain and loss. Where every tear would be wiped away, and the sadly neccesary detritus of a fallen existence could be shorn away by their own efforts. And where, just maybe, the Heartless' doom and purification could be begun in earnest.

_They think they have the advantage_, the hooded one thought quietly, thinking of the demons and devils and evil Powers who thought to control the Heartless for their own desires. He thought of the Balance, that miserable ceasefire that prevented the Heavens and Hells alike from waging active war on each other through the medium of the Prime Material plane, or the realms where the mortals lived, and how the fiends were so arrogant to think that it actually gave them the upper hand.

He considered Wuya's vile intentions for the Heartless, her sick and depraved vision of law imposed over whatever the Heartless left behind, and the layers upon layers of plots and subterfuge and double-crosses and other such things already in progress by her side and the fiendish entities supporting her, unaware that they would collapse under their own weight given enough time. He thought of Zim, the Keyblade's chosen champion, and the carnage he had wrecked on Kimblee's own small-minded but equally malicious plans from completely out of nowhere. And then he thought of what the Keyblade's champion would do when he caught wind of Wuya's plotting and her intention to use him as a pawn in those evil schemes that had contributed to his world's doom, espicially when he knew just how dearly Zim had come to loathe all things that stunk of law twisted with evil.

_She won't know what hit her,_ the hooded one thought, quite satisfied.


	19. Funny Things On Way To Oddworld

This chapter can be considered a bit of a 'things that happen on the way to the next arc' deal; it always bugged me that, with all the huge amounts of worlds to got lost in, Sora, Donald and Goofy, in the original Kingdom Hearts, somehow went STRAIGHT to the worlds that their enemies were mucking about in! (Well, at least had an interest in. Except for Deep Jungle, that was more setting establishment than anything else.)

I really like the notion of Zim's crew getting involved in a bunch of random weird adventures, as that's usually what I picture them doing when I think of cool stuff for this story.

Minor side note, if something is expanded on or has a fairly long sequence, it's probably important to the plot.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted materials.

* * *

The Astral Plane was vast, an infinite 'sea' for any adventurers to get happily lost in for potentially their entire lives and that of all their children's generations to come.

For Zim's love of meaningful conflict, and the joy of adventure, it was absolutely ideal.

The _Paragon, _after leaving the port town where they had dealt with Darvhog, had moved en route to the nearest world portal. Zim assumed that they could just pop in there and examine a other worlds there and extrapolate that universe's nature from the data thus acquired, but this was not to be, as Morte put a stop to Zim's further plan to just examine nearby world portals; the Astral Plane's portals, while there was some scheme of arrangement, did not often make sense. The lights appeared without any notion of relation to each other, and often going through one portal and then the one right next to it took one to worlds thousands of universes away.

They'd been on a beeline towards the first world for them to visit, which had been determined to be totally uncatalogued in the databanks, perhaps not even inhabited, but it was still a start. Sadly, the trip there was quite eventful, troubled by many encounters; a githyanki raiding party or two (neither had any idea who Darvhog was), a sudden squall of psychic winds that blew them off course for nearly half a day, Calvin playing with the intercom and accidentally insulting all the mothers of a passing fleet of orcs (who had gotten so lost they'd broken reality and dropped into the Astral) and having their entire federation swear bloody revenge upon Zim when the _Paragon _just shoved them out of its way, were delayed for a few more hours when Zuko had a staring contest with a space dragon and refused to back down, accidentally popped out in the universe Crucible existed in and were chased by a sentient (and hungry) black hole mob boss and it's carnivorous asteroid heavies before they tricked them into giving up crime in favor of attacking evil empires and stealing their stuff for profit, drove back into the Astral Plane and celebrated by stopping at a free-floating diner-shipyard (called 'Hot Eats, Cool Fleets') and chose not to question what it was doing there, and a few other minor friendship-building adventures of no particular consequence that took a few days to go through even though it was relatively 'close' to their initial position (distance being a very relative concept in the Astral Plane, though).

But then, at last, they had come across the portal they were searching for: the astral winds churned as they blasted through a psychological storm and still glittered with lost thoughts as they came upon a world-light that, processed through their vision, appeared to be a green-gray two-dimensional swirl right in front of them, it's churning surface moving like stagnant water with images of, to Zim and Zuko, disquietingly familiar landscapes and cities. Random flickers and images came from it, rather stunted and blurred, and there was a faint sense of unhappiness emanating from it-

And yet, underneath that veneer of loss, there was a suggestion of steadier movements, movements so precise and elegant that the only word for it was 'mechanical'. Some forms humanoid and others far more alien in appearance, but invariably of metallic form and beauteous shape, and the emotion of these was...well, the best word to come to mind was 'noble'. Calm and peaceful, restrained and inexplicably curious Riding out like waves of electricity, Zim was intrigued by it. "You are certain there is nothing here?" Zim said.

Examining the charts, Calvin said, "I said that there's no recording contact, not that it's uninhabited. I think whoever lives in this world, they haven't made successful contact with other intelligent life yet." He looked thoughtful. "Maybe the Traverse Towners are playing it safe with that kind of thing. More likely they just avoid people they can't make useful deals with, and I can't imagine random primitive worlds would have anything they would want."

Zuko leaned over, frowning at Calvin's use of 'primitive'. "Do we head there or find somewhere else? We already spent so much time traveling here...what if it's not any use?"

Morte had been staring at the portal, uncharacteristically quiet and grim. Now, he said "Er, uh, maybe not." Zim looked at him. "What's the point? Maybe you're just wasted time heading there."

"I say we go," Zim said. "I see no reason not to try it! And the whole point is to go to random worlds for even the slightest chance of locating my missing companions while we get into all manner of interesting experiences and adventures, and incidentally work on a means to destroy all the Heartless we can find! What's more random than a backwater world in the middle of nowhere?!"

"...If you say so," Morte said, looking deeply unhappy about this.

"I don't like this plan," Zuko said. "It's _stupid._"

"Too bad!" Zim said, and cackled. "Down we go!" He paused, frowning at Morte. It was unusual to see him being so open and reluctant. "...Is there some manner of special procedure for doing that?"

Calvin checked the information Cyborg had given him on precisely that sort of thing. "No," he said. "We just fly into it and enter the world. We dive from the Astral into the Material Plane on that particular world and 'verse it's in."

Zuko, curious as ever about this entirely new concept of the multiverse to him, asked, "How does that work!?"

"Search me," Morte said. "Way I heard it, these lights are all the sentient minds of a particular planet working at the same time. So if it's a dead planet, you can't use the Astral to go there, and if they having people living on nearby planets or moons or space stations things get a bit dicey. Usually you wind up going to where there's lots of people, generally lower atmosphere, or at least where most of the thought in that planet is centered; if people think about a place a lot Astral travelers generally wind up there, but it's not a solid rule, we could wind up in the middle of nowhere for that world. Not a whole lot of hard and fast rules for Planar travel, you know?"

"So the Astral doesn't connect to places that don't have sentient life?" Zuko asked, interested for a change.

"Yeah. If there's nothing to do any thinking, there's nothing there."

"Well, this place is as good as any," Zim said. "Okay guys! First world we're going to! THE FIRST DESCENT INTO ADVENTURE. Don't screw it up!"

"I'm sure you'll do that for us," Calvin said, taking out the latest issue of Alloy Blend (the premier magazine on mad science fashion and aesthetics) he'd found in the abandoned bookstore from the port town. Zim snorted and inclined the joysticks forward, and the ship dived down into the light...

And thereby, into a new world.

Zim didn't know what the experience would be like, and he expected fanfare. He expected flashing lights to go by as they dived out of the realm of thought made real into a place of physicality. He expected the Astral Plane to slide from view as a new world took its place. He expected a bright burst of light, or for things to vanish and rematerialize around him.

He was a little disappointed when the Astral Plane merely got a bit fuzzy for a moment, turning a bit sharp in extraordinary detail for a moment before disappearing entirely and a blue sky took its place with the vast curve of the ground taking up a corner of their camera view. It took a moment to adjust; Zim didn't feel anything and the ship didn't react much aside from a slight jolt as gravity jerked them sideways before the ship's engines recalibrated for atmospheric entry and knocked it back into place, a green streak flying across the sky.

Calvin blinked. "That's it?"

"Not so bad," Zuko said. He'd gone a bit green in the face all the same, his body perhaps expecting genuine cause for sickness.

Hobbes looked into the cameras with interest. "Wish we had windows," he said wistfully.

The view Zim saw through nearly a dozen screens in front of him was familiar, though he couldn't say why. His interest was piqued when the navigational instruments informed them that they were over a major population center, far too high to be easily detected. Radio waves, still extant but unregulated, were detected and processed into the systems, recordings of previous broadcasts similarly downloaded and all of it transferred into the ship's databanks for later perusal in moments. None of it was deemed relevant by the computer's sorting tags, so all Zim had to go on was the visuals seen through the cameras, of the landscape below: a curve of continental mass bordered by a warm sea spotted with high-hanging clouds.

Zim frowned, certain that he had seen that particular view _somewhere _before. His fingers nudged the joysticks and the _Paragon_ dived lower. He was actually feeling a little disappointed; there wasn't much to be going on here, and it was a lot less interesting than he'd expected his first new world in this adventure to be like. Clouds parted around them as they dived down, the ground getting gradually closer as they decreased speed to safer levels and the irregularities of the landmass clearly becoming cities and highways and population centers and landmarks, and the feeling of nagging familiarity only got worse. Not the least because something was wrong with it.

"Should we be flying this low?" Hobbes asked. "I'm pretty sure it's not the done thing to be that reckless when we don't know what's down there. People might freak out and attack us, and if we're doing a first contact thing..." He made several noises like snorting growls, his nostrils flaring and whiskers rising with every snort. "I don't know, it's seems really dumb to just charge down there."

"If the inhabitants are hostile, then we'll know right away instead of agonizing about it and getting attacked later on," Zim said shortly.

Hobbes was a perceptive lad; Zim was a mood swinger, but this more taciturn behavior was very strange for Zim. "Something wrong with you?"

"No!" Zim said immediately. The others frowned at him, and the green energy inexplicably abated for a moment, as if reliant on their focus to stay at optimum output. "Very well, fine, I simply have an odd feeling about this place!" He pointed at the screen, now displaying the broad sweep of the continent they were bearing down on, just barely close enough to see the suggestions of buildings, but still too far to see anything except landmarks. "There is something about this land that I know I have seen before."

"Have you ever actually gone out of your verse before?" Calvin asked, apparently surprised. "Because if you've actually been here before, that's one big coincidence. Stupidly big."

Zim almost said no; a moment's reflection on some of his adventures compelled him to say, "I cannot say for certain that I have,; some of the incidents I was involved in took me to other realms than my own, but I wasn't in a position to sightsee. If I have been to this place, I do not recall."

"Maybe it just looks similar to something you've seen," Morte said, a slight tone in his voice that suggested that he was _not _looking forward to...something, Zim didn't know what.

Zim nodded at that, reluctantly. He gripped the joysticks and power surged from him into the engines, and the lagging ship picked up a good burst of speed...and suddenly the ground was a whole lot closer,. Now they were bearing down on a very large city, a genuine metropolis, and the industrial colors of the buildings were dulled by a vibrant green choking it. "We'll make contact shortly! Any news from the scanners, tiger person?"

Hobbes growled at the impolite address. "We're picking up a lot of radio signals," he informed them, fur ruffled and ears flared back. "But nothing recent. Satellite signals, I can see them easy - probably television, from what we're receiving. And...yeah, wireless network, I think we're close to a bunch of hotspots. Wouldn't be too hard to piggyback onto the wireless network, because there's a lot of them in range. Most of them are really weak though, and there's almost no information being transferred across any of the networks." Hobbes frowned. "Which is weird, because there's a lot of information being exchanged on some _other _network we can't access. Strange...that one is being reported as similar to thought processes."

"...Curious..." Zim said softly.

Hobbes said, "Maybe we should download what we _can _detect? Just in case?"

Zim nodded, and told them to do just that. Calvin had already started doing it the moment Hobbes made the suggestion, rendering Zim's command (and asking him about it) pointless. Zim didn't have any time to complain, because Calvin quickly said that it was already done and being processed, and just about nothing interesting was being reported.

He did point out that all this information had faltered and come to a stop about a year and several months ago, some of them still running but everything unmanned. All surveillance that they could access reported absolutely nothing, everything on those screens devoid of any sentient life they could see, and Zim and Zuko were staring at them with a horror unrelated to that disturbing news. And yet, there was information being processed at that very moment in the forbidden network, the one that seemed alive.

"Great, we finally wind up on a new world and we're getting nothing," Calvin complained. "Static on all available networks, no one hailing us or even trying to call us down for a chat. What's wrong here, guys?" Zim and Zuko didn't say anything. "Guys? Uh, what's wrong?"

Zuko had said nothing the whole time, his eyes fixed on the screens with badly concealed shock. Now, he stood up abruptly and almost knocked Morte over, taking several steps back, staring at the screens and mouth open in sheer disbelief. "Amaterasu shower us with sanity," he whispered. "Zim!"

"I know," Zim said tightly. "Earth."

"Your planet?" Calvin said. "The one that got eaten- er, 'lost'? What about it?"

"It's Earth." Zim said.

"Say what?" Morte echoed.

Zim pointed at the screen, Zuko doing the same thing. Zim said, "That! Look! It's...no, it can't be, this is _insane_! We were there, we saw it...we saw it destroyed! _What the hells are we looking at!?_"

He stared at the screens, at one displaying the city they were approaching. The buildings populating it, the layout of streets girding and connecting the buildings, and the complete absence of any apparent life there; there were animals wandering about, and a tremendous array of wandering signatures like advanced machine-life, but no apparent sentient life.

"Zuko..." He started to say, with unaccustomed softness.

"I know," Zuko said. He was shaking. "This isn't possible." He tilted his head. "I was there."

"But here this place is," Zim said. His jaw twitched, frantically spinning components on his Pak and the nearly psychotic squeezing he put on the joysticks betrayed his emotion, hidden just under his seeming indifference. "It's Earth."

Be cold, he told himself, automatic processes regulating the panicked hyperventilating that his emotions threatened. Be calm, be rational, be like the _machine_.

The ship was silent for a moment as the craft briefly accelerated, passing below cloud-level down through a silent sky treaded only by the occasional bird, a city below them threaded with green.

Skyscrapers, nearly broken by the passage of time, stood as hollowed out remnants covered by greenery until almost unrecognizable as buildings; the ship passed these first before hovering awkwardly down. "...Earth?" Calvin repeated. "Your world? YOUR Earth?"

"You mean your world that got..." Hobbes stopped and made an awkward motion. He seemed to remember Calvin's odd phrasing and said, "Uh, 'lost'?"

"Yeah," Zuko said, voice raspy with emotion. "This can't be. This can't be _real_. I _saw it die! _I saw everything, just-" He stopped, fists clenched and steam rising from his skin. He was biting down on his lip, and a faint trickle of blood was sliding out from where he'd bitten down too hard. "What the hells is going on?!"

Zim, for a moment, dared to hope for the impossible. "Perhaps we were too hasty to judge...? Maybe we _didn't _lose Earth after all, maybe it just-" He stopped. He frowned, looked at the screens. "But that does not explain what happened here! I..." He unclenched and dropped back into his seat, bewildered beyond any capacity to express it. "I don't understand," He nearly whimpered.

Now they dropped down into the city proper, and against all reason, against all probability, against everything that they'd been told or had been confirmed, it _was _Earth. A city none of them had ever visited, a place unfamiliar to them. And yet (Zim and Zuko thought, as Calvin pulled a few tricks with the engines so that the propulsion field clashed into itself and floated straight downward onto an asphalt street nearly unrecognizable from all the grass that had grown right through and torn it up and grown over it again), it was familiar. The building styles were unquestionably that of the world they had come to live in and love, so very much born from the consumerism-aspected culture of the United States they had known, the overall look of the place suggested the East Coast, the neighborhood wide and the streets suitable for a main crossing area, perhaps an urban center in some city they had never visited.

And yet, there was still much that was seriously off. There was nobody else there that they could see; no humans fleeing for cover or hiding in the shadows or watching for this possible savior or doing anything of the sort. There was no one there, and the absence of humanity disturbed Zim nearly as badly as the place itself.

Wild vegetation had covered almost every possible surface, untrimmed and unchallenged, and in time would undoubtedly tear everything apart and grind the buildings down to dust as the weather took its toll and lack of maintenance killed these reminders of humanity. A slow process, to be sure, but as unstoppable as any other civilization-destroyer. If nothing else, it was clear that this city was _abandoned_; cars were left in the streets, long enough to have been overtaken by constrictor vines like everything else on the ground.

Window-glass had been shattered and glinted fiercely in the sunlight, so much of it from the empty windowpanes of the skyscrapers and marginally smaller buildings that the street almost glittered with a thin layer of white light. So much of the buildings around them, these accomplishments of industrial might and human will, were evidence of a larger scale of wear-and-tear deconstructing them; cracks in the walls, metal girders bending out of place, walls breaking inward or outward, debris from defeated buildings crumbling the streets...already, many of these buildings had lost the fight, barely prevented from falling completely apart thanks to the irony of countless layers of vegetation holding them together, but it was still only a matter of time before even that rotted and it all came down.

The ship managed a hover over the ground, and unseen by Zim's camera-screens, flickers of invisibility fields over artificial bodies shimmered over solemn and serious faces when the ship came to a fairly undignified bump onto the ground, making enough of an kinetic shockwave to disrupt the invisible fields, just for a moment, and Zim failed to notice, given the more distressing sight around him.

The ship was silent. Eventually, Zim said, "Where IS everyone!? Where are the survivors? Or the Heartless, even? The death machines the villains of the world brought to defend themselves, or their mutant hordes? Summoned mystical demons?! Entities from the Ghost Zone, brought over by psychic energy released by mass terrified death! Even the bodies...there's NOTHING there! Disregarding why Earth is here, WHAT HAPPENED TO EVERYONE!? And...what HAPPENED to this place? Vegetation everywhere, this city falling apart-"

"It's like everyone just vanished and left it to fall apart for years," Zuko said, appalled. "Decades, even!"

Morte made a small strangled noise, and floated up with an air like he truly regretted what he was going to say, but it needed to be done. "Begging your pardon, boss, but...I think you might be a bit mistaken on our locale, here."

"Say what?" Zuko said, so distracted he almost didn't hear Morte.

"Are you daft?" Zim said. "This IS Earth! Just...just look! I don't know why it looks like it's been left to fall apart, but I know what Earth looks like and _this IS EARTH!_"

"I know, I know!" Morte said, getting to the point regardless of how much he wished he could have put it off. "It's just not YOUR Earth!"

The ship was silent again. Zuko and Zim stared, Zim's jaw slightly agape and Zuko bemused. Morte jutted his jaw out. Calvin and Hobbes blinked, looked at each other. Calvin said, "Drama's happening. Wanna split?"

Hobbes said, "Yep."

The two brothers wisely left the room without anyone noticing, hitting the button to open the cargo doors on their way out.

A long, long moment passed as Zim and Zuko processed what Morte told them. "...Not OUR Earth," Zim said.

"Yep," Morte said.

"It's an Earth, like there's more than one," Zuko said.

"Yeah."

Zim and Zuko looked at each other. Clearly having trouble dealing with this, they looked at Morte and said as one, "And you KNEW this before we even got here."

"What's next, you're gonna ask 'and you didn't tell us' and get all huffy and self-righteous on me!?" Morte said coldly. Zim frowned. "Don't get mad, THINK FOR A SECOND! What was I supposed to say, 'hey guys, just a heads up, there's worlds JUST like Earth all over the place, but don't get your hopes up, they'll be NOTHING like the one you left behind or have any of the people you knew there, they just crop up with the same names and histories, no one knows why!' Yeah, THAT'D be smart of me. Like you'd even believe me!"

"...There's other worlds just like Earth, all over everywhere?" Zim repeated. For a moment, he looked close to passing out.

"Yeah, I just said so."

Zim stared at him. He turned his attention to Zuko. "...That makes _NO SENSE AT ALL_."

"You said it before I could," Zuko said weakly, looking a great deal more pale than usual. "How does-"

"I just told you, no one knows for sure," Morte said. "There's theories, I'll give you that. People say, patterns repeat, you see threads of continuity reform in dozens of universes, following similar themes but with just ONE thing different here and there. Same religions, for the most part. Same historical pieces, with convergence in important bits. The same narrative concept, rehashed and edited by thousands of weird ways. Personally, I think some cosmic Creator didn't feel like making up his own setting so he just took a concept that was laying in the lumber room of creationism and ran out before the alarms went off."

"...For some reason, I find that makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing," Zim said, still looking tremendously disgruntled. He looked forlornly out the screen, at the remnants of a city abandoned and lifeless. He bit his lip. For a moment, he almost stopped himself from saying it, almost made the mature and logical choice. But still there was a stubborn shred of hope, childlike and a tiny flame against a darkness that hadn't yet succumbed to the clarity reality presented. "...You are CERTAIN this couldn't be my Earth...?"

His voice was so lost, so confused and hurt, it clearly wounded Morte when he spoke just as softly. "Boss. I wish I had something nicer to say, but some things...no. It's not. It's just a place that looks like your world." Morte didn't have a real face, but he still somehow winced when Zim's face fell as swiftly and horribly as a grieving child presented with its dead parent's carcass. Morte hesitated, and added, "And you won't find another like it, even if you looked forever and ever. Let's say you find an Earth close enough to it, with the people still there and the Heartless not quite after you yet? It'll still be too different from home. Too different to settle down. You'll see those differences every day, nagging at ya, until it just gets too much and everything's all WRONG and...it rips up at you, because a world is a unique thing and you can't find a match. I'm sorry, but world's aren't mass-produced. Not outside of when they fabricate worlds, but that's another thing."

Zim bowed his head. For once, he was completely and horribly silent. Morte said nothing to him; he turned away, looking ashamed of being so cruelly blunt.

Without saying a word, at least at first, Zuko swallowed his own grief and horror at this cruelty and put a hand on Zim's shoulder. Heat flushed around the contact point, pale skin on green; in ordinary circumstances, if it hadn't been for Zim's decision to choose Good over selfishness, or for Zuko's ill-timed meddling with arcane devices, the two would have never met, this bridge between their species crossed long ago. And yet there they were, ironclad comrades in the fight against evil and taking joy in each other's company, and this small fact was evident in that single brotherly gesture.

Zuko's lip trembled, trying with all his might to master the emotions that were so prone to violence and explosiveness; it was his nature, as a Firebender, to be so passionate for good or ill. Zim looked up at Zuko, meeting the eyes of a friend who was suffering just as terribly as him, if not worse for the separation from the friends closer than family (that WERE Zuko's real family in all the ways that really mattered).

The hand to his shoulder said everything: _I am your friend, and I am here with you._

Zim smiled, just a little, faint as light motes in a window, but so real in spite of that. Childlike he had seemed before, and he still did, but this time, it was certainly a good thing. If Zim had been especially prone to crying, no doubt he would be, just over this small gesture of brotherhood.

Morte bobbed awkwardly, out of place and fully aware of it.

"I would have never thought it of you," Zim said after a moment, giving the screens a last lonely look before the destroyed hope of returning to Earth returned to being the fantasy he hadn't known he still had cherished. "Morte. Sparing feelings, I mean."

"Why not?" Morte asked bluntly.

"...I acknowledge that I have no plain answer for that." Zim turned around. "Wait. Where did...what's their names...the boy and tiger-boy go?"

"Down there," Zuko said, pointing at the screens that displayed a view of the streets (and clearly hurting just _looking _at a place that was so much like Earth); Calvin and Hobbes had exited the cargo and were looking around, investigating with the sort of care that suggested they expected something to pop out and try to eat them at any moment; ripping up chunks of asphalt to look underneath, chopping up vines to see if it was different than galactic-standard plants of its kin, taking note of a group of feral cats that had wandered by to investigate the noise they were making of that of the ship's landing, making loud observations about everything and comparing it with the things they had encountered previously...

"Do ya, y'know...want to get them back here and leave?" Morte asked. "Try a different world, make that our first world we checked out?"

Zim paused. It was an inviting notion. And yet, dishonest. "Gir might well like to find a planet like Earth. It's the only home he ever knew. If he had a choice in where he was taken...well, it's cosmically close to Traverse Town, by what I saw. It's as good a place to begin as any." He nodded sharply, a touch of the familiar heroic thrill coming to him. "We should lock up the ship and rejoin those two on the ground, we have _adventure _to return to!"

"Yay," Zuko said, utterly deadpan.

"...Would it kill you to show some enthusiasm!?"

"Probably not," Zuko said, with a small shrug. "But I don't want the risk."

Zim stared suspiciously at Zuko; the Fire Lord's perfectly serious expression suggested nothing more than he meant every word of what he'd said. (Either that or he was _really_ good at sarcastic humor.) Zim made a 'tch!' noise and they made preparations to step out.

A while later, Zuko, Morte and Zim left the ship. First, though, they had to confer with the ship's computers and make certain that the atmosphere was perfectly safe (the ship's sensors confirmed that it was, and Calvin and Hobbes were doing fine) and to insure against bacterial or viral infection they endured a brief 'shower' within an odic force chamber Calvin had rigged up on the bridge just in case, as it would inoculate them in the short-term from diseases that they lacked immunity to (or for that matter, prevent them from _spreading _diseases to this world). Finally, they prepared themselves for possible combat, Zim..._not _summoning the Keyblade because he had a vague suspicion that the Heartless would zoom in on this world if they sensed it's active presence, while Zuko got the thermal lance he'd looted from the frost giant Gunter in the Darvhog battle; it was far too large for Zuko to use comfortably, but he liked it's possibilities too much to dismiss it outright.

Then, after activating a few non-lethal security measures against possible intruders (such as nosy animals or more unsavory possibilities; they didn't know WHAT had done something to the humans, or if there had been humans, Morte had hinted that a different species might have taken their place), Zim, Zuko and Morte rejoined Calvin and Hobbes on the ground. "Is the drama done?" Calvin asked at once.

"Yep," Morte said.

"Nice," Hobbes said. "Drama's just _tacky_."

"No," Zim said. He hesitated, trying and failing to think of something to retort and managed, "YOU'RE tacky! So unbelievably tacky! And...ah...fuzzy. Yes."

"That's a stupid counter and you know it!"

Zim conceded the point. He vowed to take revenge at a later date. He gestured towards the dilapidated city they had arrived it, apparently long-since forsaken, and he said, "So, any thoughts on all this? Are the plants..." He grimaced at the growth. "Is something unusual about them? Did they cause all of this?"

Calvin grabbed a nearby vine and inspected it. "Looks like natural growth to me. Nothing worse than just long-term lack of maintenance; this place looks abandoned more than anything else." He frowned. "Maybe something just TOOK all the people away?"

Zuko shuddered. "That's creepy."

"Yeah," Hobbes said. "Uh, maybe we should take a look around? Examine the place?"

"Sounds smart," Morte said.

Hobbes brightened, pleased that he was being taken seriously. "And then we can see if we can declare the planet as our territory, set up base here and invite Zim's friends to live there after we modify it into a mobile planet and jaunt into the Heartless' dimension and blow them all up!" They stared at him. His composure deflated. "What, I'm not allowed to come up with exciting ideas?"

Zuko hurriedly spoke up, mostly because Zim was looking thoughtful and Calvin was looking like he was trying to calculate the logistics of making all that feasible, and all of that suggested very spooky things to Zuko. "A quick look around wouldn't hurt. Maybe it'll give us an idea of what happened here, if anyone really IS here and decide what to do from there."

"Why?" Morte asked.

Zuko shrugged. "Why not? As long as we're here, we might as well do _something_."

"An acceptable option," Zim said. Calvin and Hobbes voiced their their assent, and after a moment's consideration, so did Morte, and the four of them left shortly thereafter, squabbling the whole time over what formation they ought to go in and the codenames they should use if someone was listening in and also just _why _stick-on straps and zippers were so incredibly popular across the multiverse all of a sudden.

They were not alone, however.

Several invisible figures, their unseen forms masterworks of mechanical artifice, watched them go with great puzzlement, particularly towards Calvin and Zuko. Curiosity compelled them onward, and they followed Zim's party at a clumsy pace. This was very much a new experience for these beings, and completely unsure of how to proceed, they were choosing to err on the side of caution.

* * *

Several hours of intent exploration, sightseeing and a few casual experiments later, Zim had come to the conclusion that something terrible had happened here, but he didn't know what exactly.

They had seen no one, met no one; it would be perhaps a little bit better if they could say that there was no sign of anyone having been there in a very long time, but that was not so. Frequently, they had come across places where the vegetation had been cleared away and the beginnings of proper repairs begun, construction materials (crude forges, stacks of various sorts of metal, and such) left around those places in a way that suggested they had suddenly been abandoned in a hurry very recently...which was odd, since it was at least several decades since the city had been abandoned from the building decay and rate of overgrowth.

There were plenty of animals around, many of them not belonging in this hemisphere; Zim though he saw a pride of lions carefully retreating at the sight of Hobbes several streets ago, and Hobbes himself had expressed an interest in serving up the groups of deer they had seen as tonight's dinner. Certainly they were many packs of wild dogs that were nearly wolfish in size and appearance, and groups of feral cats cautiously watching them from the buildings, moving from broken window across streets by gliding on fleshy skins that had grown between their limbs. Morte had supposed they were the distant descendants of the pets that had lived here generations ago, gone wild and adapting to their circumstances, some more extreme than others.

A few streets along and no encounters with anyone who might still be there, or any sight of bodies or battle-sign (such as bullet holes in the walls or marks where energy weapons had discharged or scores from errant blades), their passing marked by the sounds of their feet crunching the thick mats of vegetation underfoot or the gravel loosened by all that growth, turning past streets and finding little more than derelict wrecks, collapsed buildings in varying states of disrepair and natural processes deconstructing the artificial structures despite the signs of attempted maintenance here and there, it all gave Zim a haunting sense of wrongness.

A mystery was being presented to them. This place was completely devoid of any apparent civilized life though there was wildlife aplenty, there was little to nothing to suggest what had taken or killed all the people away. If there had been an invasion or some outside force that had captured them, there should have been _something _there, some sign of what had done that.

And there was the nagging question posed by Hobbes after some logical reasoning: if this place was totally uninhabited by sentient life, what was doing the thinking to connect it to the Astral Plane?

Various theories and idle thoughts abounded. Eventually, as they rounded the corner of a place selling guns right next to a place selling urban vehicles and Hobbes and Calvin argued over whether it was ethical to loot them, Morte said, "I bet some apocalypse happened and all the people on this planet caked it." Zuko stared at him, more for the disrespect to the possibly dead than anything. "...It's a possibility is all I'm saying."

"Well, _something _happened here," Zim said. "As good a theory as any. And a bit obvious, really."

"Yeah, because that's clearly what happened!" Morte said.

"It seems so."

Zuko nodded, and checked one of the posters on the ground. "Does it say something about the apocalypse being nigh?" Morte asked, indecently hopeful.

"No," Zuko said, looking mystified. "It's an advertisement for a concert by something called the 'Plaid Hamburgers'." He studied it, the automatic translation struggling to edge its way into a brain that had learned to read with very different sense of alphabet. "It's just a concert advertisement."

"Sounds like progressive rock," Calvin said. "Or a little retro."

Zim deflated a bit. "I don't think we're going to find many clues like this," he said, looking upset that there weren't any obvious causes that he could go up and destroy in retaliation, like a standard-issue cosmic horror or a super villain or a megacorporation striving for world conquest before stretching just a bit too far.

Or for that matter, some _survivors _to explain things to him. He had come here hoping for adventure or clues, and he had gotten only a weird mystery. Wanting to make himself feel better, he punched Calvin.

"Ow! What was that for!?"

"I _really _wanted to hit something."

Calvin punched him in the stomach. Zim blinked, not even registering it. "That's it? Are you even trying, meat bag?!"

"You're made of as much meat as I am!"

"Hardly! And besides I'm much better quality meat!"

Zuko, Hobbes and Morte blinked. "...I don't know if he knows that sounds kinda dirty but I'm gonna pretend he didn't, and that I didn't hear that," Morte said.

"Agreed," Zuko and Hobbes said.

Zim and Calvin, as usual, began bickering. They weren't particularly picky about it either; Calvin opened up with complaints on Zim choosing to come to this incredibly depressing world in the first place and opting to ignore Zim's reply that he couldn't possibly have known it would be like this, and this quickly degenerated into a 'you shut up' 'no you shut up' 'no YOU SHUT UP' moment.

The unseen beings (in truth not many different individuals but a single consciousness incarnated in many bodies), having followed them the entire times and picked up a relatively few more of themselves, watched nervously, and wondered if this was the right decision or not. To them, or it, there seemed little choice; it wasn't like they had many alternatives to find _anybody _to talk to or offer alternatives. And anyway they (and again, the word was a matter of some dispute, for it was this mind's habit to permit parts of itself to rise up as pseudo-individuals to benefit from multiple perspectives) were still wondering where the hell these strangers had come from and why two of them were human and the others were definitely _not_ human...and yet intriguingly like beloved humanity, long since lost.

In their deliberations, silent and mind-to-mind and unobservable though they were, they still tended towards instinctively human-like moments. Nervous and awkward and more than a little scared (not unlike a child stealing a cookie from a jar and about to own up to it), they moved around a lot; ferro-plastic exoskeletons making faint noises as joints so intricate that they could barely be said to exist shifted nervously, the sounds of a restless crowd totally indecisive and afraid to make the incorrect choice.

Communication made on wavelengths only perceptible to the network of heart and mind that connected them all, terabytes worth of debate and possible outcomes and wonder all exchanged in milliseconds, as though of one single massive brain thinking deeply but reflected in dozens of reflected perspectives. Most of all there was a question of 'is this _right?' _asked among them all, and bewilderment at the mere existence of these strangers, or that two of their number should look human, and one of them look exactly like a human skull.

There was little choice, again. A consensus was reached, and then the great mind in its many bodies wondered what the best way to approach was, taking all factors into consideration and the best way to invite them into thoughts of goodwill without undue alarm or the best way to retreat if hostility ensued...

It thought so quickly, all of this happened in the same span of time it would take for a fleshy being to blink a few times. However, their bodies were still making noise, and it quite forgot about all that.

Hobbes' ears twitched, the nearly silent sounds still quiet audible to his amazingly perceptive hearing, and he glanced at his crewmates to see if they noticed. Calvin and Zim were arguing about two different models of all-terrain vehicle they favored, hardly in a condition to notice they had company. Morte had frozen in place, and was certainly aware that _something _was off; he'd stiffened a lot like an experienced melee combatant, Hobbes noted. Zuko was doing the best of them despite what Hobbes considered to be the limitations of his species (since innocent bigotry takes many forms), clearly noticing that they were not alone anymore and staring not quite at the place where Hobbes had heard the sounds coming from; looking _right _at them would definitely clue the unseen bystanders in.

Hobbes wondered for a moment whether or not he should find a way to inform the others, tried to think of a way to do that as stealthily and non-threatening as possible, and decided that if they were going to be ambushed it would already have happened. "Look," He called out to them. "I know you're there, just come out and say hi!"

Zim and Calvin stopped talking and looked in the direction Hobbes had yelled. Appropriately, there was a perfectly synched noise doubling up into a single loud _clink!_; the sound of several dozen mechanical bodies flinching in unison.

Calvin's hand went for his pyrokinetic glove, strapping it on in moments, and the Keyblade materialized in Zim's hand. Meeting this display of aggressiveness, was a chorus of perfectly synched voices, a single voice speaking through many bodies, and it cried out, "Wait, hold on, can't we talk this out!? Please don't attack! ...Please?"

"Oh, okay then," Zim said, dropping the Keyblade. It crashed right through the asphalt, it's magical weight and the poorly maintained conditions of the city not meshing well. Zim flinched, and stepped away awkwardly. Then he realized something. "I knew it! There _are _people here, _I KNEW IT!_ And...they're invisible. REVEAL YOURSELVES!"

"Okay," the many-bodied voice said amiably. The air shimmered, rippled in shapes conforming to about several dozen humanlike bodies, and those ripples faded as those several dozen faded into view. If Zim had hoped that they were humans, he was mistaken; standing across from them, in postures of varying degrees of hopefulness and awkwardness, were about thirty-six mechanical life-forms generally standing about the size and shape of a normal human, none of them particularly threatening or even armed in any apparent way.

'Generally' being the operative word; plenty of them were far larger or quite small, standing on assemblies of insectile legs or treads, bigger or larger, and still some twice as big and built for construction labor. They all had the same type of materials making up their bodies; an outer shell of a plastic-like material that was nearly fluid, appearing to be a non-Newtonian liquid (possibly individual colonies of nanoscopic machine life), placed over an elegantly simple frame clearly modeled after a human form, though stylized and idealized, and neatly androgynous, with the suggestions of womanly curves meshing with the broader build of the average man. Each unit had its own unique design, and they were all beautiful in an alien way, but beautiful all the same; the arms and lower portions densely covered in the free-form material, where it shifted around in lazy patterns and seemingly capable of transforming at any moment into complicated mechanized forms, their inner frames glowing with the faintest light of an internal power sources (brightening and fading in total unison, as if a massive heartbeat). Their heads, while different patterned, were blanks surmounted by an holographic screen displaying crude but cute facial constructs not unlike internet emoticons; presently, they were all uniformly puzzled and a bit scared.

The two groups, Zim's crew and the machine-men, stared at each other for a long tense moment; not so much ready for a fight now, Zim's crew halted at the strangeness and then Zim recalled the Keyblade to his hand, and dismissed it in a flash of light. Hobbes relaxed and stepped back while Morte clicked his teeth curiously. Zuko exhaled, relieved, and leaned on the thermal lance he'd taken from Gunter and claimed as a personal weapon (though it was far too large, and dwarfed him). And Calvin...

Took off his pyrokinetic device and shoved it into an open belt pouch before he walked right past the rest of his crew and over to the robots, who hadn't responded with any readying of weapons or hostile intent or even the slightest degree of knowing what to do. "Uh, what do you think you're doing?" Morte said as the robots stared at Calvin, apparently enraptured by his proximity.

"Making first contact," Calvin said nonchalantly. He stopped in front of the foremost robot (a stocky mech not much taller than him and twice as wide, staring at Calvin with a emoticon incorporating wonder and shock) and waited for a moment. He waved.

The mech waved back in slow and jerky arcs, like he was rather unfamiliar with the mechanics of such a gesture. The other robots stared silently, several trembling and making noises that sounded all too much like children who'd had a much-beloved but supposedly dead parent show up right out of nowhere, alive and cheery and with hugs to spare. One of them walked to Calvin, in perfectly precise strides still too jerky and so awkward he might have fallen over, and stopped in front of him. More followed his example, cautiously approaching Zim's group and looking ready to run like fear at the first sudden movement, and the robot before Calvin raised a hand as if to touch Calvin and make certain he was there, plasticine skin brilliant in the sunlight. It's fingers stopped inches from Calvin's face and retreated to its side.

The robot spoke, haltingly and painfully, the words so carefully measured for inoffensiveness that Zim felt pity for it, a pang of sympathy for a creature that seemed so fundamentally lonely it was willing to cripple it's vocabulary so that it did not upset a sentient being like this. "My God," it whispered, peering skyward for a moment before looking back at Calvin. "You. You're...are you _real_? Can this truly be? Are you..." Another pause, extremely short by Zim's standards but noticeable for such mechanical life-forms as these. And then a brief phrase, humbled and awed and quick like a exhalation of air infested with worries and far too much grief. "You're _human_. A human, a real human!"

"Uh huh!" Calvin said.

The robots leaned in, and out, as though breathing with a gusty relieved sigh.

Zuko stepped forward, perplexed by this treatment. The robots focused on him, their emoticons expressing uneven mixtures of delight at this further human, and perplexity at the condition of his face. "I'm human too," He said awkwardly, the hardness of his character worn away (if only for the moment) by pity.

The robots stepped forward almost as one, a straggler or two hanging back and too scared to hope even with the evidence staring them in the face. "Yes," Another robot said, voice colored by something that could only be described as something akin to religious awe.

The robots murmured verbally (as opposed to the more efficient communication they normally employed; for the benefit of the visitors), and it became clear that they were whispered the same thing, the echoes of the same phrases over and over again building into a few recognizable lines: "humans," "REAL humans," "They live still!" "But this makes no sense, how can they still live?" "I don't know," "I know not either," "Does it matter, they are here, they are alive!" "We were not abandoned after all!" "They're _here_, the Creators have returned..." And so on and so forth, on those general themes. Curiously, they didn't sound like they were genuinely having a conversation; the way they responded already knowing what the others were going to say, it was more like someone debating something to themselves.

"They seem nice," Morte said. A few robots looked in his direction. "Needy, but nice."

Zuko and Hobbes, totally ignored by the robots, had grown a bit uncomfortable with not being focused on for a change. "Hmph," Zim said. "They really seem to enjoy having humans around,"

"Yeah! What's up with that?!" Hobbes said indignantly. "We're not good enough for them?!"

"Guess not," Morte said, disgruntled; the robots were giving him curious looks, one after another and always at different angles as if scanning him and analyzing him from alternate perspectives, but they weren't approaching him either.

For Calvin and Zuko, their new robot fanboys (and fangirls) were getting a little too overbearing, swarming around them and expressing noises that might have been mechanical sobbing. A few of them kept trying to hug Calvin and Zuko. "All right, you guys, enough!" Calvin said, pushing his hands out to denote his personal space and warding around hug-bots. "Personal space, c'mon!"

They completely refused to move at all. "What's 'personal space'?" One asked blankly, hugging Zuko's arm tightly.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Another said, shaking his head regretfully and, since he was nuzzling Calvin at the time, bonked him right on the head.

"Perhaps it's some manner of self-contained perception of the universe as it relates to oneself, where the universe immediately around oneself is _felt _as being of oneself," Another hypothesized.

"No, most folks just don't like it when other people get really close to them," Morte said. "Makes them uncomfortable."

"Ah," Said the robot that had come up with the theory. He peered at Morte with fascination, a quick scan confirmed Morte to be a human skull, and he relayed this fact to the other robots. The more outright curious ones gathered around Morte, chattering excitedly over this.

Yet more of them were facing Hobbes and Zim, oblivious to their discomfort. "What manner of creature resembles a human so, yet is clearly not?" One of them wondered.

"Why do you superficially resemble a human?" Another asked Zim.

"I don't know, the humanoid form is just a popular one," Zim said, displeased with how close they were standing to him.

"Why does your form so closely follow a human's structure?" Another robot asked Hobbes. "It is not dissimilar to our own designs, but that makes little sense."

"Hey, my kind don't resemble humans!" Hobbes said hotly, ears flattened back.

"You have a humanlike structure, with considerations for minor anatomical details; an arrangement of central trunk, four limbs in a two-arms-and-two-legs pattern and a head," yet another robot remarked to Hobbes. "Your physiology is nearly identical to a humans in many respects, not the least reproductive and respiratory functions, and most certainly musculature and basic form. It is closer to design than it is to evolutionary adaptation. Please explain!"

"...Look, there's a lot of that in my home galaxy!" Hobbes said lamely. "The Old Ones that apparently made half of everything, they weren't that creative! They just liked that kind of design!"

The robots were quite perceptive, and clearly recognized this as only a half-truth, if even that. "It reads as, specifically, nearly-human. Your biology appears to have been created using the human body, structure and brain chemistry as a template-" In all defiance of his usual diplomatic approach, Hobbes growled loudly, his teeth showing. The robots took the hint, backing away warily. A moment later he realized his mistake and his fur puffed up in instinctive threat display. They didn't attack or retreat, but they were watching his mistrustfully. Hobbes relaxed, by a fraction or two.

Eventually, after about ten more minutes of this annoying though marginally charming treatment, the robots seemed to realize that their visitor's annoyance was overwhelming their surprise; after Zuko issued a warning growl when they started touching him and poking his face, communication ensued among them, debate and discussion concluded at speeds too fast for fleshy brains to process, and the robots decided that more restrained action was required, and certainly a measure of diplomatic action. "We...apologize," Several of them said in unison, completely in synch with each other. The effect was odd but not creepy. "If our actions appear unseemly, tell us now that we might correct ourselves."

"You're overly forward," Zim said.

"You're kind of creepy about it," Morte said.

"You're _really _obsessed with humans," Calvin remarked.

"You're not very tactful about it either," Hobbes muttered, and growled again.

"Stop TOUCHING me!" Zuko shouted at several robots who were edging hopefully close to him.

The robots retreated back into the rest. The speakers bowed their heads. "We...understand the factors at work here, and are taking steps to implement a more suitable procedure." They paused, plainly unsure of the terminology for this occasion. The pause stretched out, and the robots stared at Zim and his crew (mostly on Calvin and Zuko, of course) and in spite of their calm words, they seemed totally at a loss of what to do with themselves.

Finally, they haltingly said, "This is impossible. Your presence simply cannot be."

"Yes it can," Zim said. "We are standing right here."

The robots clicked and clanked nervously. "Well, yes, certainly, but that misses the point."

Zuko looked perplexed. He said, frowning thoughtfully at the robots, "Look, you guys seem like you want to be helpful, so just tell us something. What _happened _here? Where are all the humans you keep going on about?" At Zim's look, he amended, "You clearly know what humans are since you recognized us and keep talking about them. But we haven't seen any humans or remains of them. This place is falling apart around us and we need to know why."

The robots stared. After a time, one said, "You wish to know? You have an investment in our world?"

"No," Zim said bluntly. "But me and my friend-" He gestured to Zuko. "Come from a world very much like this one. The current state of this world, the disarray of this city along and what little we saw, the open disrepair of everything around us...it disturbs us quite badly. We wish to know why this place is in its sorry state." Zim frowned, and gave them an openly suspicious look. "And the question of _your _presence here. To the best of my knowledge, _my _Earth did not have a functional robotics program of a scale like yours."

The robots briefly glanced at each other, and said something that caught Zim and his group completely off-guard, dealing a blow to any lingering suspicions of the robots. "You mean you don't _know_?" The robots all asked, individual voices rising into a single statement that could only be described, with accents of shock and disbelief, as beseeching.

Zim and Calvin glanced at each other. (The possibility that the group was starting to develop its own patterns, Calvin and Zim generally reacting together on the side of science or silliness while Hobbes and Zuko provided a rational or cool-headed perspective, briefly came to Zim. And also that Morte seemed to side with whichever side seemed like fun at the moment.) "I'm going to go out a bit here and presume that you don't actually know what happened to the humans after all," Zuko said, his voice a good deal more tired than he had thought.

"No, not at all," the robots replied. After some thought, clearly weighing whether or not to reveal an important fact, they shyly added, "We _do _know that they made us and began to make the first of these terminals-" One of them helpfully illustrated the point, rapping a fist on its chest. "But we do not know what happened after they began the process that birthed us. When we first awoke…that is, when our mind gained consciousness and began mass-producing the terminals you see before you they had already gone. And had been so for a fair amount of time. We have been unable to calculate how long ,but we believed the vernacular is 'quite a while'. Years certainly, but not so many that the damage to buildings should have progressed so fast. "

Zim, though disturbed, observed that the timing was certainly nothing like what had happened to Zim's Earth. He relaxed a bit more, not feeling he was in danger or in the midst of crazed automatons that had killed their creators for some stupid reason. "So that explains you, at any rate. What happened to the cities to put them in this condition?"

"Wear and tear, the passage of time, lack of repairs," The robots said sadly. " The works of humanity had already been long past the point of falling apart when we awakened; you have seen it for yourselves!" One of the robots gestured at the overgrown dead city around them. "All over the world, the cities and places of civilization are like this. It has all fallen apart, and it takes so much effort just to beat back the wilderness, let alone restore everything we encounter." Another pause. "And to be truthful, we have failed to make a consensus on this matter; there are sub-routines that feel that it is not our right to restore anything at all. The thought goes that it is our duty to observe how humanity's work decays until only we are left, and then to build as we see fit, just as our creators were."

Another long silence, and the robots spoke, in a voice so pained as to be weeping in tone alone, "They created us, and they left us. We are all that are left of them that has the slightest possibility of being a meaningful acknowledgement that humanity existed. We have not reached a consensus on the appropriate form of tribute to our creators." Several shook their heads. "Do we at least attempt to restore their works, clearing away the overgrowth and relocating the animals and repairing all the artifice we find? Or should we leave it be, and build our own creations as the creative species we are?"

"Hrm," Zim said. He hesitated, and asked, "Could my group have a moment to discuss this matter among ourselves?"

"Certainly," They replied in a single voice.

Zim gestured and the others went with him a short distance away. The robots waited politely, moving where they couldn't overhear them. Once they were clear, Zim said to the others, "So! Impressions?"

"I was thinking that maybe those robots killed the humans and processed their corpses, but not anymore," Zuko said. He glanced at the robots, their attachment to their long-dead creators clearly resonating with him. "They're just so..._nice_. Sickeningly nice! It hurts just listening to them, but whatever happened here, they didn't have anything to do with it."

"Yeah, I think they're telling the truth," Morte said. "I know lies when I see them, seeing as I'm the biggest liar I've ever met. "

"Then how do we know you aren't lying right now?" Hobbes said.

"Because how do you know I wasn't lying about being a huge liar?"

"I'm confused," Hobbes whined. "Anyway. These robot guys seem all right to me. Naive and kind of easy to push around if we had a mind to, but really nice guys. Or nice guy, I'm not sure about the terminology." He tilted his head, frowning. "But we still don't know what happened to the humans on this world."

"Or if it might apply to us, or has something to do with our unknown enemies and the Heartless they control," Zim agreed gravely. He looked around, frowning. "I will say, I seriously doubt this has anything to do with the Heartless. It lacks that certain...element I have come to associate with them."

"What's that? Mind-boggling terror?" Calvin said.

"Well, that, but also this world was left to its own devices. I still don't know how they accomplish it, or what the point is, but the Heartless slay the populace, transform them into more Heartless, devour the world they're on, and repeat again. Presumably until they've eaten everything that exists. _This _world...hrm, the humans have vanished and, by all accounts, left no bodies behind, which is much like what the Heartless do, but everything else was left in place, a life after people."

"Sounds like the name of a neat documentary," Calvin said.

"The Heartless do seem obsessed with breaking everything they find," Zuko observed. "They fight and they hate and they don't seem to understand anything but tearing down whatever they encounter. _This..._well, all of this," And he gestured towards the world at large. "This looks precise. I'm thinking, whatever happened to them, it had to be a single quick attack, or there'd have been more sign of damage. Fast enough that people couldn't have responded, or there'd be _something _to show where they'd fought back. Bullet holes in the walls, tanks in the streets, armed planes that crashed when the pilots had been killed, something like that!" He looked at Calvin and Hobbes. "Do you two have any ideas?"

Calvin shrugged. "Not me. Looks like if it was Heartless, there wouldn't be a world left behind, let alone really confused robot-kids or whatever."

Hobbes frowned. "It sounds a bit like something from the ancient history of my world; I think they were called the...uh, yeah, the Dark Eldar. This sort of thing would sound like their style, but I have no idea what they'd be doing here. "

"'Eldar'," Morte mused. "That's like an old word for elven-folk, or fae. These guys of yours some kind of elf?"

"Sure, yeah. Came from the same big group as the main Eldar; they were a pre-human civilization that had conquered our galaxy but fell apart a long time before humans ever made it off-planet. Regular Eldar are still around, mostly Exodite Eldar that joined the kingdom as citizens, but the Dark Eldar..." Hobbes shuddered. "I'd really hate it if we ran into some. They do..._things_ to people. The great hero Vulkan told me once, 'Pray they don't take you alive'."

Morte clicked his teeth. "I might have heard a few things about fae-types that pull this sort of stunt, kidnapping people for evil things that...geez, I don't even like thinking about it. Everyone I ever met that knew a thing about them, it was usually because they escaped from their clutches and came out of it..._different_. These folks called them all sorts of things like 'the Gentry' or 'the Keepers' but mostly they just called them 'the True Fae'. Never said it outside a room loaded with cold iron if they could avoid it. Can't be the same things you're talking about; these bastards are older than words, the way I hear, definitely precede the Dark Eldar. And aren't actually a species at all. They might be connected, but...I don't know, might be worth looking into."

Calvin and Hobbes gave Morte a distinctly disturbed look. Zuko frowned thoughtfully. Zim asked, "You think these True Fae may have been involved?"

Morte was silent for a short time, thinking it over. Eventually he started to speak, words as carefully chosen as not to potentially offend something (or some things) that might have been watching. "They come from the shadows and the dark places in your mind, they climb from their lairs of the hollow spaces between the worlds through the things that reflect and make doorways. They do what they want and take whoever they wish, stealing them away for their own wants, and magically mutate them with tortures until they become like _them_." He paused, and added, "If a True Fae could get a way to steal over six billion humans and keep them all to itself, doing whatever it wants to them and making them into half-crazy freaks, it would do it in a second."

"...I think we really shouldn't let the robots know about them, then," Hobbes said quietly, having unconsciously taken a few steps back. Zuko and Calvin looked outright horrified (though they had their ways of coping with it; Zuko knew of spirits that were just as immoral as that and perhaps as powerful, and Calvin had personally encountered the Dark Eldar to know how they operated, but repeatedly blowing them on such occasions was heartening.) and Zim looked oddly thoughtful. "It would probably upset them."

"Where do these True Fae live?" Zim asked suddenly. "Next thing on our to-do list, BLOW THEM ALL UP. Also, rescue those people."

"...First things first, boss," Morte said, simultaneously intrigued and disturbed. "I haven't the slightest idea where the True Fae are from or how to get there. Everyone who knew something I talked to about them didn't want to talk much about it, sometimes said something about a place called Arcadia, very definitely _not _the Upper Plane of the same name and maybe mentioned something about the True Fae being outside reality or some bullshit like that, so no going. And if we did, they'd just blow us out like candles in a hurricane. No thanks, but I like being alive. And anyway we don't know for sure that they were taken."

"Hrmph," Zim grumbled, but took the point. "Can you say conclusively whether these Fae took the humans of this world or not?"

"Hard to say. Just a theory at this point, but it would explain why _everyone _vanished and there aren't any bodies. Might help if there was a calling card or something, but the real question is _how _the Nine Hells they cut a deal with someone to take all these people!" At the odd looks, Morte elaborated. "Some kinds of Fae, they're all about deals. Their powers stem from metaphysical contracts made with parts of reality, and so do their capabilities. Some things, they just can't do if they don't make a deal with it first. The thinking goes, some crazy human made a deal with them that they could take some humans in exchange for...geez, I don't know, people make up stories about what, but the important detail is that if it _was _True Fae, someone cut a deal with them that they could take the people on this planet."

Hobbes and Zuko, both men who held honor so dear that it was part of what defined them, made identical expressions of nearly-inhuman fury. "Who in the hells would dare do something like that!?" Zuko shouted. "That's...spirits, that's...there aren't _words _for how sick that is! What could possibly be worth doing something like that!?"

"Mind you, we _did _beat up a guy who weaponized stolen souls and was complicit in genocide because he thought it was fun," Calvin said, disgusted. "It might just all be because of people who don't honestly realize that stuff like that is, y'know, _Evil_."

Zim, inspired by that off-hand reference to Kimblee, and still brooding on Mr. Lyle's presence in Traverse Town, froze in thought. And then he said, "I know what happened, I KNOW WHO DID IT!"

"...Really," Zuko said, rightfully dubious.

"Really?" Calvin said, less experienced with Zim's poor connection to reality. "This I gotta hear."

"It was the _mysterious and thus far unnamed organization that sent Mr. Lyle and Kimblee and controls the Heartless,_" Zim declared.

"...Really," Hobbes said deadpan. Calvin's enthusiasm fell flat and he joined the others in staring listlessly at Zim.

"Of course! Think on it; the organization they work for is CLEARLY powerful enough to acquire information that they shouldn't have access to, equip Kimblee as well as they did both in tactics and in the knowledge to pull off those powers he employed, and to control the Heartless. They are clearly vastly bigger than I had anticipated, perhaps spanning more than just multiple worlds, perhaps star systems or galaxies or even entire 'verses!"

Dramatically, he pointed a finger upwards. "Maintaining the Heartless alone is an exemplary show of the power they have, and so why wouldn't they have that kind of power in the form of influence? I theorize that they made contact with the True Fae and cut some sort of deal with them, perhaps garnering their support in exchange for giving the people of unclaimed or unwanted worlds, such as this one, to the True Fae! An evil plan, yes, completely lacking in morals or anything approaching the measure that a sentient being ought to hold, and so in total character for our enemies."

Hobbes stared at Zim. "...Okay. You're _crazy_."

"Am not!"

"Oh, come on, you actually expect us to take that seriously?" Calvin said snidely. "Guys, he's just trying to screw with us."

"I am not!" Zim said again, indignant.

Zuko patted Zim's shoulder awkwardly as the other three walked off, leaving the Irken to stew impotently. "Don't joke like that, they can't recognize your sense of humor," Zuko said, trying to be helpful."

"But I wasn't joking," Zim said, almost whining. Zuko wasn't sure how to respond to that, so he chose to pretend Zim hadn't said anything.

Alone of them, though, Morte was silent, thoughtful, and taking all of that into consideration. It was worth thinking about.

They returned to the robots (who had stayed true to their word and had even shut off their audio receptors just in case they might accidentally overhear the forbidden discussion) and waved at them to indicate that they could start listening again. "Were your words productive?" The robots asked politely.

"Meh, not really," Morte said.

"Have you any ideas about what became of humanity?" The robots asked, shifting a gear into 'hopeful' tones.

"Well, we had some thoughts but no positive leads-" Zuko started to say.

"Based on the information available to us, I think they were taken away by extra-dimensional fae horrors to realms that you cannot pass," Zim told them bluntly. "I apologize, but I do not think it is possible for you to rescue or retrieve them, as you lack the means of accessing such eldritch realms or blowing them up." He considered. "First you'll need guns. _Lots and LOTS _of guns! Guns that shoot torn fragments of space-time for starters, and then you could probably use some tanks, the smallest being the size of buildings. Also, Morte said something about cold iron, so you should get some of that. And spaceships, you'll need those for sure to go into space. And a flag! There's no point in having a big spaceship fleet like you will no doubt end up with if you don't have a flag to look awesome and stuff. Probably holographic, canvas flags are no good in space."

"I...see," The robots said. They glanced at each other, much like a smaller-scale organism might conduct a mental debate over something it had just heard, and shrugged.

Hobbes facepalmed. Calvin shrugged indifferently. Morte stared at Zim while Zuko facepalmed, small plumes of steams rising from his hands. "_Zim..._" Zuko growled ominously through his fingers.

"What?!" Zim said defensively as the robots began talking among themselves to puzzle out just what the hell Zim had been talking about. "Like just lying to them about everything would have solved everything. And besides, lying is unheroic! Except when it's more effective or really funny, but I don't see how that would apply here." Zuko's hands stayed firmly on his face, possibly to restrain his impulse to strangle Zim. They were certainly getting tension-white around the knuckles, though.

"Your friend seems upset," said a robot.

"Oh, he's used to it, I'm sure," Zim said dismissively.

The robot nodded. It paused, and so did so very many of the robots around them. A moment passed, and then another, enough time going by for Zim's heart to once, twice, and again before the robots spoke in a single voice, a thrill of deep emotion that many people would not think a machine could be capable of (and Zim so disliked the notion that mechanical lives were somehow less 'people' than organic lives). "You say that our creators - our makers, our...our _parents_... you say they are gone."

"As best as we can determine with the knowledge available," Zim said. "...Yes. Taken by the True Fae, it seems."

The robots considered this, the air thick with emotion. Several of the robots trembled, and put hands to their faces before making low and soft keening noises. Zim knew the sound of electronic sobbing when he heard it, knew the reaction of people who had never known expressions of grief outside of ancient recordings to form base assumptions. And for all that he didn't know these people at all, it still bothered him to see such undisguised pain when there was no clear way to help it.

Behind him, Zim felt Calvin shuffling around awkwardly and Hobbes slouch back, clearly in great distress. Zuko remained still but just as awkward, and Morte clicked his teeth in tense indecision much like Zim was feeling. One of the robots shyly said, "We did once encounter a possible sign. In our explorations in the ruins of Miami, we encountered a message carved into a street that said...I believe it said simply, 'Dzarumazh the Deathless has claimed what he is owed'. Does that have any relevance? It would have been mentioned sooner, but we thought that it had perhaps been human graffiti. And yet...perhaps it came from outside." The robot shivered at this notion, and Zim was again struck by how much they unconsciously imitated humanity. They shivered when they were frightened or disturbed, a human gesture that had grown out of purely biological reactions that had become psychological.

Morte started at the name 'Dzarumazh the Deathless'. Hobbes sharply said, "Someone you know?"

The robots, as one, turned their attention to Morte. Too startled to make a plausible lie, and not in much of a mood to even try, Morte said, "Big talk among the people who know fae stuff. Some kind of really powerful Fae monster that's a real mover and shaker among the True Fae. And...yeah, it'll definitely be the same one I heard about. True Fae are really touchy about their names."

"...So the True Fae were almost certainly here," Zuko said after a moment, sounding like he really didn't want to admit that Zim had even a shred of credibility.

"...Yeah. Looks like it."

Zim winced a bit, just remembering that the robots were still there, listening to this final confirmation of their maker's terrible fate. "So," one of the robots said, so quietly it was nearly a whisper. "These 'True Fae' took our makers away, for their own alien and horrible purposes. Vengeance must be taken, then, or reparations demanded."

"Guys, think, wait!" Morte said. "You don't...you don't _know _the True Fae. Come to think of it, I don't much either, but I know _more _of them then you ever will, and I can tell you that...well, that is NOT a fight you can win, no matter how tough you are or what your bodies are made of! The True Fae, by the Powers, they're not even really beings, they're elemental bits of magic given a basic identity that consume each other in crazy life-duels and twist everything they touch just by existing near it! They take humans and turn them into freaks just...they do it to make servants, to build up little slaves, for a thousand and twelve stupid reasons that don't even make sense! They turn people into wax-things that burn forever and bulk them up into giants to carry their palaces around and they strip their bones out to replace them with molten metal and sometimes they just eat who they take and most of the time the people that manage to come back are half-crazy and slipping the rest of the way! They do even worse things every day, and have so many they don't even _notice _when one of their slaves slips away! You're not just fighting something evil, you're fighting bits of insane pseudo-personalities with the powers of gods! They're _monsters! _What do you expect to do!?"

The robots went still for a moment, conversing among each other, debating and evaluating and thinking much as they had before, the mind they comprised thinking extremely hard.

"Um," Calvin said. "I think you upset them."

"There wasn't any need to upset them like that," Hobbes said, scowling.

"I don't want these guys throwing their lives away on a lost cause!" Morte snapped. "When the True Fae get near people, the people end up _broken_. These guys have the right to live without getting ripped apart for the jollies of some thistle-toothed princess of chaos or, shit, I don't know, some other crazy abomination!"

"I don't wish anyone to die like that either," Zim said, hands clenched. "But we ought to give them all that they need to make an informed decision! If they decide their honor as beings requires them to die fighting an invincible enemy, then we must abide by it!"

"Oh, COME ON!" Morte said. He whirled on Zuko, deciding from Hobbes' comment that he wasn't going to be on his side here. "You have common sense, tell him the smart thing to do!"

"Smart doesn't always mean the cold solution," Zuko said. He nodded once at Zim. "Zim was right. We have to give them what they think they have to do. It's...it's like our responsibility as more powerful beings. If their honor requires their doom, it's part of our honor to see that they can do it and succeed. That's the intelligent decision."

"No, that's the impulsive decision," Morte replied. "And-"

The robots interrupted him. "You say the that humans might still live, in the clutches of the True Fae?" The robots, all as one, nodded their heads resolutely. "Then the only correct choice is to bring them home, or avenge them."

Morte's jaw dropped right off. Zim nodded approvingly. Zuko almost smiled. Calvin and Hobbes gave cautious thumbs up. "It would seem that way," Zim said.

"Then," The robots said quietly. "Our choice is clear. We must locate the True Fae, defeat them, and do what the right course of action dictates from there."

"...But it's been so long since the humans were taken," Morte said. "They almost certainly won't be recognizable as human, and all there will be are descendants mutated by the True Fae."

"Irrelevant. It is our duty as the children of humanity to defend and love them, regardless of present form." The robots stood resolute. "This is what we shall do."

"But," Calvin said softly. "There's not really a whole lot of chance you could find them no matter how long you look, or that you could do anything meaningful about it when you get there." He gave Zim a look, and Zim remembered the criticism he had received regarding his plan to locate Gir and Gaz and Dib and the rest. The robots didn't seem to care about the bad chances, just as Zim didn't.

A moment for the robots to pause, considering. Then, "Your statement implies that, narrow as the chance may be, there still exists a chance that this can be done," The robots said, as stubborn as metal made personable.

A pause among the group. No one else spoke up in time, perhaps not sure what to say or feeling that they didn't have the right to interfere in such decisions, and Zim was so overwhelmed by the identical feelings of the robot to his own regarding his own mission that he found himself saying, "Of _course_. By determination alone, it must be made the only conclusion."

The robots nodded. "Then," The robots said with absolute and unyielding conviction, the kind of belief that is not so much hope as it is personal truth carved into the soul. "Minor as the probabilities are, there remains hope for us." Their facial emoticons changed into big happy grins, belying the lack of motion from their generally humanoid bodies, and even those were shaking with joyous emotion.

"Yes," Zim said again, and was a bit surprised to hear how encouraging he sounded. "Of course there is. If the odds aren't zero, they may as well be a hundred percent."

"That is good enough for us," the robots replied quietly. A moment later, with some bemusement and effort at the appropriate means to express it but finding no more appropriate words to be delivered in so short a time, they added, and Zim was startled at the bared intensity of their sincerity, "Thank you."

"For what?" Calvin asked, surprised.

The robots considered, perhaps wondering what the best way to articulate the source of their gratitude, and managed, "For giving us a purpose again. We feel we have been given a choice of what to do. To locate the makers of us, and bring them home." They glanced around at the broken and desolated place around them with a more critical eye than usual, and amended, "And to see to it that they have a home worth coming back to." And, more angrily, "And if they are extinct or beyond rescue, we shall see to it that their tormentors face justice for what they have done."

It wasn't a threat, or even a promise. Just a declaration of how things would be.

"...Hmph," Morte said. "...Well, if they're so intent about it, looks like they've got their choice made. Not much I can complain about there. That honor stuff you were talking about fits in there, I guess."

"Honor isn't just more valuable than life," Zuko told him gravely. "Honor _is _life. Better to die doing the honorable thing than to without it."

"Amen to that," Hobbes said, though he was openly disappointed with the robot's willingness to throw their lives away.

"You guys are crazy," Calvin said, without rancor. He didn't seem to approve, but if he was he also didn't really care that much.

"Hrmph," The robots said to Calvin. They regarded Zuko favorably, and Calvin was genuinely annoyed at that; _he _was the tech guy, the robot ought to like him more. "Your statements have the sound of satisfaction to us. Thus we shall act so. On this, we have a consensus." To Zim, they pondered a moment and said, "You agreed with our position so quickly. Kindly elaborate, please?"

Zim paused, wondering how much he ought to tell them, if anything. He thought about doing a plausible lie, but it felt wrong just thinking about one to these lost and lonely beings that had also lost their precious ones. He felt an uncommon kinship with them; like him, they had lost things that they cherished so dearly (even though none of them had ever met a human, and Zim wondered why they felt so powerfully about beings they had never met; their devotion seemed almost religious, come to think of it), and they had come to the same conclusions he had. Either rescue, or glorious revenge.

He told them, "My world was lost, consumed by abominations from beyond the stars." He hadn't thought about it, but that line resonated dearly with what he had told the robots about the True Fae suspected to have taken the humans; as expected the moment he thought of this, the robots' composures softened, a sheen of sympathy in their electronic faces. "A...a young one, a robot moderately similar to such as you, was scattered beyond my reach and not destroyed or slain, along with one of my dearest friends and his sister, and I suspect others of my world shared his fate. I have reached the same conclusions as you only last night. It was a moment of similarity, as simple as that."

A moment, long enough for the robots to process this and deciding to take him at his word. "Then we have a common sorrow," The robots said gravely.

"In that event, I believe it possible that they may have wound up here; our world is..._was_, quite similar to yours. Very similar indeed. I think it possible they may have appeared in this planet. Such things are not unheard of, or so I hear."

He didn't expect to get much hope out of this. As he thought, the robots shook their heads sadly, after a moment of hesitation over whether to tell a gentle lie or not. "We are afraid not. Your group are the sole sentient lifeforms we have encountered here, and our component-bodies dwell all over the planet. At this juncture, nothing escapes our notice; if they had arrived, we would have taken notice."

Zim nodded, not even bothering to hide his disappointment. "...I thought so. And if that is all, we ought to move on; there are other worlds that require our attention." This was addressed to his group, and was an informal goodbye to the robots he had unintentionally inspired.

"Sounds good to me!" Calvin said, sounding pretty bored already. Zuko, Hobbes and Morte voiced their own agreements, though varied in their hesitance; leaving these robots to seek their doom at a totally pointless mission didn't sit well with them.

It didn't sit well with Zim, either. It was a good opportunity when the robots asked, "We have a question for you. A request, we believe is the appropriate term?"

"If it's about the best way to break through the barriers of reality and seek vengeance, I am unsure how to accomplish that," Zim said, secretly pleased. "I don't think I can't help you in that regard."

"No, not that," The robots said. Softly, they asked, "May we examine your ship, and reproduce the designs you use? We have no reliable knowledge of spacecraft on the level that you use, and we cannot spare the time to design our own in the traditional way of trial and error. For the sake of those that made us, we _must _have a reliable design for construction immediately."

"Ah," Zim said. "And what will you do of this world?"

"We shall leave roughly half our number behind to serve as both a beacon and to repair what has been broken," The robots said. "More shall be constructed, and our mind dwells within us all regardless of distance, so we shall suffer no disconnection. Perhaps it will be a good idea to explore the reaches of space as we go along; the equipment at your disposal, in any case, is far superior to anything you can say."

Zim didn't wait for his crewmates to argue. He knew about the idea of the Prime Directive, that it was forbidden to give advanced technology to more primitive cultures that had not achieved faster-than-light travel or moved beyond their planet. It was there to prevent culture annihilation, or worse, to prevent a species too young to use the powers of such technology with wisdom and become conquerors or destroyers. Not even if the species was harmless and kind by nature and inclination, or only wished to bring back their makers home or make righteous war upon their murderers.

Zim never particularly cared for rules, even the good ones. "You may," he said solemnly, with a slight nod of the head. He heard brief noises behind him and glanced sharply at the rest of his crew. "Do any of you have objections!?"

Calvin shook his hands, protesting. "Of course not! I'm all about bringing the light of technology to people that need it and can use it with respect and intelligence! These guys are all right, no problems here."

Hobbes sighed. "I really don't think that they should be doing all that, but they may as well be readily equipped."

"What he said," Zuko said. "But without the negative moments."

"It's a bad idea all over," Morte insisted. "...Ah, hells, why not? Go full speed ahead, just don't let them complain to us if it goes pear-shaped."

"Then we have an accord," Zim said.

"You're serious!?" The robots said, gawking. "...Hrm. We didn't think you would actually agree to it!"

"We surprise EVERYONE."

"...We wish there was something we could do to repay you," the robots said, admitting embarrassment.

"...Well," Zim said, giving Calvin a sneaky look. "We are in dire need of raw materials…"

"Done!" The robots said earnestly.

* * *

"Well, that was...moderately productive," Zim said many hours later after taking the robots back to their ship and allowed them to analyze it's schematics down to the last placement of molecular-bonded seam sealing, driving a forklift to deposit a crate load of materials and devices the robots had given them, as per their agreement; the robots had flat-out refused to give them any weapons, perhaps harboring notions of pacifism (an attitude at odds with their intent to make war against cosmic powers of indifferently evil chaos, but they seemed to operate on a 'violence is always and only the last resort' mentality), but agreed to give them as much raw materials and non-combat equipment as they liked. This ultimately wound up being various devices, gadgets and tools for outfitting their rooms and laboratory more fully, a few more basic appliances and furniture for their rooms.

"I actually feel like we did some good," Calvin said, having come around fully to Zim's point of view from the sheer enthusiasm of the robots during the whole event. "And we got a lot out of it: roombas we can modify into cleaner-bots or little servants, plenty of various materials for crafting things, and lots of neat little odds and ends! If we get rewarded this well for every successful act of good, we'll have a fully outfitted headquarters by this time tomorrow!"

"Don't count on it, boss," Morte said. "Having it that easy would just be _boring._"

"Your pessimism is unfounded," Zim said, giving him a look.

"Hah! Just watch!"

"I wonder why they refused to give us weapons when they gave us materials that they know perfectly well we can fashion into weapons," Calvin said, changing the subject.

Zim shrugged. "Perhaps they see it as being a step divorced from the actual act of violence. The idea that they would be responsible for potential ill-doing on our parts may be in effect; I suppose they might see our own devices, made from our own hands, as being ours alone and are not their problem."

"A bit myopic, I'll admit. That hive mind is a moral exemplar, but it was seriously naive." Calvin said.

Zim backed the vehicle out of the ship and exited it to where the robots assured him they would be picking it up later, and re-entered the ship. "No time for dawdling," He said. "We have more worlds to visit!"

"You want to leave already?" Hobbes complained. "But I haven't even composed an entry for the Hitchhiker's Guide yet! We should stay for a while at least, they might hold a party for us! At least stay to enjoy the view."

Zim stared at him. "...There is nothing in this world that has a view I wish to dwell on," He said coldly. "Save for the robots. At least they remain a sign that this world of humans endured beyond its end."

"How is that any different from your world?" Hobbes said.

"This world still exists. Mine does not."

Hobbes was silent.

"So!" Zim said. "Let us be off!" Zuko nodded and went up to the bridge. Morte floated up after him. Hobbes rolled his eyes and hopped down to the cargo bay and headed for the bunks, intent on composing an entry for this world on behalf of the robots (he'd checked with them first for their permission) and Calvin completely ignored them all, heading off to the recreation quarters to start drawing up schematics for the things he would make with the materials given to them. "...Okay, by 'us' that just means me, Morte and Zuko going to the bridge," Zim said, annoyed. They didn't bother to answer him. He grunted and headed up to the bridge.

"Where are the other two?" Morte asked, already waiting in the bridge for them.

"Off doing their own agenda," Zim said, deeply displeased.

"Great," Zuko grunted, sitting in the co-pilot's chair with an air of deep distrust. "They're that worst kind of independent."

"Oh, they'll get what's coming to them," Zim said, smirking as he hit a few command sequences in addition to the ones that shifted the ship from passive sentry to flight mode; there was a faint shift as it disengaged landing gear and floated up into the air, projecting it's propulsion field and hovering upwards, pointing at an angle and moving up until it had cleared enough ground to be facing an empty patch of sky and took off in a blast that toppled a few buildings, pulverizing a few to dust and eradicated quite a lot of that pestilential vegetation, giving some of the city's artifice a measure of dignity.

"What do you mean by that?" Zuko asked, making sure his safety harness was on.

"Turned off the artificial gravity at their quarters," Zim said, pointing at a screen showing a graphic of various parts of the screen. As if on cue, they heard distant outraged cries and shouts of pain from below.

"...You are a vicious cutter, you know that?" Morte said, not sure if he should be admiring or disapproving. He decided to go with admiring, it seemed more fun.

"I do make an effort."

Zim squeezed the joysticks, funneling more power through the limiters of the engines and the ship accelerated, rocketing through the sky. He glanced at a screen, the landscape below getting smaller and smaller, and to his delight he saw a great mass rising from below all over the lands as they got high enough for the continents to be merely detailed; they came from everywhere, every ruined land and desolate realm on this quiet world, and it seemed that there were _far _more robots then they had suspected, so many that as they left their previous holdings and gathered together in one spot (flying on rockets and personal anti-grav fields and crude personalized aero-forms and some just swimming through the water and rocketing at immense speeds), they moved communally by instinct and stuck close together and so there were so many of them that they blotted out the sun over the lands, flying just over buildings and casting that city into shadow.

Nearly four billion mechanical lifeforms, all small parts of a single overarching consciousness, gathered in one place and made Zim feel rather good about doing at least this one thing today; inspiring a sad and lonely being to an act of heroism and loyalty, mad and even pyrrhic though it was (and indeed, part of him thought that made it all the more noble for its supposed futility, and still more of him thought that they stood quite a good chance of success in this endeavor, if his theory was correct). At the very least they were trying to do _something, _not just laying around and feeling sorry for themselves anymore.

He gave them a last encouraging look. As a single act, all the masses below, so many of them that they appeared to be a single huge silvery organism covering a stretch of the continent, tilted very slightly, them all turning to watch him go, and unexpectedly flitted around, swarming over each other, their collective mass reshaped into first strangeness and then into recognizable forms, and then into letters, the billions of robot-bodies spelling out a brief but heartfelt message: 'THANK YOU', they said.

Zim grinned. The ship accelerated to levels the programmed safeguards would not allow, internal boosters set for planetary exiting kicking in while the Astral Plane warp drive kicked in and extra-dimensional energies crackled around the _Paragon_, turning green as it went further on, and as it reached the outermost layers of the atmosphere, the view of their cameras twisted in odd angles that was hard to process, their brains shying away from the weird afterimages forming on the screens, and a brief awareness that they were looking at suggestions of other realms while their ship readjusted its universal superposition to the Astral Plane would have made stronger stomach nauseous.

Then, everything was green. Blurred and shining bright variations of emerald and so on, and silvery light flooded in almost immediately, a sudden sense of cool refreshingness sliding through their minds and smoothing down Zim's lingering troubled thoughts with a measure of serenity.

A look at the cameras confirmed it; another successful jump, the view of the Astral Plane all around them. Zim disengaged the propulsion for a moment, and the ship hovered in the middle of the Astral Plane, the portal to the world of the many-bodied robot mind still behind them, now stronger and more vibrant than it had been. Zim switched the artificial gravity back on with an adjustment to an important-looking dial, and he heard Calvin and Hobbes' shouting from below. "You've a cruel sense of humor, boss," Morte said.

The ship drifted in the ether of the Astral Plane for a long time, floating far from the portal in an aimless direction, the three of them drinking in the view of the endless silver mindscapes before them, literally limitless lights leading to worlds beckoning them from elsewhere. "So," Zuko said. "Where do we go next?"

"I have no idea," Zim said, grabbing the joysticks and powering the propulsion back up and leading into a completely random direction. On a whim he called up the multiversal map, projecting it from a holographic interface on the dashboard, picking a nearby world-light completely at random. "Let us just see what happens from here on, eh?"

"If you like," Zuko said, and smiled faintly. "Looks like we're doing good everywhere we go. Sounds fine to me."

"...Yes," Zim agreed, and it was truly heartfelt.

Their ship flew off, leaving a resplendent trail behind them, to other worlds then any of them knew (save perhaps Morte).

The future, strange and unknowable though it was, felt good to Zim.

* * *

A few days later, on a feral planet the crew had stopped upon to do some training without needing to restrain themselves, Zuko wasn't able to express his annoyance apart from closing his eyes. "We do not need the harness."

"Hey, look who suddenly got a degree in aeronautics when we weren't looking!" Calvin said sarcastically, giving a leather strap he was hooking up a cruel tug that jerked Zuko nearly off his feet. "Hey guys, check it out! The guy who's literally _just _in the middle of an industrial revolution suddenly thinks he knows more about how recoil and thrust works than the engineers from galaxy-spanning super-nations!"

"Hey, now just a second-" Zuko started to say.

Calvin continued. "I never would have guessed that being able to field tanks that rely on pyrokinesis to so much as fight back against _basic infantry _qualifies you to _HAVE AN OPINION _on the mechanics of things you have no idea how they work! Funny, isn't it?"

Zuko grimaced. He was wired into a large harness of leather straps arranged around his body and hooked onto large metal rings set on the ground. The tension of the traps and placement of the rings had him suspended in mid-air and held in place. "I can do this without a stupid harness holding me like this!"

"_Oh,_?" Calvin said, riled up, and stopped calibrating the thing to rip out in a blistering rant. Zuko was no slouch at screaming and returned with full force, already in a poor mood.

Hobbes and Morte watched from atop the lowered cargo door that they were using as a small deck where they'd set up a luncheon, a hovering screen playing an episode of some cartoon or another they'd recording into their media database while flying through a network zone in a random galaxy. The arguing was proving to be more entertaining than the cartoon.

Calvin, still ranting, was tightening and calibrating the straps so they wouldn't fly loose in the face of excess force. He expected that they might anyway; Zuko could direct some extreme forces with his Firebending, and since he'd never bothered to test those limits, Calvin didn't really know what he was expected to work with but considered this an opportunity to gather some data. While Zuko was distracted with arguing and not in a position to whine about the straps, Calvin moved around the rings and adjusted them this way or that way so they wouldn't just break apart or fall over. The rough-hewn rock under them provided a sturdy surface and was surprising amenable to the large nails they had driven into the rock to secure the rings.

A bit of a nature lover, Calvin briefly reflected that the bickering seemed out of place in the large clearing they had set up in, tree-sized fungi blooming for acres around them upon a narrow depression in the countryside, the fungi-trees growing smaller as the area widened. They suspected that something had crashed and made that depression that also cultivated those fungi, perhaps some meteor carrying chemically-reactive metals; this planet was unnamed, and held no native sentient life apart from the children of the scientists running an observation outpost a few miles north of there (who had no interest in Zim's group apart from reassurances that they would not interfere in the observations of the native fauna). It all looked so peaceful; the bickering ruined the mood somewhat.

Zuko looked around while Calvin finished rigging up crude but functional sensors around the rings. "Where's Zim?" He asked. "He's gone again!"

"No idea," Hobbes said. "I'll go take a look." He gave Zuko a sneaky grin that said '_have fun suffering'_ and Zuko glared at him. Hobbes walked past Calvin double-checking Zuko's riggings to ensure that they were secure (and they were), and the tiger gave one of the straps a cheerful pluck; it was stiff and was hard to move. It also was really irritating to Zuko, who glared some more. Hobbes snickered and left. Calvin said, "Okay! We're ready to go!"

Calvin retreated back to a safe distance. Zuko maneuvered his hands in front of him with difficulty, resigned to his fate, and waited. "Okay," Zuko said. "Like we practiced. Starting with a slow both."

Zuko inhaled, exhaled. His arms strained with the effort, and heat shimmered over his palms. Immediately they burst into blooming fires, wide streams focused into much tighter ones,. quickly narrowed into thinner streams. It produced a tremendous amount of force; Zuko was blasted back at once, thrown back by the force of his blasts and held by the harness. If he hadn't, it would blasted him right off the ground The straps buckled and shook, straining at their anchoring points. Heat rippled from him, and his arm tilted slightly to the side from the forces and he immediately was thrown to another side.

Rattling and shaking as the metal rings started to tremble with the forces he was making, Zuko gasped, and the flames cut out. His hands still smoking, he bounced back to his starting position, breathing heavily. "I have no idea how Master Jeong-Jeong could fly doing that," he managed to say.

Calvin came closer and inspected the readout on a monitor connected to the sensors. "Looks like you were projecting enough force to rip yourself off the ground and fling yourself for at least twenty feet. Not exactly flying, but it would be pretty close for short bounds."

"Except for the part where he crashes into a wall!" Morte said.

Zuko said. "Okay, let's try vertical thrust." With his great emphasis on footwork and dance moves in his fighting style, it was no surprise that it fired up more easily than his hands; continuous streams not unlike jet plumes ignited, and there was a great clanging of metal when the thrust lifted him upwards; the harness would have been ripped right into midair if it wasn't for being nailed into the ground, and as it was, it still shook ominously, nailed just barely keeping it in place.

The streams cut off and Zuko bounced back, now sweating quite a bit and a little red in the face. "That's painful," He managed.

"Even more speed there," Calvin said. "And, geez, there was a _lot _of thrust there! If he could maintain those fire jets, he could fly! Shame."

"Endurance isn't a key component in Firebending," Zuko said defensively. "And I still don't know what the harness is for."

"Keeping you in one place so we can see how those fire jets of yours work, determine the thrust ratio, get a better grip on what you're doing," Calvin said, scrolling through the data. "When you tried training with this technique on the ship, you smashed your head into a wall."

"Just one wall! Twice, anyway. Maybe four times. It was just one wall."

"The same wall, more than once? And on the ceiling?"

"That counts as a wall."

"Finding data leads to ways on improving that data!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Now, I think we should spent about another hour or two keeping your practicing this jet technique. It may help build up some endurance for it, give you a better instinct of how to position yourself or direct the flames. Experience is critical in this sort of thing! And we shall do that again and again for the rest of forever until you get it right!"

"Joy," Zuko said flatly, regretting ever bringing up his idea on the jet technique the most skilled firebenders used to fly and how to make it work for him.

Then again, seeing as the first times he'd tried in private on the ship had ended in painful concussions, he supposed it could have been much worse.

Elsewhere, a few miles safely downwind from the others…

Zim stared at the small leaf laying on the ground of a unremarkable pre-sentient world, abundant with plant life and primitive animals yet to emerge from the sea, and willed it to move.

Nothing happened.

Zim said nothing. He cupped his hands, and felt that internal shift inside as magic began to flow, pure primordial power swelling out from that divine shard of perfection where the Keyblade's energies melded with his soul and lacing with his being. Fire swelled out between his hands, not merely superheating the air but actually blooming from his palms.

The fire, it seemed, was a part of him, if it was fire at all. It was hard to control, to grasp; it surged at his attempts to corral it, surged through with random flares when his temperance weakened, still knitting together into a swirling ball between his hands.

Zim shifted the flow. Perhaps, he considered, it was essential not to force it one way or the other, but to channel it, give it places to flow through...

The fire moved, the flares ceased, and a shining ball of flame was suspended between his hands. Chaotic and unpredictable, but it at least did what he wanted. Zim grinned.

And with that, his focus faltered; the ball bulged out, smaller flames breaking out from deeper within and lashing out to burn small holes in things-

With a faint cry, Zim concentrated hard, willing it to move into a certain path. The flames ceased, and he relaxed marginally.

For days now, since leaving the Earth-world with all the robots, Zim had been practicing this ability in private. His battle with Kimblee had made it apparent that the powers granted by the Keyblade were much more complex than he had thought, and he felt he was only scratching the surface of what he was capable of; the lightshow the Keyblade frequently created was a key to something else, and he'd only made hops and crawls to whatever that power might be.

He focused upon the leaf again. Heat, Zim thought, was the excitement of molecules moving rapidly. That movement generated heat. So...perhaps heat could be considered movement, and he could direct it in certain fashions. He knew his control of fire was the weakest aspect of this recent power, his great flaw, but by melding it with his scientific knowledge, he could use even those flaws to his advantage.

He concentrated, thinking of the leaf and the air around the fire as being one, willing the flames to move as though they _were_, a single point divided by perceptional illusion...

The fire faded slightly, or perhaps was focused. The leaf hovered several inches above the ground, as Zim had imagined it would, and when he released the flames in his excitement, the essence he was funneling into it was cut off and the fires vanished, and the leaf gently floated to the ground, singed.

"Good," Zim said. "Proof of concept."

"Proof of what-now?" Hobbes said from a mighty branch overhead, hanging from it by his heels directly over Zim.

Zim recoiled. "Ack! What are you doing here!?"

"Looking for you." Hobbes nimbly swung out and landed besides Zim. "We were wondering where you'd gotten off too."

"Hrmph. What I do is mine own concern."

"Okay. What _are _you doing, then?"

"I'm not telling you!"

"Only it looked like you suddenly have more magic powers than before and honestly that's kind of cheap, you know."

"Bah. It's perfectly reasonable extrapolation of my existing abilities."

"Is not!"

"Is too! And why are you arguing with me? You're supposed to be the sensible one!"

"…Oh yeah."

Zim turned back to the leaf. Hobbes settled back to watch him, and Zim resigned himself to the tiger's presence. Zim resumed his experiments; a small plume of fire extended from his finger, closer to white-blue than the sun-hued colors his fire normally took shape of.

Zim concentrated, willing it to burn hotter, funneling essence into it (and musing that it was looking like the lightshow the Keyblade frequently made). The light grew brighter, larger, growing to the size of his fist and wobbling dangerously.

And still Zim focused it inward, concentrating upon the lessons of fire being an aspect of light. Fire, Morte had told him, created light, and in the lessons of elemental physics great magi had discovered, some forms of light were where the holy energies of the Positive Energy Plane met fire. Perhaps light was an aspect of fire, instead of the other way around like some thought, or maybe their theories were all wrong; Zim wanted to find out. He could feel _something _within that little flame now, a flickering suspicion weightier than stone, a thought of the flame's source. Zim was a scientist, and so the numinous truth was a beacon to him. The opportunity to learn was right in front of him, and he didn't dare lose this chance.

He funneled yet more power from that inexhaustible dynamo that might well have been the Keyblade's spiritual form, pushing it into that light within the flames. The flame grew brighter, and then not so hot, and then brighter still, growing and changing, force suddenly forcing his hand away, a definite pressure on his finger, like it was pushing at him. A brilliant ball of light was floating over his finger now, flames consumed or just gone, mostly white but refracting into dozens of more interesting colors.

Zim tilted his hand, marveling at this, and the light moved with him, a definite force pressing on his hand. The force was from the light, he realized, and it shifted away from him as he had an idle thought that it should do so. He spread his fingers, and saw streamers of force spread out from the light and tug up a trail of dirt precisely in the shape of his fingers, and he turned his hand; the force ripped through the dirt in accordance with his motion.

He closed his hand. The force rolled up, wrapping into a small ball around the light, not realizing that he was starting to pant with the effort of maintaining the thing-

His focus slipped. The delicate balance of the lightball went awry, and it abruptly terminated with a large explosion.

Hobbes was sitting high enough that it didn't hit him; he watched, bemused, as Zim went rocketing past him in a thunderous blast of light that incinerated the poor plants that were in its way. "You okay?" He asked, feeling stupid at saying that to someone presently lying upside down in a clump of bushes.

"Whee," Zim said distantly. "I have telekinesis too."

"Okay." Hobbes returned to the guide, finishing up an entry on the planet they were on ('a nice place,' he had written, 'the wildlife is confined to the oceans, the plants are pretty, an excellent vacation spot if you want to get away from the stress of the technological era, and the scientists studying the place make nice neighbors.' It wasn't much of an article, and he intended to refine it for better writing and honesty). He'd written one or two of these articles since they'd left Traverse Town, typing up his observations about the worlds they'd seen (they'd visited a few since the world with all the robots, none of them exciting but still interesting), and they had been well-received by editors and readers alike.

Ron Stoppable had kept his word; an account and researcher privileges had been accorded to Hobbes and their copy of the Guide, and a small amount of money had been deposited into it over the past number of days; approved-article royalties, paid by the foundation that kept the Guide's essential services going by paying for well-written and informative articles.

Hobbes peacefully continued writing. Zim went back to experimenting and proceeded to blow things up at least sixteen times before the others heard and investigated (except for Zuko, who they forgot and left him stuck in the harness until he blew it up with pure anger), at which point he stopped for fear of humiliation, and eventually they left. In the days to come, Zim would train himself again and again in this newfound aspect of his powers, with moderately greater faculty but not much skill.

* * *

_Zim slept, and dreamed._

_He dreamed of a world of infinite darkness, of a world-body so fundamentally dark that there was no color or illumination; this place was anathema to those things, defining colors as things that did not exist here and the light of Virtue and heroism totally obstructed or oblivated. There was only shadow._

_The darkness wept, the shadows screamed, and tiny points of consciousness were swallowed all over, jagged bits of blackness ripping into them and tearing out everything that was good or even neutral, suffocating them in pain and misery until everything that was good in them had been burned away, leaving them hollow imitations of this greater darkness._

_Zim saw them fall, descend into the darkness and come out ravening horrors among the jagged darkness of this realm, all their golden years stained black and left with nothing but endless dreams of corruption._

_He saw that odd human who'd died, Stewie, clawing and screaming while massive claws tenderly separated flesh from bone, taking them apart and sewing them together again and again into ever more malevolent patterns. There had been little in him that had been good, and already it was being torn away and subverted; he was there for only a moment, and then Zim saw ten thousand yellow eyes blink open in empty space to stare right into Stewie, into his very soul, and in their gaze everything that might have been golden or shining – illuminated by virtue and goodness – was stained black. Stewie screamed just once, a small noise like a mouse being stepped on, and he wept even as cracks leaking black ichor opened in him._

_He was given no time to dwell on this horror. His perspective widened, and Zim came to see the whole of what he was being made to look at, in a single glance. The truth was made plain to him in an instant, and Zim saw that this dread malevolence was bigger than planets, larger than worlds, and it was _alive._ For mile and miles, as if the curve of a horizon, the bleak world was defined in jagged curved and humped canyons carved into the ground as if in the impact of a fallen titan, and the ground giving way to such dissolute areas of pseudo-sand that it was like a ocean large enough to drown planets, and that gave way to a true ocean of liquid shadows that were even bigger, and terrible things swam in that abyss._

_It moved for Zim's dreaming eyes, drifted back, and it was only the slightest curve, and Zim saw that this massive landscape still only formed the slightest wall in a single maze so vast it could contain whole universes, a twisting labyrinth in the shape of a mind-breaking nightmare of black spirals. And from there, Zim saw entire _universes _defined in shadow and blight and hate, each one as cold and hideous and fundamentally hollow as the rest. Hellscapes and nightmares cobbled together from thousands of observed evils. All of it defined in wicked spirals and color's total absence and landscapes twisted into the semblance of long-since extinct cultures and species. This last seemed almost mocking, a spiteful triumph over those who had died so utterly no one would ever remember them._

_And Zim saw that was moving, it was _breathing, _and how joyous it was at feeling the pain it brought to those consumed and digested in its universal depths. How little satisfaction this pain ultimately brought to it, a petty wickedness as hollow as everything else about it._

_And yet, it was still so very vast that it's titanic presence took no notice of the countless souls being corrupted into tiny mockeries of its infernal glory, things so hollow and wretched that the boundaries of individual had broken enough for them to pool into a greater self. And like it, these awful horrors were maddened pits of despair, with no compassion or conviction or temperance or valor; just an awful will, so terrible to keep such an unholy thing alive._

_A great eye, as if that of a titanic dragon's and gleaming with a fearful yellow light, tore this place asunder, and suddenly the entire realm was _looking _directly at Zim._

_In a voice that shook these universes to their core, a voice dripping with venom and hate disguised with cool gentility that Zim wanted to listen to even as every single instinct screamed at him to flee from this thing, the world-body spoke. _

_Thus spake the titan, "WHAT."_

And Zim fortunately was woken up when the intercom blared with Calvin's voice. "Team meeting you guys! Wake up and get together in the lab, I got some stuff to show you! Hurry up, hurry up!"

It went on in this fashion for some time, loud and impatient and seemingly right in Zim's ear, even through the liquid gel he'd immersed himself in. Zim blinked, relieved to find himself surrounded by sterilized goo-ey goodness, regained his senses and mentally transmitted a command through his Pak. He might as well get up now.

Dials and gauges beeped on the nearest wall of his private quarters, measuring his biometric data in an increasingly complicated set of calculations that he'd found intriguingly different from the last set of such data from a few days before all this Keyblade stuff had happened. (As of now, all his Pak's on-board functions had at last been repaired to full functionality.) In the middle of the room there was a tall cylinder going from ceiling to floor, containing Zim himself afloat in a large solution of liquid gel he had designed himself to have a number of regenerative and cleansing qualities that did wonders for his somewhat delicate biological system (and was very pleasant to sleep in, too), and wearing only a pair of dark shorts to ensure that as much of his body was in contact with the gel while modesty was given its due. The set-up made him look rather like he was inside a large vat. A number of thick cables extending from his Pak into shielded ports at the bottom where he could control the systems in that room. Now, the slots of a drainage grate opened at the bottom of that cylinder, and with a loud industrial pumping noise the liquid gel slid away, lowering Zim to the ground as it did, and by the time his feet had hit the ground all of it had been drained.

The vat's exterior disengaged with a hissing noise, retracting into the ground, and then the cables attaching to Zim did the same, disconnecting and disappearing into the ports at the bottom of what looked like a rather ornate part of the ground. Zim shuddered, the room both cold on his still gel-soaked skin and a sense of disquiet from being so suddenly disconnected from a wider information network. He ignored it and went on his business. The gel was meant to evaporate quickly, but he had made provisions for speeding it up; he stepped onto a pressure-activated section around the vat, and the metal grating on both the floor and ceiling just in front of him blew hot air up at him from all directions, drying him off in moments. The initial moment of discomfort gave way to a far more satisfying sensation of smoothly dry skin, a wonderful feeling of total cleanness, and a night's worth of rest.

Well, apart from the weird dreams, anyway, but he was getting used to those. He'd had that same dream, or varying permutations of it, for the last six dream-cycles. He shuddered at the thought. Sammael popped in, expressing horror at the idea of going to sleep next time and dreaming of _that _thing all over again, and before Sammael blipped out Zim thought that he would nearly prefer chronic insomnia.

Calvin voice was still blaring, whining about paying attention to him. hurried past a mess of cables and computer terminals in the process of being put together in a corner where he was building his own private computer network, a stack of papers with hastily scrawled messages on them he'd written to himself while half-dazed from being sleepy (one of them said 'Iron-Plated Warlord Monkey' while another said 'Step one, feed fish. Step two, realize you don't have any fish. Step three, go back in time and get some fish so you can feed them. Step four, '?'. Step five, 'PROFIT!'), an alcove filled with several holograph terminals and all of them displaying beloved images of times with his friends he'd transcribed onto a memory reader to make pictures to remind himself of the good times and what he was working towards, and some other things. He nearly crashed right into the ladder to the platform extending out from the wall over a good half of the room and hosted the assembly of tables and devices that he was rapidly making into his own small workshop, and went right to a few repurposed weapon lockers he'd modified to be his own wardrobe, rotating and built right into the wall.

The long metal cube he selected open with a pressurized hiss when he swiveled open the locking mechanism, it's front splitting and irising open into a revolving assemblage holding a number of clothing items presented for Zim on a frame of articulated rods, the clothing separated not by type of attire but by the situation where they would be appropriate. This particular one was 'Casual Wear', suitable for simple days where nothing much was required aside from some minor training or perhaps a mock battle or two; Sokka and Hobbes got gotten Zim a fair share of outfit material, and he selected a dark purple sleeveless shirt and matching military-issue shorts designed for halflings, changing into them in short order. Since he had his bunk all to himself, he didn't have much concern about modesty.

By this point, the intercom had gone quiet, and Zim was relieved at the cessation of noise. Patting the minor fabric wrinkles down and adjusting his shirt so it went around his Pak nicely, he closed the clothing locker and carefully navigated around his cluttered room, noting with some grim amusement that in the days of getting more things to outfit it with he still hadn't actually done much more with that aside from basic amenities, a functional dormancy system, the beginnings of a computer network and workshop, and the barest suggestions of half a dozen other things to occupy his time with getting operational or started. In some places, hanging curtains and massed piles and all kinds of other clutter made it hard to tell that his roomy square-shaped bunk had corners at all.

He left for the door, sliding it open and walking out onto the narrow and short corridor linking the bunks together; metal clicked reassuringly under his feet, the low-slung ceiling rumbling distantly with the of sound life support processes and the mysterious green energy-powered engines. The bunk-doors were all of the same fashion as his own, though marked differently; Zim had melted his name right into the door, while Zuko had put a plaque with the Fire Nation written characters for his name over his. On the other side of the hall, Calvin and Hobbes had chosen bunks at least two bunks away from each other (instead of rooming together like Morte had expected), Calvin's name transmuted right into the door with a small sculpture of himself posing out of it while Hobbes had hung a small handsome canvas roll with his name and portrait upon it. Morte, who had to be talked into getting his own room, signified his room by putting a doormat in front of his door with 'MORTE RICTUSGRIN' scribbled on it. This left several unused bunks, left empty; Zim hoped that they might discover more worthy allies to join their ranks. Calvin considered that unlikely, but welcomed it. Morte frankly said that it was inevitable. Zuko didn't understand why Zim wanted _more _crewmembers, since they already had five. Hobbes hoped that the next people to join would be girls because, as he put it, 'this ship is a total dude-fest'.

No sooner had Zim left the bunk corridor than he saw Hobbes and Zuko climbing out of a downstairs ladder in the rear of the cargo, presumably moving up from the large chamber underneath the cargo hold that they'd modified into something of a recreational room and meeting hub. "What's my little buddy going on about?" Hobbes asked Zim as soon as he caught sight of him trying to sneak away on the staircase to get away from them.

"You tell me," Zim said. "I'm hardly privy to his doings."

"You're up there with him half the time these days, working on gadgets or plans or whatever," Zuko said. Zim had to admit, this was true; the poor state of his room's clutter was largely due to spending a lot of time with Calvin working on various projects where their respective talents were of great use to one another.

"True," Zim said. "Let us go see what he's devised." The three of them walked up the ladder, going up to the same level that went to the bridge; instead of going straight there, though, they turned and went to one of the large doors at the side of this level of the ship, into a (ominously) shielded door with a name tag marked 'LABORATORY/WORKING/TESTING ROOM'.

Immediately before Zim was about to open the door, it exploded out of its frame while on fire from the other side, and by the time it ricocheted off the ceiling and imbedded itself into the ground, kinetic forces and stress had contorted it into a half-melted lump of slag. It was still on fire, too.

Zuko gently lowered Zim's wrist, the Irken frozen in mid-step where he had been about to open the door before it had exploded. "That is not a promising sign," Zuko said dryly.

"Don't you guys worry about that!" Calvin's voice said loudly, only a little panicked. "Just a test run on something else, no big deal! ...I think my guns need more power, the door hardly slowed a single shot down at all. That shot should have gone _through _the door."

"Are you crazy?!" Hobbes said. "You could have killed us!"

"...Sorry," Calvin said meekly. "It was an accident, serious! In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have been testing the gun at the door right after I called you guys in." They stared at him. "Well, what are you waiting for? Get in here!" Grumbling unkind sentiments, they shuffled in.

They stepped over the shallow recess in the floor that the door had been wedged into, cautiously walking into what Zim and Calvin had painstakingly modified it into a combined laboratory, workshop and testing range for their various technological designs and gadgetry. They'd made the most of the limited space (which was still a lot more than made any real sense and supported Zim's 'the ship is a bit bigger on the inside than the outside' theory) and produced a workshop of middling size if you didn't mind it being cramped. Zim, Zuko and Hobbes navigated through a badly organized mess of floor-bolted tables and workbenches totally covered with dissembled parts or tools for all manner of machining and similar things, passed under the half-finished frame of a hover-cycle Calvin was making as a personal combat vehicle for himself hanging from the ceiling in a secured harness.

They gave one of the weapons a fishy look; there was a revolving table a short distance from the door and clamped on it was a large vehicle-issue weapon similar to a Imperium-issue autocannon. It was smaller than ordinary autocannons, and the design had been modified into an energy weapon; a long barrel made sturdier with shock absorbers and coolant circulators attached to a broader ordnance projector rimmed with microfusion cell loaders for ammunition. Between that was a still unfinished mechanisms to draw power from the cells and superheat a chamber full of electrically active gas, controlling and projecting it, effectively producing a blast of superheated plasma, with (as the missing door demonstrated) spectacularly destructive results.

Zim was a bit of a weapons expert, and he observed all of this in moments, and he had to admit it was a nice design. "A curious design," Zim said, admiring it's lethal possibilities. "What is it for?"

Calvin struggled through the laboratory from the intercom set up at the computer terminals at the other side of the room, looking sheepish once he reached them, now pleased to have his professional opinion asked. "I'm working on some armaments for a combat platform for me to use," he said. "I'm not so great at the fighting on foot thing, so I'd like to be better prepared for a real fight like that Kimblee debacle, and I'd like to be well-armed too. I'm good at piloting in combat situations, so I'm exploring that option."

Zim's eyes wandered to the hover-cycle overhead. In the center of its mass there were two linked engines of incredible power, fed fuel from a reactor Calvin had reverse-engineered from the same reactor-engines the ship employed (though he didn't understand it much, but he found that it was empowered by their spiritual energy and theoretically could supply infinite power to any design, and he was enthralled at the possibilities this presented). Around these, a decidedly more unfinished frame was being constructed, a skeletal assembly of supporting components and integral computer equipment. It was a tri-wheel design, that much was clear from its shape and mass allocation it was being totally changed, broken down to its basic frame, being made larger and built around, but Calvin hadn't procured any wheels from it yet.

Calvin continued. "My modified autocannon is working out good - it's got excellent power and I'm looking into non-lethal things for it and already its weight compensation and balance are amazingly good for the modification I used - but ideally my weapon platform would have two of them as the basic go-to firearms default and I want to improve the rapid-fire capabilities. Might want to think about putting a governor on its systems for practicality though..."

"We should all have our strengths played to and augmented," Zuko observed.

"We are working on that," Zim and Calvin said. "In our respective spare time," Zim amended.

Hobbes looked around the cluttered room. "What do you even do in here all day?" He asked Calvin.

Calvin looked around awkwardly at the tables; an exo-rig here with the beginnings of powered armor only a suggestion, a crude electrically-powered whip weapon, the peculiar device he'd used to siphon away the Omnitrix energies from Kimblee set up on a pedestal with computers analyzing the vast DNA selections encoded within it, computer systems strung everywhere with terminals displaying no less than fifteen different simulations and calculated probabilities for them with suggestions to follow them up, small enclosed chambers for weapons testing, a rough firing range he'd managed to get up, a small but powerful furnace to smelt metal and recast it into different shapes, a complicated table with a surface made of aligned plates he could move around to make different transmutation arrays and therefore create any type of mechanical shape or form he knew sufficient well (thus freeing him, mostly, from the need for mass production provided he was working from a schematic with exacting standards), the piece of the Umbra Eternis' armor clamped down and six wastebins full of blunted saws with a lot of charred shavings and a weaponized shield there to show for it, and several other things that indicated both a brilliant mind and an extremely short attention span.

"Lots of things," Calvin said simply.

A nearby screen flew over, and Morte was displayed on it, showing him at the pilot's seat in the bridge. "Hey guys," he said loudly. "'Bout time I dropped in! How's it going?"

"How are you even piloting that thing!?" Zim said. "Who let you in there?!"

"It's on autopilot, Boss. And can you blame me for wanting to feel important?"

"Hmph, I suppose not. What's this about?"

Calvin answered. "I got the guys up here, I'm showing them the things," Calvin announced.

"Right, let's see how our guys take it!"

"Take what?" Zim said. "What's Morte talking about?! Have you been discussing gadgetry with him? _Why?_"

"He thought it was interesting, and he's a good theoretical assistant. And what he was talking about…ah, follow me!"

He led them to several smaller tables set up in front of a specialized enclosure, wrapped on all sides by powerful metal walls; a firing range of some sort. On the table were several rounded objects of different types, and on it's on table was the shield and shaving Zim had noticed earlier. All of these objects were securely held in small mechanical clamps on the table, save for the shaving in their own container. "I've designed us a whole bunch of weapons to upgrade our arsenal and shoot up our badass quotient even higher!" Calvin said cheerfully.

"Ooh!" was the general gist of their response. The overwhelming pounding they got in the fight with Kimblee had induced a lot of need to improve on their combat skills. Better weapons were a pleasant surprise.

"What do you have for us?" Zim said eagerly. Calvin had asked for his help with a number of things in recent days – mostly about metallurgy or seeking help with engineering problems, as Calvin claimed to be specialized in physics – but he hadn't said anything about weapons specifically. Zim certainly had no idea what was going to be given here.

Calvin unclicked one clamp and withdrew the first weapon; a cylindrical-shaped object about the size of Zim's fist, a thin frame of various metals set around a small glowing capsule resembling an ornate battery; a microfusion cell. At the top was a small dial with several settings and an indent large enough for any of their thumbs to fit in. At the sides were transparent surfaces that showed the weapon's innards, and within was a tiny container of a clear liquid shaped in such a way that it fed directly into the glowing capsule but was designed so that the liquid was blocked from actually reaching it.

"Is that a grenade?" Zim asked, interested.

"Yep," Calvin said. He tossed it to Hobbes. "Catch!"

"Whoa!" Hobbes and Zuko crashed into each other trying to catch it, the grenade falling into the ground and hitting the floor hard. Hobbes cried, remembering the explosion when Bloo had accidentally blown up their cache of grenades in Traverse Town, and shut his eyes...and absolutely nothing happened. He peeked. The grenade was sitting innocently on the floor, unexploded and apparently harmless. "It's a dud!"

"Nope, just unarmed," Calvin said as Zim picked up the grenade. "Without its safety being disabled, it _can't _explode. Give it here." Zim tossed it over to him. Calvin managed to catch it. "See this?" He indicated the dial, which had a clear plastic shield over it. "You slide that thing off, put it to the level you want, and then you touch your thumb to the indent with hostile intent; thought-reactive material, kind of like the Eldar's wraithbone tech. If you don't do any of that, it's internal mechanisms are set up so that there's nothing explosive about it. Bounce on the ground, hit it with a hammer, blow up others around it, nothing will set it off! They might break it, but it won't blow up."

"How does that work?" Zuko said. "What's the point of a grenade that won't explode most of the time?"

"It explodes when you _want _it to explode."

"…Oh. Well, again, how does that work?"

"Easy! That thing inside it is a microfusion cell; a fairly common and potent ammunition for energy weapons. It's like a tiny little cold fusion reactor, and on its own, they're very stable. Now that liquid above it, that's something of my own. It's similar to phlogiston, the theoretical fluid heat was postulated to move in; when it hits the MF cell, it kind of charges it up and excites its energy into a more volatile state, with explosive results after about ten seconds. Now, the setting you put it on changes _how _explosive that result is!"

"Why give the grenades settings if they just explode?" Zuko asked, curiosity piqued.

"They don't just explode, it's more like they convert the cell's energy with a number of charge left; the settings give different results; check this out." Calvin held the grenade out; Zim said that the dial had several settings on it, currently set to 'HARMLESS'. Above that was 'CONCUSSIVE' and 'LETHAL'. As a safety feature, the dial was specifically constructed so that it would be very difficult to wedge it into a different setting accidentally. "I'll need to field test them before we can be certain about how good they are, but the idea is this; we use concussion grenades when we don't want to kill our enemies - most of the time, I'd assume - so it'll give them a nasty hit and send them flying if they aren't tough enough to take it, hopefully knocking them out or just down. It uses the least amount of energy, and those window things are a special reactive kind of material, like the thought-reactive stuff; the energy passes right through them, making an area effect, and also so we can reuse the grenades."

He continued. "Now, Lethal is exactly what it sounds like; it should kill things good. Not too comfortable about putting them in, but...huh, you never know when I'd need to have it." he seemed disgruntled. "Anyway...this level of blast will tear off limbs and put nasty holes in anything close enough that doesn't have decent armor, and if it does, I think it still won't help, and it won't just get blasted or burned, it'll be _melted_. Hit a tank in the right place, it'll punch through!"

"Very good idea," Zim said, pleased with the grenades. "Yes, these will definitely be sound weapons! How many do you have?"

Calvin shrugged. "I can't be sure; they'll be easy enough to make. Microfusion cells are easy enough to create with our technology or just buy in the more advanced worlds, and the frames are quite simple to transmute from basic steel. And the phlogiston, my pyromantic glove makes that as a by-product even without my distilling method." He indicated another table, where a complicated array was distilling the phlogiston into a shielded canister. "Transmute the frame, add a MF cell, put in the igniting agent, seal it up, and we're good!"

"So we need not be conservative with them?" Zim asked.

Calvin made a thoughtful noise. "Well...I didn't say that. We don't exactly have huge amounts of money, let alone negotiable currencies that most places that sell those things might recognize. I'd stay with the lowest settings except in emergencies just as a precaution."

"Ah. Well, what do you call them?"

"I think I'm gonna go with MFGs, short for microfusion grenades. When we hit planet-side next time we have a fight, we should bring a few to test them out. And find some Heartless for test subjects; if we ever see them again; we haven't run into any since Traverse Town. Weird, the way they were talking you'd think you couldn't land on a planet without tripping over a whole horde of them."

"Excellent," Zim said, grinning with excitement at the thought of field testing these grenades on those wretched abominations. "What else?"

"In brief? Basic firepower for you and Zuko!" Calvin moved to the next clamp; it held a different type of grenade, larger than the MFG, perfectly circular and composed of a curiously plasticine material with grooves whirling up to a large spot at the top, seeming to outline a handgrip upon it. "Another grenade-type, this one doesn't pack as much of a bang as the...what was I gonna call them? The MFGs, yeah!"

"How's this one different from the other grenade?" Zuko asked.

"Here, I'll show and tell." Calvin indicated a device in front of the clamps, a hand-sized circular visualizer with a projector on the top. He hit a button and it projected a stream of intelligent pixels that shaped into a holographic schematic of the grenade. "The outer shell is a plasteel compound, fairly tough and hard to break, but on the inside? Very brittle." The holographic grenade split into several sections, revealing its internal mechanisms with helpful notes and pointers indicating what was what, detailing everything while Calvin kept talking. "Beneath that outer shell is a coating of my phlogiston, much more concentrated that in the MFGs. Underneath _that_, and connecting to the trigger mechanism, is a alchemically treated shell around a central igniting agent at the very core of the grenade."

The schematic turned, focusing on the area at the top of the grenade. "See that? It's made from my pseudo-wraithbone compound; not anywhere as strong or useful as the real thing, but by bathing it in a fire-aspected magical field when forging it, it becomes very sensitive to fire. You just press on the trigger bit at the top and direct a small burst of heat directly into it; simple enough, even if we're in a place where Zuko can't make fire." The grenade schematic turned up again, and waves of heat were shown rippling down, and the inner shell between the various chemicals broke apart. "The wall separating the stuff inside is broken apart by the trigger mechanism, several thin rods that snap up and break those walls. The phlogiston and the igniting agent mix, and-" The hologram grenade zoomed out, and explode in a modest blast of fire. "Boom! Even if we're in a place where you can't make fire, or it would be a bad idea to let it on that you can do that, you have fire that you can bend. And a good explosion, too."

"Nice," Zuko said appreciatively. "How big is the blast?"

"Well, I could vary the concentration of different things for different results, like for a less destructive blast or a much nastier one, but right now, based on what I've set off when you guys weren't looking..." Calvin considered. "The enclosed space makes it hard to guess, but the simulation and calculations estimate about a seven-foot-wide blast, with a three foot wide larger radius where the heat goes, it'll probably melt through armor if you do it right. By the by, shrapnel isn't a concern; every time I set it off, the explosion eats up the casing; I've engineered it so that it literally is consumed by the blast, adding more 'oomph' to it. So at least you won't have things flying through your face!"

Zuko thought. "There's a lot of stuff I could do with that. Not bad, kid."

Calvin grimaced. "Since I'm almost singlehandedly designing our weaponry, I'd think I could get a little more respect that being called a kid."

"Why did you not directly enlist my help?" Zim demanded. "I am an excellent weaponsmith!"

Calvin stared blankly. "You _are_?"

"Yes! My people were the greatest masters of machinery our galaxy had ever known!" This was not, technically speaking, entirely true, as the Irken Empire had accurately been at the top of the 'conquering and pillaging' game at the height of their glory through the power of their engineering skill and technology superiority (sufficient that they might have qualified as aliens sufficiently advanced to be mistaken as gods, but just barely), but they had hardly been the very best. In many regards, the Vortians, once allies but later subjugated to the Irken Empire, had been superior. To his credit, though, Zim _was _a highly skilled technologist and gadgeteer even by his people's standards.

Calvin gave him a skeptical look. "Huh. Given that you never really use any technological weaponry or devices, I honestly could not have called that."

"I used to use it all the time! Is it truly my fault that the Keyblade is just vastly more useful a weapon?"

Calvin ignored this; he plainly had no interest in any of Zim's protests. Zim silently vowed to take petty revenge at a later date. Zuko coughed and said, "What else do you have?"

"You guys are greedy for good tech; two different types of multipurpose grenades aren't good enough?" Calvin joked. "Seriously, though, I have something for you, Zuko." Intrigued, Zuko raised an eyebrow hopefully as Calvin went to the end of the table; on display were two metal weapons resembling two dual-blade swords combined at the pommels, but it mostly didn't look anything like swords; a nearly three-foot-long shape at either end, slightly curved and various mechanisms encased in a thick shell that looked a bit like blades; there were small projections near the tip and base of those 'blades', connecting by thin metal rods of superconductive material. The middle of the weapons were comprised of several well-shielded energy-manipulating mechanisms and small cylindrical batteries, slimming into hilts wrapped with cushioned cloth to make decent grips, and then they bulked up into thick pommels housing governors to maintain energy output at a safe ratio. (As the accompanying holograms indicated.) Calvin gingerly detached the thing and passed it over to Zuko. "You took a shine to that thermal lance you looted even though it's too big for you, so I took it apart and made something similar but scaled down. I remember you telling me a few nights ago that you like dual-wielded swords, so I based the design around those."

Zuko took it appreciatively. "It doesn't look like a sword, or two swords," He said, his good eye scanning it's delicately curved shape, examining how the projects on the 'blades' were on opposite sides, contributing to how the overall design looked like a twisting flame.

"Twist that bit in the middle, there," Calvin said. Zuko did so, and the weapon split in the middle at the pommels into two; Zuko adjusted his hands around the grips, and was now holding two swords. "It splits into two! You can combine them for stuff, see? It works with your fighting style."

Zuko moved them, slowly twirling them and moving around to get a sense of their balance, wrists flexing as the odd weapons moved. "Careful," Calvin said. "Keep the things on the striking surfaces _away _from you if you like having your bits on." Zuko frowned, but slowly spun them around as Calvin asked. "Okay, can you feel a bit right in front of the hilt, sort of a depression in the blades?" Zuko did, and told him. "Okay, squeeze on that with your index finger."

Zuko's fingers moved. The projections extended slightly, and with a faint humming noise, an electric arc moved through the metal rods connecting the projections, buzzing loudly and lighting the laboratory with a chaotically brilliant glow. Zuko almost dropped them in surprise. He let go of the button and they deactivated, the electrical arcs immediately disappearing.

"Thermal swords," Calvin said proudly. "They're heavy and they can take a good hit, and those electrical arcs are...duh, they're made of electricity! With those on, you can slice through just about anything! Touch them to something to get some fire and you can bend it, or just bend the heat from the arcs or even the electricity in it so BAM! Instant Lightningbending! You won't hurt the swords one bit, it'll open up a lot more options for you. Gives you a bit of punch to that speed you have."

Zuko twirled the swords, slowly revolving in place, savoring how perfect the balance of the weapons with, the thermal swords making a circuit as a single weapon. "I _really _missed having proper swords," he said. "...Thanks."

"Power of technology, buddy," Calvin said, grinning happily. "Do me a favor and field test them for me; always room to improve. I've tested them, but swords aren't really my thing so I'm not totally sure if they work fine."

"I'll get on that. I don't suppose you could make me a belt or holster to hold them in?"

"Is your preference for it as a single weapon as a default mode, or dual-wield?"

"The second one."

"All right then. Now..." Calvin walked Zuko through the schematics and particulars of his new thermal swords, and gave him a copy of them to look over later. Zim didn't pay much attention since it wasn't one of his new things, though he did hear something about the batteries recharging on their own but overuse would burn them out and a bit about how the electrical arc worked and the ramification of it, but he wasn't paying much attention to that.

Zuko refused to hand the thermal swords back, and after a short bit arguing with Zuko over 'the sake of things looking good in a proper gadget examination', Calvin gave up and went to the next table, the one with the shield and the metal shavings. Calvin said to Hobbes, "You said something about how you lost your shield somewhere or don't know what happened to it, so I decided to make you a new one from the bit of armor we took from the Umbra Eternis."

Calvin unclamped a large rounded mechanized device that resembled a slightly triangular tower shield, but smaller than a typical example of such a shield. It was so heavy that Calvin couldn't lift it without assistance, and Hobbes needed to help him before Calvin could pass it to him. "Your new shield!" Calvin said as Hobbes fitted his hand into a grip that also resembled a trigger mechanism on the depressed underside of the device.

"Ooh!" Hobbes said, looking it over with interest. It was a bulky shield, big and broad, and provided good cover for Hobbes even if it wasn't already a decent bashing weapon from the weight alone. Hobbes didn't seem to notice the weight, heavy though it clearly was; he admired the shine on the lion's-head emblem on the front, the smooth spiral-shaped symbols on the back and edges until it was a solid piece in some places on the sides and on others it was a hollow form shining with familiar-looking black metal retracted into its hollow insides.

"Keep the sides away from your face, hold it properly," Calvin said, giving a few more instructions; Hobbes stood in a combat stance, holding the shield as Calvin instructed.

Hobbes said, "It's got some very nice balance. A bit heavy and a little awkward for hitting things, but it's a good upgrade!"

Calvin scoffed. "Like that's all. Can you feel a control thing just under the hand grip? Twist it."

Hobbes did, and with a loud and flat noise, several blades of serrated metal slid out in a loud 'clack' from the open parts of the shield, fitting together neatly and making the shield a lot wider. "Whoa!" Hobbes said, shocked by the transformation. He examined it eagerly; already a big shield, now it was slightly larger than Hobbes itself, suitable as either a nasty bludgeon or a skillfully used protective shield. "Oh, I see, the first mode was for portability!" Hobbes tested its heft and found that it was actually somewhat lighter, as its overall mass was much more evenly distributed. "Hey, this metal looks familiar! Isn't it that stuff we ripped off Kimblee's robot?"

"Uh huh," Calvin said. He continued speaking, and Hobbes danced around into a series of stances, moving the shield around and revolving in a slow spiral to test his shield's momentum and weight. "I broke a whole lot of saws and blade whittling it down, but I got the useless bits off it and I broke the piece down into several smaller pieces that I built into your new shield; it was made a little bit brittle by the attacks, but it's still ridiculously tough. Just about the equal of really tough ceramite! " He indicated the shield's own schematic, which displayed the specifications of its hardness and toughness (both extremely high and a lot better than his old shield), and showed that this form was called Defense Form, and that there was another called Offense Form. "Move the thing again, and _hold it away from you_."

Hobbes did so; the shield-blades reconfigured, manipulated by internal mechanisms, and transformed into a massive scythe-shaped blade projecting from the shield in a huge curve of serrated metal, with only a little bit of left over kibble to be a protective shape. "Whoa!" Hobbes yelped, readjusting his grip to compensate for the sudden allocation of weight; this form was a _lot _heavier than the last one, with so much of its metal focused in a single area. He looked at it, and smiled like the predator he was. "It's like a giant claw!"

"I knew you'd like it. It's heavy, big, and mean...and you're strong enough that you could swing it around like the wind," Calvin said. Hobbes nodded, and pushed the mechanism. The shield reverted to its portability form, and Hobbes smiled at it. "You can switch modes on the fly; charge through a shower of artillery with the defense mode and ram into a bad guy, bounce off him and slice in half a missile coming at you, and then switch to portable to bash down a guy coming at you before you hit the ground! All of them are precisely calculated and shaped to fit your needs; you could throw the portable like a discus if you wanted." The schematic displayed the shield's internal workings, showing how that was all accomplished, and by extension, how to avoid damaging those workings in battle. The computer added a few tactical suggestions on minimizing potential damage and maximizing combat effectiveness.

"I'll take it!" Hobbes said.

"And," Calvin added. "I learn quite a lot about the metal Kimblee created; it's a whole new alloy, and I have no idea what to call it, but I got a pretty good idea on how to replicate it or at least make something like it. Make new armor for ourselves, plate the ship in it...all kinds of possibilities, soon as I get enough raw materials. Kimblee did us a favor, almost."

"Ah," Zim mused. "Potential. Such a lovely thing. But you are sure this metal is ..uncorrupted? The shield is in no danger of being possessed?"

"Sure. I've kept it bathed in holy water, constantly exposed it to sunlight, got a few priests we ran into when you weren't paying attention to make sure it was sanctified and expelled any Heartless influence...now it's proper metal. With some nice applications, too."

Next, Calvin picked a small bundle off the table and tossed it at Zim's head shouting "Catch!"

He was caught off-guard; it was too light (and Calvin not nearly strong enough) to so much as push him, but it did surprise him. Blue and yellow fabric bounced off his head and Zim stuck his foot out, catching it in the bend between ankle and foot. Standing on one foot, Zim said, "What is this?"

"I couldn't think of anything to make for you, so I made you a proper sheath," Calvin said. Zim lightly kicked it up and caught it; he had mistaken it for a bundle due to its unusual structure. Smooth poles and mechanisms moving against the pressure he put on it was clothed in the fabric, a folded-up structural support, and Zim looked it over, examining the multitude of simple belts crossing over a large gap in the front, seeing how it was hollow enough to fit something inside it, and that it appeared to be in a compacted form.

"What is it?" Zim asked.

"It's a sheath for your magic sword thing."

"Keyblade."

"Semantics. Whatever you call it, it's changed shape on us, and I saw you having problems keeping it at hand, so I built this thing to hold it." Zim turned it around, and on the underside there was a ring of protrusion that would fit nicely on his Pak; with some difficulty, he moved it around, and it stuck nicely to his back without need of any additional wrappings or bindings.

Calvin continued. "You just put the Keyblade in the hollow bit blade-first, and the sheath will adapt to its shape. When you want to unsheathe it, you just pump a bit of power into the Keyblade's structure, and the sheath will uncoil from it. Any other time, and those belts will hold firm so it won't fall off or anything."

"I see. Handy, that," Zim said, admittedly a bit miffed he didn't get any special weapons like the others.

"Yes, I know," Calvin bragged, buffing his knuckles on the protective bodysuit he had taken to wearing in the lab.

"Nice," Morte said. "I vote we find someplace to test these things out!"

"Agreed!" Zim said.

* * *

Sometime later - it was hard to tell, time was very odd in the Astral Plane, and they were mostly traveling by flying through it - Zim had decided that they ought to find some means of locating Gir's signal by finding a way to boost it or pinpoint it, and declared that they would search for a place with some good technology to adapt into a device suitable for these purposes.

They didn't have much luck finding either a world like that or a place to test out their new weapons for a while, but they did have plenty of adventures; in just four days after Calvin finished the new weaponry, they'd gone into a world of cowboys, a world of gangsters, a world of cowboy-gangsters, a world of cowboy-gangsters who were also ninjas at war with vampire-wolves, and then a world of nothing but shrimp-people riding giant flying shrimp shooting with guns that themselves fired tiny flesh-eating shrimp in a war against the Emperor of Shrimps. They tired of that one quickly, and convinced the mightiest heroes of that world to use duck-related puns for everything just to break the monotony. (Zuko and Hobbes facepalmed at the irony of that plan.)

After several more team-building and friendship-fostering adventures (generally involving being helpful by shaking up malicious orderly structures or just being tourists and beating up people they thought needed defeating, and certainly taking stops at interesting looking places for the occasional night to sleep outside the ship), they eventually found themselves near a world in dire need of heroes with their talents (namely, making a huge mess of everything they touched).

At least, so they judged from the content of its radio transmissions, though they had trouble understanding exactly what was going on. There was insufficient context, and the transmissions were rather spotty. Zim suspected that there was a destructive war going on wreaking havoc with the information networks. This world was also generating tremendous amounts of energy, consistent with a technological civilization ready to make spaceflight at the very least; Zim concluded that this world was in need of help and probably would be grateful enough to give them technological gifts. Or they would be jerks in need of a good clobbering, then the Paragon's crew could beat them up and take their stuff. Either way, it was a win-win scenario.

Zim decided to take a quick look. After hacking directly into the private communications of some international council and scaring the living daylights out of them, a linguistic error involving much use of goat synonyms, totally destroying and reconstructing their worldview just by being aliens, a cheerful violation of the Prime Directive (of the 'don't interfere with non-spacefaring cultures' sort), it transpired that the world they have found was called Terracandra, had never before made contact with another intelligent race but was quite keen to do so, and quickly arranged a public outing of alien life.

In short, it was basically another day in the life of the _Paragon's _crew. Such adventures had become commonplace in recent days.

(As far as the crew's reactions to this went, Calvin was giddy about being put into the history records of such a momentous occasion. Hobbes pointed out that it was a backwater world of comparatively little consequence to their own home-worlds of a vast empire that had once spanned the galaxy. Calvin had replied that historical significance still counts even if it's small. Zuko was too stunned by how fast they were moving to do much. Morte was surprisingly against the whole thing, citing various times inter-world contact with less advanced cultures had done terrible damage. Zim considered the risks negligible, insisting he knew how dealing with primitive civilizations went. He neglected to explain that it was usually as the vanguard of a genocidal conquest in the name of the Irken Empire.)

In ordinary circumstances, a grace period of at least a week of preparation would have been the proper thing. Zim had no such time, and didn't really care about Terracandra's protests, and so in a few hours his ship was hovering over one of the greater cities of this world: Public Dominion, so named because it had originally been a freehold of squatters – displaced by war or relocation or had just gotten really lost – and had just built up a new place for them all to live while the local government at the time had turned a blind eye until it was too late and the resultant housing had amazingly become a city subsequently inviting in all the major trade guilds and making itself into a massive commerce hot-spot. All that had been hundreds of years ago, and it was now simply just a very nice (and architecturally schizophrenic) city expanding from the side of a mountain and across the plains and into the coastline as a port.

In awe and shock tempered by curiosity (and, Morte had observed during the brief communications with the scientist-diplomat council that were representatives of their individual nations, hope), thousands stood assembled and millions more watched through mass media as the _Paragon _hovered a dozen or so meters over the ground (and Zim realized a little too late that this might just be incredibly frightening, because even though their ship wasn't particularly big by regular standards it WAS considerably larger than most of the buildings around them and the only spacecraft these people had was rudimentary and untested at best; Zim was making a show of power without even realizing it, a frequent accident in these situations). It was a literal show too; the ship's propulsion field was overclocking in order to stay up, so the power feeds into the propulsion field were fluctuating and making quite a lovely rippling effect on it. The field was interfacing with light waves, sparkling like sunlight on oiled water even before it started flashing off excess power into brilliant and fierce spirals of randomized color, like extremely localized fireworks.

The people, already stunned by the sheer power of such a massive craft that flew through the heavens without fear (at least by these people's standards), went '_ooh!_' and _'aaah!'_ at this visual wonder. Someone clapped and others picked it up, the applause spreading like a mimetic compulsion. Appreciative sound rippled up, battering through the _Paragon's _sound systems.

Ironically, these people probably wouldn't have liked knowing that the flashes weren't intentional, and were a sign of uneven power distribution overclocking the system while backup redundancies frantically tried to stem the overflow.

"Hey guys," Zuko said, looking at one of the screens while Hobbes ran around frantically at the alarms going off in the bridge. Just about everyone else was on edge. "I'm really not any good at this technical stuff, so I don't know if this screen is saying good stuff or bad stuff."

"What does it say, I can't see from here!" Calvin said, cloistered from sight by a bundle of floating screens as his hands ran across the keyboard with incredible speed, initializing emergency sub-routines to reroute computing power from presently unneeded functions (such as sterilizing the water in the holding tanks or the basic feed to the primary weapons), mumbling passcodes he made up on the spot that were still somehow successful and thanking all the glories of natural philosophy that his primary interest in the Enlightened Sciences had always been the vehicle and transportation-related area of Skafoi.

The natives, short furry quadrupeds with heads similar to an aardvark but with the broad flattened features of a frog and extended arms of astounding delicacy) glanced at each other. "Should this be happening?" One of them asked. "Are aliens supposed to be so ominously inept?"

"I believe we have nothing to fear from them," said another. "Such ineptitude implies stupidity, and that's nothing to be scared of." At this, there was a satisfied murmur. Regardless, several robot servitors, dwarfing their creators and somewhere around Hobbes' height, roaming about protectively, weapons at the ready. They moved on a tripod assembly with rounded wheels, and their torsos had large screens built it; two-way receivers displaying the telecommunicated visages of the scientist-diplomats presently looking worried. The robots themselves, non-sentient automatons, had no particular opinions about this. At a command from an operator keeping these machines organized, several of them extended armatures from within their frames, projecting beams of zero-point energy that balanced the _Paragon_, righting it's center of gravity and making it stable.

That helped, and as if on cue, the _Paragon_'s landing procedures activated, funneling its momentum engines into getting the whole thing to drift peacefully to the ground, and the zero-point beams powered down. The natives 'ooh' and 'aw'ed at the sight, unaware that the ship had nearly crashed into the ground.

Several moments of tense activity within the ship passed, and then various clanking mechanisms went on for a bit. The cargo doors clanged open with suitable dramatic-ness, and from them marched Zim, Zuko and Hobbes. The three of them quickly came to a stop, halting in place by the massive crowd in front of them. They beheld a vast city of splendidly crafted architecture, towers and spires extending for miles on mighty bridges suspending by thousands of filament-thing cables (astoundingly strong for their size), the super-strong crystal constructing them shining with light as great conduits positioned at key points upon the skyline channeling energy from the planet itself to broadcast it into electrical power for the entire planet and doing no damage to the world. Deceptively slim hovering vehicles flew around in precisely aligned and peaceful traffic in the air, their passengers concealed in protected bubble-shaped canopies. Large solemn-looking robots patrolled the streets and periodically assisting passerbys and pedestrians with minor tasks, and a few of these robots – not quite sentient but more self-aware than the others - had rolled over to see what all the fuss was about.

Zim stepped onto the square-shaped plaza they had been directed to, admiring the glorious technological wonderland they had appeared on, the great spires around the landing area prepared for them (and yet he noticed a great weariness around him, a sense of people already prepared to flinch from the slightest movement, and he didn't like how ragged the tops of those spires looked as though they'd been _chewed up_). The people before him stared in silent bemusement, anxious and all too willing to hope that he had come in peace.

Zim considered it splendidly ironic that for once this was the case. "Good day, people of...whatever world this is!" He proclaimed, with many excessive gestures. "I am Zim, hero of Earth-That-Was and bearer of the mighty Keyblade! ...Just dropping by, I heard you have problems. "

The silence broke into a fascinated and cheerful murmuring. They came closer, set at their ease (and a few of them plainly wondering how Zim could speak their language), and Hobbes shrugged cheerfully. "Easiest first contact scenario ever!" He said as they begun eagerly asking them questions.

"What?" Zuko said, distracted by the beings plaguing him with questions. "No, there's nothing wrong with my skeleton, I'm just built this way, gravity doesn't hurt my stature...no, my face isn't supposed to be differently colored, I just got hurt when I was a kid- wait, hold on, what? No, I don't know how the ship works or how you can build your own!" At this there was a great sigh of disappointment. "Why do they keep swarming up to _me_?"

Zim perked up. "You do not have spacecraft?" He asked.

The natives stopped, startled. Eventually a robot rolled up, and the dignitary speaking through it said, "Not quite so good as yours. We have never gone beyond the limits of our own solar system, and certainly never met other beings like you! We lack the technology to go so far, beings from beyond!"

"And yet you have such advanced technology," Zim said, indicating the great city around them, and the jet bikes above them, and the great health of all the people.

"Science is the power of sapience," one of the beings said solemnly. "Technology the means to rise above what dumb evolution would otherwise trap us into. Unfortunately, we've had other concerns preventing us from developing spaceflight and forced us into weapons and transportation expertise."

"Like what?" Zim said.

There was a terrible chattering noise, like thousands of tiny legs scrabbling over glass. At once, the natives looked up in horror. Hobbes pointed in the direction the noise came from. "I'd say, maybe that giant swarm of horrible plant-monsters from over there?"

"Yeah, pretty much," A random small child said helpfully.

Zim turned and saw, coming down from the sky towards them, a vast and terrible horde of at least a billion small but savage creatures of animate vegetative matter, flying in from every conceivable direction and joining together. Automated turrets individually larger than entire buildings arose in the distance and opened fire; though their attacks ripped holes in the swarm, the swarm itself was so large that the damage was negligible. The natives screamed and ran, hatches appearing in the ground for them to duck into for safety. The robots stood firm, ready to defend their makers, and Zim noted how utterly terrified the leaders on the robot-screens were; clearly, he happened right into the middle of an on-going problem requiring some dire resolution. "You must depart!" A cry came out from the dignitary who had directly addressed him moments earlier. "Before the menace of the Green Madness claims you and kills even more-" Zim ignored him and started walking in the general direction of the great horde, plainly not caring that they were even now chewing through the tops of buildings and in their rush towards them. "Er? What are you doing?!"

Zim stared at it, almost curious. He said, "I've no time for more swarms of horrible monsters. Calvin? Dispose of that interruption!" He snapped his fingers, and by no, the swarm was nearly upon them, the continual fire of the turrets doing little to dissuade them despite the superior firepower.

"Okay," Calvin and Morte said on the intercom. Zim stood his ground as part of the horde extended and flew at him, seemingly a great tentacle shape, many thousands of snapping jaws coming for him (and they were close enough for Zim to observe that they had a great many variance of form, but curiously they tended towards low-slung quadruped bodies with unusual growths throughout, not counting the many flapping organs that enabled flight) and he watched peacefully as his ship's guns powered up, and opened fire.

Green light lanced right into the tentacle formation coming at him. A fearsome heat billowed out, as the entry beam disintegrated scores of the plant-monsters. Ashes fell like rain and the formation turned inside out, constituent monsters panicking in, and then the beam superheated the air and surface texture of the plants enough to make an explosion that caught the remainder of the formation, and when the light faded, the entire formation was just dust floating on the wind. The horde churned, recoiled, and the automated turrets from before hammered into them with renewed enthusiasm, even as the _Paragon's _guns fired again. Green light flared in tandem with the electric-blue of the turrets, and in due course the horde was reduced to several large unorganized groups. They swarmed up and then down, too dumb to flee in earnest, they just kept pressing the attack, and the precision-guided blasts from the turrets reduced them to scattered bunches of individuals, and a few blasts later, not even that. The continual rain of ashes was mixed with larger clumps of burning plant matter. A small child ran out and stomped on one, giggling like a loon, and scurried out of sight before anything bad could happen.

"...Or you could do that," the dignitary who'd been warning them finished.

"I _knew _blasting the crap out of the infantry devourers was a good idea," One leader or another said snidely to another leader. "You owe four credits!" The other rolled her eyes but did not contest the point.

"So..." Hobbes said carefully. "Were you guys _planning _on telling us that you were having a horrible monster problem before or after it attacked?"

"You're the one who came right in without bothering about protocol or threats," another dignitary said pointedly.

"And besides," Morte said loudly through the intercom, making sure everyone could hear him. "The hapless villagers hardly ever tell the heroes - that would be us - about the big mess until after it shows up to show people what the deal is. Or representatives of an entire planet. They count as being like villages. Same narrative concept."

"What in the name of the Great Principle is he going on about?" Someone asked. All over the city, hatches leading to civil shelters were opening and people coming out, expressing their amazement loudly...not to mention their irritation that a bunch of weird aliens had killed the horrible threat a lot easier than they could have.

"Not important," Zuko said quickly. "Anyway...what WAS that...that thing!?"

There was a good deal of awkward glancing around from the locals. A few people whistled. A few shuffled around, embarrassed, and someone coughed. The overall sense was that of an obvious problem that no one really wanted to address. The robots sidled away a bit, none of the dignitaries wanting to be in front, and in the shoving one of them was forced into the front. The robot's screen in question, displaying a woman of their species wearing an incredibly large and impressive hat of office (complete with its own live mini-dragon) gaped at her fellows, who just shrugged innocently. Their respective robots scooted back into the crowd.

"I'm waiting," Zim said impatiently. "I presume this has something to do with the distressful nature of your communications."

The dignitary who'd been volunteered looked around helplessly. She sighed, and began speaking. "We, er, may not have been clear about what our distress was, visitors from Outside."

"What?" Calvin said. "You mean rampaging horde of giant killer things that eat everything _isn't _an ordinary hazard? This place is weird!"

"What," Zuko said flatly. Slowly, many heads turned towards the _Paragon_. Quite a few eyebrow-analogues were quirked. Hobbes snorted good-naturedly.

"...It's normal where I come from..." Calvin muttered.

"Ignore him, he's just a rambling idiot I keep around for the shooting and mechanics," Zim said. ("Stop bad-mouthing me in front of people!" Calvin screamed.) "Explain this matter, and perhaps we can aid you."

"Unfortunately true," The representative, who incidentally was named Kikkabikka, admitted. "Well, where to begin...it's not easy to understand where, there's quite a lot even we don't know..."

"Start with the part where you could have gotten us killed because you weren't upfront about telling us what we were getting into," Hobbes said. Zuko nudged him roughly, not thinking this was a diplomatic thing to say. "What! You were thinking it too, I could smell it on you."

"You did not!" Zuko said.

Kikkabikka's robot rolled up. Zim and his crew quieted, realizing that matters were being explained now.

"In brief," Kikkabikka said, and tiny flying robots resembling animate pixels flew out from hatches on her robot, assembling into a indistinct image. Calvin noted that it was a bit like his own imaging projector technology but far more primitive. "What you just helped kill were in effect the frontline infantry of the most insidious enemy we have ever known; a nature-venerating cult-"

"Doesn't sound so bad," Hobbes said.

"Who are vicious murderous traitors who wish to kill us all, terraform the planet to a state of primeval chaos and cease to be sentient beings."

"Okay, that sounds pretty horrible," Hobbes said.

Kikkabikka nodded gravely. She adjusted something on her side and now the pixels changed, now depicting what was probably imaging data; photograph of a shape moving at great speed and slightly blurred in the middle of a pounce upon the viewpoint, and even though it was colored much the same as its surroundings, it was clearly the same kind of people as this world's natives, but terribly altered. It was much larger, for one thing, limbs elongated and body bulked up until it around a human's size (judged from the objects of contrast in the picture). Abominable mutations had worsened its appearance, its muscles were so swollen it looked hunchbacked, its open mouth revealed several eyeballs staring inside its mouth, and a dozen more peered from all over its body in uncomfortable places, and that was quite without all the small spikes dripping with venom upon it's right arm, or that it's left arm had split into a huge mass of writhing tentacles at the elbow, or that a second mouth had split open its stomach region.

"...Ew," Zuko said.

"Indeed," Kikkabikka said dryly. "We say they are afflicted by madness, but it is more precise to say that they are people who have voluntarily betrayed the great works of our noble civilization, abandoning all technological society to align themselves with the 'natural order'. And by that, we've determined that they had actually allied themselves with a dread force that was likely once locked away, and been transformed into its soldiers. Even now it whispers into the ears of us all, speaking in our dreams and in our heads, and it _changes _something inside us. And when it finds weakness, the kind of moral dissolution that coerced the first of these cultists in the first place? IT moves on to physically warping them. With results as this particular abomination."

"What's wrong with respecting nature?" Hobbes said. He didn't sound offended (at least a little bit) he just honestly wanted their opinion.

Kikkabikka blinked. "Nothing," She said, though her robot rolled it's optics theatrically. "Green growing things are of the world, and not respecting them or their works is a distasteful thing. Yet...these cultists take it further. They worship the philosophy of natural selection, or so we understand, they find meaning in that vicious bloody nastiness, they find glory in the whole _thing _of killing for the sake of survival and they glorify it, take it to its obvious logical extreme..." She grimaced, an almost cartoony expression on that froglike face. "And thus they have declared war on our civilization in general and our technological ways in particular. They find technological advancement to be offensive, and seek to destroy artifice wherever they find it. And more specifically, the _means _of it. They seem to have decided that sentience itself is their enemy and wish to spiritually lobotomize everything they meet. Have nature consume our cities, bring us back to base savagery and resume killing each other for sustenance, that sort of thing."

"Again," Zuko said. "Ew." Hobbes almost asked what precisely was wrong with killing another thing for the purpose of eating it, since he didn't really see a problem with that but he figured  
that with this crowd such sentiments were dangerous to voice. And the rest of the cult's philosophy he founded objectionable.

"How do you know all this?" Hobbes said, all the same. These people seemed nice, but he knew better than to just take them at their word. (And he had objections to people making war on an 'uncivilized' culture in the first place and pinning their supposed savagery as an excuse for that.)

"We have video footage!" The pixels changed to a video of a cultist, in a comfortable cell wherein he was apparently immersed in a pleasant direct-to-brain simulation, raving and ranting while foaming at the mouth of all the things Kikkabikka had just told them, but in considerably less coherent words. "We lured him in with cake and he told us all their secrets."

"You could have faked that video," Zuko pointed out.

She looked shocked. "But we didn't! That would be..._lying!_"

Everyone present gasped, and shuddered. Zim blinked. "I see," he said, and then looked to his crewmates. "I trust your objections are satisfied?"

"I think so, yeah," Hobbes said, looking a little guilty for upsetting the natives so. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I get the picture!"

"Hmm," Zuko said, frowning faintly. Such credulity spooked him a little.

"We never disbelieved them to begin with," Morte and Calvin said.

"Okie-dokie," Kikkabikka said, instantly mollified and cheerful again. "So, you understand our situation?"

"Indeed," Zim said. "Your enemies are fiends that revere nature for _specifically _its most brutal traits. So, hmm, yes, we get to fight EVIL HIPPIES! I KNEW THEY WERE EVIL! Because they're called 'evil' hippies. It's a bit of a identifier. I knew it was coming all along! But that's not important. What evil abominable thing changed them, anyway? You never went into detail."

One of the other leaders, older and passing the time by reading a book entitled 'Horribly Painful Things I've Personally Either Suffered, Have Accidentally Caused, Or Both In The Last Four Hundred Years', looked up. He said, "About fifteen years, give or take that muckiness with the time-jump gun when I dropped it last week. Best as we can say, an exploration team unearthed some very unusual ruins several dozen feet buried underground in an undersea trench that had been torn open by an earthquake about twenty-six years ago. The explorers came back...ah, changed. As you saw. Quite strangely." She shuddered and continued. " They told us about what they had found there, deep in the dark where it should have been forgotten: a _board game _of all things, and a magical eye within it that told riddles of an ancient jungle and it's perils, and they told us that this game board was a way to the apotheosis of all jungles, a realm of savagery and survivalism.

"It spoke to them of ancient times of glory and splendor, without artifice or consciousness, when all things were savage and 'pure' in their reckoning, and claimed that this realm had given them the power to bring back that time and cast down the era of technological progress. When we tried to help them, determine how to stop their insanity, they broke loose...killed everyone in the hospital they were incarcerated in, and left. A few weeks later, they arose from the sea upon a fossilized sea serpent they had brought back to life and attacked a coastal town, killed everyone there, and they induced the native plant life to cover everything and consume all the artificially-made things there. From there they created slave-husks from the plants, great hulking monsters, to kill on their behalf, and they mutated all the animals they could find - insects, mostly - into gigantic and more varied forms for much the same. And then they moved on, attacking and destroying all the facilities containing weapons potent enough to destroy them all, crippling us...and we have been fighting them ever since. They claim that they summon impossible beasts and terrrors from the game board, of all things!"

"Heard about a game like that once," Morte commented. "It was called 'Jumanji'; cursed thing it was, you play a game on it and it throws increasingly worse jungle perils at you and transforms stuff into the jungle itself until either all the players die or someone wins. Looks like this exploration team of yours were sucker enough to...I don't know, _listen _to it and it got them thinking the same way as them. Nasty business."

"…An _board game?!_" Zuko said incredulously. "Are you serious?! That's the stupidest thing I heard all day!"

The scientist ignored him "In any event, we've been fighting with them ever since. Our technological advantage was fairly even with their absurd magnitude of fighters, forced evolution and ability to control the things of nature-"

"How?" Hobbes asked.

She shrugged. "They can summon gargantuan beasts, control the things of the wild and the elements, and alter themselves as they please, but we have aircraft, weapons of great destruction, and the means to modify ourselves without risking our sanity. What does evil magic possibly manage to do against our cybernetics and firearms, to say nothing of our heavy combat-vehicles? Sadly, our most powerful weapons - missiles and titanic robot servitors - were destroyed when they struck at the facilities where we stored them as part of an old peace agreement, but we've made do."

"Ah," Hobbes said.

"In any event," She continued. "Things processed as they did, and a short time ago, something crashed and provided them an unforeseen advantage that has already cost us an entire continent...and more importantly everyone who lived there." She hesitated, shaking a little, and the picture changed again. "Not even a few days ago, something materialized right in the sky directly over a small city. It crashed, making a fairly large crater, and then someone photographed what was left." Now the pixels assembled into a copy of what must have been a digitally preserved photograph; a large crater in a city not unlike this one sometime around dawn, the crater melted right through the metal walkways it had gone through and leaving only a large hole in the middle of the ground; it seemed to have drilled nearly through the bedrock. Inside the crater was a twisted lump of metal that looked very much like it had been a crude cage before it had crashed, broken open from the inside after impact. "It was undamaged in the crash, and we haven't picked up much from it. Some unusual energy signatures, true, but it seemed unusually intact when it had crashed..."

She kept going on, rambling on about fascinating observations that reflected positively on the potential for dimensional science, but Zim wasn't listening. That dented hunk of metal looked very familiar indeed, and he was getting a sinking feeling that the recent deaths Kikkabikka spoke of were his fault now. "Something broke out of that thing."

"Oh yes, we thought so." She fretted. "Something quite strong, strong enough to survive impact and break out with brute strength alone. A group of beings; a skinny tall thing not unlike you with a peculiar obsession for outdated trends, a pair of massive blue...things like your friend with the burn mark," and here Zuko blinked. "And many smaller beings again like your friend but closer to his size. They attacked people randomly, stole everything in sight, and left. Apparently they ran smack into a raid by our cultist foes by sheer accident and...had some sort of discussion?"

The pixels changed. This time it showed a different part of that city (a neighborhood block now unrecognizable with the savage vegetation overgrown everything in sight, everything made of metal rusted into ruin, and many dead but still animate bodies lumbering around; it was uncannily like the word where they'd met the machine-mind but more malicious). In a semi-circle and surrounded by hulking bestial figures - some sort of bodyguards perhaps - about forty or so creatures not unlike the people here Zim had met sat in deep conversation with a trio that was clearly Disco Darvhog and the frost giants Jord and Gunter, backed up by their human underlings who were now armed to the teeth with all the weapons they had found. By all accounts, both parties looked pleased with one another.

Zim spat. Zuko gaped. Hobbes stared in disbelief. "They left together," the scientist continued, visibly nonplussed by their visitor's reactions. "Shortly after that, the cultist's attacks became far bolder: they were once content to attack disorganized settlement and our less well-guarded stations in order to establish footholds. Now, they attack without rhyme or reason, attacking everything they seem to find, running in all direction and assimilating all that they conquer into that green hell of theirs! And their minions, such awful things: vast animate plant golems, hordes of slavering abominations, armies of our own people degenerated into bestial viciousness and slaughtering even each other in their bloodlust...and they seem to have acquired many awful and more unique powers. Now they fly and spit fire and swell to titanic size, and that was just the start." She shuddered. "It feels so...wrong. So unwholesome. How are such things even possible? They just ignore all the laws of reality."

"It's more like they're using laws you're not really used to," Morte observed. "Seems to me that some of our annoyances did a team-up with yours."

"...Come again?"

Zim indicated the pixel-picture. He sighed in disbelief and said, "I fear that we are to blame for your predicament...not the evil hippy thing, but the escalation. Some time ago we fought that very fiend; a space pirate named Disco Darvhog and his cohorts. We sent them to drift in a metal box, and it appears that they came right into your world in the same way we did by sheer chance and decided to assist these cultists of yours."

"That's incredibly improbable," she protested.

Another one of them, more amenable to any explanation, said, "But why?"

"Darvhog expressed strong anti-technological sentiments when last we clashed. No doubt he was offended by the state of your wondrous enlightenment and sympathized with your foes and offered his assistance to them."

As a whole, the other creatures deflated, too hard-pressed by debilitating war and hardship to raise too many objections to this admittedly far-fetched idea. "Oh dear," a few of them muttered.

Zim looked around at the world, at the vast and stubbornly shining metropolis around him, at the gleaming machinery standing firm against the foes assailing it's makers and wielders, and at the people daring to hope even in this time. At least _this _sight was a far cry from that world of lost humanity and their grieving machine-children. It ought to preserved. "In that case, I owe it to you. We shall help you."

"We are?" Hobbes said.

"You are?" said the dignitary that had done so much talking.

"Darvhog met these vile cultists that he sympathized with and fought with them to further their cause. I feel that I ought to do the same for you all!" Zim posed. He posed… _dramatically_. "SHOW ME YOUR ENEMIES! So that I may blow them to itty-bitty pieces and such."

The scientist-folk looked at each other. They looked at Zim's ship, or more specifically it's very big guns, and thoughtfully looked out to sea where their enemies had established a base in recent times, that swarm keeping this city's forces too off-balance to wipe it out.

"And in exchange? What do you wish in this bargain?"

"Well, I have misplaced a number of my own friends. If you have technology that I could use to locate the signal of an android with a specific call frequency, that would be ideal. And a few other things, such as metals or similar resources that we don't have, would be suitable."

There was a debate among them. "...We accept your terms," One of them finally said, apparently shocked that it was so easy.

"Neat," Zim said again. He glanced back at the ship, where Morte was curiously watching. Morte, who had crippled himself into thinking that he was incapable of contributing because he lacked a body. Morte, who Zim had come to think as a proper member of his crew and was in need of a means to contribute more fully.

Zim looked back at the natives who he'd agreed to help. The natives, who were _very _technologically advanced. "A query. How is your prosthetics or cybernetic industry?"

* * *

A few hours later (quite fast, given bureaucracy, but the people _were _desperate for any sort of aid against their relentlessly savage and seemingly endless enemies) and after some refitting to Morte's shock and utter delight, Zim's ship had again taken off to the skies, the sea skimming away underneath and small islands zooming away and covered in dense jungle with vast clouds of smoke pouring from them. Zim considered disintegrating the jungles but deemed it more appropriate to cut off this problem at the root and have things take place from there. A squadron of combat drones flew behind, flanking lines of personnel carriers bearing power-armored troops and heavy tanks to be dropped in at a moment's notice, all for a single devastating strike at the cultist's benefactor (Assuming it _was _Darvhog, and even if it wasn't Zim liked a good fight; either way, a victory would be a point for Team Good.) The key, of course, would be _finding _him first, but Zim's new allies knew that the mightiest warrior of the cultists had lead the beachhead on their attacks on the city Zim had landed in, and this warrior likely knew where Darvhog was.

The target was a large island, previously a coastal resort, and Zim's mouth curled into a mute snarl as he saw the broken buildings and the warped skyline, the entire place completely overgrown in a too-thickly-covered rainforest that had been amplified until it had choked every single available surface. A single gargantuan tree dominated the side, slightly taller than the other buildings and off-shooting in vine-like growths to cover the ruined city, comparatively tiny growths still larger than buildings and spreading into the streets and even into a large matted surface over the seacoast.

A small swarm of buzzing things, probably the same sort of monster like the plant-based horde they had destroyed earlier, encircled the top of the tree and flew about the island in a patrol, and as soon as Zim and his makeshift fleet were in their eyesight, the patrols vanished into the forest, no doubt alerting their foes. Zim personally doubted they were the only sentries; perhaps the coral had been mutated into a crude computing system to predict an attack, or the very sea-life had been co-opted as watchful soldiers. However it went, now the cultists stationed on this place knew of the attack, and this suited Zim's purposes perfectly; first impressions were always important, especially in war.

Perhaps a sane person would have stopped to think for a moment and realize that, by coincidence and good speaking skills, he had become the siege-breaking commander of an alien army that was putting all its trust in him because of sheer desperation, and perhaps think about how absurd and quick this had all gotten. Zim was not conventionally sane, however; his only recognition of how unusual the circumstances were was a faint knowing smirk. He gave the order to keep moving forward, and his crew readied for the fight.

As they prepared for another big battle, prepping themselves mentally and whatnot, Calvin was greatly concerned by the intelligence they'd been given; apparently quite a lot of the monsters the cultists had created or bred on this particular island in the past had been impossibly large insects the size of tanks, imbued with all manner of biological weaponry to make them a match for tanks themselves, and they'd only gotten bigger. For some reason it was these bugs that concerned Calvin the most, and as they armed themselves (all of them with the weapons they'd been given by Calvin, and also Zim and Zuko had borrowed flamethrowers to augment their Firebending) he absolutely refused to shut up about it.

"The chitinous death is coming," Calvin said gravely as they stood in the bridge, adjusting the lightweight body armor they had been given and adapted to their own body types (the natives of this world having quite different bodies) and force field generators humming on vital points of that armor. They stood behind Morte and Hobbes, who were in the pilot's chairs, waiting to be fired into the fray through the same rapid-launch system that had enabled Zim to directly combat the Umbra Eternis earlier; they'd all been given weapons and had been using their time to modify them for their own use, and Calvin was outfitting a laser rifle with a set of beam splitters to separate its beam into several smaller beams with greater penetrative power, and focus optics to intensify those beams. The laser rifle itself had been more overall reinforced to withstand the added stress. Fortunately, while the people of this world were smaller than him their long strong arms had the same reach on their weapons, so Zim and Calvin had no problems with them.

Calvin was rambling. "Ready your souls and nerves, fellows, for we may never return from their pendulous jaws! All human advancement is just a byproduct of our eternal war with our insect would-be-overlords, WE MUST NOT GIVE THEM THE CHANCE TO RULE US. That way lies only doom."

Zuko stared at him. "They're just _bugs_. Insects. Lumps of ugly meat in mobile shells. By all accounts they're so big they'll crack apart at a touch and can't possibly sustain themselves. What are you going on about?"

Calvin's eyes twitched nervously. "You speak too calmly. YOU KNOW NOT OUR PERIL. Be of brave heart and stout courage, for we face the horrors of the jungle and all within!"

"Urgh, _jungle,_" Zim said, shuddering. "So much rampant vegetation growing without planning or reason, infesting everything in sight, choking and feasting...how can these savages _stand it?!_"

"Some people _like _living in places like this," Hobbes said sternly.

Zim stared at him. "...Who in their right minds would volunteer for habitation in this green hell?!" Hobbes growled, his ears flattened back, and then he facepalmed at his leader's obnoxiousness.

Calvin was still rambling. "Bees the size of fighter jets, shrieking along in swarms greater than armies and bearing stings greater than harpoons! Squadrons of ants that dwarf tanks, spewing venom that melts our very flesh! Beetles that sup on blood and bones, chewing into our flesh and devouring us from the inside to animate our skin for their own sick pleasures! Flies that spit sticky web-stuff and lay eggs in the still living bodies of their victims! _Little buzzy things that hover in your face all day and just won't leave or die no matter what you do!_" He turned solemn, a serious look on his face. "Have great courage, and turn back if you do doubt your strength! For we are engaging in a battle humanity has waged since the dawn of time, from the time of the spear to the epoch of the promethium bombardment! Our ancient enemy lies in wait, and we must do battle with all hope and heart! IF YOU WISH TO HAVE PEACE, NOW WAGE WAR WITH ALL YOUR HEART!" He cocked the gun, dramatically. A laser blast accidentally discharged and burned a small hole in the wall. "Oh God no! Not the wall's finish, I spent hours grinding that down! Um...pretend that didn't happen! It was the bugs! Yes, a pre-emptive assault on their part! Now my crusade against them is totally justified. Yeah."

Hobbes, sitting in the co-pilot seat, rolled his eyes. "You sure you don't want me in on this siege of yours?" He asked Zim.

"This ship requires two pilots to operate at maximum efficiency," Zim said. "I'm not sure why Cyborg designed it that way, but it does present a few difficulties. Zuko's abilities and mine are suited to destroying the terrain, and Calvin is quite capable of the same. You and Morte can handle the rest just fine."

"You better believe it!" Morte said, small enough that he couldn't really lean out without having to let go of the joysticks. In regards to his surprising skill at piloting, he had been chosen to be the main pilot in Zim's absence. His unexpected mania and cheery attitude was a sudden change in him; the question of how to help him grip things had been addressed by their allies, and they had risen to the occasion magnificently, placing him into a head-jar prosthetic harness; metal gleamed all around him, a delicate harness strung around him with neural-responsive discs on his cranium and feeding into a set of armatures to both his sides and underneath him, spindly and jointless limbs presenting exceptionally dexterous tools much like hands, and several of these hands were holding onto the ship control joysticks. The natives had taken a lot of interest in Morte, and had supplied him this small exo-rig to help him with his surprisingly proficient piloting skills (not surprising, as the ship's controls were amazingly intuitive and Morte had the force of will, if not subtlety, to operate them) and he had been only too glad to have hands. It wasn't too _much_ of a change, given that he used his jaws quite well, but he was amazingly giddy at having something close to a proper body again. The natives were embarrassed but pleased for his gratitude.

Hobbes ignored him. He tensed slightly, looking at Zim, and Zim noticed that Hobbes was delicately rubbing that strange charm on his necklace – a religious thing, Zim presumed -, rather like a man fiddling with the beads on a rosary. "...Good luck, you guys."

Zuko's grimace lightened a little. "I won't let your little brother get hurt," He promised.

"I don't need protection!" Calvin snapped. Zuko and Hobbes ignored him. He looked at Zim beseechingly.

Zim sidled over and muttered to Calvin, "When everyone is so much larger than you, they automatically assume you're more childlike."

Calvin nodded glumly. "Even when you're the only technically capable person in the whole task force," He said. (Technically, Calvin _was _a child, but he didn't often act like it.) He distracted himself by clicking open the ammunition chamber on his laser rifle and making sure that the energy cells were primed. Zim did much the same for his own flamethrower.

On the view screens, the island loomed, a vast field of tangled green shimmering over corroded ruins and many flicker-fast moving forms underneath that green. A voice crackled over the radio and said, "Aero drone controllers to Exalted Hero, we are clear for combat! Patch us a hole in there and we'll do the rest."

Another voice, elegant and calm, said, "Tank drone operators ready for assault! Give us a space, and it will be done."

A third voice, chirpier than the others, said, "Infantry droppers, prepped and ready, saying the same as the rest!"

And a fourth, excited for the battle, roared "Heavy infantry mech troops standing by, happy to blast those traitors into the Big Empty and waiting for instructions!"

Morte commanded a tentacle-like armature to press a button. The radio activated and Zim said, "Calls received and understood; we're about to begin the initial assault. Stay calm and prepared, we mark our passage with fire. The moment we provide an entrance for you, bring in the drones and infantry. Wait for a signal before dropping heavy ordnance or anything else!"

"Confirmed, over and out!" The voices replied, and the radio went silent. Calvin said, "So, do _we_ have a plan for what we're gonna do?"

"Our plan couldn't be simpler," Zim said. "We hit them until they give up."

"And if they won't?" Zuko asked.

Zim shrugged. "Then we just do whatever seems appropriate to stop them from being a threat."

Zuko and Calvin glanced at each other. Between the two of them and Zim, they had about fourteen of Calvin's prototype microfusion grenades strapped onto bandoliers on their front, with a few fire-based grenades for Zuko and Zim. "Well, might as well have fun with it," Calvin said. Zuko rolled his eyes.

The canopy was less than a few dozen feet in front of them now. Zim, Zuko and Calvin stepped into the launching square-zone. Morte's prosthetic hand paused over the relevant buttons. "Hey, Boss?" He said.

"Yes," Zim answered.

"...Good luck."

Zim nearly smiled. "We shall return without incident."

"Here's hoping!" Morte pressed the button, and the floor dropped out from under Zim, Zuko and Calvin.

Moments later, hatches appeared in the front of the _Paragon_, and three small figures came shooting out wrapped in energy shields and looking like giant glowing bullets, and behind the _Paragon, _all the other ships flying behind it - the troop carriers, the drone fighters, the carriers bearing tank drones, and the others – came to a stop and waited for their cue. (Zim considered it a good thing they had modified the ejection process to fire the people _behind _the pilots as a quick battlefield entry technique.) A great army poised to strike from the rainforest and watching through the vines watching in shock as the 'bullets' radiated flame around each of themselves, neatly lancing through an upraised section of the canopy so thick that it was a shield against dropped enemies or missile attacks.

There was a faint thud when the 'bullets' came to a stop less than a third through; there was heat, and then burning smoke, and the liquid flames of their weaponry or metapowers ate through as Zim and Zuko burned their way into the canopy with Calvin close behind until they ran into something close enough to moving air, smacked into a growing vine as thick across as a large car, slick and smooth and an excellent standing surface. The flamethrowers switched off and the three of them hopping on in, and slid on down.

The wind blasted in his face, his own calls of exhilaration whooped like a victorious beast, and Zim came to a sudden stop as he and the other two came grinding down onto a fairly large area where the rainforest had grown right over the roof of a large office building, so thickly that the thick measure of vines was as stable as the ground and there was no way to tell where the rooftop had ended.

Zim looked around, pleased that there was no one in immediate sight, and spotted several large gaps where branches of the island-tree were grown; elsewhere they were so thickly entwined they were like walls coming in on themself to make a crude roof overhead, but there were open places where large things (such as a ship) could move through easily. He gestured at the other two to get moving. They nodded, and the three of them started marching forward.

The vines crunched underfoot; Zim winced, loathing the feeling of walking on such treacherous ground, hating the cool warmth under his boots, trying not to think of how long he would fall if the vines suddenly gave way (assuming he just didn't fall onto the roof underneath), and trying to keep a damper on his instinct just to burn away all this sickening overgrowth. It all made his head spin a little, and his stomach churn, and he decided right then that he was never going to go to another big jungle or rainforest if he could avoid it. They passed through gaps several times over, walked onto vines slipping under the undercanopy before them, saw broken remnants of debris somehow caught in mid-fall by the violent growth of the plant life, saw tepid brightly colored flowers slowly turning to face them, observed that there were quite a lot of holes for things to come out of in the plants...and all the makeshift alters stained with blood, arranged to feed the plants, and there were only fragments of bones left. Most of them looked like they had been mutated before they had been killed. Perhaps they had sacrificed their own people, or even children; a lot of the bones, Zim noted, looked quite small.

"Feh," Zim said after they kept walking without incident. "Some terrible army of raiders. We should have been attacked already." He panted a bit; it was insufferably humid, and horribly _noisy_; animals were screaming and calling and shouting and all manner of vocalization. The jungle felt like an active malevolence, watching them and waiting for weakness…

All in all, Zim was relieved when he shortly heard the sounds of many insectile feet moving in unison, heavy footfalls in tandem, and even heavier thundering steps behind those, right in their vicinity. He, Zuko and Calvin quickly moved so that their backs were between a corner and an open space (so they could flee if need be) and waited.

They didn't have to wait long. The faint sounds of purposeful locomotion became louder; there was a swarm of movement, dozens upon dozens of forms swiftly ascended from canopy-ground that moved aside to permit their entry and...

And now, they were completely surrounded by fearsome warriors like the natives of this world but much larger and gruesomely mutated, many of them riding giant insects, and together Zim's group was outnumbered eight-to-one.

Zim grinned, one eye opened too wide. "Perfect," Sammael said from his shoulder, gleefully rubbing his hands together.

The cultists and their insect-beasts approached; descending from gravity-defying positions overhead on the branches and just charging straight through from the paths around them, stopping less than about a dozen feet from Zim and his two teammates, either standing their ground or clinging freely to the tree surfaces or perched upon giant ant-like monsters (who were studded with crude organs rimmed with spiky bits and various nasty enhancements), all of them bearing either weapons seemingly grown from vegetative matter with all the nastiest components of plants in existence, or else massive bones chipped into clubs crackling with eldritch energies. At least a third of them were hulking brutes wearing powered armor grown from a complicated symbiosis with magical plants, plant-fibers formed powerful superhuman musculature under barklike armor thicker than elephant skin and likely harder than steel. And of course, there were the insects; the smallest were the size of motorcycles and bearing single riders, the biggest the size of tanks and bearing all manner of bulging organs bristling with sharp wriggling things inside, and all of them were totally singular, hybrids of ants and beetles with varying degrees of distinguishing marks as one or the other.

Zim was pleased to see that standing in front of them like a brave hero, plainly the leader of this group, was the same cultist from the picture that they had been shown earlier; his tentacled arms writhing, his many eyes blinked coldly, and his remaining hand clutching a bladed club with edges grown from its bark-like substance. His name, Zim had been told, was Girakkuka, but he likely would not answer to it.

Girakkuka just stared while his compatriots scowled or grinned or drooled blankly at Zim as suited them, covered in blood and their own filth and poorly fed to the point of malnourishment; judging from how so many of them looked nearly emaciated, Zim judged that their retreat from modern nutrition and the many health benefits of their technological society had gone badly. And if their bodies had fared badly, their minds seemed even worse; most of them seemed _gone_ or damaged, and he wasn't sure he wished to know why.

They spoke all at once, a horrible susurrating horror of a noise that had no discernible relation to words as Zim understood it, even his Pak's language protocols unable to decipher the spirit of their words. There _was _no intent or thought there to be found, just a vague sense of will crushed under an overwhelming force that had rendered them into its puppets...and a _willing _submersion, at that. That, and a savage joy that sickened Zim to hear it. Girakkuka, seemingly the head of this poorly managed warband, managed to find the words. It was clearly a struggle for him, too. Of all things, he spoke a question. "You. You are helping _them?_" He gestured, his tentacles writhing, at the canopy where Zim had just blasted through, presumably meaning the people of this world who Zim had allied with. "Those that use corrupting machinery." Zim nodded. Girakkuka grunted. "...And you came...from the realms Outside?"

"Indeed."

"What are you doing here, then?" Girakkuka asked, oddly not shocked to see aliens in the middle of his own conquered territory and apparently leading an invasion by his enemies.

"Fighting you. Reclaiming territory. Burning down anything that gets in my way or looks like it needs burning."

"Ah, alright." Girakkuka gave Zim's weaponry a disgusted look, and readied himself.

"But wait!" Zim said. Girakkuka halted, looking surprised. "I want to know what _you, _specifically want to fight for. Why you're fighting the other people on this world."

Girakkuka considered this. "Why?"

"Because we might possibly kill you and I really would rather avoid that," Zim said earnestly. "I would rather avoid killing anyone at all, really, but I understand that this is rarely possible in battles of this nature, so if I must engage in lethal conflict, I insist on knowing if my foe is truly deserving of death, or that killing them is the best move to make in the circumstances. So, I want to hear your side of this conflict, in your own words, so I can make up my mind."

Most of the cultists seemed rather confused at this, mumbling to each other (the ones that could speak anyway, many of them just growled or gibbered) and the mood clearly pointed towards just killing the three intruders on the spot for the implied threats. "You three," Girakkuka said flatly. "You three alone would destroy us all, without aid."

"Yep," Calvin said.

"Don't underestimate us," Zuko warned, a flare of heat smoking out of his throat.

Surprisingly, Girakkuka looked speculative. "If you would be so fair-minded," He said eventually. "You could join us and take down the oppressive hegemony that chains this world!"

Zuko raised an eyebrow. Zim actually laughed. Calvin said, "What."

Whatever power had changed Girakkuka into what he was now had negatively affected his ability to recognize social cues, or maybe he had been blind to that sort of thing even before that. He failed to realize what Calvin meant and took it as an honest question. "Join us!" He urged. "Abandon the ways of metal and grease and embrace the natural order! Become one of us and kill every last one of the mechanists who falsely call themselves the lord of the world! Fight and return our world to purity, and give it freedom from industry, and release it from technological slavery-"

Zim held up his hand as Calvin spat, enraged. "No," the three of them said.

"And then when the ashes fall and the metal rusts, and all who opposed us are rotting piles nourishing the earth, the green shall devour all the works of failed civilization, and we shall be good and clean once more, laughing and dancing and killing as the ancient ones of the elder days, reveling in- wait, what did you say?"

"We said no."

"...A shame, I had thought you reasonable. And why not?"

"...Isn't it obvious?!" Zim roared. "I am most certainly not going to join a mad crusade against all that is good and science-y in the world! Partly because it's incredibly stupid but mostly because it's against everything I stand for!" Girakkuka glowered at Zim for this, his mouth opening into a bloodthirsty leer. "Now hurry up and starting fighting, I'm getting _bored _already! ...uh, Girakkuka, that is your name, right? I'd just like to have the right thing to put up on the plaque for whatever trophy I take from you."

Girakkuka narrowed his many eyes and growled deeply. It echoed, the dozens of other cultists hooting and shouting and gibbering with their own war cries and joining in. "Names," He croaked, amid the noise. "Mean nothing. Are nothing. Born to die, silly people give names, we make things. All things break, all things die. Way of the wild is better; some things die so that others live. Rising about your station to make things to find power? Bad. Stupid. But mostly bad. You work with the enemies of the world, the ones who Make in defiance of the natural order? You die too."

"Um, animals make things all the time. Tool users are _everywhere_," Calvin said. Zuko merely looked confused. Zim said to the cultist, "Have you realized that your ability to speak gets incredibly sloppy when you're annoyed?" Girakkuka ignored both comments. Zim said, after thinking about some of the things that the cultist had said earlier, "This is why you fight? You perceive this technology as, what, weakness?"

The cultist simply said, "Nothing should think. All things should just _be_. Crafting is a sin against the natural order."

"Ah," Zim said. "Another foe who doesn't understand the basics of what he's even talking about or the nature of that which he supports. Such madness simplifies my observations considerably." He nodded at his companions. "Gentlemen? Smash them like ants under a boot. The boot of _Science! _Wait, that metaphor makes no sense. Oh well, just fight!"

Girakkuka roared defiantly, voicing his own challenge, and his warriors returned the favor; their insect mounts and allies swarmed, spitting and blasting and such; a blast of burning acid caught Zim on the shoulder and he rolled away only for the lead cultist to leap forward with impossible strength and knock him halfway across the area, through nearby vines and gaps in the wall-forming branches. Calvin started firing like a maniac, enthusiasm outmatching his aim but still doing pretty well; several insects disintegrated in oscillating beams of focused light, their riders crashing into the canopy ground only to roll to their feet and keep moving.

Other cultists just smashed through the mess, the obstacles created by Calvin's shooting presenting little barrier when they leaped with great strength, their riding insects swarming over them, or the massive plant-based exoskeletons they had been fused to strong enough to just smash through. Zuko waved Calvin down and fired a flaming lance from his flamethrower right at the heart of the attackers, and the cultist's resolve wavered in the face of a flamethrower amplified by Firebending. The flames spread, splashing onto the very inflammable canopy-ground, and even as Zuko modulated the flames so they didn't spread beyond where he wanted (a circular area right in the middle of the attacking cultists), they broke rank and ran for cover, a lot of them on fire. Given that most of them were either using vegetative weapons or _were _covered in such, their panic was understandable.

Regardless, a few of them stood their ground, still charging even as Calvin fired wildly at them (and it is a difficult thing running with lasers right at you) or Zuko and Zim using the ambient flames to power themselves and fire blasts and beams at their foes, cutting down a few with just-barely-nonlethal hits; they just came wading through even as they burned, screaming courageous defiance. The most fierce of them all was Girakkuka himself, throwing himself through the flames to crash into Zim and bring his swordstick smashing into the smaller Irken again and again with a strength that tilted and rocked the canopy-ground; purple blood splattering his swordstick's spiked surface.

Zim grinned with the joy of battle, even with the crazed cultist standing with both feet forcing Zim on the ground, and he drove an elbow into an unarmored knee, pale light glowing on his arm. Girakkuka buckled, just a little, and enough for Zim to smash a clenching fist burning with incendiary light into Girrakkuka's stomach, one forceful motion working through the thick tangled mess of his root-armor, and right into the toughened but still all-too-mortal flesh.

Fire launched, Zim's skin glowing hot for a second, and Girakkuka gasped, agonized, as light flared out from _inside _him, his armor burning away in a neat semi-circle on both his front and back, matching where Zim had struck. His stance wavered and Zim drove his hands into the ground with enough strength to rip himself out, drove back into a standing stance on one leg, and chambered that leg's muscular power to deliver a head-butt into Girrakkuka's face. This couldn't go on, Zim decided after having half a glimpse of seeing Zuko blazing away with a nearly-solid dome overhead to catch his foes attacks and Calvin climbing up a large growth to get a proper vantage point and shoot at everything that annoyed him while his pyromantic device on his arm splashed the ambient flames at strategically viable points. They were doing well, in the circumstances, but-

"THE LAW OF STRENGTH BE PREVAILED!" Girakkuka roared, interrupting Zim's thought. "FLESH TRIUMPHANT! WILL CONQUERS ALL!"

"SHUT UP! I WAS TRYING TO _THINK!_" Zim yelled, driving the fuel tank on his flamethrower into the cultist's stomach. Eyes wide, Girrakkuka retreated as Zim fiddled with the limiters on the nozzle before he let the power flow through him, and then what he fired from his flamethrower was not even something as simple as liquid fire but a controlled and contained inferno. It was so hot, it burned the air, making a forceful blast that knocked away the cultists and their insect allies on the spot when Zim's stream cut back to where he had been thrown, cutting a line of flame into the pernicious vegetation and lighting all it touched on fire; the cultists who had the presence of mind to do so fell back, and those that didn't were knocked back when Zuko and Calvin both drew in those flames with their own abilities and launched them like short-range artillery.

But there were still too many of them, and at least sixteen different insect-riders and eight hulking brutes in exoskeletal armor fell upon Zuko and pummeling him mercilessly, and even more did the same to Calvin and even _more _came barreling at Zim, a shrieking fanatical horde eager for blood and death.

Zim threw himself at them, headbutting the closest one and kicking him away, rebounding onto another and letting loose with his flamethrower, blasting down at least six in one go without killing them needlessly. His hand dived for a microfusion grenade and lifted it high. "About time we tried one properly," he muttered, moving the dial to 'Lethal' and triggering it and throwing it in a high overhead arc. Some of the cultists turned to watch it fly overhead and lodge in a cluster of weight-supporting vines above. Nothing happened.

"Hah!" One of them said. "What was that supposed to-"

The grenade exploded in a flash of superheated plasma, green energy flashing as the vines exploded everywhere in white-hot fragments, splattering onto the unfortunate cultists with painful results like so much lethal shrapnel.

"The grenades work," Calvin said faintly, plainly disturbed by the carnage.

"Spam them, then!" Zuko said, less charitable to his foes. He took an incendiary grenade off his bandolier and triggered it too, throwing it so that it landed on a cultist's head and rebounded, bouncing off other heads until it landed neatly and exploded in a sphere of fire, consuming at least three cultists. Many more were added when Zuko amplified that fire, expanding it out by dozens of feet, and then he contracted it into a thin concentrated line, turning it into a whip he manipulated by spinning and dancing through the cultists descending upon him, literally cutting through their ranks.

The battle intensified. Zim lobbed another grenade, and the cultists directly assaulting him scattered to avoid the explosion; they failed to make it out in time. In the heat of the resulting explosion, he reached in to pull out a fireball and shove it into the chest of a hulking brute clad in their crude vegetative power armor, suffusing raw flame into the whole of its substance. It flailed around as it burned from within, knocking away its allies in its horror and stomping ants and fellow cultist alike. It also caught Zim across the chest, and his very bones rattled as he went flying again, and he had a glimpse of Girrakkuka knocking down the burning hulk away (who's armor was gone, a pitiful wreck lacking limbs or even a good portion of his body, all of it consumed to sustain his armor) and barreling at Zim even as Zim smashed into the wall and slid down.

Zuko watched this happen with wide furious eyes. "All right, more field testing," He said. He maneuvered his flamethrower into its at rest position, the weapon clicking onto the fuel tank, and from his belt he unsheathed the two swords Calvin had made for him. The cultists stared at his choice of weaponry and laughed, one of them punching another in the shoulder as if to say 'get a load of this!'. This one stepped forward, lifting aloft a hammer-like projection extending from her forearm and swung up high.

As she brought it down, Zuko turned the one in his right hand on, tilted it blazing edge forward and swung, thinking vaguely that while he had practiced it on materials of varying resilience to get a handle on how it performed, he hadn't used it in actual combat yet.

The electrical field of the blade flashed blue amid the green. The attacking cultist screaming, clutching a cauterized stump while her hammer-attachment fell to the ground, still smoking. "No resistance of any sort," Zuko said. "It burns through flesh and bone like it was paper." He smirked. "Perfect."

Zuko powered up both blades and swung them as the cultist lunged at him in fury; first the weapon she'd picked up was sliced cleanly in half, and then the back of Zuko's blade hit the back of her head and knocked her down. Zim climbed on top of her considerable mass for higher ground and spun to intercept the incoming blows from four of her friends in a single movement; their blades and bare hands were sliced away or deflected as chance had it, and before Zuko's feet where even touching the ground again fire blossomed from the electrical arcs of his swords and blasted big messy holes right through them. Zuko landed, his feet kicking down on the head of a survivor, and jumped away to do the whole thing over again on someone else. He actually thought he was having fun, and went to go help Zim. "Swords work great!" He called to Calvin as he passed. Calvin, stuffing a live grenade down the throat of some fungal-horror, gave him a thumbs-up before he ran from the inevitable explosion.

Girrakkuka ignored the screams and the shouts as Zuko and Calvin began fighting in earnest; wild flares of magical force screamed out from him, resonating with the green growing life and bending them to his will. The ground under Zim, a huge mass of vines that spread for miles, moved from under him and rose up, more plants appearing with deadly purpose; brilliant flowers bloomed, spikey buds in their core, and internal fiber-muscles spasmed and launched poisoned spikes at Zim. He dodged them easily, bending halfway back until nearly in a handstand and springing backwards to avoid a second volley by a dozen other poisonous barb-spitting flowers, and the ground-vines rocked as the poison killed them, a good section of the ground, going limp and falling away. Girrakkuka moved nimbly over these new holes, commanding great flesh-eating pitcher-shaped plants to emerge from under Zim, and Zim leaped with even greater nimbleness away as he swung from the plants' attempts to scoop him up. Girrakkuka growled, and the vines came to life under Zim, rising up. Zim slipped, and was still falling when they wrapped him up completely and squeezed so tight his force field began bending.

Girrakkuka grinned, willing the vines to squeeze with all their might...and fell over as at least four of his compatriots were sent flying into him. He stood up in a hurry, annoyed by the interruption and then incensed by the sight of the laser holes in their arms and many burns. "Weak!" He said, and turned as Zuko and Calvin came charging through, screaming madly. Girrakkuka raised his hand, and gigantic pods blossomed up, great man-eating plants he rather favored. They opened, slimy maws extending thick tentacle-like vines in hopes of ensnaring prey. They swung and caught Calvin, who quite reasonably went into a berserk panic, and his rapid-fire lasers soon got him free and punched a few holes in the plant that had caught him (though it didn't appear to even notice).

Zuko was better at not being caught; he projected a blast with his flamethrower, and his Firebending talents ensured that when it hit the plant that had tried eating Calvin, it was incinerated in seconds, and so where the next two the fire blast hit in a twisting stream that he directed with willpower alone. Calvin dashed through the flames, firing enough lasers at Girrakkuka to keep the cultist dancing away, and his attempts to free Zim were halted when another man-eating plant appeared. Growling angrily, Calvin threw a grenade right into its open folds, consuming it in one go. When it was gone, Zim had disappeared, and Girrakkuka was gone too. Screaming in frustration, Calvin turned and cursed when he saw that the rest of the cultists had arrived on the scene, and there were so many of them they made the ground quake with their constant footfalls, and their collective noise was going to create a few headaches.

"Oh, come on!" Calvin complained.

"We can take them," Zuko said confidently. As the closest to them, Zuko seemed to be in the most danger as the many horrors surrounded him and fell in; he moved like a whirlwind, executing sword strikes as he whirled in mid-air in mid-bounce from one cultist to the another, almost seeming to breakdance between them and with every move making a single smooth swing with a sword. He kicked off one and went high, and exhaled streams of fire that neatly blasted them back, giving him plenty of ammunition to knock away and make some breathing space before he landed right into a uncontrolled mess of flames eating at a fallen vine and firebended them into coherent beams with incredible speed and power, blasting holes into the ground and limiting the cultist's movement before targeted the larger clusters of them, and it happened so quickly that the light and the noise shocked them into inaction, leaving them easy targets. And everything that could burn, the fire touched, and spread. By this point, the entire jungle was likely to have a massive firestorm cut through it soon.

"Where'd Zim go!?" Calvin said. "We need to find him and get our back-up in here like _now!_" He jumped back as a plant-hulk swung down at him and he climbed up its arms to stick his rifle into its mouth and fired, shoving himself at the brute as its massive arms caught a riding insect crushed its head in (not to mention smashing the cultist riding it). Calvin clambered up onto its shoulders as it started falling, using the vantage to blast his foes all over the battlescape again and again, their teeming masses completely covering almost the entire ground and a lot of the walls, and they meant little to him, his pyromantic device amplifying his laser blasts into explosive bursts that leveled their numbers advantage nicely. The hulk hit the ground, crushing more cultists underneath, and Calvin neatly ran off, shooting as he went, seeking cover from the arcane blasts the cultists fired at him or the poisonous spikes fired at him.

On the underside of the canopy, Girrakkuka was watching the battle and he was not pleased, and he was also quite confused how two fighters could have such a long fight, and the treasonous thought that perhaps technology _was _an acceptable form of power swelled in his mind, that their weaponry gave them sufficient might to compete with raw numbers. Musing upon it thoughtfully, he considered the mess of vines Zim was cocooned in and Girrakkuka had brought with him when he'd tunneled under the canopy-ground, and decided to kill this one enemy in his grasp. He moved to command the vines to crush the life from Zim...and halted, realizing that the plants were being pushed away from a massive force from within, like a telekinetic shell was swelling inside them, and a mighty glow of all colors shone through the gaps in the vines. It ebbed, it grew, and then a single titanic blast of coherent light trickling with flame blasted right through the vines and nearly into the cultist, a stay beam tearing the swordstick from his hands and imbedding it into a tree growth. "I was using that," Girrakkuka said absently, rubbing his aching tentacles.

Zim emerged from the smoking ruins of the plants, heat still glowing around his hands and shaking a little with the effort of that attack (and having no idea how he had done it)...and almost fell straight down, grabbing a stay remnant of vine and jerking a little as he hung on for dear life, noting to his dismay that he was standing many stories in the sky, with nothing but gigantic plants to catch him if he fell, and it would likely kill him. Mechanical spider-legs extended from his Pak and attached to the ground-canopy that was now technically above him, and before Girrakkuka could do much, Zim moved into one of the many holes ripping open in the canopy ground and jumped into it.

He hopped back on the ground, spider-legs folding back in, and blasted his way through the crowd until he found Zuko and Calvin back to back on top of an outgrowth from the big tree, blasting the horde trying to get at them, and losing ground. "Oh, hey, you're back," Calvin said, shooting in-between breaths. "Is it just me or are you guys tired of all these jerks too?"

"Indeed," Zim said. "Shoot up and cut a hole in the wall we blasted through!" He pointed, the small holes they had come through visible even in this area. "Give our own allies an opening!"

"No arguments here!" Zuko said as his flamethrower ran on empty, taking a canister of flamer fuel and injecting it through a fuel line while Calvin bought him time. "Calvin, think you can distract them?"

"Got it covered," Calvin said, swapping out his rifle's depleted energy cell for a fresh one. "Man, I gotta make my own gun, this is _fun!_" He let off another shot, hitting a cultist in front of Zuko and knocking that unfortunate into the path of his fellows, and then Calvin began firing with great precision at the cultists in precisely calculated shots, giving Zuko time to point his own flamethrower up, breathe deeply in...

And then a massive straight blast of augmented flame fired up from his flamethrower, so hot it actually scorched the metal, slicing up through the canopy and out the other side, burning right through. Zuko turned, awkwardly moving the burn in a full circle and slicing a crude hole. Zim joined him, and though his blast was smaller and his flamethrower was not harmed as much (for Zuko's was starting to _melt_) their combined blasts sliced cleanly through the thick layers of plant life. Soon, a flaming circle was cut into the canopy above, beams of sunlight piercing through the uneven gaps, and the teeming mass of cultists paused, very much unsure of what to do. Girrakkuka, at the back of his horde, stopped and stared, and was totally confused; they had rarely been attacked on their own territory before, forcing their mechanist foes into the defensive with little time for a direct assault; he had little experience in defending against a siege.

The newly cut section of the canopy, at least thicker than an entire skyscraper, budged. It sank inward, slightly. Girrakkuka roared furiously, realizing what had happened, and Zim suggested, "RUN!"

Zim, Calvin and Zuko ran for it, Zuko channeling the fire around them into a blast that knocked him (and Zim and Calvin, who he slammed  
into on purpose) well out of the way and to a far corner of the chamber just as that massive section of the canopy fell out and tumbled with deceptive slowness and unstoppable momentum, such that only a falling object of incredibly mass can get. In mid-air it fell apart into several slightly smaller but quite large bundles of still-smoking severed vines and branches and general plant matter, and then _that _smashed into the canopy-ground with a titanic rumble, dozens of the cultists fleeing through the wreckage, and many of them were too stunned to run and were crushed underneath it. The canopy-ground shook, wavered, sinking under the feet of those who were near the impact zone...

There was a great creak. And then, with satisfaction, that zone caved right in under the weight, and many of the cultists who hadn't been crushed were still too close and fell with it, either trapped under there or ensnared by falling vines or just in the wrong place. In the safe zone far from there, Zim saw that many-colored mess of plant-matter fall down, down, right into the descending slope of another mass of vines larger than a small town, and get dashed to pieces upon it. He had an internal wince at all the many, _many _tiny living forms crushed as well.

The cultists who remained (and there was still a lot of them, enough to cover every inch of canopy-ground with a few gaps here and there) flinched from sensory overload as sunlight flooded in through the new hole, and presumably shocked from the deaths of their comrades. The insects, many of them uncontrolled by riders, weren't so affected, and resumed trying to kill the three heroes. Zim and Zuko went back to blasting flames at them, to minor effect. "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR INSECTS TO GROW THAT BIG! WHY HAVEN'T THEIR EXOSKELETONS COLLAPSED IN THEMSELVES BY NOW!?" Zim screamed, as the insects fired volleys of biting little ticks from their biological-guns at him, acid sizzling from their bodies as they splattered into trees.

"I TOLD YOU! THE ENEMY DRAWS NEAR!" Calvin screamed, his laser-fire painting a bloody streak through the insect ranks.

"Calm down," Zuko said. "Our back-up is here!" And indeed, he had cause to smirk as he did, for that was when the first of their allies' aero drones, a narrow green-hued design with so many weapons it was basically just a mobile weapons platform, flew in through the hole they had cut into the outer canopy. In moments it was upon the enemy, the rapid-fire grenade delivery systems on its underside firing freely as it swooped overhead, the grenades flying on precise loops and pounding into the horde's mass before erupting in caustic flame that the vegetation easily caught, savagely tearing holes in the horde and killing dozens of them in one go, and was even easier for Zim, Zuko and Calvin to use with their own meta-abilities and devices respectively, effectively giving them on-the-spot artillery. The drone looped as the cultists counterattacked, flying into the opening in the floor to avoid the waves of magical force and hurtling projectiles the cultists could muster, looping out to fly close enough to Zim, Zuko and Calvin so they could hop into a offered passenger pod on top of it, and fly them out of what was rapidly becoming a kill-zone. The drone flew out to the top, out of harm's way, and eight more of those drone flew in, doing the exact same thing as the advance scout had...

The chamber erupted into brilliant flames, and scores of the cultists fell in them, their mad ambition coming undone before their eyes, the vegetation scoured by heat and flame and burning away from the scar-pitted metal they had grown over.

The explosions were magnificent.

The cultist's day, already bad, got worse. The light darkened as the massive orb-shaped craft flew in, opening and disgorging about a dozen infantry troopers, clad in mini-mecha powered armor loaded to the brim with weapons and descending on gravity-negating jump-packs, who crashed into the ground and promptly smashed into the charging cultists while the aero drones departed. Craft similar to theirs appeared in the hole though much larger, and fired about six or so mechanical spheres per carrier into the melee, bowling through the cultists before making a loud hissing noise as internal compartments disengaged, and the spheres unfolded and assembled into fairly large combat drones like the robot servitors Zim had seen in the plaza earlier, though these were much larger and heavily armed, glaring with faces that were mostly a large cycloptic eye capable of firing lasers which promptly lanced into the masses of their foes.

Infantry and mechs alike waded into battle, individually a match for even a score of the cultists but lacking their sheer numbers; even with Zim's support and promise of aid, they just didn't have the numbers for it. The odds were made even better as the aero drones took position in the big opening, serving as artillery and opening fire; behind them was the _Paragon,_ ready to open fire, and on either side of it were floating transport platforms hosting a platoon of hover-tanks that gladly gave even more artillery support.

The tanks opened fire, and the cultist either scattered or were splattered by it. The mechs urged the troopers back, fearing for their safety, and the mechanical warriors firing missiles into the cultist's and smashing down the remnants to clear out the lines of cultists before them, pushing them back and allowing the troopers to move in and open fire with on-board grenade launchers and Gatling lasers, cutting the cultists and their minions down. Artillery support smashed the rear ranks of the cultists, shockwaves keeping them in too much disarray to fight back properly, and the trooper-mech combo repeated their tactics, slicing through the cultists' greater numbers slowly but surely.

Zim, pleased how things were progressing, spoke into the radio in their little passenger pod and tried to ignore how cramped it was. "Exalted Hero to Paragon, clean up this mess now!"

"'Exalted Hero' as a call sign? Bit conceited of you, Boss," Morte said through the radio. The _Paragon _flew in close enough to let loose with a salvo of plasma that melted right through miles upon miles of trees that were so tightly packed they couldn't be squeezed through, and they caught _more _fire, and with a slow grace vast scores of the jungle were burned away or melted open for the rest of their fleet to fly in and join the battle.

Needless to say, the battle was over shortly afterwards.

It was just a matter of pacifying the insects and shackling up the cultists for interrogation or imprisonment, and trying to determine where their mysterious benefactor was. After they'd gotten things into order, Zim had Girrakkuka brought to him in a containment harness, the smoke of burned vegetation a lovely smell as they set up camp on top of the roof where the ground-canopy had covered, the aero-drones and heavy troopers busily burning down all excess vegetation as they reclaimed this city again (and the _Paragon _was helping with the burning, Morte rather enjoyed piloting the ship though Hobbes had...issues over the whole thing). Girrakkuka winced and shuddered with every bit of obliterated plant life, and Zim thought he was rather overreacting. Standing with Zuko and Calvin beside him, the mechs behind him as support if a fight somehow happened, Zim looked down at Girrakkuka and was pleased to see that the cultist was surprisingly ambivalent about losing this entire city and outpost to a surprise attack. "Your faction is no good at defensive action," Zim told him while the jungle burned. "You're quite good at offense, from the damage you've done; you just drop in, attack everything that moves and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. But when you have to fight like that, you, eh, don't do so well. A pity, that was actually getting fun."

"You fight well," Girrakkuka replied calmly. "A shame that you refused my offer. I fail to see why none of you would."

A passing mech, brighter than some of the other automatons, said, "It's because you guys _SUUUUCK!_"

"Yes, what he said," Zim said. "Now, business reckons. Where is Darvhog?"

The cultist's expression, warped though it was, took on a guarded look. "Who?"

Zim wasn't fooled. "The strange silly githyanki who has somehow increased your powers by what my new allies have told me, taught you arcane secrets, and gave you the means to increase your powers such that you pose a serious threat. I have pre-existing business with him."

Girrakkuka glared. "I will say nothing."

Zim wasn't much put out. "Eh, oh well, guess that's up to Plan B: burning down and destroying every last outpost, stronghold and domain of your wretched cult down to the last miniscule raiding party, and they are no more than a bad memory! By then, Darvhog will have be found, and your cause will be... heh." Zim snapped his fingers, and a nearby fire winked out with a faint haze of smoke that faded. "Burned away." He gestured towards the titanic flashes of light and flame illuminating this dark place all around them, consuming vast scores of the vile greenery with each flare and leaving only ash behind.

Girrakkuka flinched, hesitated to deny him again, and Zim thought he had the cultist in the right frame of mind to speak. "Well," Zim said. "You heard the man! Let's wrap up the cleaning, get these cultists a good prison-island or something, and get back into fleet position! We move out to burn the rest of that cult in-"

"Wait," Girrakkuka said, thinking furiously though it visibly pained him. He swallowed, a hint of treachery still hurting, but the matter seemed clear; either risk them defeating his benefactor, or let an all-out war of extermination totally wipe out his cause. Even if his cult won, it would be a hard victory, and it would take long to regrow from there. "Stop. I...I can tell you something."

"Oh?" Zim said. "Like what?"

"...I can tell you where the one who empowered us is being kept."

An odd turn of phrase, Zim thought. "Oh, that's good."

Girrakkuka narrowed his eyes. "First, though, you tell me something."

"Yes?"

"How has our enemy become so strong!?" He indicated the mechs, the drones and troopers burning away the plant-matter from a statue near the ground; the weapons they carried, the armor they wore, all of it vastly improved and different and far more efficient and destructive than what he remembered. "They were not nearly so powerful and..._advanced _when I last led the raids against them and claimed this city for our own."

"Simple," Zim said cheerfully. "Darvhog taught you how to make the best of your abilities, and some of his own? I did the same thing; I gave them better schematics for their weapons, provided more efficient energy-recycling methods, taught them improved metallurgical processes and far better methods of weapon-making, and some other things. It was science-stuff, you wouldn't be interested."

"...In so short a time?"

"I taught them a thing or two myself," Calvin said, grinning. "Mass manufacture is a lot easier when you use the world's energy to transmute materials into what you want."

Girrakkuka, of all things, seemed genuinely intrigued at that. "You can do _what?_" He said, astonished. "And it does the world no harm?"

"No more than a cup of seawater hurts the ocean."

Girrakkuka was silent, and thoughtful. "...I will think on this," he said after a moment. "...Darvhog and his group are being held on the first domain we made our own, in a relic-place of the old people." He spoke several coordinates.

A mech analyzed them, mapped them, and double-checked them in the blink of an eye. "Very good." To Zim, he said, "Command is sending a stealth drone to investigate these coordinates. We shall be glad to assist in finding your enemy, Exalted Hero!"

"Okay," Zim said, and motioned to move out. He glanced at Girrakkuka. "Curious that you were eager to help us so quickly."

Girrakkuka stared at him. "…I said that you have given me much to think about," he said calmly, and that was all.

Zim grunted. He looked away, and saw Girrakkuka's swordstick sticking out enticingly from a tree growth where it had been embedded earlier. Zim wrenched it out and cried, "Aha! A trophy for our trophy room!"

"We have a trophy room?" Calvin asked.

"We do now!"

* * *

After that was settled, and the captured cultists to be imprisoned on an island where hopefully they could be convinced to return to society and let go of their destructive agenda (and Girrakkuka seemed quite intrigued after what a trooper had mentioned about it, and Calvin thought this was a good sign for a maniacal nature-venerating psychopath to be suddenly fascinated by the scientific principles of alchemy), the _Paragon _was once more heading the small fleet, and reporting to the leaders of this world that the attack (which had been a test run of sorts) had been a roaring success, and plan where being made to repeat it on other outposts all over the world and win this war, and defeat the cultists with the technology Zim had given them (and they were extremely excited by the extraordinary possibilities such technology advances that had been given to them presented, and turn the engines of war towards more peaceful applications, as is the nature of scientific development). The drone was sent, and returned in less than a few hours, and Girrakkuka's story checked out; there was a pyramid of sorts, deep within that jungle, and Zim was eager to finish the job and deal with Darvhog, thus cleaning up his earlier mess.

Several other fleets set out to defeat the cultist's most powerful strongholds and break them in a single decisive swoop; with their strongest holdings broken and their benefactor defeated, it would either end this war or at least tilt things strongly in the mechanist's favor. The _Paragon _set out, another fleet in tow, towards their destination.

After several hours of flight, Zim was again waiting on the bridge and watching the cameras as the edge of a continent came into view, totally overgrown and infested with a rainforest environment, though it was quite unsuited for the climate (which was rather cold, really). He smirked at the fleet following after them this time; this one was so big it blotted out the sky overhead.

"So what are the chances the cultists here found out about the earlier attack and are gonna go on the defensive?" Morte said.

"Getting better all the time, I'd say," Hobbes remarked as the rainforest trembled and a large section of it assembled into a half-mile tall golem of plant-matter and elemental energy, roaring madly and ripping itself from the continent, streets and buildings scattering off it as it waded into the ocean and charged right at the _Paragon_, pulling back a fist larger than a city block.

The aero drones serving as an honor guard separated and flew into combat position, opening fire on the giant plant-colossus. It hardly even noticed the hits, but it was surprising enough to throw off its aim. The tank-carriers flew in, and the tanks opened fire, a full round of destructive artillery nailing the colossus right in the head hard enough to knock it off-balance. "Mega-scale response mecha-pilots to Exalted Hero, we have this one!" Called out a group of four massive ships each about the size of the colossus' chest, squarish and oddly contoured and garishly colored. They were so individually expensive and valuable that they were never used save in the most dire times or greatest military need, such as now.

The ships said, "We'll rip this thing down, you continue your mission!" With that, the four ship transformed, disassembling and then combining with each other, and then what crashed into the ground was a vaguely humanoid mechanical hero-monster a little smaller than the plant-golem but likely a bit stronger. "Defense Beast, Armor Up! Heavy Assault Angel, Weapons On! Mobility Gremlins, Activated! Coordination Network, Online! Flight-Tech Monster, Integrated! Combination, ACHIEVED! WE ARE SYNCHRONIZED RESPONSE COLOSSUS, GO-GO!"

The giant robot crashed into the plant-golem, and the _Paragon _flew by, giving the plant-golem a few passing blasts for good luck. "You'd think they wouldn't do a combining sequence when you could just pummel the damn thing," Zuko said, glancing at the dueling colossi on the screen.

"And miss the opportunity to be a proper sentai team!?" Calvin said, horrified. "You speak madness!"

"What's a sentai?" Zim said blankly.

The _Paragon _flew on...and experienced surprisingly little resistance as they went on. No more plant-golems appeared, the rainforest was deceptively quiet underneath them, and while there were a _lot _of flying cultists, cultists riding giant flying monsters, giant flying cultists, and tiny monsters riding on giant flying cultists, they were easily dealt with. Zim found it rather disappointing; this was clearly the enemy's greatest stronghold, why was the opposition so weak?

"I suspect they may have spread themselves a bit too thin," Zuko observed as a warband a thousand strong readied a catapult at their ship and where immediately obliterated by support artillery. "They've focused on violent expansion and now they can't even protect their own holdings."

"LAME!" Zim complained.

"You sure you don't want to go instead of me?" Calvin asked Hobbes.

"Yeah," Hobbes said dismissively.

"But you haven't even tried out your new tech like we have!"

"I'm _sure _I'll survive without field testing for a while. Besides, I'd rather explore the jungle, not help destroy it."

"Okay, if you're sure…"

In short order the land began to rise, reaching small hills under the overgrowth, and a pyramid-shaped mess was just barely visible in all the green. "Launch us there, and be prepared!" Zim commanded.

"Have fun," Hobbes said as Morte hit the launching button.

Again, three glowing bullet-shaped forms were fired from the _Paragon_. A good many number of people who were not cultists but lived under their rule watched curiously from the tree tops as the green blasts lanced across the sky, clearing a prison perimeter and smashing into a particularly large tree that served as watchtower. There were more actively malevolent forces on watch, and they sent out the alarms.

Drums beat like a massive heart in Zim's head, and he wondered what the noise was as he crawled out from the remnants of tree all around him. "I am so sick of plants already," he said.

"I miss proper tropics," Zuko said sadly, shaking off large fragments of the tree.

"And I suffer nothing at all!" Calvin said cheerfully. A crystal ball landed out of nowhere on him. "Ow."

Zim kicked it away. It floated up, staring silently at him; it was about the size of a basketball, intricately faceted, glowing with arcane light and one particularly large rune seemed to be staring at them like an eye... or a scrying spell. "Is it me," Zim said. "Or does that thing look like a disco ball?"

"Guess so," Calvin said, rubbing his head as he sat up. "Looks like we're in the right place."

The rainforest rippled around them. On cue, a warband of cultists outnumbering them twenty-to-one surrounded them on all sides, pointing all manner of gross biological weaponry at them. "Surrender and die!" they roared.

"Don't you mean, surrender _or _die?" Zuko asked.

"No," One of them said patiently. To his surprise, Zim realized that most of this warband were made of some vaguely familiar looking humans. "Surrender is the coward's way out. To be cowardly is to die a messy squishy death. Therefore, surrender to us and you will die."

"And if we fight?"

"Oh, you'll die anyway, but it'll be honorable!" The cultists looked excited. "Now battle!"

Zim and Zuko prepared to fight, but Calvin said, "Wait! I don't suppose you heard about what happened to Girrakkuka, did you?"

The cultists paused. "...His outpost was attacked and he was defeated, I hear," One of them said, but uncertainly. Others looked suspicious, suspecting trickery.

"I heard the sea came to life and ate his feet off!" One said.

"_I _heard the mechanist's robots came to life, overthrew their makers, and pledged allegiance to Girrakkuka, so he killed the robots anyway because robots are evil," said another. "So the robot's ghost ate his tentacles as vengeance!"

"_I _heard a rumor that aliens joined the mechanists, allied with them because it seemed like a good idea and led an assault on Girrakkuka's outpost to see if they could pull it off!" A small cultist chirped. The others stared at her. She shrugged. "Sorry, it's dumb, I know, forget I said anything."

"Information travels fast here," Zuko muttered. "How does that happen with people who don't have any apparent messaging service?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Zim said.

"Hmm, good to know," Calvin said. "You know about the attack but nothing in particular. In that case..." He made a pose. "We come to bear homage and good news to the great Darvhog!"

Zim looked at Calvin, gaping; this approach had honestly not occurred to him. Zuko shrugged and decided to go with it. The cultists frowned. "We heard no tell of such a thing."

"Of course not. We only just escaped from the machinists. You know, our news is so good that they couldn't bear the thought of us having it, so they tried to take it all for themselves."

"Oh? Then what _is _the news?"

"I can't tell you if you're not Darvhog; the news is so good it would make your _head explode _from its goodness!"

The cultists gasped. "But I like my head!" One of them gasped.

"I keep my brains in there!" Another cried.

"Actually I've always wondered if head-ventilation would help me think faster," another said thoughtfully. Someone slapped him. "Ow, sorry!"

"Direct us to Darvhog, and free yourselves from the threat of the good-head-exploding news!" Calvin commanded.

"That-a-way," A cultist said, pointing to a path that appeared to be made of a lot of small hoverbikes crushed together into a solid shape. "Just follow the path to the big pointy triangle thing, listen for the funky music and don't let the giant man-eating plants...uh, eat you. I guess?"

"Okay," Calvin said, and he, Zim and Zuko left.

"I cannot believe that actually worked," Zim said, as they started along the path.

They heard a coughing noise behind them. They turned around and the cultist warband was standing there. "None of that makes any sense, in retrospect!" One cried.

"You're carrying filthy technological weapons!" Another shouted. "How did we miss that?!"

"KILL THEM ALL!"

The warband charged...and then a passing aero drone fired a laser and cut through a nearby tree of incredible size, toppling it and several others on the warband, crushing them. A few of the survivors whined, loudly. "That was convenient," Zim said.

"You're welcome!" The drone said, and flew away. Zim and his two teammates walked down the path, vaguely aware of fire blasting in the distance behind them, and the death cries of the plant-golem as it was defeated upon the sea, and the great cry of warfare going on while more warbands tried to engage Zim in their own plant-based war machines but where interrupted by the _Paragon _blasting them to tiny bits, and the mechanist's fleet moved towards the giant tree in the middle of the city that served as the cultist's capital and merrily began capturing the cultists, burning everything to the ground (or in the case of the giant combining robot fresh from its victory over the plant-golem, stomping everything flat) and a good time was generally had by all. Except the cultists, obviously.

But that wasn't a concern to Zim, Zuko and Calvin, now nearly a surprisingly open area that looked like it had recently been under a good deal of supervision; a large clearing free of excess plant life, the most dominant feature a large ziggurat-style pyramid of the curving shapes that this world's people seemed to favor (and rounded shapes were odd to see on a pyramid too, but Zim though it looked neat), and the mark of the Funk Revolution Pirates was spray-painted on the sides of just about everything, but not with a lot of enthusiasm. And then, there was the funk music, the incredibly loud and obnoxious funk music, which still couldn't drown out the sound of drums beating.

"Where is that drumming coming from?" Zim complained.

"I don't know," Zuko said, cutting down the man-eating plant they'd been warned about. "It doesn't sound right..."

"My toes hurt!" Calvin whined.

They entered into the area and, briefly noting the merits of just blasting everything until it was rubble, concluded that it lacked style and started walking up the steps of the pyramid. A disco ball sentry hovered overhead, looking right at them.

At first, there was silence. (Apart from the funk music, anyway. And the wind blowing noisily. And screams of battle, and the explosions, and the open warfare going on about less than a mile away and edging towards victory. And the small tinker toys on the ground singing old pop music records...scratch that, the place was darn noisy. It was very inappropriate for a reunion battle.)

Then, and Zim observed that the ground had several small refreshments that looked like it had all been dumped in a recent hurry, the funk music began to change. It became louder, more annoying, funkier, and then so loud it made the ancient stone rumble, and a few disco balls floated up out of the entrance of the pyramid, shining brightly and pulsing in tune with the music.

Lights shimmered, lasers flashed, and psychokinetic lights flashed around in a pretty nice spectacle. "GUESS WHO'S BAAACK!" a voice cried from within the dark entrance to the temple...which had a pretty funky look for an ancient temple, as if recently redecorated.

"I just said that," Zim said, piqued.

The music got louder as two massive figures exited through it, soon recognizable as Jord and Gunter, both giants bearing boom boxes larger than most average sized men with little trouble and tapping their toes to the music. Several paces they strided until they were about six feet away from Zim and his two friends. They winked, grinned and then they turned at attention towards the entrance of the pyramid. There was the clicking of overly large platform heels pounded as a tall and lean figure walked backwards to behind his apparent honor guard, and came to a stop in front of the astonished audience. "OOOH YEAH, DISCO DARVHOG IS _BACK_, BABIES!" Darvhog crowed, a thick board game in his arms for some reason, disco-dancing the whole way over to them and posing. "I GOT THE FEVER, FOR A REMATCH! YOU CAN'T KEEP DOWN THE FUNK, KITTIES AND BOYS! BRING IT!"

He stopped. "Hey," Zim said.

"You suck at this," Calvin said.

"Didn't we leave you to drift in the Astral Plane?" Zuko asked.

Darvhog held his pose. He slumped and sat down hard on the floor, pouting mightily, seriously put out. "Wasn't that a good entrance?" He asked Jord meekly. "I thought we rehearsed this! I thought, geez, I spent like five hours in a BOOKS LIBRARY looking up dramatic acting!" He dropped the board game in his arms and wailed into his hands. "Man, I blew it! AGAIN! MY LIFE IS MISERY, DUDES!"

"Relax, boss, I think they're just confused or something," Gunter said quickly. "Probably because the last time they saw us they'd pushed us out of a cage and left us floating in space."

"No, you just suck," Calvin said cheerfully. Darvhog cried even harder.

"Seriously, what are you doing here?!" Zim said. "Astral Plane. A big cage! We left you to drift! HOW DID YOU END UP HERE!?"

Darvhog stopped and sat up, shrugging. "I got no clue, man. We were just like, floating, and we went on floating. Right into a portal!" Zim stared. "It's the Astral Plane. There are portals. As in 'Portals of the Astral Plane'. Bit of a design feature! How did _you _now think that would happen?"

"...I didn't know it worked like that!" Zim protested. He frowned. "...And why didn't Morte say anything...?" He shook his head. "Bah, whatever! I shall atone for my error in leaving you to fall upon this world! You shall answer for your crimes, and by that, I mean I'm gonna beat you up a lot and give you over to the authorities so you'll be _their _problem, not mine!" Zim laughed maniacally.

Darvhog perked up. "Now _there's _an evil laugh!"

"Boss, he's talking about taking you to the guys we're fighting," Jord said. "Like, that's not good!"

"...Oh," Darvhog said. Zim noticed, now that he wasn't moving around so much, that Darvhog had a game board firmly tucked into his arm.

"And hey!" Jord added. "Where's that cute fluff-muffin you guys had with you last time?! I wanted to cuddle him and squeeze him and take him home and make him my boy-wife! YOU ARE INTERFERING IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, that ain't cool! Yo."

(On the Paragon, Hobbes suddenly shivered. "I just feel as though a terrifying fate has been cast for me and I should fight it with all my heart and soul," he said.

"Maybe a crazy villainess just decided she's gonna claim you as her personal property," Morte said.

Hobbes stared. "That's a bad thing?"

"...Can't see why it would be!" They both high-fived.)

Calvin blanched at Jord. "Stay away from my brother, you crazy giant-thing!" He shouted, running at her.

She stuck her foot out and tripped him, and grabbed him in mid-air by the leg. "Hey," She said in a lower, sultry voice, batting her eyes. "I didn't see ya too good before, but you're pretty adorbs yourself, kid. Give you five years or so to grow up nice and cute, I got myself a nice little harem! Yum-yum."

Calvin blinked. "Wait. What?"

"Jordy, we've talked about this!" Darvhog said sternly. "No kidnapping kid heroes because you think they're cute and might grow up into pretty boys you can have your way with forever and ever! They're some legal problems there on a few worlds and people tend to frown on lack of consent, even in our line of work."

"Aw," Jord whined. Calvin wriggled his way out and ran away, hiding behind Zuko and staring suspiciously at Jord. "Ah, isn't that cute? He's playing hard to get! And the fire-dude's a total cutie too...wait, _wow, _I totally did not realize just _how _cute! That settles it, I shall take the whole crew and they shall be my love-squishies!"

"...I don't believe I've ever had anyone say that to me before," Zim observed. Zuko paled, and said, "I already _have _a girlfriend, you fiend!"

"I'm a frost giant, not a fiend," Jord said.

"No one cares," Zim said. Jord pouted. "Now, I suppose we resume the fight from when last we clashed?"

"Aw, do we have to?" Darvhog whined. "I'm just, I dunno, not really _feeling _it."

Zim blinked. "Say what?"

Darvhog shook his head. "I just, I dunno. Coming to this planet was a bad move. These cultist yahoos were bad news the whole way through. Good for nuthin' punks!"

Zim was even more confused. "What?! I thought you were working for these fiends! And happy to teach them power and the means of destroying the machine-using folk of this world."

Darvhog shook his head. "Yeah, that's what I _thought_." He scowled, crossing his arms. "Freaking loonies. I show up and think, hey look at these guys, they're fighting the dudes all around this place for fun. They love nature and magic, so I'm like 'hey lets' do a team-up'! So I show them some moves, teach them how to really use the power they have on them, show them how to do it better and longer, the secret lore of green growing life and the splendid potential in even a leaf or the weakest bug...and then they go and start _killing _their own! And eating them! And, urgh, _other _things."

"...You've identified yourself as being evil. You object this this why?"

Darvhog looked appalled. "Killing people for no reason!? What's the point in that!? It's tacky! It's dumb! It's...ugh, it's too much for me. They got mad when I objected to the whole baby-barbeque thing, so they stuck me here so I could give them more power from this thing they found." He indicated the mysterious board game. "Bad mojo, that is. Heh."

"I could have told you it's stupid to ally yourself with vicious psychopaths," Zuko said.

Jord rolled her eyes. "Now he tells us!" Gunter raised his hands to his fist and tenderly chewed on his thumb, looking worried. Jord patted him on the shoulder, looking concerned. Zim took that as a reason to assume that they didn't particularly want to be here and asked, "I presume that you have no wish to be here-"

"Got it in one," Darvhog said, putting his hands in his face and pouting heavily. On his hip, Moofy the talking alien sword chuckled darkly. "Oh shut up, this whole team-up was your idea, Moofy, now look where it's got us. Under house arrest!"

"If that's the case," Zim said. "Why don't you just leave?"

Darvhog looked at him, aghast. "...Do you really think we would still be here if we could?! These cultist whackjobs are like _swarming _all over this place, the entire rainforest obeys their commands and would squash me flat if I broke orders and ran, and that's saying nothing of the guard animals they have all over. Wonder where they are..." A loud blast in the distant, and a rather squishy organic thud (as if of grenades blowing up large animals) responded. There was a fairly messy shower of light, and gore. "Ah. That answers that question. My point is, we don't have any _way _of actually getting off this island, crossing the ocean, and these morons don't have any ships we could steal and jump back into the Astral. Believe me, I checked. And I don't know any dimension-hopping spells or anything like that." He slumped back, looking depressed. "We're hosed."

"Yes," Zim said, totally unsympathetic. "Yes you are. And how I laugh!" He did so.

"Now you're just being mean!"

"You brought it on yourself. Now where is that thing we've heard tell of? Some sort of evil artifact that made the cultists go mad in the first place?"

Darvhog looked shifty. He indicated the board game he was carrying, and carefully put it on the ground. "That's the one," he said. "Fascinating little thing; the cultists here had me study it and give them greater access to its powers, aside from what I taught them. I've done a good job on that, so that's pretty much the only reason they haven't killed me yet, aside from maybe not being _total _jerks."

Zim ignored Darvhog as he started droning on and on about things that he had no patience for, like 'dimensional-warping sympathetic resonance' and 'extraplaner demi-plane, not distinct from The Beastlands but without the Good ickiness' and 'apotheosis of all jungles, warping intent and tricking people into playing the game so it claim more worlds for itself and expand one bit at a time', and while the talking went on, he studied the board game, Calvin and Zuko taking an interest in it as well. Zim delicately ran a finger along the ancient carved wood of its surface, feeling the deep groves of animals along the edges of the game's cover, the word 'JUMANJI' written in inexplicable English on the front. Seductively, entrancingly, the drums beat in his head, rumbling with faster beats between the heavier poundings...

He had a sharp compulsion to flip the board game open, and did so. Inside the open halves was a set of game pieces (stone carved into the shapes of African animals) and a set of rules. Zim paid little attention to them, noting that it ominously stated that 'once started a game cannot be abandoned' and such things about would-be players best beware the consequences.

The drums stopped. Zim had a nasty suspicion that the drum beats were the game's way of luring people in.

"Whoa, what the stuff!?" Gunter yelped, taking his thumb out of his mouth and grabbing Zim by the rear collar of his body armor, yanking him back before he could touch any of the game pieces. "Are you crazy, man...boy...alien...little green halfling fellow!? _Don't start a game!_"

"Why not?" Zim asked, having no intention of doing any such thing but curious why Darvhog was suddenly backing away in horror and Moofy yelping in fear, and Jord...scratching her butt and not paying the slightest bit of attention to events. Calvin gave a mistrustful at Darvhog, the githyanki suddenly clamping right up with eyes wide and lips tight. Calvin levered his laser rifle at him, the heat sinks flaring off excess mechanically-made heat, and then he regarded Jumanji board game again. Calvin wondered aloud, "Why's it in Low Gothic?"

Zuko raised up his flamethrower, aiming it at the Jumanji board game. "...I was going to say 'why is it in English'. Weird; you have a different name for that language?"

"...That's a good question. We should probably ask Morte how that works," Calvin said. Zim poked the board game, smirking when Darvhog sputtered furiously. The gith marched up and snarled, "Don't. Mess. With. That! Do you _want _it unleashing everything it can on us?!"

"Why are you so frightened of it?" Zim said.

Darvhog growled. "I'm not frightened, I just don't want you messing around with it," he said. "It's a magical board game that's, like, a desire-twisting link to an sub-dimension collectively known as the Bloom of Jumanji, Pod of the All-Hungering Blossom. Picture the biggest jungle you can. Individual trees bigger then cities, sprawling root mats larger than continents, a swarming screaming horrorshow bigger than _worlds_, just full of screaming and killing and every single nasty thing that anyone ever thought is in the jungle. Monsoons crashing down out of nowhere and earthquakes ripping the whole place up. Man-eating apes, people-munching plants, monsters worse than anything you've seen these loonies throw at ya...it's got them all, and worse." His words became low and slightly crazed, a fascinated whisper. "It _thinks_. It knows. It wants to be here. It wants to be _everything_."

He looked at the board game and took a single measured step back. "It wants to eat everything, and make them a part of it." He chuckled lowly and said, "I admire it's purity. Free of remorse, no real thought but volition and hunger. It's...clean."

"You sound like one of those cultists," Zim said disdainfully.

"Perhaps they have a point." Darvhog indicated the board game. "Don't pick up, move, or so much as poke the game pieces. You don't want to start a game session. Trust me."

Zim stared at the board, listening and weighting Darvhog's words carefully. He observed the intricate and beautiful, a winding marker path arranged in a delicate and mystical pattern around a large jewel in the very center; perfectly round and black, like a great eye lost in slumber, but so very ready to awaken at the first sign of prey. (And wordless and clearly, Zim heard something whisper to him of the ones who had made this thing, people who had thought too deeply of the same source as this board game's true power, who had been beguiled and then enslaved by it; they had been bidden to craft it, the weight of history demanding that this horror must _be,_ and then they had been consumed by it. The thoughts whispered to Zim how _evil _this thing was.) And Zim thought, _this thing shall burn_.

Zim said, quietly, "Zuko."

Zuko straightened, looking at his friend. A leaf from a tree fell on his shoulder, and upon touching Zuko burst into flames and fell to still-smoldering ashes. "Yes?"

Zim stood up, staring at the board game with a twisted grin. "What is it they say in your country? About the last resort for something so terrible it simply must die."

Zuko's lips tightened, a fierce looking coming over him. He lifted his flamethrower. "'Fire cures all diseases'," he said, and exhaled a fierce burst of fire. Zim thought, in the rustling of leaves and vines and other such things, that the jungle itself recoiled from the holy flames.

"Whoa, dude, don't...just don't, watch where you're pointing the flamey bits!" Jord said, taking a few steps back.

"Hey, watch it," Darvhog said warningly. "Don't go frying my buddies! Or my stuff for that matter, I have plans for this board game!"

"Oh?" Zim said.

"Yep! First I'm gonna find a way off this rock, then I shall attune myself to it through a series of rituals that will synchronize me with its essence, sort of making me it's brain, then I'll be able to freely summon its power! I've already done some of that, just not where I'm fully in control or synched with it, and I can't really do much aside from pull out back-up or infuse its essence into my cultist employers, or-"

"Silence," Zim said. "I get the idea, but would destroying the board game harm you in any fashion?"

"What? Oh, no, definitely not. I'm not synched to the point where hurting one effects the other."

"Good," Zim said. "Zuko? ROAST IT!"

The frost giants grabbed Darvhog and leaped for cover, ignoring their boss' cry of protest, and the twin flamethrowers of Zim and Zuko washed right over the Jumanji board game, the evil thing right in the splash zone of their flames, glowing all the hotter and brighter when Zim and Zuko channeled their respective pyromantic abilities into augmenting the flames, and it turned almost white-hot when Calvin did the same with his own magitech device. It held for a second, and lanced up into the sky in a narrow pillar of white-yellow light, burning so intensely that it blasting a hole right through the dense canopy overhead where trees had grown together, melting the stone underneath-

A pulse of incredible and primal power washed out from the board game, warping the space around it; for a moment everything seemed perfectly still, a set of probabilities leaning towards a single outcome (the board game being burned to destruction) and then that pulse rearranged them to another, and in that moment the flames were snuffed out, the heat was blasted back at them, and their flamethrowers and laser rifle were blasted right off them into blasted piles of slag about a dozen feet behind them. The pulse glowed around Calvin's magitech device, and while the magic glowed fiercely in its desire to destroy this thing of artifice and wonder, it's innate power proved enough to at least survive the assault, though scarred and sparking and leaking fuel lines from internal components

Zim hit the ground and bounced, thrown back. Behind him, there were two muted explosions where the flamethrower's fuel caught fire. He adjusted himself in precisely three split-second movement to dodge the shrapnel without looking or even thinking about it. Zuko put the fires out with a single sweep of his hand while Jord and Gunter shuddered and Darvhog stared in naked hunger at the totally unharmed Jumanji board. And Calvin screamed in horror, frantically patting his wounded device, pulling out an emergency spool of binding fabric onto his device to close the marks in it until he could repair it on his on-ship laboratory. "No no no," he whispered. "Oh shit oh shit, please please _please _don't be broken, I'm sorry, please be okay, it'll be fine, I can fix you, there's nothing wrong with you I can't fix-"

Zim thought he heard a faint mechanical whimper from the magitech device Calvin was fussing over.

"Oh quite belly-aching," Darvhog said, completely unsympathetic. "It's just a stupid machine. Buy another one if you got such a hang-up over it."

Calvin whirled around, expression frozen into insane rage. "I BUILT IT WITH MY OWN HANDS, YOU ARTIFICE-FORSAKEN LUDDITE! I WILL DESTROY YOU!" Zuko had to grab him and hold him back until Calvin started freaking out over his poor wounded device.

Zim swallowed, finding it hard to look at Calvin in his distress, and glared at the board game. "Very well," he breathed, slipping off the remnants of his flamethrower harness. "So this is how you want to play things, eh?! I shall show you some _true _power, eldritch thing."

He stuck out his hand and, in a flash of light and swirling forms, the Keyblade materialized in his hand, glowing and burning with elemental light. ("Oooh!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord said. Moofy said, "_Oh_ my!") Sharp fields of solidified light glints on the Keyblade's edge (or at least the portion Zim typically used when he hit things with it), the actual surface blackening like old iron in random cracks and sharpened lumps rising out, and glowing red swirls wrote out pictograms of rage and promises of retribution on the Keyblade's surface.

"What are you doing?" Zuko asked warningly as Zim pointed the Keyblade at the Jumanji board game, faint shapes moving in the eye-like jewel in the center of it.

"The Keyblade can unlock things, like Kimblee's Philosopher Stone and such," Zim replied. ("The Key-what now?" Darvhog said. "What about a stone? Man, I am _so _out of it! Some nemesis _you _are.") "I intend to see if it can 'lock' them as well; seal away this things power, or at least access it and turn it back upon itself."

"Can you even do that?"

"Zuko, trying is the point of that thing! That's what the scientific method is all about! I must see if my hypothesis bears out!"

"BREAK IT TO LITTLE BITS!" Calvin raged. "MAKE IT SUFFER! CRACK THAT STUPID EYE THING AND THEN HURL IT INTO THE SUN! Hush hush, my little fire-starting device of perfect doom, we'll make the evil game pay and then I'll fix you up good and new...maybe I'll even upgrade you and make you better! Would you like that, huh? I bet you do!"

Translucent spheres of light, half-shaped into something almost like recognizable forms, gathered at the tip of the Keyblade, suffusing into Zim and engulfing himself and those around him. "Whoa, hey, wait, what are you doing?" Darvhog said. "Don't break it, I need it for... stuff. Yeah! I have a whole epic thing planned, I just-"

"Blah blah blah," Zim said. "BORED NOW."

The Keyblade fired a beam of light right into the heart of the eye-jewel on the Jumanji board game; it connected with a spectacular flare, red and yellow light spiraling all around from the glow now radiating from the board game, a fierce and alien power rising from it in competition with the Keyblade's own and Zim's will; Zim sneered, pushing more power into it, again and again, the light blasting up and around, and he could feel a connection appearing, and the sense of _other-_ness emanating from the board game, a connection pushing against him and wrestling with the Keyblade attempting to induce a seal upon it, locking away its power within the board game.

Zim felt, somehow, even though they weren't wielding the Keyblade themselves, the wills of Zuko and Calvin there with him, pushing and pressing against the incredible pressure of that _other _coming from the core of the Jumanji board game, invisibly fighting alongside him, and he didn't know how they were doing it or if they were even aware of it, if it was just their hopes and determination being psychically relayed to him and given further ammunition, but he welcomed it all the same-

A subtle shift. A passive twist in the forces moving against him. The savage force behind Jumanji switched tactics, ceasing attempts to deny Zim direct access to itself and simply gave him what he wanted...and pulled him the rest of the way through.

The light flashed, almost alarmed and panicked, and Zim said, "What-" and then a tremendous pressure built up around him, the jewel-eye suddenly transformed into a swirling portal into _somewhere _else, color and movement draining away inside that moving orb of passive ravenousness, and surprisingly letters appeared in front of them, spelling out words, and they read, "THOSE WHO CARRY TORCHES HAD BEST BEWARE; GOING INTO THE JUNGLE CAN BE QUITE A SCARE."

"That's a terrible rhyme," Calvin said, and then the portal within Jumanji violently expanded outwards, catching Zim and Zuko and Calvin, ensnaring them and drawing them in a colorful screaming whirlwind-

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

Darvhog peeked, having hidden behind Jord and Gunter.

Zim, Calvin, and Zuko were gone, with nothing left to show they had been there except for the smoldering bits of flamethrower and some parts broken off the pyromantic device Calvin owned. The Jumanji board game sat in place, looking unaccountably smug.

"Ew," Darvhog said. "...To be fair, I totally warned them!"

"I don't remember you saying anything about the board game possibly eating them," Gunter said. Moofy added, "Indeed!"

"Guys, come on. It's an evil magic board game that summons jungle hazards; if you're not expecting it to try and eat you at some point, you're doing it wrong!" Darvhog said, rolling his eyes.

"Of _course,_" Moofy said sarcastically.

Further discussion on the situation was forestalled by the board game suddenly being nudged all by itself, jerking this way and that. It stopped, slightly tilted to the left, none of its game pieces knocked onto the board (and thus beginning a game)...but red energy, as red and bloody as retribution given a color, cracked out in bits and streams, chips of wood flung away with such speed that they imbedded themselves at least a few inches into the pyramid stone. Darvhog blinked when Jord caught one that was about to drive itself into his right eye, and it burst into flames from having its velocity so suddenly arrested, shattering into pieces from the force.

The board game rattled and shook, white-blue light streaming out where the red wasn't so concentrated, the cracks growing bigger and breaking the playing field, radiating outwards from the suddenly shaking jewel-eye in chaotic patterns, nearly breaking the game into several pieces.

The board game rattled and shook more violently still, ghostly flames swelling from the cracks by the moment, and they left blackened traces where they were; the carvings shifted, melting into the wood and then simply gone, the entire board game melting in starts and bits. The hinges hooking together the upper halves broke away, steaming up into molten slag as the flames swept over, in shapes like gear-teeth turning each other. one by one, the game pieces shuddered and cracked and suddenly fell apart in ignominious bursts one after the other, fading into dust that was swiftly scattered by the board games frenzied movements that were so erratic and pained that it was if something was inside it and busting out.

Now, the cracks around the eye-jewel were so many, and so bright, that the eye-jewel rested onto a doorway to a sun-scorched sky or the red dust of a burned world, though this was hardly noticeable for a moment; the entire board game creaked to the left, just once, and from the eye-jewel came more words, jagged and faint and looking as though they'd been penned by a handmade imprecise with abject panic, and they said 'IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED'.

And then the Jumanji board game exploded in a blast of purified white-hot light right from the eye-jewel. Wooden splinters and smoking chunks dropped onto the ground in a brief shower. The eye-jewel itself hit the ground on its edge and spun dizzily in place before eventually tipping onto its side and falling on the ground with a faint and final _'click_'.

(And unknown to them, all around the world, the cultist's battle rage subsided and their strength left that as they were about to deliver killing blows, the furious power that had enabled to crush metal with their bare hands suddenly gone as they shrank slightly, the most extreme of their mutations rudely reversing themselves. Spells born of the wild magic of Jumanji fizzled, failed to fire or ceased to work, leaving the cultists trapped in now-dead plant-hulks or horrified to feel their self-imposed improvements reverting to their natural state. Plant-golems collapsed into their component materials, scores of summoned beasts and plants collapsed into threads of essence-light or simply vanished. Caught in pitched battle all over the world where the fleets had been inspired by Zim's success, the cultists kept fighting to the bitter end as their code of honor demanded or surrendered in selfish denial of that very code, cowardice reinforcing itself at this dire time where the power that had made them so mighty and capable of destroying the very brothers and sisters they had betrayed suddenly left them weak and helpless. Wherever the power of Jumanji had improved them or directly appeared on the battlefield, it either died or left them, but the actual effects of that power, and the magically-created jungles, remained intact, beautiful and wondrous for all their depraved origins.)

The light lingered, hanging in the air as if it were a free-standing portal, and then Zim, Zuko and Calvin fell out of it and crashed onto the ground, looking severely haggard but pleased with themselves; their armor was cracked and broken and halfway destroyed in places to be crudely repaired with bits of transmuted rock and vine wrappings, as was Calvin's device. Zim took one look at the rainforest around them and let out a small girlish shriek, catching himself and pretending that he hadn't done that.

"AT LAST!" Zuko yelled. "FREEDOM!" He fell onto the ground, hugging it.

"HATE JUNGLE!" Zim squealed. "HATE IT ALL! BURN IT DOWN!"

"At last!" Calvin cried. "FREEDOM! VENGEANCE! And..." He looked around, noticing that nothing had changed around him. "And that war is _still _going on? They haven't even gotten over here yet?! LAME!"

Darvhog looked at them, at the ruins of Jumanji, and then at the rainforest about them all. Nothing about it seemed particularly changed. "Huh. You'd think that with the game destroyed, everything it made would be gone now."

"There IS such a thing as ontological inertia," Calvin said disapprovingly. "And why are you still here?!"

"Say what?"

"We were stuck in that thing for weeks," Zim said, looking around for the board game. "What happened to it anyway?"

"It just blew up. And what are you saying, weeks? It's only been a minute or two!"

"Hey now, I was _there_," Zuko said. "We were in that jungle for at least two weeks before we killed the damn thing!"

"You _killed _it?! Killed what?"

"The jungle, obviously," Zim said.

Darvhog stared. Moofy said, "The jungle of Jumanji."

"Yes."

"The extraplanar apotheosis of all hostile jungles."

"Yes."

"The incomprehensibly vast and supposedly indefinite jungle that was the source of the game's power."

"Yes."

"The jungle that is _larger than worlds, _filled to the brim with the absolute most deadly and monstrous horrors all jungle environments any mortal jungle has ever had, and the shades of those whose drive to kill and survive at the expense of others hunting its greatest terrors. And you _killed _it."

"I already said yes repeatedly."

"..._HOW?!_"

"Easy," Calvin said, sounding affronted. "It's a _jungle. _Yeah, it's nasty, and it was stupidly big - why would trees evolve to be bigger than cities? It makes no sense and the thing should have broken under its own weight - but it's still just a jungle. Made of plants and animals and icky things. Things that _burn_. So we set it on fire! Not all at once, we were there for a while evading and fighting the dangers, but except for those kids and that one guy we helped get out of there and also the fire-proof stuff and I _guess _that bout with dysentery I came down with for a bit, it was easy."

Zim shuddered. "Speak for yourself," he said with deceptive calmness. "I saw things and endured things that no sentient should have to. The memories of that jungle shall haunt me forever. The Irken Powers forbid that I should ever behold another jungle or rainforest environment ever again." He glared at the trees. "STOP MOCKING ME!" He set them on fire.

"You're quite calm about being trapped in Jumanji, then," Gunter said. "Why are you not insane now?"

"Oh, I noticed he just gets really calm and quiet when he's totally lost it," Calvin said dismissively. "We were there together the whole time, I've noticed things now. It was like a camping trip! Except for the horrible animals constantly trying to eat me and the evil plants also trying to eat me and the diseases and the horrible weather bent on making me as uncomfortable and exhausted as possible so those things could eat me, and the complete lack of anything approaching the hallmarks of civilization, and a dearth of precious technology...so, wait, yeah, it pretty much _was _like camping except no one is telling me it was for building character."

"Such horrors we experienced," Zim said, still quiet and low and shaking a little. "Even fire will not cleanse that nightmare from my soul. Beasts of the wild and the other perils aside, I have witnessed what the cancerous organic defilement of nature unbound does to a world. We shall never speak of that place again!"

"But it was a valuable team-building exercise," Zuko protested. "We had a life-changing field trip together and we can't just pretend it didn't happen-"

"NEVER. AGAIN," Zim repeated. Zuko rolled his eyes. "So! What happened to the game?!"

"It exploded," Darvhog said. Glancing back and forth, he pocketed the eye-jewel of Jumanji while no one was looking. "There was nothing left of it, just bits and splinters. Yeah."

"You're lying, but I don't much care," Zim said.

There was a great explosion, and debris flying up into a vaguely fungal-shaped bloom of dust and light. "Welp, there goes the tree-lair of the cultists and the brunt of their greatest military assets," Darvhog said, perversely satisfied. "That's _them _out of my hair! Now there's just...these guys and the machinist people who are probably ticked at me for supplying their enemies. Dang it."

"Probably," Calvin said, drawing a transmutation circle in the ground while they were distracted. He activated it, and the portions of the pyramid directly underneath Darvhog, Jord and Gunter reshaped into cube-shaped prison cells that sealed around the individual prisoners, connecting to each other by chains and rising off the ground on crude wheels, the whole thing made of the same stone as the ancient pyramid. It probably counted as defacing a historical site but Calvin didn't seem to care.

"Dang it!" Darvhog whined. Zim scooped up some of the dust and splinters from the Jumanji board to display as trophies of his victory (though hard-won at the cost of some nasty jungle-related trauma), and they went on their way to meet back up with their allies, dragging their prisoners with them.

By good fortune, the fight had basically been won when Zim had destroyed the Jumanji game board game; when Zim's group made it over to where the explosions had come from (assuming that to be where more of his allies would be, and that the fight was over), experiencing a surprising lack of opposition and clearing the way by simply burning through all the trees and such in their path, they met a coterie of surviving soldiers, mechs, robot servitors, and Morte and Hobbes with the _Paragon _floating triumphantly overhead. It took only a short time to explain events to all those there.

"Wow, you guys _really _could have used me," Hobbes said on the car-sized tree root he was squatting on, almost wistfully. "Wish I could have gone to that jungle place-"

Zuko, Zim and Calvin flinched. "NO YOU DON'T," The three of them said. Hobbes flinched back.

The area they were standing in was fairly open despite having only been crowded to the brim by immense vegetative growth less than an hour ago, most of which had been burned away in the battle or by petty malice. The former great tree – now a sad sight to see when it had once been so mighty - where the cultists had made their home was lying in several large pieces across the new clearing, the surviving cultists themselves rounded up and being arrested properly and sulking. Their beasts of war, at least those not sufficiently of Jumanji to be destroyed along with it, milled about aimlessly, for without their master's powers to commune with them and induce them to fight they were largely harmless, and so were left to their own devices. It made a suitable place for more landing parties, coming in bunches of four and more by air speeders, and discuss what to do next.

"Hah!" A mech said, batting ineffectually at Darvhog's cage. "How are ya now, tough guy?! Not so nasty when you're not being a glorified arms dealer showing psychos how to kill people and make monsters, huh?!"

"Dude," Hobbes said. "Stop tormenting the psychopath, it reflects badly on you, machine-people in general, and it's just bad taste to harass prisoners."

"Guys, the robots are picking on me!" Darvhog whined. A random child came out of nowhere, pushed his cage over, and ran off. "HEY! WHO LET KIDS OVER HERE?!"

"But it's a field trip," a school teacher explained.

"Who brings a field trip to a war zone? Seriously; me and my guys all have Evil alignments and even we think that's just tacky."

"We do?" Jord said. Gunter raised an eyebrow at her.

Satisfied that Darvhog was in custody, and no longer his problem, Zim turned to a robot servitor that, going by the screen on it, was a communication channel for all the leaders of this world that could be able to attend (most of them being busy coordinating the functions to give their military specialists the go-ahead to send out their generals on everything). "All things are accounted for?"

"Yes!" the leaders chirped, deliriously happy that their war had ended in a decisive clash so suddenly they were still half-expecting the whole thing to come undone any moment now and plunge them again into devastation and suffering. "We are even now pursuing the rest of their cult, but I do not think it will be long; their impossible powers suddenly left them not long ago, and they ran for it. At this point, they are little more than a collective band of like-minded scoundrels lacking cohesion or military strength. You broke them-"

"Mostly be accident," Zim said. "I suspected that destroying their artifact of power would weaken them, but not so drastically."

"Even so, we...there are not words for the extent of our gratitude. If there is anything we can do to pay you back for this...well, we are in your debt. Just say the word and it will be done!"

Zim considered, remembering the payments they had been promised, and knew when an opportunity was coming at him. "Well, in addition to the things we were promised...while our ship is quite potent at warfare, we lack the more rarified technology we need to locate my friends. We are solely geared towards survival and combat technology at the moment, so in addition to some supplies, and whatever other technology you could risk sparing us, we could use any machines you have that could serve that purpose." Zim thought a moment and added, "Also you can take back the things we borrowed for these missions. The armor and weapons."

"WHAT?!" Zuko, Calvin and Hobbes shouted.

"I simply feel we ought to design our own weaponry and armor."

"CAN I KEEP THE HARNESS THING!?" Morte yelled.

"Certainly."

"NO COMPLAINTS FROM ME!" Morte yelled back.

"Ah, is that all?" The technophiles said. "For all you've done? Consider it done. And what do you wish done with this Darvhog fellow?"

Zim shrugged. "I care not one way or the other. I suppose you have him well in hand, anyway." He turned; Darvhog and his two frost giant buddies (the three of them giving vitriolic glares at the humans in the assembled cultist ranks, none of them looking even slightly sorry for abandoning Darvhog like they had) were being led to a prison transport speeder destined for a maximum security prison. "Hey," Darvhog said off-handedly. "Do you guys have any idea how my magic works?"

"No," the arresting officer said cautiously.

"Good to know. Funny thing, did you know that one of the big triggers for arcane magic is verbal components, like saying the spell's name? You wanna see how that works?"

"Do I!" The officer said eagerly, always ready for education.

"Okie-dokie, watch close!" Darvhog boomed, "_Sunder_!"

The stone cages exploded, dust fountaining down; Darvhog, Jord and Gunter were moving out a moment later, bowling the officer out of the way (but not too badly, he was a pretty cool dude) and Darvhog issued a mighty blast that knocked away the other officers from them and cast a force field to deflect the small-grade firearms that were loosed against him, holding ground while Jord and Gunter knocked the machinist's out of their way, ripped into a parked speeder and tossed the drivers out of it. They just barely managed to stuff themselves inside the sphere-shaped craft and Darvhog dived inside as well, the circular anti-grav ring at the back powering up, and Darvhog's spells were terminated as he powered up the speeder, which swiftly flew into the air away from the various attacks that came at him.

"Dang it, get back here!" Hobbes shouted, shaking a fist at him. "I DO NOT WANT YOU AS A RECURRING ENEMY!"

"LATER, SUCKERS!" Darvhog screamed as the speeder flew away, laughing insanely the whole time.

More attacks followed his retreat until he was well over the horizon, already gone by the time it occurred to Zim to ready the _Paragon _for a chase. Hobbes said, bemused, "How was he even flying that thing?!"

"Our vehicle instruments are _amazingly _intuitive," A nearby mech volunteered.

"Okay, but a totally foreign flying vehicle of complexity he is clearly unused to and even dislikes?"

"Amazingly, Intuitive," The mech repeated.

Zim looked at the robot servitor, having the decency to look embarrassed. "…I appear to have tempted fate."

"I apologize," the leaders said sadly. "And I doubt we'll be able to catch him, with things as busy as they are."

"Well, I doubt he'll be much of a problem to you," Zim said. "He told me he simply wishes to leave. But if you see him, give him a good blast for me!"

"Will do!"

"So," Zim said thoughtfully. "Now let's talk about what I could use in equipment, and then I'll tell you everything you need to know about spaceship crafting..."

The natives blinked. "That wasn't part of the deal."

"Do you want to achieve proper spaceflight or not?!"

"Okay, okay!" They settled down and discussed those things.

* * *

Some days later (the team having stayed on that world for a bit for various considerations and helping out on a few cultist-hunting missions just to make sure they didn't leave their erstwhile allies in the dust), the _Paragon _was again flying out into space, it's armor bolstered with a new protective armor prototype donated by the technophiles as a goodwill gesture, leaving behind the world of luddite cultists and technophillic heroes to a brighter future.

Inside the ship, Calvin was rubbing his hands excitedly in the cargo hold where all the equipment their ship could possibly have contained was making it very crowded with Morte and Zim standing there as well while Zuko and Hobbes aimed the ship and fueled it with its peculiar psychokinetic energy. "Well, that was a few days well spent," Calvin said, levering open a crate and examining a top-of-the-line sensor module.

"It does feel nice to do some good in the multiverse, does it not?" Zim said. "And we got free stuff out of it!"

"Them's the perks of being Good," Morte said cheerfully.

"More raw minerals we can use for making things, a bunch of weapons we can toy around with, plenty of personal-scaled anti-grav engines for vehiclecrafting, all manner of sensory or tracking equipment we can use to make better things to find your missing guys, schematics for all of those things to improve on...and also they refurbished our ship with top-quality amenities!" Calvin sank into a big poofy chair he'd been dragging along behind him. "Time well spent, guys!"

"Now what?" Morte said. "You think the guys could have helped us get it put away all neat, but no, you guys had to be so anxious to get out of there..."

"It is not a question of what to do next. It is always a question of what seems like a good idea at the moment!" Zim cracked his knuckles. "We've some time before we have enough power over emergency stores and can make a jump into Astral space; we should use it productively! I recommend getting these into that makeshift laboratory we're hooking up for things of this nature, and then we can get to work kitbashing up analysis engines to locate my missing people! IT WILL BE FUN."

"Let's get to it," Calvin said, already running off to go find an automated gantry to move the stuff for him.

"Feel like betting how long it'll take him to start lazing off?" Morte asked Zim conversationally.

"That is a short-odds bet. You're on!" Zim said.

* * *

Elsewhere...

Envy the Jealous, one of the last homunculi and spawn of the enigmatic entity that named itself Father, walked silently under an alien sky, the wind rattling ominously in his ears as if it knew that Envy didn't belong.

Dainty looking feet pounded great dents into the reinforced metal of a catwalk suspended between two monolithic buildings built on top of a solid foundation of an entire neighborhood a mile off the ground. Envy did its best to walk off the lingering effects of being violently teleported to another world; it questioned Wuya's like for teleporting her agents places when ships were more comfortable, but supposed that this was just efficient.

Even so, Envy had to sit down on an air-conditioning vent several dozen feet away (rickety and rusted, occasional puffs of smoke going up his coat), breathing heavily before looking up into the sky at the moon up in the sky, for it had arrived at nighttime only moments ago directly from Wuya's domain.

It was hard to see the moon; what Envy initially mistook for thick black clouds were columns of smoke dozens of miles wide, the pollution of several dozen generation's worth of indifference and intentional malice turning the sky overhead into a dark mess churning with the threat of acid rain and only barely relieved by natural starlight in the thin areas. Even those were small and dismissively faint, so thick was the pollution. Most of the illumination came from the electric lights – clamped into lamp-posts and wall fixtures and great suspended lights between buildings – and many of those were broken or in bad need of repairs. Up here, where the powerful and wealthy could afford a modicum of luxury with their people's great technology, it was largely tolerable or even wondrous. Further down, into the filthy and dark depths of the city, the light got worse. Deeper there, where the lights had broken long ago and only the most misfortunate squatters or desperate of escapees dwelled, terrible things moved without fear of illumination. Envy felt a sense of brotherhood with those creatures.

A Glukkon hive city, a vast collective of buildings and neighborhoods and manufactories smashed into each other into a crazy mash-up like the worst nightmares of rural paranoia. Catwalks and small bridges both official and rigged together by the ingenious locals so they wouldn't have to risk the public walkways where urban predators did their filthy work. Not much different from the other hive cities like it; miles of cold metal above and below, spreading out across the landscape as a urban wasteland, pressing down the weak and unfortunate as a by-product of rampant consumerism.

And yet, it was not totally dark. The pollution-clouds broke through in places, and moonlight shone down on a weary world. The dark reaches of heaven, lit by the luminous presence of uncountable stars vast distances away and offering the faint hope of romanticism to those below, and outshining them all was this planet's moon. Visible among that moon's many markings was a large shape uncannily like the two-fingered paw of one of this world's more significant rational species.

The handprint, it was said, that signified the gods' favor of the Mudokons. Once a mighty race until their presumed arrogance drove their rivals the Glukkons to enslave and debase them.

Envy was certainly on Oddworld, just one small world in an infinite sea of such places but one with great promise and needing attention.

A small motorized cart, hovering slightly above the ground on a modest anti-grav engine, waited for it behind. Envy grunted, letting it's bones and muscles slip or slide out of the way into more harmonious configurations, it's body adjusting itself and shifting into various other forms for comfort.

Envy shook his head and hopped up onto the scooped protrusion on the front, grabbing hold of the joysticks for controls on the front, and the motor cart obligingly floated forward at a slow but comfortable pace. Envy sat back, contented, and waited.

Behind it, the cart's front was an automated hatch, a keypad nestled into it and wholly responsive only to Envy's very unique bio-morphic signature. The contents within (some weapons, a few changes of clothes, basic field rations, a comprehensive report of everything he would need to do the job properly including a summary of all his allies and probable foes on this world and how they might aid or impede Wuya's plans and the best ways to accordingly deal with them, several extremely-well sealed barrels containing a weaponized chemical gas marked 'REAVER GAS' and a few other things Envy thought would be helpful for the mission) were securely locked into place, and the nigh-indestructible exterior was proof against nearly any force that Wuya herself commanded, and Envy had no fear that the contents would be used against itself.

It found itself meandering through the urban sprawl, observing how things compared to the official reports complied for this mission. Envy saw many things.

Envy saw a shopping market, and within it a vast crowd gathered before a public speaker, a Glukkon with a hoarse voice and prison camp tattoos, screaming in wild and fanatical tones of the downward slide their people had taken, and that the Glukkons must retake their place as the true dominant species and exterminate all threats to their reign, cutting down the untrustworthy Mudokons and Gabbits and other pretenders to reason; on a sea of dirty blood the Glukkons would rise and leave their suffering behind. A troop of armed security enforcers came in unseen mid-speech, and most of them agreed with the speaker. Others did not, repulsed, and argued. Envy wanted to see what would happen if things were stirred up, and took out a hidden gun and shot the rabble-rouser without anyone realizing until he was dead. A riot swiftly broke out when the blood hit the wall and the speaker's body hit the ground, and both parties blamed the other for the murder. In the chaos, Envy departed without incident.

Envy saw a huge titanic factory floating in the sky, repurposed from a rival corporation of scientific endeavor, kept tethered by a huge tractor beam. Great smoke belched from it, the byproduct of armaments and ammunition being machined, and metal smelted and remade into the cybernetic components of the Glukkon's most fierce soldiers: the Big Bro Sligs. Envy made a note of it; he'd heard of such massive factories becoming commonplace now, but he hadn't realized how big they'd become.

Envy saw a group of skittish beings who were plainly not Glukkons; a troubled rabble of many species and shapes, huddled under cold blankets and fried-out food supplements. They also bore marks signifying that they belonged to one corporation or another; escaped slaves, Envy presumed. They ran off in a hurry when they saw Envy passing overhead on a walkway; when Envy saw a security patrol, Envy dutifully informed them of what it saw. The screaming that followed thereafter brought a smile to Envy's face.

Envy saw many more things. Each and every one was catalogued and remembered with a thoughtful calmness, and Envy couldn't resist the mischievous urge to make things worse here and there. Tormenting those that annoyed it always gave Envy considerable satisfaction, and Envy privately considered every living being that wasn't explicitly an ally to be an enemy.

Unsure of whether or not it ought to go to the last known location of Wuya's failing agents in the area, the last known location of their runaway experiment (and funny enough both locations were the same), locating and confronting the Glukkon Queen or coercing the queen of the much-abused races of Sligs that served the Glukkons as bodyguards and muscle, Envy decided those all sounded boring and resolved to go wander until an ideal situation presented itself.

Wait, listen, and then make them bleed with their own swords. Envy liked that method the best.

Envy moved on, and happened to notice a small child too close to the rails. With the same amount of ingrained habit as a man scratching an itch that he's been accustomed to for ages (and even less forethought or interest), Envy shoved it over the rails to plummet to its death. Envy was annoyed when the child grabbed the railing on the way down and calmly climbed back up as if this happened every day. With a snort, Envy acted like it hadn't happened and went onwards.

* * *

The Astral Plane and the infinite multitude of worlds it connected to was full of wondrous secrets and a never-ending supply of adventure, but it was also full of opportunities to just sit back, relax, and enjoy life for a bit.

Hobbes yawned, waking up from a short nap right atop the _Paragon's _exterior._. _The ship itself was resting along the inner curve of a planet called Shoregird that had no native sentient life apart from generations-entrenched colonists that had introduced themselves already; they seemed to have taken a liking to Zim's crew, borderline amphibious beings descended from a predatory aquatic race called Pisces Volanns. Their ancestors, as depicted in the Hitchhiker's Guide, looked like totally badass mermaids with the qualities of sharks and angler fish, and while these descendants certainly resembled their ancestors, longer periods of time immersed underwater had adapted them into a stout body shape rather like manatees, only way more badass. Far more fishlike now, with slimy bodies with opposable flippers, vestigial neck-mounted tentacles for fine manipulation, powerful tails and heads like angler fish mixed with crocodiles, and curiously solemn-looking features. They didn't seem too bothered about nearly losing their amphibious abilities.

In any events, the Deep Volanns (as they called themselves) had been pleased to have tourists, as Hobbes and the rest had found when the Volanns had met with them while their ship had come to an hovering stop over an underwater outpost in the shallows of an inland sea. Glad to meet people that weren't in horrible danger, terribly lonely or trying to kill them for once, they'd talked.

As it transpired, Morte's initial suspicions that the Volanns' ancestors had killed any original natives were unfounded; the colonists had come in a scientific mission many hundreds of years ago and settled there some time after a terrible incident that had nearly wiped out the life there. According to these studies and reports from neighboring world, Shoregird had suffered catastrophic (though totally incidental) damage from a interstellar war that had happened to come too close and the collateral damage had totally wrecked the landmass; what hadn't sunk and pushed the sea level up exponentially had become tangled bunches of islets all over the planet, and the single largest landmass was less than half the size of a Brighthammer-standard island, about twenty miles across and shaped like a crescent.

By some peculiar quirk of geography, forgiving climate, and a touch of terraforming by the Volanns when they arrived to make the landscape a bit more to their liking before they found the intricacies of the sea a much more interesting home, every bit of land on the planet was tropical beach in some form or another, with temperate climate too. A touch of genetic engineering, importing appropriate but endangered species to thrive, and natural selection to boost surviving animal populations had ensured an astounding variety of life on each island and even more in the sea. Zim had decided to take some time off and recuperate from their exertions and the Volanns encouraged it, having not seen unexpected visitors like them in nearly eight months and being a fairly relaxed group besides. The first one to meet them and their most frequent visitor in the eighteen hours they'd stopped there, a young lady named Rekklae, mentioned that they were lobbying with the Galactic Resort Commission to have their planet advertised as an ideal tropical resort in order to bring in more money and maybe get people to think of them as something else than 'that one planet with the freaky fish guys'.

(Apparently, it was a good thing they'd landed here; the Deep Volanns had a unified government ruled by a meritocracy-determined council of scientists advised by wise artificial intelligences, but much of their society had gone off to their own devices in recent years and the more moderate of Zim's greeters thought they were up to no good. Rekklae claimed that a technocratic cult called the Demiurges of Tentacle And Silt, worshipping the conceptual power of the sea and it's generative bounty, had gone off conducting weird and probably unsanctioned genetic experiments. The rise of sea monsters just several miles out to sea from here was likely no coincidence.)

For his part, Hobbes was wholly enjoying the prospect of a little tropical vacation. He leaned back, moving into the breeze and luxuriating in the smells brought to him by the wind. He immersed himself in the sensations, knowing in moments what just about all his crewmates and everyone on the beach was doing. A human smell, curiously hot and smelling faintly of ashes, came his way. It was still fairly new to Hobbes, but he was becoming familiar with it. He turned towards its source and his ears pricked at the loud human grunting of a capable body hauling itself up the ship with great speed, so swift and silent that Hobbes was a bit surprised that even he noticed it. It swiftly became the noise of footsteps on metal and approached; Hobbes turned his head and saw that it was Zuko walking up on the top of their ship, moving in a very deliberately casual method that suggested that he was putting all the effort he could manage into forcing himself to be smooth and calm. It was an amusing image; Hobbes smirked a bit, remembering that most of his experience with Zim's distant friend involved him either at the front of battle roaring like a dragon and fighting just as hard, skulking around corners and staying just out of sight while keeping to himself, or making dry and sarcastic remarks.

Hobbes sat up, ears smoothed, and said, "Hey!" before Zuko even got to the comfortable distance he generally preferred when he talked to anyone. Zuko misstepped, almost tripping, caught off-guard by Hobbes' suddenness. His foot swung to the metal under him, connected, and he got his balance back.

"Hi," Zuko muttered, almost a grumble.

Hobbes snickered, pleased to bother anyone and satisfied how _easy _it was to get under Zuko's skin. Hobbes made a show of yawning and said, "How long was I asleep? I told Calvin to wake me up if anything happened."

"Nothing happened," Zuko said. He jerked a thumb behind him, at the beach below the ship. Hobbes was curious enough to stand up for a better look and saw that Calvin, Morte and Zim were still there; Calvin was playing in the water on the cycle he'd been designing; after leaving Terracandra, he'd replaced the prototype vehicle's engines with an anti-gravity engine, reshaped the frame to accommodate lighter mass for heavier armor and removed the wheels, modifying the thing to be a speedy and agile hovercycle with respectable armor. In but a few hours here, he'd also made it totally water tight and submersible, racing underwater with a group of local lads that had taken a shine to him.

On land, upon the beach itself, Morte was happily within the harness and was trading stories with the Volanns woman Rekklae, telling her about everything he heard going on in her particular quadrant of the multiverse; it was apparently only a stone's throw, cosmically speaking, from Hobbes' own universe, a thought that made his stomach twist up and the rest of him desperately wish he'd at least said goodbye to his mother... he tried not to think about that and took note that Zim _still _distrusted open water and was keeping back as much as he could. Hobbes had seen him earlier, typing up what he'd learned about this place into the Guide in a journalistic sense of 'keeping things up to date', but now he seemed to be experimenting with his powers again; the subdued lightshow around him was familiar to Hobbes by this point.

Zuko said, "I'm not really sure what we're still doing here. There's not really any reason for us to stay here."

Hobbes waved his hand. "Maybe nothing to deal with our overall mission, but, yeah, you really need to learn how to relax. Spending a few more hours, maybe a day and a half, in a nice place like this? That's not a delay, that's a chance to unwind."

Zuko snorted, producing a brief cloud of embers. Hobbes flinched back. "You honestly think it's a good idea to sit around and mess with fish people?" Zuko said. "This planet has nothing we need to bargain for, scavenge, and they certainly don't need our help! What are we even doing here? There's nothing here that has anything to do with that thing I like to think of _as what we're actually supposed to be doing!_ What's next, throwing a _beach party?_"

Hobbes winced. "Yikes. You _really _need to unwind. Or get a girlfriend, a nice lady to talk to."

"I already told that crazy giant Jord, I have a girlfriend!"

"Uh _huh_. And now that you mention it, a beach party sounds like a nice idea if we don't jump planet in the next few hours. I'll throw it at Zim when he's done with whatever he's doing, see if that'll get him out of his water thing-"

Zuko facepalmed. "Oh, spirits. _Please_ stop me from giving these people ideas!"

"Relax! Almost everyone we've met since we left Traverse Town has either fought us, followed us like creepy stalkers, tried to kill us or yelled at us! It's nice finding a bunch of people that might like to just hang out and party before we have to go."

Zuko, to his credit, didn't immediately argue against that just to reinforce his own point. He looked back at the ocean, watched the Volanns cavort with Calvin (who was just racing and yelling and shouting and actually acting like a carefree boy his age for once and not a super-scientist employed by a galactic monarchy) and looked at Zim with a worrying look for a long moment that reminded Hobbes starkly of the look an overprotective big brother might give an intelligent but foolhardy younger brother who was in over his head. After a moment of regarding Zim producing several small bubbles of glowing light and moving them around telekinetically (somehow) and genuinely enjoying the beach without having to get too close to the water, Zuko relented and sat down, staring intently at the ground and frowning thoughtfully.

Hobbes waited. Sure enough, moments later Zuko nodded, some of the tension going out of his shoulders and loosening up his posture nicely. "Okay, okay," Zuko said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "You have a point. Enjoying ourselves a little might be nice." He smelled the air, seeming to take in more than just oxygen as he slowly faced the setting sun, and smiled faintly when a flush of heat darkened his skin for a moment.

Hobbes make a fake bow. "And now the student understands the lesson. Enlightenment points for everyone!"

Zuko was sitting next to Hobbes, with his scarred side facing the tiger, so until Zuko turned to present him a sarcastic grimace Hobbes had no idea how Zuko felt about the quip. He'd noticed that Zuko's scar was deep enough that the muscles were too damaged to do much more than small muscle movements; there was almost no emotional response that could be seen from that side. Even his eye was just barely capable of small movements, and while it looked healthy enough, Hobbes was sure that his vision was fairly poor from that side. He wondered if Zuko's eyesight was bad on the scarred side; he'd seen him fight and he certainly favored his other eye.

Further discussion was dismissed by a tremendous flare of light from Zim's position that split the clouds, nearly shoved the _Paragon _over, produced a shockwave that rocked it hard, hammered the shockwave-tossed sands with sufficient heat to flash-burn them into glass (and since Morte had been buried in the sand by the shockwave, he was stuck inside a large bubble of the glass; his friend was okay though), and knocked everyone at sea at least a mile out. And also, it seriously surprised a small seagull.

By the time Zuko and Hobbes dropped down from a handhold Hobbes had grabbed in the ship's hull before they could plummet, none too pleased to have been smashed right onto glass, the titanic pillar of light was starting to fade and the air still glowing with faint arcs of diffused colors, and of _course _Zim was standing right there at the epicenter of it, hands shining furiously.

Zim looked around, his hands still glowing with the same light. "Ah!" He said, eager to deflect blame, and said, "He did it!" while pointing at Calvin. The light around him shaped into a translucent construct in the shape of a hand pointing a finger, hovering disembodied in mid-air.

Zuko and Hobbes just glared at him.

The floating hand faltered, and broke apart into thousands of tiny shining fragments. "You're not buying it, huh?" Zim said.

"OUR BEACH!" One of the natives screamed, loudly.

Hobbes winced. "Uh oh. There goes the beach party…"

A Deep Volanns named Peppika hauled himself onto the beach, leaning up on a patch of sand just north of the glass. He gaped, mouth open and needle-teeth glinting in the light. The beach nearly shone, sunlight refracting through the glass in all the colors of the rainbow, producing a prismatic aura in the weird and enticing patterns of the glass. Peppika said, "Holy egg factories, that's _beautiful! _A beach made of funky glass will _surely _bring in the tourists!" He saluted Zim. "Thanks, man!"

"Oh, that worked out okay," Calvin said, bobbing in the sea and driving back, a few of his new buddies following along.

"You see?" Zim said smugly to Hobbes. "Everywhere I go, I bring joy and hope."

"Yes, either that you've left or you're going to leave," Morte said acidly from where he was trapped in the glass.

"What did you just do!?" Zuko yelled. "Now you have _light-shooting powers?!_"

"...I honestly have no idea," Zim said, extending his spider-leg attachments and using their lasers to burn a section of the bubble trapping Morte out. He tapped it a few times in structurally weak points, and chipped it open enough for Morte to climb out.

A chortling noise down the beach called to them. They looked and saw another native was trying to get their attention. "Pardon me, newbies," said the native, a nice young gentleman-in-waiting named Grakke, and he pointed at three other beach goers that had come down from the other side of the beach to see what was going on. "Do you know those fellows down that a-way?"

Zim looked to see them. "Huh, they look a little familiar_HOLY HELL ON MY SHOES WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!_"

"Yo," said Disco Darvhog, wearing a tremendously tacky pair of beach shorts.

"How's it hanging guys?!" said Jord and Gunter, wearing modest bright yellow swimwear (probably unnecessary, since they normally wore swimwear anyway), beach shorts for Gunter and a one-piece swimsuit for Jord.

Zuko gaped. Hobbes stared, dumbfounded, then he chose just to stare at Jord's plump figure in that nicely conservative swimsuit, which was a lot more fun. Morte was already doing that, never one to pass an opportunity to ogle a pretty woman. Jord giggled at the attention and posed, absently plucking at where her swimsuit pinched at the excessive flesh on her broad thighs. Zuko frowned at Hobbes' behavior. Zim stomped away, marching to Darvhog with his eye twitching and flames randomly spurting out of the air. He walked to Darvhog, and as soon as he was close enough, punched him in the leg. "Ow!" Darvhog whined, falling over. "Not my standing leg! I need that for standing! Also jogging. And other stuff."

Zim grabbed him by the neck, lifting the much taller githyanki down to his face. "What. Are. You. Doing. Here?" Zim said, red light issuing from his mouth.

"Nice glow," Darvhog said. "Not too good at keeping it contained, though."

Zim ignored that. "We left you on that planet with all the stupid cultists! With no spaceship or means of traveling into the Astral Plane! _And you explicitly told us you don't know any teleporting magic! _You told us you were trapped there! SO WHAT IN THE NAME OF INAPPROPRIATELY NAMED BELGIUM ARE YOU DOING HERE?!"

"I told you they'd be back," Morte said snidely. "But does anyone ever listen to me? _Nooo…_"

"...Can you let go of me?" Darvhog asked. "It's kinda uncomfortably bending over like this."

Zim pushed him over. "How did you escape?!"

"Hah!" Darvhog said. "That's easy! We..." He stopped. "Uh...how _did _we escape, guys?"

Jord shrugged. "I dunno. I got drunk out of my gourd to celebrate getting loose of those goofy cult-guys! Like, a record for me getting drunk kinda."

Gunter put on some fancy spectacles and pulled out a rune-studded metal cube six inches on each side. He pressed one and it displayed a holographic image. "Well, sir, as you and our esteemed rivals can see from these pictures I took for posterity, we waited until our aforementioned rivals were prepared to leave and we clung our speeder to the back of their ship," he said, the cube's images displaying images as a visual aid for his explanation. "After reinforcing our craft's fragile superstructure with defensive magic such that it was able to survive both atmospheric exit and re-entry into the Astral Plane. We laid magics to keep the ship on our personal raider and departed, and we followed you to this beach afterwards."

"What," Zuko said flatly.

"But the people on that world were hunting you!" Zuko protested.

"They were kind of busy with that whole full-scale war thing," Jord said wisely. "Sure, they'd already won but it was still heavy work tracking down the losers and caging them. Way too much work to pay attention to guys like us! We had a few close calls though; one guy almost yanked my hair! I like my hair where it is, you know."

"And what are you doing on the beach, anyway?" Morte asked Jord. "You're a frost giant. I thought like the heat, so what are you doing on a planet with a solely tropical biome?"

Jord grinned cheesily and shrugged. "...Hey, everyone likes the beach! It's, like, a sauna for me."

Zim groaned. "I do _not _believe this," He grumbled, realizing the very distinct possibility that Darvhog really was a rival who would never ever stop following him. It was going to be even worse than Dib was at his most annoying…

"WHAT'S ALL THE YELLING ABOUT!?" Calvin yelled from out to sea.

"DARVHOG CAME BACK!" Hobbes yelled.

"WHAT, REALLY? THAT SUCKS! HOW'D HE DO IT!"

"HE HITCHED ON OUR SHIP!"

"BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

"THAT'S WHAT WE SAID!"

"LOOK HOW LOUD I HAVE TO YELL FOR YOU TO HEAR ME!" Darvhog yelled to Calvin.

Zuko assumed a fighting stance. "Prepare for a good face-stomping, you sad silly pirate-things! I shall rectify my mistake in trusting in the competence of organized structure."

"But we're on Evil Vacation!" Darvhog said, backing up in open horror. "You can't beat up a dude and his buddies on the beach when he's on Evil Vacation! That's...that's just _mean!_"

Jord teared up, sniffling a little. "You guys suck! Some rivals you are! And they call us evil!"

"I don't think they do, actually," Gunter remarked sadly. "No one takes us seriously!" He started to cry, weeping big gushing tears. "We try _hard _to be evil and awesome! _What do we do wrong?_"

The Deep Volanns there stared. "…Huh," Rekklae said, sliding away from the sobbing villains.

"That's just sad," Grakke said.

"Okay, beating them up now feels messed up," Hobbes said. "Are we going to…you know, actually fight them? That doesn't feel right…"

Zim facepalmed. "I, okay, I…will you idiots stop crying already!?" They did so, hushing up and stilling tearing up a bit. "Answer me this. Have you stolen anything or killed anyone or done anything evil here?"

"Nope," Darvhog said honestly.

Zim groaned, facepalming again. All the conduct of Great Goodness that Aang had taught him suggested that beating up crying people, even when they were evil, was just not right even if they had to answer for past crimes or were really annoying. "…I suppose we can't," Zim said reluctantly.

"Yay!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord cheered.

"But what about all the evil things they've done before?" Zuko asked.

"Aww," Darvhog, Gunter and Jord whined.

"…Oh, yeah!" Zim said. He thought about it. "Eh, I'll give them a freebie this time," Zim said dismissively. Zuko shrugged, glancing at the space pirates and growling. To those very pirates, Zim said, "Now, you three! Go find some other beach and annoy someone else!"

"Aw!" Darvhog whined again. "But annoying you is so much fun! And I haven't found anyone to talk to since Moofy refused to talk this morning."

"I don't care!"

"C'mon, please? I'll say please a million times and then six more if you don't say okay! I'll say it until whatever you have for ears explode and your brains drop out and your skin crawls out and you get 'please' stuck in your head forever. Please please please please please-"

"Gah, all right! You can stay here, just...don't bother us!"

"But we want to barbeque! It's not a beach party without a barbeque! Or a rival to be a buddy with."

"STOP COMPLAINING! FINE ALREADY!" Zim looked at a random native. "You keep an eye on those three! They are evil and stupid and stupidly evil! But mostly evilly stupid!"

"Hey!" Darvhog, Jord and Gunter said.

Gunter thought about it though, and brightened. "But they admitted that we _do _evil things! Our evil is appreciated and acknowledged!"

"Go Team Us!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord said. They high-fived. Darvhog had to float up with magic because of how much larger the giants were.

"Will do!" The native said cheerily to Zim.

The remainder of the day was pleasant enough even with Darvhog and his silly sidekicks; as Darvhog suggested, they had a barbeque later that night, and annoyingly Zim found that he wasn't _completely _terrible company, nor were his companion. (Calvin seemed unusually inclined to hang around Jord, for some reason. Zim didn't care to speculate, though the frost giantess was a quite beautiful woman, he thought.) With the natives keeping an eye on the Funk Revolution Pirates, they were no harm, and their night passed without incident.

Zim still tied the three pirates up the next morning and asked the natives to bring them into police custody through whatever contacts they had; he was hardly going to let them actually _get away _with their crimes.

Darvhog was a pretty good sport about it. "You know I'm just going to break out anyway and no one's gonna care that escaping prison is a crime onto itself," he said. Zim had to admit he probably had a point, that happened ridiculously often for some reason.

* * *

Oddworld was just one of those worlds where something interesting was invariably going on. Wars of liberation and industrial expansion, such as went on now, only encouraged such things. The tensions between the many races of the world coming to the boiling point outright amplified it.

Mudos, one of the more heavily populated continents, was one of the primary staging areas of that war. It was hard to say why; it was not particularly large, especially significant one way or the other, it was just a place for people to live. It could be argued that since the dread Glukkon Queen, Lady Margaret, (and by extension her ally Skillya, the most powerful queen of the Sligs, the mercenary people who served the Glukkons) enjoyed lairing in various dens of resplendent luxury maintained by her children, it was important after all, but she'd apparently only gone there after things had grown more disastrous, perhaps to govern her subjects more closely… and be safer with the majority of them close at hand.

Quite why so many things had happened there was hard to say. Likely it was because the leader and somewhat reluctant messiah of the Mudokon's bid to escape slavery and probable genocide from their Glukkon overseers had begun the whole thing there.

Across all known worlds of the multiverse, there is a curse that translates roughly as 'may you live in interesting times'. Mudos, in its sprawling peaceful swamplands won through conquest and festering cities choked from incompetent industry turned to evil and immigrant slums expanding by the month to make more beds for their desperate occupants and all manner of spirits writhing in impotent rage and despair, was a good example of the terrible truth of that particular aphorism.

In an otherwise unimportant backwater stretch of wasteland occupied by mining facility that had become abandoned when the resources had been totally harvested, now only important from a meteorite crash in the very heart of the town itself, a young elf from another world had time to consider the grim truth of that phrase. He'd seen more than his fair share of different parts of time (and had grown to loathe time travel), not to mention worlds, and it was a bitter truth that all his life had been an interesting one. Of late, bitter and frustrating and terrible as well.

Perched on a high point where two buildings lay right next to each other, one much taller than the other, he and the small warband (or raiders, he didn't know which was more appropriate) were waiting for the opportune moment to strike, their attention fixed keenly on a convoy of massive vehicles resembling crude floating boxes, each of these caravans roughly the size of a small house and flying several feet above the ground, moving at a hurried pace that would go right through this town. The pilot chamber at the top, each exactly big enough to house a single pilot and instruments and nothing else, was amusingly puny by comparison.

The elf stood slightly higher; enough to get a good view, not enough to risk being seen, and hoped the enchantments the shaman chanters had worked on his raiders would hide them from sensory devices. He breathed in, breathed out, hardly weighed down by the salvaged body armor rudely fixed upon his fairly short but broad body. Several strands of long green hair, lightening to blonde at the tips, got into the sniper's goggles he was wearing and it was a moments effort to brush them out of his face; a tricky feat, since he was holding a large morph-gun currently set into an anti-material rifle and prepped for sniping action.

Beside him, his raiders tensed; Mudokons, all of them, tall and wiry humanoids with blue-green skin of varying shades, turtle-like features, three digit hands, and vaguely worried expressions; all of them were dressed in the tribal regalia of their people (naturally growing head-feathers that denoted status and identity, vibrant mixtures of tattoos and body-paint, and slightly elongated light body armor magicked into existence by mighty nature magic), and they were all carrying large firearms forged from secrets given to them by their ancestor spirits, resembling crossbows but with very little mechanized form and a glowing bolt of divine energy for ammunition. All, incidentally, were male; female Mudokons, like their Slig and Glukkon foes, were egg-laying giants akin to termite queens, hence the common 'queen' term.

The elf, named Jak, spoke into a minute microphone-earphone set hooked into one of his amazingly long and narrow pointed ears, confirming if the other snipers were in place. The commanders of the other units confirmed, all of them set up and ready to launch the attack as soon as they were in place. When they finished, another voice, wheedling and male and extremely dear to Jak's heart, asked if he was still supposed to wait before the fight was started before he swept in. And for that matter, he still wasn't entirely clear about the plan.

Jak chuckled darkly. "Don't worry about it, Daxter," he said, easing his hold on his rifle. "The plan couldn't be simpler. That convoy is headed straight to the nearest factory-town to drop off a load of slaves, captured tribesman and anyone else who had the bad luck to be there and not the right species when the local Glukkon governor decided he needed a bit of petty cash on the side. It's just north of this town, so they have to cut through here. Our source confirmed it, they'll just take the main road here, splitting up and coming back together when they reach this part right here. We'll drop 'em, shoot the lead convoy; the one with all the weapons. The others will crash right into it, and that's when our tomahawkers and skirmishers jump in. Shooters provide cover fire, I jump in and make a mess, and then about a few minutes later you come in with our own cargo ships; we'll get the slaves in there and fly off to safe territory before they even know what's going on. Easy!"

"Now that you've said all that," said a Mudokon next to Jak, a lanky youngster named Achey-Eye, a gloomy former slave with aspirations to shamanhood that were outstripped by a talent at long-range combat cultivated from years of being forced to play extremely hard _and _dull shooting simulators intended for military training. It certainly made him a natural Mudarcher, a firearm-specialist warrior. "It probably won't happen. What if they were listening in?"

Jak snorted. "As if they're using anything as retro as what we've had to scrounge up. They save all the _good _tech for themselves."

"Not so bitter," said another Mudarcher called Bad Drink from behind Bokton, short and slim and a bit unhinged from too many years of being a taste taster for the now defunct Soulstorm Brewery. "Brings bad quarma. Careful now. That brings the bad ending. Never a good thing."

Jak grunted in response, and grinned predatorily at the sound of increasingly noisy engines. Several of the Mudokons stiffened, unpleasantly reminded of their old bad days as slaves and foodstuffs to the Glukkon, and itching for bloody retribution. "We're on," Jak said simply. He held a hand up for silence, gestured to be prepared. "Skirmishers in place?" He asked again.

"Here!" Said six groups of melee-specialized warriors, grouped in units of six to nine and hiding in the alleyways and potholes and abandoned wrecks ahead and behind the area where the attack was planned; when the convoy was struck, they would swarm out and strike a decisive blow. All of them were tomahawkers; Mudokons trained in the warrior ways of their ancestors and long-lost traditions, armed with spirit-blessed weaponry and great physical power uncommon to the normally fragile Mudokons.

Jak asked the same question of the snipers, other Mudarchers and warriors armed with scavenged sniper rifles (and similar weaponry), all perched on concealed vantage points like him, and they answered in the affirmative as well. By now, the engines were louder than ever.

He dared to look out; coming their way was the convoy, already speeding into the abandoned town and coming their way. Undetected by anything, he adjusted his goggles to zoom in on the armored guard-tank at the front of the convey. He smirked like a warrior acknowledging fierce foes at the sight of the three warriors riding it and waiting to spring at any threats; anthropomorphic hyenas, two male and one female, wearing clothing that looked like it came from a rummage sale, and carrying customized weapons designed to maim or cripple rather than kill. "Stay sharp, guys, we got the hyena trio on hand."

Daxter's voice bit through the radio silence. "Ugh, them again? Didn't they get blown up when we crashed that flying munitions factory right out the sky? I hate those guys!"

"Nobody ever stays _dead _anymore," Jak agreed.

He looked down the scope of his rifle at them, and the heads of the hyenas lined up nicely in the view-finder. Trajectories and angles were calculated instantly and the view-finder locked onto them, the rifle automatically reshaping such that if he fired, the shot would almost certainly hit.

Jak's finger came to the trigger. Just one clean shot, and then this _world_ would be a little cleaner. Then he could start on the rest, move up to the people he knew made this world so dark and miserable, kill them one after another and make it _clean_-

Darkness rose in his head, firing his thoughts like a piston engine. Violet electricity danced in his mouth, making his teeth it so that he wanted to _bite _something so hard it would break, and it needed to be meat, to be living and squirming, feel blood on his tongue and screams in his ears, and dull this pain by making others feel it-

He shuddered, and dismissed the lock-on. The darkness receded, and Jak thought. The shot might not make it, and it would be disastrous if they tipped their presence too early…and Jak knew that was just dancing around the real issue, that just killing someone in cold blood felt _wrong,_ even after all these years since Sandover had been lost to him. Efficient as it was, something of the hero he had once been a long time ago disagreed with the notion of just headshotting the hyenas.

The convoy continued on, blissfully oblivious to Jak's momentary crisis. It reached the point where they were supposed to split; the logic, as Jak understood it, went that by dividing up in dangerous places like this, the potential loss was minimized. If only one caravan was destroyed or captured, the others would be more likely to survive by forcing an enemy to divide themselves. It practically ensured that one or two would be taken, but it was considered acceptable losses.

Jak waited, ready to give the signal. All around the ambush, the tribal warriors he had allied with tensed, ready to free more of their brothers and repay back the Glukkons for their savagery, their weapons yearning for proper use in combat (this not being a metaphorical statement, given their spiritual origins)...

They were of course completely surprised when the convoy abruptly peeled away from the main road, caravans scattering into alleyways and all heading to the left side of town.

Jak gaped. He heard the Mudokons around him communicate shock and horror, and a multitude of voices echo that sentiment through the radio. He roared as quietly as he could, the noise bleeding into maddened animal fury and a crackle of purple lightning issues from his mouth. He clamped down on the energies suddenly roiling around in the pit of his stomach, held back the tide of darkness long enough for it to subside, and yelled into the communicator, "_The plan's wrecked, they're not heading down towards us! Go left, follow them! If we hit them hard and fast, we can still make this work!_"

The warriors who'd volunteered for this were consummate professionals at raiding and rescue; there was no argument, just variations upon 'You got it!' before they moved into action, some leaping with magically augmenting leg muscles to rooftop to rooftop, others commanding the very metal of the buildings to carry them to their destination and bits of that metal broke off and flew into the air with Mudokons on them, and still others moved in ever more singular ways with the powers granted to them by the spirits.

Jak's abilities were rather more scientific in origin...painfully so. He jumped, sliding across a pipeline that made an excellent grinding surface and jump from that to rooftop after the other. He shouldered his gun and yelled into the microphone, "Hang tight, Dax! Time schedules been jumped up a notch, we're gonna need a lift out quick as you can!"

"Gotcha, ol' buddy!" Daxter said, voice a little high and scared. It shook a little, and he was still trying not to panic. "Coming quick and good! Good luck!"

"Same to you!" Jak stood his ground, barely aware of the tomahawkers popping out from their hiding places and speeding through the dead town, their skills well-suited for skirmishing. The convoy, as yet, wasn't aware of them, but that was about to change one way or the other. He took sight and primed his rifle, yellow eco bolts charging; the game had already been changed, and he was having to think fast. Fortunately, they weren't too far from the convoy already, all he had to do was give a single good shot at something-

Ah. Another guard-tank, keeping up the rear. He took aim. His goggles and the view-finder calibrated the distance, the gun reshaping again for one absolutely perfect shot, on-board computer doing the math and running through every possible calculation and variable, using the wind and air friction; to an outside observer, all it did was twist slightly, the barrel extending a bit.

The caravans were tough, mobile damage-soakers that could withstand even the savage wildlife that the Mudokons sometimes employed in their attacks. An ordinary gun, except perhaps the military ordnance the Glukkons outfitted their mercenaries with, wouldn't even scratch it. Jak's morphgun was definitely _not _ordinary.

Jak squeezed the trigger. The gun's roar was muffled by the silencer mounted on the rifle's front; a streak of yellow energy like fire made solid was momentarily visible, as was the indicator lights on the guard-tank. The next moment, those lights blew out, the streak struck true, and the flight mechanisms of the guard-tank erupted in a small blast of yellow and molten metal.

The crash it made, Jak thought vindictively, was very satisfying.

He and his raiders were still moving, crossing the alleyways and rooftops between them and their quarry, when the rear of the convey crashed into the downed tank, toppling over and smashing into each other. They were sturdy enough that none of them were damaged, but they did fall upon their sides, the somewhat delicate balance thrown totally off kilter, and they skidded around crashing into each other while trying to regain balance.

Ahead of them, the convoy slowed. A few caravans turned, and the ones at the front kept going, and that was all the raiders needed even as the convoy's multitude of soldiers opened fire from their combat vehicles; six lightly armored but powerfully equipped speeders flying alongside them swiveled their autocannons into place and opened fire, mortar shells flying everywhere-

Buildings exploded around them, shells exploding on contact with them or blasting through and then exploding, pulverizing them down to their foundations. Metal and slag rained down, and a large chunk narrowly missed Jak, and some of the Mudokons were too slow, the metal slicing them into pieces or crushing them underneath or metal made molten by the heat of explosions gave them awful but mercifully quick deaths.

Jak snarled, his free hand hitting a interface on his gun, and it's mass reconfigured itself into a short stockier blaster, acceleration coils mounted on the barrel and focus optics upon it. "Keep hitting them!" Jak roared as he opened fire, a bolt of weaponized Yellow Eco striking right between the gap between open space and armor plating on a speeder, sliding through and hitting its engine to produce a magnificent explosion. "KEEP HITTING THEM OR THIS WAS POINTLESS!" The Mudokons roared back, a wordless war cry, and moved with spirits-granted speed, climbing up walls as though their fingers had sticky-pads and jumping off to dodge the inevitable attack, their firearms blazing bright bolts of something akin to superheated blasts of air at the vehicles. Most missed, a few did not, and two of those vehicles went crashing to the ground and smashing into walls or cargo craft; the latter weren't damaged, but it was still satisfying.

Jak moved forward as the tanks finally revolved around to face them, and parted off the road so that the convoy could hurry through. The tanks opened fire, autocannons mounting on the front in groups of four each blasting open unsightly holes in the walls and an explosion incidentally taking off the arm right off a hopeful Mudokon warrior. Other weapons on the tanks opened fire and the warrior threw himself to the ground, screaming in indignation rather than pain, his weapon clattering to the ground. Jak ran through the fire, autocannon rounds and flurries of bullets and all manner of energy weapons from the multitude of both vehicle armaments and enemy firearms blazing through him and obliterating the area directly behind him.

He moved faster than was possible. His limbs were fueled with a strength that couldn't be powered by mere muscle, the force with which he pounded his feet into the ground for a dodging leap left heavy dents, and when he was flying through the air he was merely nicked and marked by all the projectiles. He passed over where the first of the downed convoy was struggling to get off the ground and fired his gun again and again, rolling onto the ground and sliding on his side and getting back up again and still shooting.

As he jumped onto the downed convoy, it occurred to him that the rest of the caravans weren't keeping the fight going; they were retreating to their destination, going forward, not even bothering to keep up their fire. A shrill scream answered him as he looked down into the pilot chamber; a green humanoid creature with a squidlike head and a mouthful of tentacle-like protrusions, muscular and wiry underneath the light body armor he wore, his lower body tapering to a tail encased in a set of mechanized legs to give the semblance of a bipedal creature. A Slig, the reluctantly loyal mercenary people working for the Glukkons, the glowing red eyes on his face-concealing helmet bright with blood-thirst.

Then he got a good look at Jak. Jak growled and the Slig's eyes dimmed. Though the beak hidden under its tentacle-protrusions was probably never designed to articulate his language, the cybernetic 'Slig pants' it wore came with language translation technology. It verbalized something, and the words came through the Babel Fish in his ear canal as "OH MARGARET I'M GOING TO DIE." It hurled itself back, cowering in horror.

Jak instantly leveled his gun at the Slig; the green thing curled back, desperately trying to find a weapon. Momentarily intending to kill the Slig as an obstacle in his way, Jak hesitated, and then winced at his terror. "Get out of here!" He said, kicking the Slig out of the cockpit, who hit the ground and nodded quickly at Jak, crawling on the ground and scampering away for dear life. He just barely managed to avoid getting run over by the Mudokon tomahawkers; slightly larger than the others with their purple head-feathers sticking up in tight bunches, their bodies mystically enhanced for close combat, and carrying absolutely massive weapons like a mixture of swords and tomahawk blades made of a red-hued and curiously organic metal, large glowing orbs of spirit-energy housed at the edge.

Dwarfed by their weapons, they still swung them with extraordinary lightness and skill; they moved quick, leaping over the latest round of explosive shells obliterating the walls and streets around them, tearing open the cargo craft. "It's empty!" One of them cried. "Nothing but blank space!"

Jak snarled. "The hell is going on?!" But the shooters on his side were already moving. Jak got into the pilot's chamber the Slig had vacated, and he had learned a short while ago how to use the particular mechanisms of the craft the Glukkons favored. It rose into the air shortly, two Mudokon Mudarchers manning the weapon stations as Jak ordered, and it flew on through, swiftly overtaking the skirmishers and barreling right at the convoy. The barrage of weapon-fire halted for a few precious seconds, the enemy briefly puzzled by the sight of one of their own coming at them, and that was enough time for the Mudokons to open fire. They were untrained in vehicle combat, working with reflex and crude understanding of mechanisms, but their aim wasn't bad; blaster fire and autocannons knocked a caravan into one in front of it, and that one was hit in such a way that an occupant accidentally hit the wrong button and started blasted at the wall that promptly fell on them. They weren't harmed, but they were pinned.

"Take down the Sligs!" Jak said. "Get their vehicles under our control and keep going!" He was in a bit of a hurry, because the head of the convoy (the tank with the hyenas, an unusually large cargo ship and two guardian speeders) was rounding around the corner and heading into a crater in the middle of the town.

Jak speeded by as his men, wounded and hurt, still slew the Sligs with well-timed blows and opened up the cargo; luckily this one _did _have captures in it, and out came several dozen groups of terrified Mudokons and assorted sentient beings came out, fleeing right into the careful ministration of the native warriors. Jak moved past them and halted his vehicle, turning it sideways right into the path of a hail of automatic fire from a tank's machine guns which otherwise would have killed them.

A hole or two was punched in the side of his cargo, the glass in a window shattered and sliced several lines in his face, but he still grinned as he saw the Mudokons leading the slaves away into various alleyways, skirmishers leading while the shooters kept up the guard, directing cover fire to make their escape. The tanks and speeders moved ahead, plainly more concerned with the head of their convoy.

"Good work," Jak said to the warriors that had gotten the captures. "Hold off anyone who looks mean until our getaway gets here!" He called forward any available warriors, and they quickly came up… piloting several of the downed craft that hadn't been totally pinned under the rubble or broken in the fighting; a speeder or two, and one guard-tank, all relatively intact. Jak nodded his approval and said, "After those ones at the front! They're up to something!"

Some Mudarcher snipers took up position, providing cover fire as Jak's men advanced. Jak was a good shot with his own morph gun, attacking with it sticking out the broken window and the roaring wind and horribly hard to calculate factors all around still not much of a problem, and his Mudokons admirably lucky; their combined firing resulted in another downed enemy speeder and the autocannon on one of the tanks being knocked askew while it was still firing so that it's shells wound up turning the tank inside-out. Three caravans were swiftly commandeered, the Sligs thrown out and the four dozen slaves inside broken out (though only one caravan had any), and again they repeated the tactic of providing shields for them while the Mudokons got them away, this time simply driving the caravans to relative safety.

The slaves were swiftly escorted, Jak calculated that there were only seven caravans left, and he charged forward yet again, a poor choice as it was. A lucky shot hit Jak's vehicle, and then another, and then sixteen, punching in in some unfortunate machinery. It skidded and began dipping, and Jak was barely aware of something moving at him extremely quickly before a surprisingly violent weight hit the front of his craft so hard it flipped it mid-air and came crashing down.

Drool flecked his windshield, a short furry muzzle snapped savagely, and narrowed eyes glared at him. "Pull over!" She snarled, reaching in and grabbing him roughly in the shoulder, claws sinking into the gaps in his armor, and ripping him right off his seat and through the window before smashing him into the craft and throwing him into a nearby wall with inhuman strength.

Jak's wind was knocked out of him by the wall; he had enough time to see the remaining convoy hurrying into a large crater a short distance away, and then he hurtled into the ground, a disorienting experience pushing the odd sight from his attention. A roaring weight came crashing into him, but he had the presence of mind to shout, "Keep going! _GET THE PRISONERS!_"

There was a satisfying whirr where the speeders and carriers his men had taken flew right past him and his attacker, and the sounds of battle as they opened fire. A clawed hand grabbed hold of his neck and lifted him up. "What is your problem with us, huh!?" She growled, a hyena-woman; larger and broader than the subordinate males serving her, dressed in an eclectic collection of clothing and armor she might have scrounged from a rummage bin somewhere (oversized black pants with matching combat boots, a shirt so scarred by battle it was a tube top, and a rather dusty blue soldier's jacket). Her gray-brown fur spotted with black stood on end, her head that of a slightly anthropoid hyena and her impressive set of bone-crushing teeth bared.

"Shenzi, is it?" Jak said, his voice vibrating with a growl echoing his words, Dark Eco shining from his mouth. "Problem is easy. I don't like you guys."

She growled again, a disturbingly monstrous noise to come from a sapient being. Shenzi viciously kicked the morph gun right out of his hand and shoved his face into the wall. "You and your sidekicks are _dead!_" She said, slamming him into the wall again and again with one hand. A bruise formed, the brick cracked, Jak's bones started to hurt a little bit-

And he was getting mildly annoyed. His hand moved, a blur, and fasted around her ear. He viciously grabbed hold of the various earrings there, pulling until he heard her scream, and punched her hard at the jaw. Her jaw muscles were harder than rock, but it hurt her more than him, and when she recoiled it gave him enough room to slam his elbow into the side of her neck (carefully avoiding her spiked collar).

Shenzi fell, choking and snarling, and he was let go. Jak kicked up his morphgun, catching it in mid-air, and hit the interface on it to transform it into a broader and shorter shotgun, the barrel glowing red. Shenzi looked up as Jak squeezed the trigger and a concussive red blast of eco energy hammered her in the chest, knocking her head over heels, her long mane tangling in the dirt where she rolled back to her feet, dazed and gasping. Jak growled, thinking that the shot should have collapsed her into meaty chunks. "Gonna...get you," She said, dropping to all fours and charging.

Jak was too slow to move and she pounced right on him, knocking him through the weakened wall. A moment later there was a blast of red and she came hurtling out a different part and Jak went through the new hole, taking time to shoot a different section on the wall. The resulting rubble fell right on Shenzi, and Jak ran even before he heard the rubble starting to shift again and her extremely loud curses when she popped out.

Those hyena-people, he'd learned on earlier occasions, were just as stupidly tenacious as he was.

She was already bursting out of the rubble when Jak moved, and any attempts to pursue him were halted as a loud blast, of seventeen separate explosions dozens of feet above them where enemy missiles and explosive ordnance had been premature detonated by Jak's allies, hit her like a hammer. She could take a good hit or two dozen without slowing, but the noise hurt badly enough to drive her to the ground with her pawlike hands clamped over her ears.

Jak barely noticed any of this, the battlefield reduced to an array of sensory input in his mind and separated sharply into _IMPORTANT-RIGHT-NOW, THINGS-TO-KILL, THINGS-TO-NOT-KILL _and _NOT-IMPORTANT_. Categories flickering all about him, shrapnel and bullets and weaponized energy flying all over and hitting him and knocking him down only for him to get right back up and keep going, the dark thing inside growling and clawing at the door to _get out and KILL EVERYTHING_-

His bones creaked, his teeth itched. He felt his nailed thicken and lengthen, sliding rudely against the fabric of his gloves. Small waves of power ripped up the ground in his footsteps, nearly invisible ripples cracking the busted streets, and Jak furiously whispered to him, "Not now, dammit, not now _not now_!"

A speeder fell from the sky, the fragile craft cut into two uneven sections by gunfire, right on him. Jak didn't even stop moving, the several hundred pounds of finely engineered metal first screeching horribly when the purple-hued lightning that screamed out from blasted one piece into thousands of flying shrapnel that made a horrible of mess of whoever met them, and the other casually batted aside with Jak's free hand with a strength that wasn't his, belonged to the monster-

Something in him pushed, and Jak _roared_.

It was something that should never have come from the mouth of an elf; it was wild and ragged, rippling up to higher registers with that impossibly deep tone, the echoes rising as though it had been spoken with several dozen mouths, and when it faded it sounded like a screeching war cry, the battle sound of an abomination, a thing that was fundamentally _wrong._

When Jak moved, bolting across the road to where his enemies were so dearly focused on, it was too fast to even register. Bullet whizzed by, energy flew, and guard troops flung themself at him, and all of those dangers were shoved aside as roughly as the speeder pieces had been. His mind worked furiously, the thought _KILL THEM ALL _powering his fight instincts like fuel on flames-

Several explosive shells were loosed; none of them hit him directly, but enough landed near him to catch him in their erupting radius, knocking him head over heels right through six walls and blasting him right out of what had been perilously close to being a frenzy.

In the crater, mere feet from where Jak had been about to go through, the hyena-man who'd called the attack from behind the cargo craft within the crater, snarled as more Mudokons poured in and relentlessly assaulted the slave-carriers. "Don't these guys ever _quit?!_" The hyena, a burly fellow named Banzai, the dirty trenchcoat he'd taken to wearing over battered body armor and surplus military wear flapping in the wind from the explosions. He winced, the noise hurting his ears. "Worse than cats, even!"

A whimpering drew his attention. On the ground was another hyena-man, much broader but around his height, laying on the ground with his paw-hands on his ears and squealing out a mad half-barking pained cadence. This hyena, given the rather out of place name Ed, had already been pretty dirty before this battle and his ragged assortment of light green shirt over long-sleeved black-and-white striped shirt and cargo shorts improperly maintained, but all the dirt flying everywhere wasn't doing them any favors. Banzai winced at his pack-brother's pain. "Whoops. Sorry, buddy. Thought I told you to watch the explosions, man!"

Ed whimpered, giving a loud rasping bark that almost sounded like a laugh. Several of the Sligs loading a sparkling, shiny material at the very core of the crater into the heavily armored and intriguingly empty carriers, snickered at him. Ed immediately whipped around and snarled at them, foam coating his jaws. They recoiled and made a show of getting back to work, driving the small but strong hovering forklifts they piloted into the ground to excavate as much as they could.

More blasting raised the battle's sound up a touch, mixed with the hooting and whimsical war cries of the Mudokons as they charged; skirmishers brandished their weapons as impromptu shields against projectiles, snipers laid down cover fire as the melee fighters and opportunistic pilots pressed the attack. In a swarm of flashing metal and well-timed attacks, the barricade formed by the Sligs and their vehicles was wedged open just enough for one or two Mudokons to come through, enough to attack from behind and get more of their numbers in...and more were coming.

Banzai and Ed readied themselves, raising laser weapons that resembled small machine guns. Ed crouched low, spiritual power flooding into his legs, and a single leap carried him across the crater and right into a Mudokon warrior, slamming him through the ground, and Ed was already firing wildly when he stood up, shooting indiscriminately at Mudokon and unwary Slig alike, screeching and laughing the whole time. His lasers were imbued with his bloodlust via magical force, pulsing out and burning whatever they hit into ash.

The barricade trembled, something heavy smashing into it, and Banzai had a moment of watching the Sligs abandon their vehicles before it was roughly pulled apart, Jak running through and aiming his morph gun right at them even though Shenzi was in hot pursuit. She bowled him over before he could shoot, knocking him to the ground and throwing him back outside the crater. "Dump the people-cargo!" Shenzi yelled. "That's what they want; give them the meat-bags and run for it!"

"But ma'am!" A Slig yelled from the forklift. "We haven't collected all the aetherite yet!"

(Jak heard, and repeated "Aetherite?" with a puzzled expression.)

"I know!" Shenzi yelled.

"And those slaves were gathered through the course of two months-"

"They ain't the prize, _think straight and just do it!_"

The Sligs responded at once; two craft standing guard rushed past him, roughly skidding up the crater-side and turning so that their backs (and cargo doors) faced Jak and his Mudokons; the many dozens of slaves inside, latched together by handcuffs hooked to each other and horribly crammed together, were thrown clear by momentum, and the Mudokons broke rank to catch their enslaved brethren and the other unfortunates.

Jak stood up, already recovered from the beating, and his gaze shifted to and from the slaves and the hyenas repeatedly; longing for violence at the hyenas, compelled to help those in need, the two traits so close to his nature fought for dominance, urging him to action, and slowly his attention focused on Shenzi and her sidekicks, the black of his pupils expanding to cover all his eyes and shrouding in murderous darkness-

A third blast, this coming from above. Not a weapon, but the sound of powerful engines directly overhead. Jak looked up and a group of flying vehicles, much like the cargo craft but altered to fly properly and repainted a fetching shade of blue with an alignment symbol of a Mudokon handprint on a yellow background, came screamed down. "Told ya I'd get here!" Daxter's voice shouted from the lead vehicle.

Shenzi recovered from her surprise. She looked back as one of the forklift ripped into the ground, tearing the sparkling material along with a good chunk of earth and tossed it into a newly emptied cargo carrier, and she made a decision. "We got what we came for! Forget the slaves and _run!_"

Daxter's ships flew in. The Sligs and hyenas dived for cover, crawling awkwardly on the ground and hurrying into their speeders and vehicles while the Mudokons tried to shoot them down, the hyena's obedient soldiers shooting back and forcing the Mudokons to retreat. Jak shifted his morph gun into a configuration not unlike a grenade launcher, firing several large capsules that exploded impressively at the ground, blowing apart a few of the slower Sligs, further forcing them back.

The hyenas and Sligs were quick, though, and piled into the closest vehicles at hand. The cargo carriers containing the sparkling material they just harvested were the first to leave, all of Shenzi's forces firing madly at the Mudokons with a terrible desperation, forcing them backwards. Jak called his forces back, none of them well-equipped to withstand a sustained fire-fight, and Shenzi's forces quickly retreated from the battle, moving up the crater and fleeing at incredible speeds.

The Sligs targeted the slaves, knowing that the Mudokons would put all their effort into protecting them; only a few craft were left to fire, most of the others the Mudokons had taken throwing themselves in front of the slaves to take hits for them, and the ones that didn't were left to fire precious little weaponry.

Daxter's vehicles swooped in, flying in a practiced formation that would ensure that as many of the slaves as possible would be tossed in and flown out of danger long enough for them to circle back and collect more until all have been secured, but that was hardly necessary this time; Shenzi's forces abandoned the slaves and stolen vehicles without so much as a second glance, blasting everything in their path out of town. At their speed, soon they were out of range, little more than clouds of dust rising in their wake.

Jak blinked. He breathed in, breathed out. Already, the battle had been concluded.

Daxter's ships flew in and landed, so that the slaves could file in, which the Mudokons managed for them quite admirably, comforting them and being cheerful about things and trying not to think about their brothers lying dead or requiring immediate medical attention (supplied by combat medics hurrying out of the cargo ships just in case). Jak said, "What was _that _all about?"

Daxter's ship, sleeker than the others and essentially a point ship, opened its doors and out stepped Daxter, hurrying to his friend on all fours. Red-orange fur shimmered in the dying light of the day, his long and inflexible tail flicking back and forth, and Daxter's small frame that so closely resembled a blend of both otter and weasel (hence the term 'ottsel' for his appearance) was soon at Jak's side, looking more like an animal that was wearing body armor and a goggles-strapped helmet rather than a sapient being. "What was what all about?"

"They just up and left." Jak stared at where the hyenas and their forces had gone. "Forgot the slaves, just took some weird stuff and left."

"...So, does that mean we won this one?"

Jak looked around. He stared at the devastation, the dead Mudokons lying in pieces or bleeding out or being carried in pieces to the healing shamans' sides. He stared at the slaves, many of whom had been brutally vaporized or maimed in that last desperate retreat by the hyenas. He stared at the death and destruction that he, as always, could have prevented if only he'd been quicker or better. "...Honestly? I don't know."

Daxter rolled his eyes. "Precursors, but you're depressing, buddy."

Jak rolled his eyes too. "Comes with the territory."

They made a point to never spent much time in an area they didn't have territorial control of, which was precious little on Mudos. Jak resumed his leadership role, coordinating the slave rescue efforts and leading them into ships and accounting for their weight to keep the ships as light and quick as they could. It took a short time, still too long for Jak's liking, and many of them feared a sudden reprisal attack by the hyenas any moment.

But none happened. Soon, their rescued people (thanking them dearly and enthusiastically, at least the ones that weren't quietly sitting in shock) had been placed into the escape ships, and then they were taking off for a flight into safe territory, where they could either be taken to off-planet ports (in the case of tourists or locals who just wanted to find a safer world) or Mudokon tribes to be properly educated and freed in full (in the case of the Mudokon scrubs, or anyone who wanted to join them for whatever reason).

One by one, the ships left, hurrying quickly. Only Jak and Daxter were left, as Jak had been staring down at the crater the whole time. It was clearly making Daxter uncomfortable. "Come on, buddy," He said, patting his much larger friend on the knee (since that was as high as he could reach). "Let's get going, okay? You're spooking me."

Jak didn't answer for a moment. "Dax?" He finally said. "How many vehicles did they lose today? Not the ones that were destroyed, but the ones we managed to take for ourselves and loot properly."

"Uh...I dunno. More than usual. Most of them, really, at least five. Mostly speeders, but more tanks than we usually get."

"And they lost a fair number of soldiers and mercenaries," Jak said.

"I guess so."

"And all the slaves they were carrying this way. And with the recent big up-slide in production lines, they need every set of hands they can get."

"Uh huh?"

Jak frowned. "So...what was so important that they dumped all that and didn't even flinch so they could get away with what they were taking from this crater?"

Daxter looked down. "...Huh. I dunno. What stuff? I didn't see them do that."

"They finished right before you got here. Whatever it was, they really wanted it. More than valuable vehicles or manpower." Jak bent down to the ground, and picked up a small shard of the shining substance the hyenas had been so keen on, this piece knocked away in the big rush. He held it up to the sky, and the light filtered through the crystalline facets in dazzling rays and shines. It was no particular color, light radiating off it in dozens of variations of shades of every possible color, primarily green and blue. It felt warm on his fingers, and Jak gave it a suspicious lick; it was sweet to the taste, leaving a lovely aftertaste like candy.

Daxter peered at it. "Uh, I ain't a gearhead or whatever, but that looks kind of familiar."

"Yep," Jak said. "We've seen this loads of times, across a lot of worlds that know spaceflight. That meteorite that crashed here, it was loaded with this stuff. Funny thing is, they called it aetherite. Not sure why." Thoughtfully, Jak pocketed the substance. "Everyone else I've met calls it 'Gummi'."

A moment passed.

Daxter, his mind stalling for a bit at the implications, could only manage to say the first thing that came to his mind. "It's weird. I always thought 'gummi' was a stupid name. Why'd they call something you make spaceships and stuff out of after a candy-thing?"

"No idea. That weird kingdom from that universe with all the grim darkness did it first, the weirdoes."

Daxter shrugged. It didn't seem really important to him. "Wonder what they want more of that stuff for? Not exactly hard to come by. ...Meh, whatever; where are we heading next? Back to Abe and Munch at the Great Raisin?"

Jak shook his head. "I dunno about you, Dax..." His eyes narrowed, a determined set at his mouth. "But I'm following those hyenas and finding out what the Glukkon cartels are actually up to."

"What?!"

"I'm sick of always just reacting. I need information and I think they might be actually up to a real agenda instead of just doing stuff for business."

"Seriously?" Daxter said. "There's like a port up there, big on the tourists they got coming in on this place like we did! Security all over the place, tons of nasty freaks they've been making! You really wanna jump right into that?"

Jak shrugged. "Might as well. Whatever they're doing, none of us have the slightest idea what it is. And I really hate not knowing exactly what the bad guys are doing, it _never _ends well."

"Good point, buddy. You got a plan?"

"Yep." Jak shouldered his gun. "Follow the hyenas to wherever they're going, see what they want the gummi for, and make a huge mess of everything."

"...Simple, easy to remember. Works for me! Hop in, we'll take the long road in, oughta escape patrols and scanners if we play it safe, huh?"

Jak grinned. He reached down and lightly punched Daxter in the shoulder. "So you're in?"

"Like I'd ever do anything else." Daxter went back into his ship, the pilot's chamber modified to be roomy enough for a few people. Jak followed, sitting on the co-pilots seat.

The ship lifted up and took off, flying in the same direction where the hyenas had gone, sharply veering away as they came into view of bright lights in the distance.

Further that way, almost too faint for them to see, there was a city crowding the horizon, and it was there that the hyenas, and now Jak and Daxter, where heading to.

In Jak's head, his thoughts echoed with the screaming of a caged monster. He did his best to ignore it.

* * *

On a lifeless world, scarred so dearly by ancient warfare that it was a dust-stricken desert land of deep valleys where ancient oceans had dried up long ago, towering monoliths in the shapes of pyramids still bore scars from some ancient battle, and everywhere the dust that was all that was left of that world's inhabitants choked the hot winds unceasingly churning in the violently temperamental climate.

For eons, this planet had been at peace with the destruction of its people, not unlike so many other worlds in this particular universe that had died in a regular cycle of destruction. Now a new conflict disturbed the peace, and if any tutelary spirits remained to keep guard over this world, they were content to watch with interest.

If they existed, they'd probably annoyed by the stolen relics, ancestral weapons, schematics of varying sorts of sacred glass-molding techniques, and all manner of long-lost secrets that the space pirates nominally on the side of Evil had ferried away to a hidden place on the planet's moon before Zim's crew had found them. They weren't even having the decency to plan to sell them to museums or put the scientific elements back into popular use.

This battleground bearing witness to the first conflict in ages was a sprawling colossus made of a peculiar glass as strong and resilient as metal; once a circle-shaped island-sized city flying in the sky with bound air spirits working in concert with gravitational engines of immense magnitude. Both had failed long ago, the engines failing and the spirits fleeing when their captors had perished, and the ground was a ragged valley where it had crashed, tearing up the landscape around it and high peaks rising around it. The foundations of the city broken in the impact, many buildings had toppled over at the city's edges and broken on the ground, the impact cracking up that very ground into jagged and deadly spikes the size of small hills, a deadly obstacle for a unwary adventurer. Ironically, this kept the rest of the city fairly intact; it had been built to last, and with the outer buildings forming a stable surface to rest against, the spiked rocks a thousand-and-more points of counter-balancing, the city had been preserved.

For ages, all had been silent.

Now, the constant dust of the wind, the ashes and such of the planet's long-dead inhabitants bourne into the sky and swirling about forever, swirled about a battle and scraping against buildings and exposed skin against the backdrop of a new battleground. The crackling of lightning, the roars of fire-bursts, the chittering of eldritch energies, clash of metal on crystal, and above all, battle cries of such ferociousness that even the wind was humbled.

Over this city, nearly even with the smallest of the mountain peaks, two ships were engaged in battle: on one side, flitting between bolts of plasma fired at it with reckless abandon and moving so quickly it seemed to be sliding in and out of an ethereal realm with each blinking movement, there was a smaller ship, narrow and with great bladelike wings at the rear (a design recently in favor of the multiversal Skrull Empire and their allies, including the Lich Queen of the githyanki) and sorcerous engines propelling it at incredibly precise yet immense speeds. A multitude of weapons, long pole-shaped artifacts called force cannons, channeled ambient magical energy to hurl bolts of force in dangerously precise bursts. The _Paragon, _far less agile but vastly tougher, had yet to land even a single blow, but it's many impacts hadn't even been registered. Calvin and Morte operated the _Paragon _in tandem, desperately trying to line up a shot and hammer the enemy ship, which was operated by Gunter the frost giant, and the radio waves sung with their constant back-and-forth banter.

And below this battle, upon the glittering ruins of a bridge long since shattered into immense shards by some unknown disaster, Hobbes was doing battle with Jord, his new shield proving it's worth and parrying her blows without so much as a dent, a source of great frustration to the frost giantess. In fact, it was even _hurting _her fists.

Unfortunately, she was keeping them on the defensive, an impressive feat for a woman clad only in a bikini-pants ensemble in the middle of a dust storm while Hobbes and Zuko had the sense to wear heavy coats, full-body covering protective suits and goggles to protect them from the worst of it. She didn't appear to even notice the dust or vicious winds, though; her native realm of Jotunheim was a far more perilous and wild realm. It was a sore point that neither of them could get past her, the frost giantess making it her job to prevent them from joining Zim in his fight upon Darvhog (interrupted in the process of salvaging a miniaturized death ray) further up at a point where the bridge slanted sharply upwards, a suitable climbing point to the portions where it remained intact, and where Zim and Darvhog had chosen to fight one another.

To her credit, she was doing a splendid job of it; though she wore no armor, she had carried a magic scroll that imbued her with sufficient arcane protection to prevent Hobbes from employing his pressure point technique. Her speed and strength was all she needed, and was hammering into Hobbes and Zuko with much enthusiasm; if it wasn't for the bridge's durability, the shards they fought upon might have shattered from the force of her blows. With limited space to move, she had the advantage, vastly tougher and stronger than either man and alarmingly fast. Already, Zuko had been knocked off the side of the bridge, forced to scrabble for handholds or fall down onto the rocks below, and Hobbes wasn't doing much better.

Higher, on the more preserved parts of the bridge that was actually intact and roughly level with some of the higher buildings (perhaps a rather epic main street when originally built), Zim was faring better than his teammates, his battle with Darvhog seemingly concluded and Zim victorious. Scorch marks from firebolts and grenade blasts (some larger than the others) marked places where Zim had nimbly stayed out of Darvhog's close combat range and kept the githyanki back with the use of a grenade launcher he'd made a few days ago, shimmering bits of expended magic crystal littering the ground and evidence of Darvhog's new technique of focusing arcane power into crystals for quickly empowering his spells. Of Darvhog's actual magic, there was little sign; he seemed strangely reluctant to use the full force of his magic, and now it had gone badly for him; Zim had forced him to the side of the bridge, where the walls had long ago fallen away or been taken by looters (who, according to Darvhog's banter, had still missed the _really interesting _things). If Zim fired a grenade, even a miss would still get Darvhog in the blast, and the concussive force could still send him falling right down and be splattered on the rocks below, or worse.

Zim had, of course, made this quite clear to Darvhog.

Now, Zim scowled at the space pirate, none of his usual levity in place. He held his grenade launcher in both hands, the weapon crafted by himself and modeled after a shotgun, it's revolver-style ammunition carrier loaded with miniaturized versions of the microfusion grenades Calvin had made. Both Darvhog's silver sword and the crystal blade Moofy had been forced from his hands, leaving him apparently defenseless. Zim pointed his grenade launcher at Darvhog, another matter piquing him, and he said, "I am so _sick _of seeing you! How do you keep finding us!?"

Disco Darvhog, his arms held up in a gesture of surrender, said, "It's only been a few times, man! And technically this time you ran into _us_. We're just doing our thing, not actually raiding anyone or trying to fight you..."

"It's been too times too many, fiend!"

"I'm not a fiend, I'm a githyanki! Okay, some people would suggest that there's not much of a difference, but we're certainly of different cosmological origins-"

"It's just an expression!" Zim paused. "Wait. You know about fiends?"

"Duh! Only a total moron wouldn't know about fiends! Tanar'ri, baatezu, yugoloths, all the rest...what you might call demons and devils and...wait, I dunno what people call yugoloths in plain talk."

"I fought a ham demon once," Zim said.

"Neat!" The friendly nature of their interactions gave Darvhog hope for a more peaceable resolution (i.e., getting away with the stuff without getting beaten up or tossed in jail again). "So, uh, I don't suppose you'd consider letting us go this time-"

"Nope!"

"-I mean, you're being a _cool _nemesis and junk...wait, what'd ya say? I was still talking, didn't catch that."

"I said no! Incompetent buffoon of a pirate! Don't you listen when I am talking!? Some villain _you _are. What kind of foe doesn't even bother to listen to the hero?" Zim had a brief moment of acknowledging that he'd actually done that very thing more than once, and chose to ignore it.

"Aw, come on, don't be a square!"

"I know not what that even is!"

"It's not really cool to mix pedantic speech with casual talk, man. It just sounds _weird_ unless you have the style to pull it off, and sorry my friend, but _that _kind of style, you just don't got it."

Zim's antennae twitched under the heavy hat-portion of his environmental suit (which was really just his recently acquired longcoat outfit zipped up and with a few things added it, it was good at covering him even without those things). "How droll. The incompetent space pirate who parades around in a _disco theme _is mocking me on a lack of style."

"...What's wrong with a disco theme?"

About to say 'everything', Zim stopped himself. "Not the point. Right now, I suppose this is the moment where I ought to make a grand and heroic speech about evil never winning and Good always triumphant but that's rather too cheesy and sickening by my standards, it associates me with things I'd rather not deal with. It dilutes the nature of Good to something closer to stickling around the status quo or something stupid like that. It demeans my alignment!"

"Ah. In that case, could you seriously think about letting me go? Only I wasn't actually stealing or doing anything evil this time, I was just salvaging from a lost long civilization that doesn't even have any survivors or heirs or anything with a claim to them!"

"Oh, I know, I'm not after you because of the salvaging. Only a real jerk would be after you over that."

"I told you, it's not stealing, it's salvaging-oh, wait, you _did _call it salvaging, my bad." Darvhog frowned. Overhead, their ships briefly passed by, Calvin and Morte's incoherent string of cursing at their inability to just hit the other ship audible over the intercom. "So, you're _not _here being a self-righteous prickle over taking stuff that no one has a claim to?"

"Of course not!"

"Okie-dokie, so...why _are _you after me?"

Zim grinned. "You still have yet to pay for your crimes upon Terracandra or that port town we met you at, or the evils you committed to wind _up _in those places in the first place!"

"Oh, come on!"

Zim cackled. "Did you think I would just _forget _about all that?! The ruination of the port town, which will likely cause trouble for many who come that way and need its services? On its own, that would not be too terrible; you merely took advantage of a situation for your benefit, and I cannot fault you too much on that. But Terracandra...you deliberately aided a cult of technology-hating madmen! You taught them how to use their magic more skillfully, manipulated them into summoning dread abominations or mutating the wild life to create dread abominations, gave them greater purpose and ambition, and in so contributing to even more deaths than you already had! A mere threat was made into a planet-shaking crusade! If we hadn't arrived and helped to nullify the worst of it, that civilization may well have crumbled in years to come! And you willingly consorted with a dread artifact of obvious evil to do it all; _that _is why I'm fighting you and intend to deliver you to the proper authorities! Getting you out of my life for good is just a pleasant bonus. Heh hah!"

"That sucks. Hee, at least you're not miffed about how I stole the jewel of Jumanji to empower my magic and profit from the death and desecration of who knows how many people!"

"...You did what now!?"

"Damn it! I should _not _have said that."

"Eh?" Moofy said from the ground, evidentially so disinterested in Darvhog's survival he had gone to sleep.. "What? Were you talking? Ah, it matters not." He hummed and his glow dimmed, apparently going back to sleep.

A rumbling came from overhead. Zim ignored it. "I am certain my crew will deal with yours shortly," Zim said. "And then, you will all be in our custody." He laughed manically. "Now, surrender properly! ...Eh?" He looked up sharply, as the _Paragon _tumbled in the sky overhead, one of its propulsion discs damaged by a lucky shot; not enough to make it fall, but more than enough to throw it off-track for a few precious moments. "No!"

"Heh. Gotcha!" Darvhog said smugly.

The githyanki's ship, Gunter shouting triumphantly, flew overhead, dipping over the bridge, surprisingly huge as it came in. Zim simply took aim at it, hoping to shoot a weak spot or something, but didn't get the chance. The ship swooped up, underside bared, and it's active weapons switched out for more powerful ones: more powerful force cannons, a set of long objects shaped like lances and glowing with arcane energies sliding out into weaponized ports. They powered up, firing lances of concussive force, strafing from overhead and flying away.

They were well-aimed. The blasts hit squarely at where Zim and Darvhog were standing, avoiding Darvhog entirely but blasting Zim nearly twenty feet into the air though he had managed to evade getting directly hit. Zim hurtled away, and Darvhog laughed, his plot for stalling Zim successful, and grabbed both his swords in a single fluid motion (Moofy complaining bitterly when he woke up). Broken super-glass was flung into the air, and Darvhog jumped, his feet touching airborne shards smaller than his fingers and somehow finding purchase before leaping away with telekinetic force, using the shards as stepping stones.

He alighted neatly on a nearby rooftop that was only decimated enough to be tilting over. His ship flew off, the _Paragon _regaining balance and throwing bolt after bolt of superheated matter at it, igniting the insides of a few buildings they struck.

Zim turned in mid-air, getting a brief sight of the fight below; Jord grabbing hold of both Zuko and Hobbes, smashing them into the ground one after the other. Zim was hurtling to the side of the bridge, doomed to hit either the deadly rocks or a building wall at terminal velocity, and resolved both of his problems with a focused blast of flame in front of him. The recoil launched him away from his current trajectory, closer to Darvhog's location, and a beam from his fire blast struck Jord right in the back. Not enough to damage, but enough to hurt, and gave his allies a moment of respite. As Zim flew overhead, he took aim and fired several shots; he was too high up to have a hope of hitting her before the grenades exploded, but that wasn't the point; Zuko forced his way out of her grip, the heat of the plasma explosions fueling his bending and strength, and he breathed a blast of fire right into her face.

Zim didn't see what happened next; right in front of him a wall was approaching. His Pak extended his spider-legs and they connected to the wall, angling him out so he just barely swung in through an open break in the wall. They released, he hit the ground and skidded for a few dozen feet, sliding right out another hole at the opposite side of the building, and once he was free-falling again, his spider-legs took hold of the wall. No longer burdened with such bad momentum, he climbed up the wall with commendable speed, calculating and thinking fast, and when he sprung up to the rooftop, sliding a few more grenades into his weapon in the time it took to flip over the rooftop and retract the spider-legs into his Pak, Darvhog was still standing there, looking impressed.

Zim said, "Cease and repent!" and pointed the grenade launcher at him.

"Do what now with how?" Darvhog said. Behind him, the _Paragon _feinted, flying down to the buildings as if suffering a power failure, and the broad-winged flyer followed, Gunter eager to exploit such a weakness. Calvin pulled their ship up sharply, causing quite a lot of dust to go everywhere, and Gunter was too surprised to dodge the rooftop, crashing into it and bouncing off, damaged and vowing revenge as he took to the sky again.

Taking advantage of that distraction, Zim leveled his weapon, took aim, and fired with mechanical precision; Darvhog was quick, but not quick enough to evade the grenade, and the concussive blast caught him square in the chest and blasted him clear off the rooftop and back towards the bridge; Zim was already leaping, and crashed right into his chest feet-first, light flickering around them as they suddenly accelerated, pushed by some unknown force. Darvhog grit his teeth, a hand-shaped construct grasping them and slowing their descent down, so that when they smashed into (and _through)_ the slightly curved and mostly broken roof running over the bridge, impacting on the bridge below, it didn't hurt _quite _as much as it could.

They bounced a few times, Darvhog cried in dismay when the pain from dozens of lacerations and bruises hit him, and Zim just whooped joyfully. Zim grabbed hold of a loosened cable as they passed it, whipping off Darvhog and leaving him to come to a crashing halt a short distance away. He approached and stopped right in front of Darvhog, the space pirate grunting in pain at him. By some precisely calculated planning on Zim's part, they were right where they had been fighting earlier. Zim smirked. "Your magic is meaningless before my technological superiority," he said. "Your weapons are inferior. Your allies poorly armed. All you have is your ridiculous magical power."

"Hey, my guys are doing pretty good. And your technology is a crutch," Darvhog replied evenly. "Take your guns and armor away, loose your ship, can't find your science minion? Then you have _nothing_. Even if I lost all my sidekicks and weapons, I'd still have my magical lore and power. And then I could still grind you into paste, little scientist."

"'Little'…?" Zim's skin warmed with internal heat. Light crackled around him like miniature thunderbolts wreathed in clouds. "I have magic too, you know."

"And you don't even know how it works. How can you expect to make it work for you if you don't even understand it?"

Zim snorted. "For someone how claims to dislike science as much as you have, you possess a firm grasp on the scientific method."

"Now that's uncalled for!"

"No, calling you silly names would be uncalled for. What I'm doing is giving you a chance to surrender, just one last time." Zim pointed a finger; a burning laser went out from his finger, incinerating a hole in Darvhog's hat. "I will only offer you that _once!_"

"Neat," Darvhog said. "We have a total 'unrepentant villain and noble hero' thing going! Sure, we don't quite fit the archetypes per se, but I'm a nice guy. I'll give you time to work with it. And besides, what do you think I'm doing here? C'mon, at least have the cool-itude to ask. It's what heroes do, asking the villain what the big plan is."

Zim rolled his eyes. "'Why are you here'?" He said sarcastically.

"Stealing everything that isn't nailed down, like when you caught us here. This place is major league old, the junk here ought to fetch a pretty price on the more outgoing worlds."

"All right then," Zim said, pumping the rifle up with a nice solid clicking noise, priming the grenades and sliding the freshly loaded ones into firing position.

Darvhog's eyes bulged, glancing back to the abyss around him and hardly believing that he was in this situation _again_...and just perhaps, he seemed to be listening to the sounds of battle that had been between Jord and her enemies. Sound that weren't there anymore, but there was something moving on the bridge underneath them. "Wait! I haven't even gotten into my big plan yet!"

Zim stared. "What big plan?"

"And that would be my cue," Jord said from behind Zim; he turned, freezing at the sight of Zuko slung over her shoulder and Hobbes nowhere in sight, and it was enough to doom him. Jord gave him a single punch with a wide sweeping motion, her hand nearly the size of his entire torso. He felt his bones bend where her punch struck him, and then he was airborne, about to hit a building wall at terminal speed, Jord and Darvhog grinning smugly.

Zim suddenly impacted a heavy surface that was not the building he'd been about to hit. It was a lot more soft and fuzzy.

He fell again, grenade launcher miraculously still in hand, and came crashing down onto an outcropping from the building he'd almost crashed into that made a nice landing spot. Hobbes groaned behind him, having thrown himself to interrupt Zim's impact. "A fine save," Zim said, standing up shakily. "That giant woman packs a mighty punch!"

The two ships dueled overhead, encircling each other and blasting again and again, Gunter driving his ship ever more downward, trying to get closer to Darvhog for some reason.

"Catch!" Jord said, and threw Zuko at them; he was too badly winded to do much and knocked Hobbes and Zim over again. Jord laughed, and Gunter flew by overhead, another hatch opening and dropping something big and metallic; Jord caught it easily, placing it on the ground. Gunter flew away, ship tilting totally sideways and sliding through a gap in the buildings too narrow for Zim's ship to go through, forcing it to fly overhead. When Calvin went over the buildings, he and Morte screamed in frustration; Gunter's ship was nowhere to be seen, having flown through complicated passages that led under the mess below them.

Zim saw all of this, and thought quickly. "Get us back up there," Zim commanded. "They're up to something!"

"You got it!" Hobbes said.

"Ugh," Zuko groaned. "What's going on...?"

"Talk later," Hobbes said apologetically. He grabbed Zuko and Zim, tucking them in under either arm. Zuko groaned wearily, looking up, and Hobbes took a mighty jump that carried the three of them up the wall. He bounced, the wind and dirt stinging their faces, and then they saw Darvhog and Jord on another part of the bridge. They landed, and Hobbes jumped again from rooftop to rooftop, moving to their foes-

Gunter flew past. The force cannons powered up again and the resulting blast hammered the three heroes, punching them right out of the air and into the air, moving helplessly in a long arc far away from Darvhog and Jord. The _Paragon's _support fire forced Darvhog's ship to fly off, stopping it from following up on the attack.

Darvhog smirked. "Let's get this rolling, Jordie!"

"Right you are, boss-man!" Jord said. She settled her attention upon the object their ship had dropped; a finely cast metal cauldron with locks on the lid and obsidian framework. She flipped the unlocked lid open, revealing that it was totally empty. She reached into it, pulling out a long wand of slightly looping shape, made of a magically reactive material called octiron (and it had been difficult acquiring it), and handed it to him.

"Moofy, what now?" Darvhog asked, taking it.

"What?" Moofy said.

"The plan, man, the plan!"

"What? Oh, yes! I remember!" Darvhog fitted a piece of chalk to the thing Jord have given him. "Now," Moofy said from its place in its sheath. "Draw the runes as I tell you, and I shall do the rest." Darvhog put the wand to the ground as Moofy whispered arcane calculations, carefully tracing a large complicated circle around the cauldron, inscribing runes within that circle. Runes, moreover, of binding and control, programming basic directives into a mindless entity or group of them.

Some minutes later, annoyed by the ships constantly firing overhead and musing that it was absurd that neither of them had scored a decisive blow yet, and then Hobbes landed less than twenty feet away from them, Zuko and Zim quite awake and extremely angry. "Oh, hey, they're back!" Darvhog said, alarmed. His runes were just barely halfway done. "Jord, hold them off, I'm not done with these yet!"

Jord grinned, clapping her hands together. "All rightie, boss-man!"

Zuko glared. "Not again..." He said, looking seriously displeased at going toe-to-toe with the giantess again. His hands undid two small clamps on his outfit's belt, matching holsters on either side unlocking, and from them Zuko withdrew the Dragon's Teeth laser swords.

Hobbes cocked his head, stretching in readiness for an intense workout. "Hobbes," Zim said grimly, remembering how tough she had proven to be. "We cannot fight her evenly, but with numbers and superior tactics, we can win. Intercept her attack."

Jord roared in challenge, levering herself with a powerful leg tensing, and then she charged at them like a rhino, footfalls shaking the bridge and raising up dust. She was _fast_, covering more than half the distance in moments. It didn't seem fair, that something so strong and huge could be so quick. "Understood," Hobbes said, preparing his shield; now, he was ready to prove it's worth as a weapon for the first time. Unlike the others, he hadn't had a chance to test his new weapon yet.

He switched his shield into its defensive mode, the plates unfolding and locking out into their full configuration. Jord was nearly upon them, a shamelessly bold and beautiful blue juggernaut, her great bulk moments from flattening them. Hobbes moved, even faster than she was though he lacked her raw strength, moving his shield in front of him even as he stood his ground. She crashed right into him, momentum and muscle power carrying her onward; Hobbes gritted his teeth as his arms ached with her weight, his feet sinking into the ground. Lifting slightly into the air, her hands scrabbled for purchase, both of them sliding ahead from her charge and the ground ripping up under Hobbes' heels. Tired of this, Hobbes slammed a foot down, arresting their slide, and with a tremendous effort shoved her down onto the ground with an even bigger shake.

She landed on her back with an annoyed ground, long thick legs first pointing up and then curling in; she kicked out with coiled strength, and if Hobbes hadn't moved his shield back into position a kick that would have snapped ordinary men in half would have hit him in the chest. As it was, he was lucky to only be launched nearly fifteen feet away, skidding along the ground and going right past Zim and Zuko.

But she was unbalanced; she had only a moment to concentrate, and by then Zuko and Zim were upon her. Zuko activated his laser swords when he reached his minimum Firebending distance from her, and swung a blade, amplifying the heat of its electrified edge into a focused blast of white-blue flame, hitting her square in the face.

"Ow!" She said, actually reeling. "That _hurt, _you little-" Zim was suddenly climbing up her leg, her pants fabric and then plentiful flesh offering many handholds. "Hey! Whoa! What are you doing- ACK! Easy, there! Ooh, hey, I'm kinda liking this-" Zim's hands hauled up from her bikini strap to her shoulder, hauling himself up and swinging the butt of his grenade launcher into her face. She blinked. "Was that supposed to hurt?" Zim's fist was suddenly in her face, and produced a big blast of fire point-black with such force she was shoved back, and Zim bounced backwards from the recoil. "Ow!" Jord whined, wiping soot off her face. "Just when you were winding me up too, you little tease!"

"Don't call Zim a tease, it's creepy," Zuko said. He moved, swinging his blades in a circular movement, gritting his teeth in concentration. Fire bloomed from him, static electricity forming in the spaces between his blades. A halo of faint lightning encircled him, and he jabbed them forward inexpertly; a small bolt of lightning shot out, and Jord jerked away from it in time. With little but glass to ground it, it harmlessly flew by. Jord rushed forward. "No-" Zuko started.

She leaped and slammed her prodigious bulk onto him. He made a small faint squeak where his break was forced out, and she lay on him a moment to make sure he had no more air in him before she stood up, grabbed him by the collar, and forcefully kissed him right on the forehead. She chuckled, ignoring his outraged cries. "On the other hand, _you're _closer to my size, hot dude. A bit spicy, but tasty looking."

"I _have a girlfriend!_"

"...Yeah. So? Oh, hey, more of my harem!" This was a response to Zim and Hobbes charging at her, outraged at this ill-treatment of Zuko. She turned, tossing up Zuko and grabbing him by the leg and proceeding to use him as an improvised weapon.

Behind her, Darvhog was scribbling with surprising speed and calm at once; every move was measured, every stroke precise. A complicated spell diagram was taking shape, centered around the metal pot-thing and spreading out, looking almost like a whirlpool if one cared to give its multitude of geomantic lines and binding runes a shape.

"Almost there," Darvhog said, grinning hopefully, desperately.

Overhead, there was a great blast; Gunter's ship curved around the Paragon, twisting around the barrage of gunfire from Calvin, flipping around and aiming it's force cannons at the propulsion discs at the top. The frost giant piloting it took aim, charged...and a great blue light flashed out and hit nearly at the same time, a distortion of the air directly at the top of the Paragon, a blast that struck over three of the larger ship's propulsion discs. Calvin let out a horrified shout mixing nicely with the screeching protest from the propulsion field that sounded rather like a cry of dismay in its own right. The field warped, crackled, the ship's center of gravity loosing cohesion even as it kept moving onward...and then it dipped, plummeted, and crashed onto a small block of buildings and kept going, shattering them under its weight. The field went out, the discs intact but damaged enough that they couldn't power the field. The Paragon hovered up listlessly, bouncing awkwardly from six buildings at a time to more, pulverizing those as well. Gunter boomed cheerfully, arcing upwards and out.

Zim, Zuko and Hobbes saw this, roaring in horror, and took it out on Jord. She could handle it, but they didn't make it easy for her, trying with all their might to just slip past her and defeat Darvhog in a critical hit, but she was simply too fast and big to move past; Hobbes reverted his shield to its default mode, swinging it like a discus at her and nailed her chin. She stumbled back, and Hobbes galloped forward, and one of her flailing feet caught him in the jaw, tilting him slightly over her and into the air. She had the presence of mind to swing her hand, grabbing him out in mid-fall and throwing him at Zim.

Zim slammed into Hobbes on purpose to arrest his fall; they were skidding back a short distance, and then he and Zuko were advancing to give Hobbes some breathing time, the two pyrokinetics (or so Zim assumed) summoning flames and pooling them together into an incandescent missile slightly larger than Jord. It struck with a mighty blow, driving her into the ground with a satisfying blast. They charged, hoping to move over her-

She stood up as soon as they leaped, letting them crash into her and bounce off. "No getting past me!" She boasted, swaggering forward. Zim glanced at a shine on the ground; a large piece of the strong glass they used her, big enough for a shield.

His Pak changed, and instead of a spider-leg or four, a tendril ending in a delicate claw emerged. It snagged a shard of supernal glass bigger than he was and swung it, parrying Jord's blow; even with all her strength, the glass held firm, her fist bouncing off without even a scratch. Zim stared at it briefly, amazed.

"Nice, huh?" Jord said with a wild grin. "Those guys that made this stuff, they found a way to take psychic energy and imbue it into crystal-junk like glass, make it super-strong and easy to mold!" She smirked. "And they left the knowledge of it just laying around for me to find out."

Zim stared. "You figured out how to use a long-lost glassmaking technique?"

"Psh, nah, they had it detailed in some temple way underground. We were here for a while before you found us, we had enough time to figure out the frescoes and decode them! And now _we _know the secret! There's tons of guys that'd pay big money to learn it too!"

"That's a stupid plan," Zim said, thinking he knew what Darvhog was planning at last, and lunged.

Gunter flew by overhead in his ship, letting loose with a few low-powered and well-placed blasts. Hobbes covered himself with his shield, Zuko punched a fireblast at it and went down when the force beam went through and hammered him down, and Zim was knocked down as well. The Paragon was still struggling to get airborne with several of its flight discs out of order, Zim realized.

It got worse. Darvhog stood tall, laughing maniacally (and coughing, his lungs weren't used to it yet), and he shouted, "It's done! Everyone, pull in!"

Jord retreated, and Gunter's ship flew in, hovering menacingly over Darvhog's group. Zim and Hobbes retreated, Zuko managing to crawl close enough for Hobbes to lift him up on his shoulder and the three of them gather together.

Zim took aim with his grenade launcher and fired again and again, hoping to hit Darvhog; Gunter let loose with volleys of force blasts, and the grenades exploded in mid-air. Zim reached for the grenades on his belt, and as he did, realized too late that they had already expended the supply brought with them during the earliest portions of the battle; they had worked admirably, but now they had none left. Zuko and Zim let loose with fire blasts, and Jord intercepted them, taking the hits with miserable grunts of pain.

Hobbes started to throw his shield, but he was too imbalanced holding up Zuko to manage it, so he stopped before he lost his shield or worse. Darvhog gave them little choice. "Now!" He said, placing Moofy into the cauldron, at the very center of the spell diagram. It was a pity Calvin and Morte weren't around to explain what that diagram actually did, or they'd have been even more worried.

"The scroll!" Moofy commanded. "Summon its power!"

Darvhog moved quick, too quickly for any of the heroes to do anything; Zim was wracked with indecision to do anything, Zuko was too weary, and Hobbes was hampered keeping Zuko up. Calvin and Morte were in no position to help, either. So, Darvhog chose his moment well, plucking a large scroll from inside a concealed pocket in his shirt, unrolling it and placing it upon one of the circles in the diagram. He poured magical energy into it, unleashing the power within, and spoke the name of the spell carried within.

"_Create Undead!_"

The scroll, and the arcane words of power inscribed upon it in ink made from the powdered bones of long-dead necromancers, glowed with awesome power. Moofy glowed even brighter, a thundering still-point of absolute magical might distilled into a material shape, and then his glow dimmed, and the scroll seemed to absorb the power he had manifested. The light turned dark, defying the laws of chromatic light in the process, and became a darkness as deep as the reaches of the most ancient abyss.

The dark light, the light of magic so powerful the air twisted at its weight, was directed by the spell diagram. It flooded into the diagram, spelled out and shaped by it, redoubling its power before shooting up into the sky...

Right into the clouds above, and the winds around them, diffusing into the dust on everything around them. The blackness split and crawled like visible static electricity, passing over Zim's group without harm.

The dust _moved_.

Pulled as surely as iron to a lodestone, the dust on every surface and coating the wind around them and the clouds above, it all split away and swirled over Darvhog, Moofy glowing mightily and almost looking like a Heartless himself for a moment. The dust was just dust, and so couldn't scream, but Zim heard a faint howl from the wind, and almost imagined the dust screaming at this ignominy. The dust pulled together into distinct forms, apparently tiny due to their distance from Zim, briefly letting in the sunlight as the dust ceased to block the light, and then it was dark again, the spawning figures so many they blotted out the light.

These figures hit the ground, one after the other, until they crowded every single bit of available space, standing still and silent. Zim flinched as one brushed against him; tall, about the size and shape of a human, their reconstituted bodies naked and emaciated, broad spade-shaped heads graced with a stack of four horizontally-positioned eyes and set in expressions of near-terminal gravitas, and from their highly detailed muscles and desiccated flesh they seemed mummified. The massive group, this _army_, went on for miles and miles, covering the entire span of the bridge and still competing for space, many forced to cling to the sides or fall off, easily numbering in the thousands.

Hobbes slowly looked around, quite justifiably alarmed to be totally surrounded by an army of the newly created undead. "Uh..." He said. He poked one of them in the shoulder. His finger sank in to the knuckle, dust on his claw, and when he jerked away, there was a hole in the mummy's arm that swiftly sealed up with the dust it was made of. The mummy gave no impression of even realizing any of that, or that it was aware of anything at all.

"Well," Darvhog said, pleasantly surprised. "I knew it. There _were _Protheans here! Second stop now; aaand, _SEAL!_" Darvhog placed his hands on the pot. The spell diagram lit up, not so brightly but strangely intense; the mummies were motionless as a ray of magical energy field up from the cauldron and arced up. It struck the chest of a mummy Prothean, which flinched back; glowing lines like veins spread out over its body in an instant, and the mummy relaxed, a dim light of something like faint awareness (or basic programming being dumped into it) making it more...well, 'lively'. It slowly shifted from side to side, almost dancing, and the ray went to the next mummy and through it, repeating this again and again; the ray forked, multiplying with each mummy it programmed, again and again and many more times, endeavoring to activate every single mummy present there.

It wasn't entirely successful. For every mummy it programmed, five more were disintegrated by the power of the spell, or it wasn't powerful enough to successfully animate them even after remaking them back into a semblance of the bodies the dust had been eons ago. Either way, the ones that failed simply collapsed into dust by the spot. Much of the army had died again by the time it was done, flooding down from the bridge in a whispering mass that collectively was a brief roar...but that still left a potent army of the undead numbering in at least a few thousand. For living soldiers, perhaps that wasn't too many; for undying horrors obeying commands without conscience or restraint, it was a terrible concept.

All of this happened so quickly; the mummies created and dropping down, the secondary spell programming the ones it didn't outright destroy. There wasn't an opportunity to halt any of it or sabotage it, at least that the three heroes saw. Calvin and Morte might have known, but trapped in a crippled ship they probably didn't even realize most of that was happening.

Zuko said, "What."

"Oh," Zim said. "_That _was his plan. Making an army of the undead out of the ashes of this planet's extinct sentient inhabitants. Surprisingly creative, I will admit."

"Mummy things! Protheans that were once dead!" Darvhog said, taking up Moofy and sheathing him. "Undead that I have returned to life, in service of my ambition! _Who is your master?!_"

The Prothean mummies were silent. Of course, they couldn't talk. But, as one, they all bowed onto one knee, genuflecting deeply. They raised their fists out in a militaristic salute to Darvhog. Not at Moofy, but at Darvhog. The statement was clear.

Darvhog grinned, and spread his arms. "Well," He said conversationally to Zim, Zuko and Hobbes. Jord grinned maliciously, and as one the Prothean mummies turned to the three heroes. "...You still wanna 'bring me in'? Make me face my crimes? That other stuff you were talking about?"

Zuko stared at the undead army staring down at them, outnumbered _at least _twenty-to-one. "Uh," He started to say, and stopped. There wasn't really anything to say. Even with all their power, they didn't have all their group present, and those odds frankly sucked hardcore.

"Eep," Hobbes said, ears flattened and tail bushy.

"Yes," Zim said, without hesitation.

"_Eep,_" Hobbes said again.

Darvhog tilted his head. "You really wanna fight thousands of mummy fighters just to get to little ol' me? While you're completely _surrounded _by them?"

"Yes! It sounds like fun," Zim said.

Hobbes clapped a paw on his mouth, silencing him. "_No it doesn't!_" He yelped.

"What he said!" Zuko said.

"Mm mmm mph?!" Zim mumbled, indignant.

"I couldn't hear that," Darvhog said innocently. "Was that a surrender I heard? You'll let me get out of here and take my new buddies with me?"

Zuko thought quickly, and thought hard. "...Yes," he finally said reluctantly, glaring hatefully at the space pirate. Darvhog whooped at this.

"_Mprmh!?_" Zim screamed, still too muffled to make sense.

Gunter landed the Funk Revolution ship behind Darvhog, squashing a multitude of mummy under it into dust. They just stood there blandly and let themselves get crushed, reforming back a few moments later and struggling listlessly to escape. A doorway opened in the bottom of the ship and Jord hurried on through. "It's been fun, guys," Darvhog said, putting both hands on the cauldron. "But I got other places to be. Loot to sell, bargains to make...you know how it is. Uh, maybe you don't, I guess we're not really in the same line of work. Hope to fight with you soon again!" One last portion of the spell diagram was still glowing, and finally activated; centered directly around the cauldron, it released a wave of arcane energy that swept over the mummies, collapsing them back into dust and binding them into an inactive travel-friendly form; in only moments, all the mummies had been collapsed, and the wave flooded back to the cauldron, crashing into it. The dust funneled into it, a great tornado swallowed up by the little artifact that was entirely too small to contain so much, and with a small sound disconcertingly like a belch, all the mummies had been stored inside it, waiting to be called to battle. (Darvhog explained all of this as it happened to Zim, he didn't want his foe to leave with the wrong idea.) "Buh-bye! Ladies and gents, off to Oddworld!" Darvhog said, picking up the cauldron and running away even as Hobbes let go and started running at him to take advantage of the mummies' absence. Darvhog hurried into his ship, a few blasts of low-yield force discouraging an advance.

The ship of the Funk Revolution Pirates took off, flight engines that duplicated vertical-take-off-and-landing turbines allowing it to hover straight up before engaging its primary flight systems. By then, the Funk Revolution Pirates were already flying over the buildings, out of range, over the edge of the city, a faint speck advancing into the atmosphere, and then they were gone.

They stared for a moment.

"Zim?" Hobbes said.

"Yes?"

"You _suck _at tactics."

"…Yes."

At long last, the _Paragon _came flying overhead, wobbling unsteadily and struggling not to tip over. "Guys!" Calvin said through the loudspeakers. "Why's Darvhog getting away?! What was with those mummies!? What did we miss?!"

"Darvhog's actual plan wasn't just looting, he was here to animate some sort of army from the dusty remains of this planet's people," Zim said.

"That's horrible!"

"He stuck them inside a giant pot-thing. Used superior numbers to convince Hobbes and Zuko to stay down."

"That's cheating!"

"And he still thinks poorly of technology."

"_That's unspeakably horrifying!_"

"...That was his plan?" Morte said. "Huh. I honestly would not have called that."

At this point, the _Paragon _flopped down, crashing onto a cluster of thankfully intact buildings. "And now our ship is down," Zim said. "Beaten by a band of disco pirates and a tiny ship with only a handful of weapons! The shame of it!"

"We might be here a few days fixing that," Zuko said, eying the broken propulsion discs. "Again. We really should have protected them better..."

"We can fix those things here," Zim said firmly. "We have the materials on-board for a patch job until we can find a more suitable place for repairs."

"We'd have to make a one-way trip to a place we know would have some, or make a jump into the Astral Plane and float along until something good happens," Morte said. "What's your pick?"

"I'm no navigator," Calvin said. "I just fix the things. What's the closest-" He paused, remembering the tricky bits of traveling to different universes world-by-world. "What's the most immediately adjacent world that definitely has places where we could get this thing fixed?"

"And where enterprising space pirates can sell their ill-gotten gains," Zim added. Zuko glanced at him, annoyed. "What?! We still have no detained Darvhog! Our quest shall not be delayed by something this petty."

"I thought our mission was finding Gir and the rest."

"Until I get the means of actually locating Gir's signal across dimensions, we cannot make much progress on that. I intend to fix our earlier mistakes when we erred with Darvhog's detainment, or lack thereof."

"Makes as much sense as anything else we do," Hobbes said reluctantly.

Zuko bowed his head. "...If you say so."

Calvin and Morte voiced their own largely indifferent assent. Zim nodded, their course clear for a moment. "Now,… Darvhog said something about a place called 'Oddworld'. What is that?" "

"That's a world not too far from our current position!" Morte said. "That is, using the Astral Plane. It's a bit of a wild world right now; lots of upheaval going on, the guys in charge are a real nasty sort, the usual 'evil oppressive berks' situation. The right situation for criminals or freedom fighters to jump in and do their thing; it'd be _real _easy for Darvhog to find buyers, and he might just know that if your guess is good. And their whole economy is making a killing in catering to tourists like us! We could find ship-repairs real easy...provided we're willing to spend a lot for a little."

"We'd have to make do," Zim said, grinning psychotically at everything else Morte was saying; it sounded like a place ripe for adventure, and just the sort of action he'd come to crave.

"You realize that since he flat-out told you where he's going, he's probably expecting us. Or planning for us to show up."

"I'll not let anything as crude as basic logic interfere with my plans! As soon as we're capable of going, we're off to Oddworld."

"Okay," everyone said reluctantly.

Zim gave orders. "Hobbes, confer with Morte and refer to the Guide, I wish to have everything we could know about that place compiled. Everyone else, ready yourself for repair duty and prepare for battle!"

"But we just got done battling," Hobbes said. "And we lost."

"Then I'm sure you're anxious to wipe that mark from our record. We've only been a team for a short time, this loss is one too many!"

"Not that anxious, really."

"You are if I say you are!"


	20. The Wretched Hive

Disclaimer: I don't own any franchise that appears here, or make profits off them.

* * *

Lights shone from the great sprawling titan of the Glukkon city of Lulu's Fortune, building-sized spotlights glaring up into the dense smoke above the city; spotlights, mounted on motorized carts riding along tracks built into deceptively shallow lines upon the highest of buildings, shone directly into the grim blackness over the great Glukkon city. More ships were coming in, and these lights herded them to their destination.

Through clouds so thickly entrenched with pollution and badly managed industrial byproducts that the sky above was invisible against its pallor, metal moved downward, the first sign of artifice-born behemoths coming from the stars. The clouds seemed to part for a moment, pushed aside by a large herd by the spacecraft coming through; star-flyers meant to move between the darkness where the stars did not shine, commercial liners and planet-hoppers for tourists on sight-seeing expeditions, skyjammers and even a military ship or two, all of them slightly corroded by the toxic fumes and polluted clouds they passed through.

The city, sprawling for miles and assimilating all in its path into its superstructure, rose from the ground in layers upon layers of dark and grim construction, and through its jungle-like density people lived (often on the streets), a vast and terrible sprawl of cramped corridors and rooftops that formed ground-floors for other buildings and catwalks the size of entire streets; ragged blankets set between walls formed brief shelters for the many vagrants who had nowhere else to go but much to fear, massive cramped apartment complexes and cheap hotels shaped like crude blocks providing just barely suitable comfort for others. Others, menial workers or technicians or foremen slaving under the corporations that ruled this world, didn't even glance out. The few who did were not from around here; tourists who had not grown used to the many ships constantly flocking to the city, merchants seeking deals to be bartered and had only just arrived, mercenaries simply following orders that required their presence.

There were still many people who looked up in awe as the latest flock of ships flew in, herded to a docking tower rising above even this city's massive skyline. That was saying quite a lot; the buildings, built upon each other and against each other and upwards with an almost savage perspective of forced competition, were so tall that literally thousands upon thousands of the poor and homeless, working menial jobs for minimum pay just enough to feed themselves, had lived their entire lives without ever seeing the sun or natural light, buried far beneath the notice of their economic superiors and suffering alone in the dark.

Here, there was a small quadrant of scientific laboratories that had since lost all funding, the scientists once working there leaving for more profitable arrangements (and perhaps lamenting that military hardware was the only thing the cartels cared about anymore and actually _useful _research was scorned). Currently, they were being occupied by a disorganized clan of squatters who supported their families by doing dirty but well-paying jobs for corporations with agendas that could be well-served by the likes of them. One of these buildings, originally an armaments factory until its workers had been sold off to a conglomerate war-factory, was missing part of the roof; the hole was clumsily patched up with scrap and blankets and broken plastic, scored where the acid rain had nearly melted through.

There was a large hole in the patch-work already. Big enough for a man to step through, a hunched shape was looking through sat in front of it with a mild expression of curiosity under all the equipment he wore; an elf wearing a heavy cloak, thick survival-issue bib overalls, and a variety of equipment (moisture-recycling baffles on the chest, an air purifying gas-mask, and other devices necessary to survive in this city's environment; the Glukkon's handiwork was not kind to the weak).

He was one of those watching the ships. A scarf pulled over his gas mask and goggles brought down over his eyes, his face was totally concealed. Dressed like so many other tourists and adventurers seeking to make a profit or advance their own agenda (and body concealing cloaks had become the new fashion in town), few would have given him a second look. Even so, mild as he looked, he seemed to project the sense that his personal space extended for at least a few miles and that it was a very stupid idea to annoy him. The squatters gathered away from the hole, so nervous the fear was practically a solid thing over them, looked like they wished they hadn't been given a first look now they knew who he was.

On the elf's shoulder was an otter-weasel thing, dressed just the same as his friend. The ottsel, Daxter, hissed at the sight of the docking ships. "This place _stinks_, Jak. No offense, squatter guys."

"None taken," they said.

The elf, who was of course Jak, grunted. "It beats me why anyone would want to come to this Precursors-forsaken nightmare of a world."

Daxter gave the squatters a brief look. They seemed mildly offended this, but didn't say anything. Daxter said, as if an afterthought, "Uh, we did."

"That's different," Jak muttered, refusing to back down on his argument, a habit enforced from years of being Daxter's friend. "We have an agenda."

"Maybe some of those people coming in do too," Daxter speculated.

"If you say so." Jak looked out a moment longer, and stepped away from the hole. The squatters let out a sigh of relief that he wasn't showing himself like that anymore; there was no sense in taking risks, even if no one could immediately recognize him. Jak turned to them, and bowed his head. "We'll only be here for a few more days. Until the heat dies down."

The unofficial leader of the squatters, a hulking Big Bro Slig (that is, a Slig who'd been fed a special diet of steroids and mutative chemicals until he was a gigantic brute tougher than tanks and twice as mean) named Big Greg who'd quit his job as a security enforcer when he couldn't stomach the brutal nature of his job, nodded rather quickly. "'Least we could do. Your guys helped a friend of mine out of a jam once."

Jak blinked. "We did?"

"You raided a factory. My buddy Mart worked there. You didn't kill him, just shoved him out. They figured he was dead because he didn't show up for roll call, so he got out of that crummy post without even having to die first."

"Yeah, thanks for that," said Mart, a Slig. He waved at Jak.

"Oh," Jak said. It was a little novel actually helping someone with his brutality for once.

Mart raised his hand. "Not that we ain't glad to help and all, but did you really have to crash your transport right into the security lounge when you got here? The arbitrators are all over the place now!"

"Well, how else were we gonna get in here without anyone trying to arrest us?" Daxter said pointedly. "This way we can lie low for a bit and get the hang of things, see how things work."

"Just give us some time," Jak reassured them. To Daxter, he added more quietly, "Then we find those crazy hyenas and find out what they're up to."

Daxter nodded. The squatters glanced at each other, openly surprised about that, and wisely decided that they didn't want to know anything more.

Jak glanced back at the hole, looking at the ships at the docking tower. He pitied anyone who needed to come _here_. Or worse, doing it because they thought it sounded like a good idea.

* * *

The herded ships, the _Paragon _among them, dove down through the vast docking shaft they had been directed down, a tight separation of several dozen feet maintained between them at all times so there was a minimum of crashes; a wise precaution, as even though the shaft was large enough to accommodate even all these star-faring ships (and size is a must among such ships), it was still quite crowded with all those ships in there.

Zim was mildly interested in the unusual variety of the ships around them, observing that their make and models were slightly similar to what he'd encountered in his home universe but only if he actively tried to compare them; it was parallel evolution in technological terms. Beside their ship he saw a narrow craft (shaped a bit like a fish) big enough to seat only a small party, suitable only for hopping from planet to planet and avoiding long star-passing journeys through the heavens of space. Slipping over it was a cluster of insect-like cargo carriers individually larger than whales, moving in rough concert organized by the individual pilots in each (and concert wasn't a metaphor; the pilots operated them by playing music as a large band, the music resonating with the carrier's sonic-based computer mediums and activating flight algorithms). And many more dozens of ships Zim only had moments to see before he could even analyze them; right past Zim's own ship went a small craft that looked much like his old Voot Cruiser.

Ahead of all the ships was a craft leading them to designated docking areas; a huge ship larger than any of them by far, a great blocky construct that was nearly as large as the shaft itself, looking quite a lot like a fairly ugly brick. Great clouds of smoke blasted out as it propelled itself at a steady pace, leading them pass rows and rows of recessed viewing areas where cubical workers took note of their presence as they typed down cargo manifests and updated the docking log, harried technicians clustered around the many cameras that lined the inside of the shaft from every possible angle, taking pictures every thousandth of a second that a ship was in view so that every single ship was recorded and remembered just in case something… _unfortunate _happened to its owner (and thus put the ownership up for grabs). The purpose of this ship initially eluded Zim, until a number of projections from it, facing the ships, caught his eye; they were gigantic guns, aimed right at them. If a ship disobeyed, attacked, or otherwise offended this armed ship, they would be blown right out of the shaft and killed.

Ominous, Zim thought, given that this was only a docking tower.

Through the shaft, there were equally vast holes in the walls, leading to different docking stations, great long lines of spaces and workers milling around like eusocial insects. Every so often a ship left the herd without any apparent reason. This mystified Zim until a voice crisply called through his radio, not bothering to hail him or any such politeness, and said, "Turn at the next docking station immediately."

"Who's saying this?" Zim demanded, reverse-tracking through the frequency, the _Paragon_'s on-board computers synching with and hacking into the source with only a brief pause. Zim had of course extensively modified the communications, networking processes, and built the various (and increasingly powerful) computer equipment of his ship into a self-contained network of each dedicated terminal providing a specific function (and he had also improved virtually everything of the ship he could get his hands on during the recent days when they had just been traveling and didn't have much else better to do), and even though he was working with obnoxiously primitive machinery by his standards, he was still doing it with his extremely advanced technological expertise, and consequently pretty much everything he'd improved here was far beyond anything the Glukkons of this world had. Consequently, it wasn't hard for the _Paragon _to make a connection that couldn't be inverted or used by the operator on the other end of the line. (On the other hand, it didn't seem that secure a network, at least for Zim; for others, it might well have been nigh-impregnable, but Zim's network had the advantage of making calculations based on quantum mechanics.)

"What the-" The voice started. "How the spit did you get onto this- JUST TURN, YOU IDIOT."

A large opening appeared in the shaft, presumably the one they were meant to turn through. Grumbling, Zim cut off the connection with whoever he'd been talking to. The gun-ship leading them turned several large weapons towards them, power conduits lighting up ominously below. "I'm going, I'm going!" Zim squeezed the interface joysticks, transmitting his intentions into the ship's navigational systems; the _Paragon _veered away from the rest of the ships, halting in a crude turn as its momentum still carried it downward. It roughly came to a stop in front of the hole and then it's propulsion reactivated, pushing it right through.

Morte, floating within his head-jar mechanical harness and floating just above the co-pilot's seat alongside Zim, glanced worryingly at a screen displaying the ship's view of things behind it; the gun-ship was visible for a second, and then it, along with a brief glimpse of the screaming herd of ships, was gone. "Okay. This is a bit worse than what I was expecting."

"We have to go down a huge shaft with guns pointing at us?!" Calvin said from the side-seats. "The Guide didn't say anything about that!"

"Sure, I'm certain the leaders of this place would love to advertise that," Hobbes said sarcastically from next to Calvin. "'Come and visit lovely Oddworld! It only rains acid eighty percent of the time and the air is a lovely shade of brownish-pitch at this time of the year!' 'Come fly in and get giant guns pointed at you wherever you go just in case you do something funny!' 'Oddworld, you might _not_ get killed!'"

"You realize that if they're this straightforward about intimidating tourists or traders," Zuko said, sitting across from Hobbes with a bench of side-seats all to himself. "They're either incredibly paranoid about their enemies and suspect _everyone _of being a possible threat, or they're so military-focused that it's bled into every aspect of their industry." Given the Fire Nation's militarized culture, Zuko _would _know about the second part.

"I'm thinking both, really," Morte said.

Zuko grimaced. "We should be careful," he said. "It sounds obvious, I know, but it's the best we can do right now."

The hole they flew into was long, and it opened out into a cramped space that their ship's database (wiring into planetary information networks and automatically downloading everything Zim's algorithms had calculated to be relevant, which still left room for misinformation) confirmed as a docking station; a square-shaped chamber of spaces for ships to dock into and be serviced, most of them filled but a few capable of housing ships much bigger than the _Paragon._ Several levels above that had more menial workers and technicians and overseers all watching the docking ships sharply, as if suspecting that every ship harbored unkind thoughts about their mothers. Several man-sized drones (of the sort that looked like tiny ships) flew in front of the _Paragon,_ trailing holograms transmitted directly to the viewing screens on the Paragon and giving them extremely clear instructions on how to land. 'FOLLOW THE DRONES,' said a scrolling message. 'THEY WILL LEAD YOU TO A LANDING SLOT.' Zim followed them, his ship leaving bright colorful trails in the dimness between the large spotlights in the station.

The individual docking ports certainly looked like slots in the ground, arranged into long rows on each level. As Zim approached the one the smaller ships led him to, massive vise-like clamps, padded at the edges, extended from either end of the 'slot'. A bit cautious, he flew ahead and passed through them; the clamps latched onto the ship's fore and aft, holding it tightly but not enough to damage it, and retracted into the ground, neatly bringing the _Paragon _into the port and docking roughly with a faint grinding punctuated by an off-beat clicking noise (like the docking station had its own soundtrack, one with a lot of techno-drums). They connected with their bases, and there was a final rising of smoke from whatever was powering them.

"What now?" Zuko asked, tensing up and radiating heat.

A light on the radio panel lit up. A small log-screen stated that there was an incoming call. Zim flicked a switch, accepting the call and connecting to the network. "Yes?"

"Hello," a quiet and raspy voice said, every word slowly spoken as if carefully chosen from a long book of translation phrases. "You have successively docked, tourists! Kindly power down your ship's propulsive systems."

Zim looked at Morte, silently giving him the go-ahead to do that. Morte hesitated for a moment, suddenly aware that Zim had appointed him the pilot, and imperceptibly his expression changed to a more confident one, his jawbone aligning more cheerfully. He looked at the dashboard as instructions were transmitted from his on-board database (located in a cogitator engine housed behind his head-jar in his robot-body, and just installed the other day by Zim himself, who wanted all his allies to be as useful as possible) as holographic images on the inside of his head-jar. The instruction were clear and concise; several mechanical tentacles (or mechadendrites, as Calvin said) extended from ports on the underside of his robots body, small articulated digits extending and flipping off switches and powering down other systems. There was a faint humming below them as power was rerouted from the engines to more optimal configurations; the computers, mainly, and minor sub-systems, and the remainder was simply returned to the great engine-heart of the ship, which glowed slightly as its power went up a bit and routed the excess into various storage batteries around the ship (which Zim and Calvin had installed, recognizing that the ship's power was self-replenishing, and thought it useful to make batteries to store it; these were larger than Hobbes and unwieldy, but Zim could think of many uses for potentially unlimited energy.)

"Thank you. Feel free to leave your ship – right _now_, actually – and welcome to our fair city. Be sure to dress for our environment, mind you."

The voice cut off. Zim disconnected it anyway, just to be sure no one was listening in. (He hoped that they were disturbed at how easily he had done it.) Zim then sent several situational directives to the ship's main computer, and they were rerouted through the network just for the sake of redundancy in case the security was compromised. "Be ready," he said, and hit another sequence that produced a loud clanging sound from the cargo hold; the cargo doors had just slammed open. That said, Zim stood up and hauled himself off the chair, walking down the room.

Morte followed, floating after him. "What was that with the computer-stuff, Boss?"

"Activating the security," Zim said briefly. "If anyone tries to infiltrate our ship, steal it or go looking in here, they will _regret _it."

"Smart move," Calvin said, he, Hobbes and Zuko getting off their chairs and walking with Zim and Morte, all five of them moving out. "Do all five of us get to go this time?"

"If the ship is secure, why not?" Zuko said reasonably.

"It's always possible that things might go wrong," Hobbes conceded.

Zim snorted. "With my modifications? These rubes won't be able to so much as scratch the coding."

"Careful, your pride is showing," Morte said dryly as Hobbes scowled at Zim's open dismissal of the inhabitants of Oddworld. "We should bring weapons, too. Just in case."

Calvin raised his eyebrows. "What, really? I'm all for bringing the firepower, but wouldn't that be a little bit inflammatory?"

"Coming off the docks with weapons on display isn't the most diplomatic gesture," Zim agreed. His friends stared, astonished. "What? Certainly I can think logically some times, can't I?!"

Wisely, the others didn't rise to this (though Calvin did snort). Morte replied, "Honestly, boss? My info does seem a bit out of date, but I _do _know for sure…" he paused, checking something from both his database and the ship's. (As his cogitator was continually updating itself from the ship's while retaining backups just in case, it was pretty much the same thing either way.) "Okay, yeah, this one is for sure. Honestly, the fat cats in charge here – the higher-ups in mega-corporations mostly, but the big leaders are cartel heads all assembled in the hierarchy of something called the 'Glukkon Hegemony' – don't really care if you have weapons or not. They're so far removed from the daily swing of things, I don't think it's even occurred to them that it's a bad thing to let angry poor people run around with weapons and kill each other over scraps and credits. If we play it safe and don't blow up any more buildings, we'll be fine."

He paused. Everyone looked at Calvin. "It was just one building!" He protested.

"Right then," Zim said. "We grab weapons suitable for infiltration. We should find somewhere to set up a temporary base while we're here and get the rest of our weapons down there later. Send someone to pick up our stuff on the ship or something; I don't think it would work well to try to operate out of our ship here, unfortunately."

The rest of his crew agreed, nodded and mumbling.

The armory had to wait though; first they changed into different outfits suitable for Oddworld, heavy clothes worn over protective gear and various mechanical aids to help them cope with the harsh weather and conditions of an Oddworld city. Fortunately, they already had such equipment and clothing (Sokka's shopping trip having provided such).

Then they took their stop at the armory (really, just a spare room they had remodeled with more revolving wardrobes machines to store their weapons and armor, computerized to bring up specific items for criteria they requested). Given they were explicitly trying to look like cautious tourists and not would-be conquerors, they took more subtle weaponry. Hobbes took his new shield, Calvin equipped his fire and ice wonders on his arms (keeping their upgraded components in additional sections on his belt, having devised a means of compartmentalizing those components. Zuko sheathed the Dragon's Teeth laser swords, and Zim didn't really need anything with his power to summon the Keyblade, but he took a laser rifle he'd made the other day for the look of things. Morte didn't actually need any weapons, looking fairly intimidating as he already was, but he had permitted Calvin and Zim to install a number of ports and modules to install weaponry in a few days ago, and now Zim installed several small sub-machine firearms (with different types of non-lethal ammunition that could deal with armored or fleshy foes as warranted) into them.

Hobbes objected to the basic idea. "Guys, we're just going to go find out what that annoying pirate who won't leave us alone is up to. We're not going to go make _war _on this place."

"Some basic armaments is 'going to war'?" Zim asked.

"What? No, I just mean that maybe getting ready for violence is probably just thinking too much."

"Oddworld is a mean, nasty place," Morte said. "Tough, hard, cold, especially in the Glukkon territories and their allies or minions. Heck, the street levels and below are just hive-type hellholes owned by urban warlords fighting for territory and killing each other for fun, and there's _things _under the lower levels. And that's saying nothing of what the cartels that run these places do on a global level, or to their ancestral enemies… uh, or so I read in the guide."

Hobbes seemed disturbed by the notion. "And the guys in charge don't _care_ that any of this happens?"

"I hear they _encourage _it! Keeps the population managed and tough for when they gotta gang-press for the military. And gets lots of bodies for the meat-factories, eh?"

"Ew, sounds like where me and Hobbes grew up," Calvin said, while Hobbes seemed confused why eating their dead was a bad thing. "..Wait, they eat their dead?!"

"They eat everything, and sell it too. They have a big thing about ripping everything they can find to shreds, merchandising it, packaging it and selling it to other planets, no matter how badly they hurt themselves in the long run."

"Okay, they're jerks," Zim said, satisfied at this point. "I say we do something about that while we're here!"

"Try to control your ambition," Zuko said as they left their armory and headed to the cargo hold. "At this rate you'll want us to recruit an army."

They left their ship, which closed behind them (a closed-circuit channel remaining open between the ship's computer and Zim's Pak) and walked down a wide bridge suitable for rolling cargo or luggage down, all of them (except for Morte, who was fine without other measures) dressed in outfits suitable for the heavily polluted and dangerous Glukkon cities; long hooded trenchcoats worn over thickly padded coveralls, articulated gloves and boots of matching material, and worn over the neck like an odd scarf were goggles and air-filtering equipment (just in case the air turned bad). Zim considered himself lucky that he simply needed to add a few things to his new outfit from Traverse Town, and the others had modeled their clothing on his look; the different outfits looked pretty much the same, with small variations on their different styles and color-coded for each of them. Zuko and Zim wore sun-yellow and red respectively, while Calvin wore dark blue edged with black, and Hobbes was wearing pleasant shades of bluish-green. Their equipment varied; Zim was used to environments like Oddworld, so he required only a rebreather and goggles, as did Calvin though more protectively so. Zuko had his whole body covered up, since he probably couldn't deal well with it. Hobbes needed a lot of sensory-dampening ear-plugs and nostril-inserts just so he wouldn't be crippled by overload, and that likely wouldn't be enough.

They were surprised by the horrible noise of the docking station; the ship's audio had diminished the noise factor, and it caught them by surprise, hitting them like a hammer as ships were docking and departing with roaring engines like feral beasts silenced by even louder clamps and vises grinding down on metal to hold the ships with booming clanks and clangings. The pneumatic roars echoing one another as liquid-filled tanks relieved pressure with titanic hissing, gargantuan doors opening and slamming loudly enough to replicate a small explosion… and all the people talking and shouting and arguing and crying, their sounds blending into a solid dull roar. Fortunately, they recovered before it got too bad. They dealt with it pretty well, all things considered; Zim was used to this, as was Calvin and Hobbes, and Morte could just mentally filter any sensory details that bothered him thanks to his mechanical suit. Zuko came off the worst, the Fire Nation's industrial revolution nowhere near the scale of this place. He stared wildly, clamping his hands to his ears and mouth uttering nonsense words as he tried to make sense of all the sheer busy-ness going on.

After a few tense minutes, Zuko managed to get up, wincing with every step, his teammates giving him concerned looks but unsure what to do. Hobbes provided him two spare ear plugs, which Zuko gratefully took; specialized audio receptors, they tuned out all extraneous noise instantly.

They started walking down out of the cargo hold, wondering what they were supposed to do next, and became aware of a new noise; a faint whirring screech, and rubber wheels against metal. They turned and saw a small motorcart approaching them from what was probably a central kiosk near their slot; narrow and low-slung, the cart was a pitted gray two-seater, the rear seat raised rather higher. At the front was a tentacle-faced grouch that their time studying the people of this world identified as a Slig (humanoid, green-brown colored, cybernetically augmented with mechanical legs, and a face-full of rigid tentacles). Behind him, riding in the seat and clearly in charge was one of the people that dominated this world; a Glukkon.

The cart came to a stop in front of them. The Slig scurried out, Zim raising an eyebrow at his 'Slig pants' mechanical legs, and opened the rear door. He was promptly kicked back by his boss as the Glukkon in question stepped out and acknowledged Zim's group, walking the six paces or so over to them; a fairly standard representative of his species, he was slightly shorter than Zuko, purple-gray skin looking a bit pale in the docking station's lighting. Bald, forehead high and sloping up into a large cranium, his deep-set eyes blinked at them in a head that looked a lot like a wrinkled potato. He muttered something to his Slig assistant, who came back with a small holo-slate that proved to be an enchiridion of sapient species. He had to lean over as his assistant identified their respective species in several flickering images (beaming the information directly into his brain via internal cybernetics, and Zim detected the informance transference); while he seemed humanoid, it was hard to tell, as he was wearing a nondescript business-suit with no sleeves and cartoonishly exaggerated shoulders, as if he didn't have arms.

The Glukkon got the information he needed in moments, and then walked over to them. Perhaps 'walked' was an inappropriate word; his shoes padded across the ground in an extremely quick pattering motion. Given that he was swaying slightly from side to side and looking ridiculously serious as he walked, Zim wondered if he was even _trying _to look impressive. Calvin snickered at him. "What's so funny?" The Glukkon, whose nametag read Mary (and made Calvin laugh harder), asked indignantly.

"Uh, nothing," Hobbes said, nervously elbowing Calvin. "He's just having a stupidity fit."

"He's definitely not laughing at how incredibly stupid you look," Morte said. Hobbes kicked him, not minding that Morte's robot-body was made of metal and plastic composites. "Ow!"

"Ah, well then," Mary said, buying it completely. He said to his Slig assistant, "Bring forth… _THE PAPERS!_"

"Okie-dokie," said the Slig. He scurried away to the kiosk. Zim and his team stared awkwardly at Mary for a long moment until the Slig came back with a stack of documents. Mary said, "I have these for you to fill out!" He walked to them as his assistant brought the papers. "Standard procedure, nothing too terribly invasive unless I decide to fetch the orifice probes, simply fill them out and file them in triplicate so we can do a background check and see that you aren't eco-terrorists or what-not."

"I hate paperwork!" Zim whined.

"Uh, what was that about orifice probes?" Zuko said uncertainly.

"Nothing," Mary the Glukkon said innocently. He whistled, glancing back and forth.

Zim grunted, resigned to this in his pursuit of making Darvhog's life miserable. "Very well, then."

"Okay!" Mary said. "What are your names! And no lying! Or its _PROBING TIME_." The Slig raised several extremely ominous instruments.

"Zim of Traverse Town," "Calvin Cadia," "Hobbes Fenris-Cadia," "Fire Lord Zuko of the Fire Nation," "Morte Rictusgrin," the five of them said quickly, keen to avoid probing. (Zuko suspected that Hobbes only wanted to avoid it because the probe-wielder wasn't a female he found attractive.) The Slig wrote down their names on their respective papers.

"Very good," Mary said, giving Zuko a long look over the 'Fire Lord' thing. "A ruler in exile?"

"Actually," Zuko started to say, and Hobbes slapped his hand over Zuko's mouth. Hobbes quickly said, "Yep, exile! Long story!" Zuko glared furiously at him.

Mary raised a bony ridge over his eye. He shrugged. "Curious, but we get all sorts. Now… age, species, approximate height and weight, it's important for things…"

They had to file those things themselves, especially since a few of them had to guess, not having measured or weighed themselves in some time or being sure how old they were. "Hey, that guy lied on his age!" the Slig said, pointing to Morte. "'Incalculable eons' is not an acceptable statement."

"But it's true!" Morte insisted.

"Ooh, probing…" Mary said menacingly. He stopped, noticing that Morte was a disembodied skull in a mechanical body; there was nothing _to _probe, or any orifices for it. (How Morte maintained a sex life in spite of that was a mystery best kept unknown.) "Bah, I suppose you look your age, then…"

Mary then forced them to answer a ridiculously long number of totally meaningless questions and bizarre trick questions, finally ending with "What is your purpose in coming to Oddworld?"

_"Don't say revenge!"_ Zuko whispered to Zim. A paper was handed to each of them, with a number of choices present. Zim blinked, because 'Revenge' was at the very top of the list. Fortunately the next one after that was 'On a mission with nothing to do with the Glukkon elite', which he marked down. Calvin checked off 'Tourist', which was technically true. Hobbes checked 'I have no idea'. Zuko checked 'hunting down a fugitive'. And finally Morte checked off 'to buy cheap useless stuff' because he figured that's what the Glukkons wanted to hear.

"Very good," Mary said, after giving them a once-over.

"Now, if that'll be all," Calvin started to say. "Where's the exit!?"

"Not so fast!" Mary said. "I told you, you have to fill out the forms… _IN TRIPLICATE!_"

He gestured towards a large stack of remaining papers the Slig assistant had carted over when they hadn't been looking. Zim's eyes widened in horror. The stack was taller than he was. The Slig laughed maniacally. Mary permitted himself an evil chuckle.

"Do you treat every single incoming tourist like this?" Calvin said, exhausted, hours later after they _finally _finished filling out the forms.

"Nope," Mary said. "Just the ones who hack into the flight orders and talk back to us."

"…Ah," Zim said bitterly.

Mary indicated the exit; a row of elevator doors at the far side of the room. "Exit is through there. It will take you to the ground floor and out of the docking tower. Do try to bankrupt yourselves, that's always hilarious."

Zim's group left immediately, though not before Zim whispered to Calvin, "_MAKE THEM SUFFER._" Calvin nodded ominously, and slipped away when they passed by a group of miserable looking tourists that had gone grey-faced and whispered to Zim that they needed to leave before Oddworld claimed them too. In the commotion, none of the guards or workers saw Calvin sneak over to the computers and paperwork.

They were nearly at the exits when Hobbes said, "Hey, where'd Calvin go?"

"Right here!" Calvin said, walking briskly towards them.

"Where'd you go?" Zuko asked as Zim called up an elevator.

Calvin whistled innocently. "Absolutely… nothing at all."

As if on cue, there was a brilliant flash of flame far off that went nearly to the ceiling without harming anyone, a timed explosion igniting every pile of paperwork around there and consuming them in moments. "_MY EVIL PAPERWORK!" _Mary screamed in horror. "_I WORKED HARD ON MAKING THEM MISERABLE!_"

"Sixth time this day alone," his Slig assistant remarked. "Looks like it's bringing in less tourists and delaying more people and minimizing revenue. You'll probably be getting a demotion for this."

"No fair," Mary whined. "I liked being an obstructive bureaucrat!"

There was some commotion from upstairs. "Sir?" A technician said to Mary. "The background checking filters just went down! All the computers are doing is playing video games!"

There was a pause. The other technicians shouted, "HOORAY!" and went to go play video games, ignoring their responsibilities.

"Revenge be ours," Calvin said smugly.

"I refuse to believe that actually worked or accomplished anything," Zuko said stoically as an elevator came up. They winced as it opened up; it would have been cramped for just one person, let alone all five of them. Even so, they shuffled in and entered, and immediately regretted it; it was small enough that all five of them were shoved against each other in extremely awkward ways.

"Move your machine-y backpack thing out of my side!" Hobbes whined, forced against the wall and his elbow jammed into his side.

"That 'backpack' is the repository of my being, if you don't mind!" Zim said, packed between Zuko and Hobbes, intimately uncomfortable with how small he was compared to them.

"Ow!" Morte complained, trying to hit the button; he was shoved into the corner, right at the interface, and his mechadendrite appendages clawed at them, trying to hit a likely looking button. "All you guys are pushing against me, _really not liking this._"

"I hate my life," Zuko said morosely, packed between Hobbes and the wall and Zim smashed between him. Elbows and whining assaulted him from all corners.

"And I suffer nothing at all!" Calvin said cheerfully, lucky enough to be just in front of the door and not too close to anyone. One of Morte's new claw-attachments hit a button, the tentacle-like arm it attached to managing to extend just enough to hit it. The elevator, suspended by several extremely powerful cables over a tiny shaft going straight down to all publically accessible levels, immediately hurtled downwards, intense pressurized forces shoved the capsule-shaped elevator down like a bullet, and for a moment everyone in the tiny elevator was thrown up into the top, smashing painfully, and then came crashing back down as it came to a stop a few levels below. "This is less pleasant," Calvin wheezed, both out of breath and now under everyone else.

"I think I already hate this planet," Zuko said, sticking up slightly out of the groaning pile everyone had been knocked into. The others whimpered and moaned something in the affirmative. Consensus was reached; no one else liked this planet so far.

Zim poked his head out, pushing Hobbes' larger body aside enough for him to see when the door whooshed open; a large open space, about the size of the docking station they head been in. It was far more cramped though, hundreds of small spaces of glum workers placing together various components of ships much long the one that had kept its guns on them earlier; guns being assembled here, hulls soldered into place there; there was so much going on that Zim only had the barest glimpse of it, but it looked like this was some sort of manufactory, all done with manual labor, where parts were delivered and military-grade ships were being assembled piece by piece. The overseers, floating around on throne-like hoverchairs blinked at Zim, raising eyeridges in puzzlement. "Wrong floor," Zim said, and Morte hit another button.

The elevator jerked back into motion, and again they slammed into the ceiling. "Ow!" The five said as one, the ceiling no friendlier than the last time and even a little harder. Gravity sucked at them, the elevator shielding them from the worst of the pressure used to propel it, but it was tremendously inefficient and uncomfortable; even Zim, used to things like this, felt like he was having his stomach sucked out through a straw.

They stopped again, and of course slammed into the floor in a big pile. "My poor aching bones!" Hobbes exclaimed, unlucky enough for everyone else to land on him.

Calvin, to his satisfaction, was now on top of the pile. The door opened onto a small and badly lit chamber; sixteen Glukkons in dark robes were clustered around an alter made of clumsily but lovingly welding scrap metal, a totemic idol taller than them and all centered around a photograph of a moon with a massive three-fingered handprint upon it. "Great sigil of the spirits!" One of them cried as the others chanted feverishly. "Hear our devotions! May our faith feed your fate!" One of them banged on a set of drums. "Accursed be the smoke and blood of our people! Ten thousand punishments on the tainted quarma of our wretched ancestors who turned from your will! May the Mudokons rise up high again, and a new order of harmony ring true! In your name, machinery be awakened and the mechanical spirits live again! In your name, may our wretched campaign of dominance fall, and our honor restored in a tide of our forsaken blood! In your name, sixteen thousand lifetimes of plenty for those who survive by your goodwill! _In your name!_" The drumbeats beat faster and fast, rising up to a climax. Someone brought for a melon before the alter, and the speaker raise a orb-studded tomahawk up high. "_May this offering reflect the doom_ _of our foes!_" The drumbeats came to a sudden stop as he swung, and the melon erupted into ghostly fire, rind and vegetable pulp and disintegrating in moment and leaving not even dust. "THE SPIRITS HONOR US! GIVE PRAISE!"

"HAIL!" The other Glukkons cried.

"What's going on up there?" Zim said. "I can't see!"

The Glukkons whirled around at his voice. "Damn it, I knew we should have had that elevator discontinued!" The speaker said.

"We saw nothing!" Calvin insisted.

"Oh, lucky that. It would really suck if our worship to the spirits of our world were told to the villainous cartels, since that would get us killed in horrible ways," The Glukkon cultist said. "…Please don't tell anyone."

"We won't," Calvin said.

"Oh, neat." Another Glukkon hurried over to a control panel, disabling this room's access from the main elevator routes. The doors automatically closed, and Calvin fumbled for a button on the access panels. This time, he actually looked at them, and not sure which to press, selected one that said 'GROUND FLOOR' as everyone else managed to get on their feet, and with how tight they were bunched up, this meant that they helped each other get up totally on accident.

The elevator went zooming down again. This time, they were prepared, and clung to the elevator's railings. It was still painful and a miserable experience, but at least they didn't crash into anything… at least until the elevator came to its destination with a halt that launched them into each other like a lot of pin balls.

When the door opened, they stumbled out, dizzy and in Hobbes' case distinctly sick. Even Morte was hovering back in the elevator distinctly wobbly, and he didn't even have organs. "That is the most stupidly inefficient elevator I've ever suffered in," Zim said, sitting down and shuddering while Hobbes crawled over to a convenient trash can and expunged the contents of his stomach in it.

All of them had to wait a few minutes to recuperate from the elevator, and they had a moment to admire the lobby they were in; at last, they had found their present destination. Precisely _one _moment passed (the head mechanist of the conclave of engineers and architects that had been chain-ganged into designing this tower being a bitter and vindictive sort) before a hidden spring-loaded part of the floor activated, and the elevator flipped up and propelled Morte out like a macabre bowling bowl right into Hobbes' head, knocking him over. Morte rebounded off a wall, hitting Calvin and then Zuko (dislodging Zuko's breathing equipment) in rapid succession, finally bouncing into Zim's back and both of them falling over.

"Yes, I'm very much starting to hate this planet," Zim said from the ground.

"Then go find another one and quit whining," said a passing Slig wearing black mechanized combat armor, a light machine gun slung over his back, compact sub-machine guns holstered at his sides and a belt of grenades wrapped over his chestplate.

Zim almost retorted, and had a rare moment of consideration; the Slig was armed to the teeth and clearly official, even military. For once he was silent, and vowed hideous revenge towards this world at a later date. The Slig seemed to smirk and went on his way, face-tendrils clicking out a jaunty tune. Zim watched him go, and the Slig's mechanical feet clanged heavily on the floor and it echoed in that vast space; the lobby was a cavern of an interior space, a vast and wide-open sphere-shaped chamber lined with elevators and doorways wherever architecturally possible (even when it interfered with proper construction) just to give all the different elevators in this docking tower a central hub. Thousands of people were moving through it, literally dozens of species all mingling together and mostly ignoring each other, seeking help at the various information kiosks stationed around the lobby and lining up at gargantuan vending machines for a snack or two and milling around and sitting patiently at benches to recover from the elevators and heading right towards a set of automatic sliding doors to exit the building.

The Slig officer joined a group of his companions, totally forgetting about Zim, and Zim forgot about him; focused on the exit, he stood up. "Aha, that wasn't too horribly painful," he said. Behind him, Morte was floating off the floor, Calvin was shakily managing to get up, and Hobbes and Zuko had regained a semblance of dignity, the tiger-boy's fur still a bit moist. "Behold, the exit!"

"Hooray," Zuko said weakly.

Hobbes sniffed, and winced. "Ugh… does it really stink in here or is it just me?"

Calvin frowned. "Come to think of it… it smells a bit like the hive cities we've been stuck in, hasn't it?" He scowled.

"I don't smell anything," Zim said.

"You don't have a nose," Morte said as the four of them started the long walk to the exit.

"I can smell anyway, and you have no nose either!"

"…Don't gotta get personal…"

Zuko shuddered. "Good spirits beyond and sideways!" He hastily shoved the goggles and air-filtration mask over his face, assembling it as quickly as he could. It came together with a snap, Zuko's long hair awkwardly brushed away from the large goggles and cleansing equipment that made a faintly steampunk mask for Zuko. "Ugh… thank the sun, that was _foul! _It was like getting punched in the everything."

Calvin snorted. "Bah. Rubes!"

It was a short while before they found a quick way to the exit; a sort of ground-level escalator, just a set of motorized rubber that one stood on to be carried there. Once they found it, though, it was a quick shot to the exit. The doors opened in front of them, surprisingly dim sunlight for early morning shining over them as the four of them stepped outside,

Past the doors, the padded metal of their respective boots (except for Morte's robot suit, it just made an interesting venting noise) making footsteps that echoed together against metal plating over looping frames underneath. The doors closed behind them as Zuko stopped in mid-step, one undamaged eye wide behind his goggles as the noise of a city in full-swing hit him (but thankfully diluted by distance. "Oh my spirits," he said weakly.

The others kept going, and Zuko caught up with them looking astonished. They were on some sort of upraised construction that arranged itself as a modernized plateau of sorts, two wide ramps opening down into access-ways at either side of the exit (or entrance, it seemed) to the docking tower, and they immediately felt a sudden crushing sense of terrible smallness. Zim stopped in front of the railing girding the plateau, looking down past a staggering array of gigantic buildings rising to incredible heights in the sky for unknown purpose and clustered suffocatingly close to one another. Zim looked down again into the great hollow they seemed arranged around to a 'shelf' of roads and walls all made by gigantic catwalks lined with tiny buildings, a moving mass of colorful busyness that was obviously a vast number of people so densely clustered together they seemed more like a single massive entity than huge groups of people. Down, to the levels below that; a twisting and turning crazy series of loops. Roads, he presumed, magnetic-controls keeping the massive lone of moving vehicles locked in and prevented from free-fall while the bizarre construction took as little space as possible. An immense flock of car-sized vehicles (one-seats, mostly) flew cautiously under the watchful eye of armored vehicles floating lazily around them with guns trained on likely targets. Zim saw the pedestrians walked on the far side of that road, looking extremely terrified of getting run over, but they had little choice; everything else was so winding and hard to navigate that it would have taken hours to make it any other way.

Below even this were more levels, going down for many hundreds of feet, alleyways and roads for pedestrian and vehicle alike arranged without much civic planning beyond obsolete needs of long-gone moments and arranged into a labyrinth of urban design and vast scale, everywhere electrical lights larger than even tanks fastened to every available surface and not yet illuminated. Holographic billboards and advertisements projected from seemingly unimportant apertures in the buildings that formed the very foundation of other buildings, displaying shamelessly blatant commercials aimed exclusively at making the viewers feel bad about themselves for not buying the product and indulging in the fruits of their labors. And down from there, more than over a thousand feet below (so vast was the scale), the sunlight did not penetrate well, and Zim saw the shambled suggestions of what might be shantytowns and clustered homes of the desperate and poor, and in the darkness many thousands of people were moving in quick and stealthy ways.

This was a gigantic view for Zim and the others to take in all at once. But beyond him; there was another single building, an office building nearly as big as the docking tower they had just exited, and it's superstructure alone would have fitted quite comfortably in that space. Zim looked up for a reference, and the sun was blocked out from him; thick and greasy clouds thickened by pollutants weaved around the upper reaches of the docking tower, the sun a faint light beyond them, and the top of the docking tower was completely lost higher into the sky. If it toppled down and fell into that area right in front of Zim, the entire place would be crushed like an insect before a rhino. He couldn't even see the vast rounded shape that had surrounded the shaft they had been in, let alone the needle-like thing they had flown into as entryway for ships.

The area before him was like a canyon recreated in a badly maintained urban aesthetic; buildings upon buildings for walls, thin fog moving around them, countless thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians and tourists all moving together and tending to their own business in a staggering faceless mass… and there was still _more_, buildings even large rising up on all sides, their purposes unknown, casting all before them into the shadows of the rich and mighty.

And directly around them was a huge collection of catwalks and passageways and smaller buildings swelling out from the docking tower like benign tumors, food sellers and street merchants and less clear salesmen hawking their wares and seemingly refusing to let anyone go without a purpose short of anything but a beating. Zim suspected that you could have fit the whole of Traverse Town's population in this docking tower and the catwalks… though they'd be seriously cramped.

"…I'm impressed," Zuko said momentarily. "It's like my great-grandfather's dream of industrial progress!" He looked longer, totally silent.

"So what's next, boss?" Morte said. "Boss?"

Zim said nothing. He was still staring down into the canyon-like vastness, like a man watching the abyss and waiting for it to blink.

"Boss?"

Zim was still silent. In a tiny corner in a road connecting two small buildings together, almost invisible by a mixture of aligning offices and a passing bus big enough to carry other buses, one of the armored military vehicles cornered a small car, which stopped in mid-flight. Without warning, the military vehicle opened fire and the smaller one ceased to exist in a blast of flame and light, and briefly, screaming.

Almost imperceptibly, his lips tightened. His hand started to go to a position to summon the Keyblade.

"Boss!" Morte said, not noticing what Zim had.

Zim stopped. "Eh?"

"What are we supposed to do next, huh?"

"Oh…" Zim looked away, reluctantly. "Go forth and… wander until we can think of something to do, I suppose. Find someone who knows a way to find out more about people who might contact Darvhog here?"

Hobbes snorted. Even so, they left, picking the left ramp by whim and walking down it, staring in wonder and mild caution at the vast city around them. Zim stared back a moment longer, and then followed his friends.

The city hurt to be in; screams and sirens and construction equipment and all manner of other sounds, the basic background noise of a city but turned up to insane degrees, was nearly an environmental hazard; all-encompassing, ever-present and painfully loud. They hissed with it, even the hardened hive-dwellers aching with it.

"This place is horrible," Zuko said, eyes shut.

"Whiner," Calvin said unsympathetically, though he was wincing too.

Zuko snarled, kicked him; Calvin nearly tripped, and the bit of metal grating he was standing on slipped right out of place. Combined with the kick and Calvin's movement, he ended up stumbling backwards and right over the rail. He shrieked, belly punching into the rail and his whole body leaning forward, slowly tipping over into the vast abyss below, and the thousand-fold variations of deadly industrial hazards all around-

Zuko grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back to safety. Calvin was still breathing heavily, gone a little pale in the face, and Zuko looked downright horrified. "Dude!" Hobbes said, ears flattened and fur bristling, his teeth bared. "You almost killed him!"

"It was an accident..." Zuko said, hands shaking a little.

Zim shuddered. "By the proscribed mechanical designs… that was _too close_. I suggest caution. This city's very construction is dangerous!"

They nodded, still shaken by what had almost happened. Calvin put his hand on the rail and looked down… and down some more, at the almost random arrangement of thousands of catwalks and ladders and crude escalators going down on this one docking tower along, linking into a large pedestrians'-bridge some hundred feet below, linked right to an open hub of densely packed moving masses that were undoubtedly all manner of people clustered there for some reason.

Calvin looked down past that, to the thousands of feet below and still going, harsh metal and industrial hazards everywhere in sight, just waiting for an unlucky fool to fall in and add their remains to the processing loads. He gulped and moved away, staying very close to Hobbes and well away from Zuko. He looked like he wanted to grab onto his feline brother's wrist and not let go.

They moved on their way, tempers gradually starting to get worse from a combination of shock at what had nearly happened to Calvin, the dizzying scope of this city (and the uncertain purpose of it) and just how abrasive the whole place was from the uncultured architecture to the overwhelming background screech. (Screams predominated, to make things worse.) They weren't made much better when exiting crowds from the dock tower, probably kept back on other business, came crowding down behind them and pushed them around and into the crowd and spat them back out with no idea where anyone else was, and just as soon as they found each other, _another _crowd came up and did the exact same thing. Luckily, this time they managed to stay together, shoving their way through and ignoring the infuriated and rather vulgar screams of excessively violent threats sent their way.

The five of them walked the opposite way from the crowds in a hurry, wondering briefly where they were going, and it took them nearly fifteen minutes of climbing down ladders and riding elevators down and wandering around a looping set of catwalks and somehow not managing to leave the same spot because they had no idea how this place was arranged and then running _back _into the same crowd full of people that were mad at them; of course, they were literally running, so they knocked even more people down by accident.

People went flying into each other, one or two hit the rails and at least four dozen more got trampled in the confusion, and small fights broke out before some idiot said, "Hey! It's those jerks from before! They knocked me down _again!_"

"Oh dear," Hobbes said.

"Pike it!" Morte said.

People screamed, whether in fear or anger or some mingled relief that _something _interesting was happening for a change. Several cantankerous sorts (so deeply dressed in layers of protective cloaks and coats and devices that it was impossible to tell what they were) took out rather nasty-looking guns that Zim judged to be ballistic slug-throwers, each large enough for Zim's head alone to fit in the barrels. These belligerents started pushing through the others for a shot at Zim and his crew.

Hobbes' jaw dropped. "They're going to kill us?! Just for being pushy?!" Zuko pushed forward, the insides of his breathing mask blazing with solar heat.

The gun-wielders pushed forward, their weapons at the ready… and Zuko thrust his arms out and a ferocious wave of fire erupted in front of him, twisting into a wall of fire from the 'ground' of the catwalk all the way to the bottom of the one right above them (so that it was a bit like walking around in a box with a plain view of the extremely long and nightmarish fall to certain death below, like something made specifically to terrify claustrophobes and vertigo-sufferers). The people with the guns immediately fell back and a panic broke out, and they started screaming about another munitions accident or some fuel-line had ruptured and _Lady Margaret damn it _this was just like the accident last week when the entire Mid-Eastern Ammunition Quadrant had exploded-

The fire vanished, with only a puff of smoke and some mild charring to the metal grating. The crowd fell over each other and stumbled and gradually realized that nothing as bad as another industrial accident had happened. They didn't know what had happened, but nothing terrible was going on. A few people were still hyperventilating, as if they thought the docking tower catwalks were going to collapse completely. Eventually someone pointed out that 'those stupid tourists' were gone. Grumbling, the fellows with the guns put away their weapons, and the crowd dispersed.

Directly below the catwalk where all this had taken place, Zim's crew was huddled together along with a faintly bemused Glukkon who'd kept quiet, waiting for their pursuers to give up. "That was close," Hobbes said, still a bit sore from grabbing Calvin and Morte and jumping off the side of the catwalks (hovering over _all that way down _for precious seconds) and swinging back into this slightly lower section with Zuko and Zim following suit.

"This totally makes up for the almost-killing-me thing," Calvin said to Zuko, teeth chattering and pale again. His fire wall had brought them precious time.

"You're welcome," Zuko said. "Spirits… I hope not everyone here is so irritable."

"Yes, I _truly _wish I was a Metalbender instead of a pretend Firebender," Zim said morosely. "Then I could have just wrapped up those fools in the catwalks! Or knocked the guns out of their hands."

"Am I the only one who noticed that everyone here has weapons out in the open?" Morte said. The others grumbled assent; of course they'd noticed, but hadn't considered it important until now. "I _told _you so!"

"You're new, eh?" The Glukkon said. The crew jumped, they'd totally forgotten about the Glukkon who'd happened to be there when they swung in. Zim turned around cautiously, and the Glukkon's mouth quirked indulgently. "No worries, I say. Least you didn't get shot and carved up and melted down into next week's rations for the soldier-gangs."

"Is that likely to happen?" Hobbes asked, worried.

The Glukkon laughed, dislodging a few small clouds of ash and dirt that he seemed totally unaware of. A loosely fitting pair of coveralls, bought from vending machines, rustled with his movements, and Zim realized that the Glukkons weren't entirely honest with their suits; he had thought them to be tall and imposing creatures, but due to the design of this man's outfit, it was clear that they were actually rather stunted-looking creatures; his legs were incredibly short, puny and withered things with surprisingly flexible digits, but the arms were long and broad, turned slightly inward and walking upon the hands with little grace but decent dexterity. "Hah. You _are _new!" He leaned forward; the Glukkon's outfits had no apparent shoulder details, the arms sliding inside the clothing and being unobtrusive, making them look a bit like amputees. "Good to meet you, eh? I'm Scruffy. Lead technician on the vending machines for the Express Arrival Towers Station, don't ya know."

"The what?" Zim said.

Scruffy chuckled. "Dad-gum, you are new, ain't ya? Follow me, then, ain't got nowhere else better to be, I'll bet."

Scruffy trundled off in the peculiar gait of the Glukkons; it came from walking on their hands, Zim thought. His crew looked at him and at each other for a moment, and with a mutual gesture of 'why not?', they followed after the old Glukkon.

He stepped down a short ladder in the catwalks, going down a few levels and briefly passing under at least three directly and cutting through two. "Yep," Scruffy said, nudging his head at the walls, which were boxed off with wiring here, thankfully. (Zim wondered why they were so negligent about safety.) "This is where cheapness gets you; tourists falling or getting attacked by grumpy locals. Costs too much to put in better railing, they say. Feh, bunch of cheap whiners in the cartels. Uh, don't tell anyone I said that, I don't actually care too much about living longer but I'd rather not get sneaky-fed to my buddies. Be just like the upper management to pull a stunt like that."

Where he indicated, Zim saw the city; the great sprawling and haphazardly arranged buildings, smoke pouring out and up into thickly pooled clouds of pollutants. Somewhere absolutely massive, even the size of smaller town by themselves; he wondered what such gargantuan buildings would be for, or what this city was centered around, and then he understood when he saw the smoke again, and the vast shapes upon the horizon that he initially thought were mountains but where even _bigger _masses of buildings going as far as the eye could see. "This is a city of factories!"

"Got it in one," Scruffy said, herding them into an elevator. They shuffled in, and it sharply rocketed it down, but more gently than the ones in the docking tower itself had ever been. "Welcome to our, heh, 'fair' city of Lulu's Fortune. Most call it Fortune, on account of irony makes everyone laugh." He paused, and said, "Technically this part of the city is more of a port; big place for ships to come in, you must've noticed."

"'Lulu'?" Hobbes asked.

"Yeah, one of the guys who funded the expansion of this place. Used to just be a regular factory-city, but then they _really _expanded the place. Lulu was a small-timer who made it real big some years back; traded it all for the latch batch of Gabbit eggs, the weirdo. Managed to get a nice chunk of money together even after he went broke and helped fund the expansion here. Made a heap of money, I thought."

"Factory town, you said?" Calvin said, his nerves calming down a bit at the mention of artifice. "What do you make here?"

Scruffy made a rolling shrug. "Wrong guy to ask that, man. I'm just the guy that fixes the things. Word from the news people is, heh, 'what do you _want _made?' Probably there's an factory-block for it somewhere. They ship materials, somewhere here they make it into parts, somewhere else they put it together, and ship it back to wherever they want it. Mostly military stuff, I hear." He shuddered. "_Lots _of military stuff, these days, and they're getting some right mean freaks to hold the guns. Watch your backs, is all I'm saying. Tourists aren't welcomed in the bad places of town… which would be hard to pinpoint, if I had to guess."

The elevator came to a stop, and before them there was a great wide open space of relatively nice looking metal ground; it expanded into a wide solid-looking road suspended in mid-air, rising up at the sides into blocky walls large enough to cast his own ship into shadow many times over. Dense crowds wandered to and from this road, rarely mingling and staying a good pace away from each other as vast tanker-fliers lumbered by overhead carrying shipments and casting everything below into shadows that blotted out the sparsely available light.

The road terminated into an even bigger space; a tall cylinder-shaped structure topped with a mess of holographic signs floating everywhere, in and out and just taking up a lot of space. Several of them were damaged or outright broken, displaying randomized messages that was plainly unhealthy for some people, showing nothing but blank static or more serious errors. Enough were working properly that it wasn't that noticeable, but it had to be causing problems. Large passenger-shuttles came in and out every few minutes, the crowd not lessening or growing significantly as scores of people left on the shuttles or were dropped off, waiting anxiously while mean-looking patrol units flew by with their weapons on the ready. A nearby holographic sign helpfully read 'EXPRESS ARRIVAL TOWER STATION'.

Beneath this sight, the light was only slightly filtered through the hologram, and the dirt in the air made the projection slightly thicker. It was still enough to make a shadow on the ground, far larger than it should have been.

Zim blinked, a sudden gust blowing grit right into his eyes. A hand came to his face, wiping the filth away, and he blinked again through irritant-tears; the shadows had diminished to their regular size.

Zim tugged at Zuko's belt as Scruffy walked out, apparently deciding to become a temporary guide to the tourists and cheerfully talking about how this bridge used to be an executive's only pass until the rioting got at least fifteen deaths over the legal limit of fatalities required before official business had to do anything about it. "Zuko!" Zim hissed urgently.

"What is it?!" Zuko hissed back. "I'm trying to listen-"

"_The shadows! Look at the shadows!"_

"What are you talking about- OH." Zuko froze in mid-step, and Morte bumped right into him, sputtering indignantly. Zuko didn't notice, staring ahead; they were just in front of the bridge, and in the position to see a narrow wedge between bridge and station; there was a space suspended under the bridge and below the station, likely to do essential maintenance on the structural materials (the environment being pretty mean on even the Glukkon's preference for robust building forms) and all of it was totally dark; the dim natural lighting was obstructed by the shape of the station and bridge, and all the lighting except for a solitary electric lamp was out.

A low-slung shape was moving in that darkness, staring directly at them with pale yellow lights for eyes. It's totally black flesh was nearly indistinguishable from the shadows, and there was a suggestion of writhing lengths like tentacles imbedded with rusted blades.

Beside it, a larger form appeared in the shadows, and stared with its own lamp-eyes. Two more pairs of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness, and then six more, ten silent horrors skulking in the darkness.

Zuko elbowed Hobbes. "Heartless!" He whispered, pointing at the dark things hiding under the station.

Hobbes jerked, his fur fluffing out and his hand going for his shield-weapon. Calvin, listening in, raised an arm already glimmering with magical flame that looked nearly solid. Morte's harness rustled with mechanical ball-point servos swapping out his concealed guns.

"And then I was standing _right in the crowd _when Vice President Mukluk of the Moderately Comical Cybernetics Corporation announced that his company was dumping in money to replace the bridge after a stray missile blew up right on it and killed thirty-two people (and at least three of them owed me money!) but all they did was rip off a huge chunk of scrap and polish it up into this here bridge and bolt it into place," Scruffy said, coming to a stop and noticing their aggression. "But I said… er, hold on. What's with the firepower? Story wasn't _that _boring, was it?"

"It's not you!" Zim said, powering up his laser rifle, the view finder on it locking onto the Heartless. "Do you know that you have horrible shadow-monsters in your city?"

"Huh?" Scruffy looked around and noticed the Heartless (still enough out of clear sight that their variety couldn't be determined). They hadn't moved or made any motion to attack, simply sitting there and staring; it was hard to be sure, given their complete lack of anything resembling true sentience or sapience, but in the hollow blankness of their stares there seemed to be a touch of dulled curiosity (like a predator noticing a competitor and wondering what it was doing there) and nothing more. "Oh, them. That's it? Put the guns away, please, you're making a scene!"

People walking by in crowds so thick Zim couldn't even see the walls were indeed pausing to stare, the collective masses of people-blurs halting in several-second lulls. A very few did notice the Heartless, but by the disinterested expressions they were giving, they thought it no more significant than pigeons in the park.

Zim did not put his gun away. "And you have no issue with horrible abominations skulking under your public transportation?" He said dubiously.

"No, no!" Scruffy said, now looking alarmed. "Look, please, put the shooters and stabbers away, _someone is going to notice!_"

A truck-sized flying craft was coming in; painted black and yellow in checkerboard patterns, the colors mixing in jagged and spiked shapes, it turned sharply in mid-air, looking something like a ray fish; a central hub with the cockpit in front, engines both antigravity and propulsion behind, a set of wide scything wings on the sides to stabilize the flight (and look scary) and infantry-scale weapons mounted on ball-shaped armatures. The Heartless stared fixedly at Zim as they slung away, vanishing into a shaft in the center of their hiding place and crawling deeper into the depths of the station away from any prying eyes.

"Put 'em away, put 'em away," Scruffy hissed, his calm voice belied by the wretchedly anxious gestures he was making at them. Zim glanced, puzzled, at Morte, and their guide-skull of sorts hovered back in fear, looking quite like he wanted to join the rest of the people around them who were suddenly moving as fast as they could away from the area (but as nonchalantly as they could, as if terrified that getting absolutely any attention at all would be fatal).

The ship was almost overhead; it wasn't particularly fast, but Zim thought it could withstand a full-fledged assault; the metal was bulked up at virtually every angle, and while he wasn't sure what the metal was exactly, it had barely any scoring on it at all from previous engagements but otherwise looked fairly old-fashioned. "Do it," Morte said, hovering towards Hobbes fearfully and all his various guns retracting back into place with a hushed noise. Even his various tentacles and mini-mechadendrites curled in, as if afraid that putting even a single chunk of metal out of his personal space would lead to losing it.

Growling under his breath but more bewildered than angry, Hobbes put his shield back. Calvin depowered his elemental-gauntlets, bits of ash and frost dinging on the ground in a fairly neat summation of his own disappointment. Zuko sheathed his swords a bit more forcefully than he needed to, standing totally still and silent. Zim deactivated his gun and holstered it, wondering what in the world was going on.

The craft, apparently some kind of military police vehicle, stopped overhead. Waves of antigrav force centered at them from the vehicle, hitting the bridge; to its credit (and the engineers, for it was just so much recycled scrap) it didn't so much as sway but stayed totally still, like a rock ignoring the wind. "Stay where you are or be purged," A terribly calm voice said, warped slightly by the communicator he was speaking through. The vehicle rotated, staying in place but shifting its axis so that the cockpit, seemingly made of solid metal but treated so that it was totally transparent, was facing them. The pilot, a large Slig wearing mechanized body armor bristling with integral weaponry – two sub-machine guns on each forearm, a compact plasma caster perched on his shoulder, and a grenade launcher on his other shoulder – and in the terribly cramped space around him most of it was taken up by even bigger weapons and ammunition loaded into every possible space. His hands rested on the controls of his ship, Calvin looking up and determining how all of it functioned in a single glance. The several dozen or so weapons mounted on this particular part of the craft moved onto everyone there. Scruffy took several miserable steps away from them, shaking and doing his hardest to stop himself from it.

A minigun the size of a small car, three grenade machinegun linked to each other like a Gatling gun, at least two actual Gatling guns, another two Gatling guns but designed to fire lasers instead of bullets (a rarity among the weapons, few of which fired non-ballistic projectiles) and four low-yield missile launchers (these actually built into the craft itself, subtle weapons seemingly part of the mere curves of the ship) focused on Zim alone. Even more weapons converged on his crewmembers, quietly powered on and rotating their ammunition centers and locking on. Zim had to admire the sheer overkill, and these people didn't even _know _who he was or what they were doing.

"Aslan forsake my shoes," Hobbes whimpered, staring at his feet and slowly reaching for his shield. "We haven't even _done anything _today and they're already trying to kill us officially. As opposed to the random thugs that don't like us. Is getting attacked by locals going to be a theme with us? I don't think I like this theme."

"Quiet!" Calvin said. "Calm down a second – and I can't believe that I'm the one who just said that – and wait, we don't know what's going on here…"

"Some jerk is going to shoot at us because we… don't like Heartless or something," Zim said. "Seems clear to me."

"Hey," the Slig said, his voice weirdly unfocused, as if he couldn't really be bothered to pay much attention to anything apart from hitting the kill-buttons. "I'm not a jerk. That's mean of you. Typical tourists."

"Don't shoot!" Scruffy cried… and ran back several steps until he was safely out of the firing range of the vehicle's current aiming field. "Okay, _now _you can shoot."

"HEY!" Zim's crew shouted.

Calvin shook a fist angrily at the retreating engineer. "We thought you were cool!"

"I'm still cool! Just really interested in keeping my life intact," Scruffy said defensively, still totally pale and shaking. "I… I can't… damn it!" He turned and fled for his life, too shame-faced to look at Zim and his crew.

The vehicle tilted very slightly at Scruffy. A plasma rifle swapped places with one of the Gatling guns, bigger than a human was tall; it discharged a bolt of ionized super-hot gas like a miniaturized storm, streaking right into Scruffy's chest and he stumbled forward, time enough for one brief horrified gasp – it wasn't supposed to happen like _this_, the look in his eyes said. The plasma bolt sank in, busily consuming his insides before the whole thing erupted and the air around him ignited into a boiling fire, disintegrating him in an agonizing instant, too horrifying quick for Zim or any of his crew to have done anything. Green fire erupted from where the plasma ate the metal floors, molten droplets of metal scattering around as Scruffy toppled over, already dead. He fell apart, his flesh and bones consumed down on such a level that it all became dust and even that dust was fused into a glassy chunk that melted away in the plasma's heat.

The plasma rifle retracted. "Making a scene and wasting Arbitrator time is punishable solely by death," the pilot of the ship, presumably an 'Arbitrator', said placidly, with as little interest as if he hadn't just killed one of his city's people but had merely wiped the dust off an instrument screen. He paused, apparently considering something, and did something to an input key.

A nearby screen, hanging right over Zim and his crew (still reeling from the suddenness of their temporary guide's demise) from several thick cables wiring in from a large box marked 'PROPERTY OF MUD-WALKER INDUSTRIES; TAMPERING IS PUNISHIBLE BY EXECUTION', crackled with static for a moment before it displayed a inappropriately cheery message that read 'ARBITRATOR KILL COUNT FOR INFRACTIONS AGAINST THE WILL OF THE CITY'. Below it was quite a large number. The toll went up by one with a small dinging noise, and a brief fanfare.

The Arbitrator's vehicle turned the other way. It's intercom boomed on, and in that same totally deadened voice, the Arbiter said, "'All infractions against the city or deemed such by an Arbiter are punished by death or service. Be pleased for both; the former enlivens the routine of the Arbiters, the latter does your duty for burdening the city. Making a commotion in sight of an Arbiter and being an accessory to the commotion are punishable by immediate execution and recycling, if a body is recoverable. All personal effects and property belong to the corporation responsible for execution. This notice is required by law. Thank you.'"

The vehicle flew away, apparently satisfied by killing someone (and perhaps that was entirely the point of it; the law required killing, and as long as someone unimportant was dead, the law was satisfied), and by all indication this seemed to be the high-point of the man's day. The glassy bits that remained of Scruffy tinkled in the ever-present wind (generated by the massive air-recycling baffles mounted at precise locations to prevent the air from getting too stale or toxic) for a moment before bouncing sadly away. The plasma-ignited green fires burned for a moment, and then went out, leaving a slight scorch and several ugly marks in the bridge. A random child ran out, grabbed the Scruffy-glass, and ran back to wherever he'd come from while rambling about how 'those Petrosapiens in the block' would pay handsomely for this meal.

A stunned silence was all that Zim's crew could manage while the crowd slowly went back to normal, hurrying around and moving carefully. Eventually Morte finally said, "What the hell was that!?"

"Police brutality?" Hobbes said morosely. He took out their copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide from an inner pocket in his coat and brought up the entries on Oddworld in general, and this city in particular. "…It doesn't say anything about stuff like that, or the law structure!"

"Are we surprised?" Zuko said darkly, looking shaken by the fact that they had almost _died_. Not for the fact that they could have been killed, but that it would have happened so suddenly, cut down by an indifferent law official if not for that poor frightened Glukkon drawing his attention instead. "Probably they punish people and keep them from saying anything that makes this place look bad."

Calvin stared at the smoking spot where Scruffy had been cut down. His mouth worked into something like a troubled grimace. "And stuff like just killing people like that is just regular business around here?" He made a disgusted noise. "We need to fix that!"

"We do?" Zuko said.

"We shall," Zim vowed. "A place with public policy for such brutality is not just an offense to our work, it is an _insult_. A vile social structure like that is an insult to everything we do, and an insult requires, no, _demands _correction."

Ordinarily, Zuko might have made a comment about how Zim was being overly ambitious. Now all he could do was stare at the smoking spot where Scruffy had been only several minutes ago. He didn't nod or agree in any way… but he didn't argue against it either.

They stared broodingly, perhaps thinking that the faint screams they kept hearing made sense (either further police brutality or attacks by armed thugs that made such brutality necessary), and finally went on their way, quietly talking among each other and trying to figure out where they were supposed to start fixing something as big as this entire corrupt city.

They went across the bridge without further incident (a thug or two tried to mug them as they crossed over but they were in no mood to have fun beating them up so Hobbes just shoved them into a weight-bearing pillar so hard they cracked it a tiny bit) and into the station. For a moment, the suggestions of what a violent place this was could be forgotten for a second, subdued under the largeness of the area. There was an impression of being under a gigantic metal mushroom; a huge pillar-shaped structure in the center of the station, many people going right to it, rose up several stories into the sky, expanding outward into multiple levels at regular intervals, thick supporting braces keeping the fragile-looking floors in place. At the very top there was a dome-shaped 'cap', a framework over thousands of thin steel squares to provide cover from the elements, reinforced with a cloth-like mesh flapping down in folds here and there through gaps in the frames.

Open windows in this structure, patterned on its sides, made it clear that there were many elevators inside it, going up to these different levels. It wasn't clear what else was going on in there, but the shuttles flying into the upper levels every few minutes (at least fifteen shuttles moving together at once and flying off in unpredictable directions) made it clear that this was something like a bus station but on a much larger level; passengers needing cheap transportation came here, waited for an appropriate shuttle to arrive, and went on-board to be dropped off at their destination.

At the very bottom, on the base level, most of the place was occupied by a weird mixture of a food court and flea market; hopeful salesmen had pitched up tents and kiosks while booming music advertising their wares drew in a few interested tourists. More established merchants and franchise-workers waited at special booths, lines of customers filing up and dining at their leisure upon several clusters of tables set at short distances from the bigger booths. Vending machines were places everywhere against the makeshift walls that the massive support braces hoisting up the upper levels made, offering everything from things Zim was used to (snacks, soft drinks, junk food) to more unusual choices (ammunition specifically for guns made by competing war profiteers, one-use outfits, protective gadgets) and some truly bizarre things (fold-up robots that impersonated popular celebrities, do-it-yourself organ transplant kits, spare machine parts specifically for someone that had just hijacked a speeder but sadly it had broken down on him in a stern chase). Not much in a mood for shopping or food, Zim's crew passed these things by (though Hobbes was briefly tempted by an automatic acid rain collector before remembering that he was supposed to be sulking) and went up to the main station, or rather the mushroom-shaped building in the center.

It loomed over them, much like everything else, and they stopped in front of a flashing screen on the front, one of several just like it. Shuttles both arriving and departing were listed, continually changing as they came and left, available passenger space listed and whether or not certain species were forbidden from riding on specific shuttles for 'publicity reasons'. (Fortunately, Irkens, humans, anthropomorphic animals weren't forbidden from anything. They weren't sure what Morte was, and Morte refused to give a straight answer, so they didn't look for him on the list.) The levels the shuttles were arriving at were also listed, and conveniently, it listed the shuttles primarily by which ones you should take for your next destination. Since they were so new, though, it was hard to figure out where they were supposed to go.

Calvin looked up at the dashboard, where the 18 Mucky Yellow was arriving from the two-hundred-and-twenty-second one wheeled variant production facility and headed towards the Royal Old Folk's Recycling And Soylent Green Market ('Bring Your Own Elderly and Get The First Two Helpings Free!'). "So, where are we going now?"

"Just wandering around at random will hardly serve us well now," Zim mused.

"Why not?" Zuko said sarcastically. "It's been our whole plan up until now."

Zim let it go; none of them were in good moods after their poor reception and the death they had partly been responsible for (and they still hadn't gotten a straight answer why no one seemed to care about the Heartless), and it would do them good to vent.

"Well, our whole reason for coming here was tracking down those crazy space pirates," Morte said slowly. "Best thing to do is find the scummiest place around and start asking questions; bunch of idiots like them, they'll be wanting to sell off what they got to whoever's willing to buy."

"Unless they get killed, or find someone higher up who's willing to buy, or went to a different city, or never came here in the first place after all," Hobbes said.

"Darvhog wanted us to follow him, I think," Zim said. "That whole 'adversary' thing. And this city is the only place on this entire planet that allows ships to land without being fired on."

They nodded glumly at that; the planet, when they arrived upon it, was guarded by a thick array of space stations and automated satellites armed to the teeth, along with a sizable stationary fleet, all forcing them to land. Fighting their way through would have been suicide.

"Maybe Darvhog just came in here, hustled his way out and found a cheaper town to do business in?" Zim suggested.

"It would have taken him longer than he's had to do that," Hobbes said. "This place is really big; too big for him to go without a ship or something."

"Then the chances are that he's still here, trying to sell his loot or those mummy things," Zuko said. "…Right?"

"Probably," Zim said. "I suppose it's the best we can do for now!"

Morte looked at a sign below the arrivals/departures board. "According to this," He told them. "New arrivals are forbidden from going around certain areas without supervision and approval from an established authority. The rich parts of town, namely. So that narrows it down a bit." He laughed. "So instead of searching an entire planet or a city the size of a micro-nation, we just get to look through _parts _of a city the size of a micro-nation. So much better."

"Oh, we shall find him," Zim said. "OR he will find us. He has ever since we encountered him, after all. What is the most likely destination, then?"

Hobbes looked at the list of destinations, reading them down. "…Well, one of them is called the Newbie's Quarter. It's a quartered section of the less populated part of town not far from here; it's where tourists and non-natives are legally required to live under pain of death, according to the sign."

"Then there we," Zim said. "And we start asking questions loudly! And by that I mean we find places full of evil jerks and scare them into telling us stuff."

"I think that was implied, yeah."

"Well, I prefer there not to be misinterpretation!"

* * *

_Elsewhere in Lulu's Fortune…_

Here and now, the towers above the city, built upon the sturdy formation of lesser buildings and manufactories extending as wide as an natural mountain range across the countryside, at the very heart of Lulu's Fortune.

Rising up so high that they created the skyline, they strongly resembled a crown set upon this monument to the Glukkons power, and indeed they were even called the Crown Towers. They loomed over the city, of purposes mysterious and left totally unknown to all but the corporate experts in the know and the most trusted of the Arbitrators, the hired muscle of the corporations who were the true power of Oddworld. Once, it would have been said that they were the power behind the Glukkons; now, the Glukkons and those who ruled Oddworld were the same.

The Crown Towers were among the most impressive in all of Lulu's Fortune, and the most well-guarded; primarily corporate offices that saw to the affairs of the cartel-owned businesses that were easily among the most powerful in all of Oddworld and certainly the mightiest forces in this city (and residence for the same), it also played host to trusted enclaves of the Vykkers, smaller creatures that tended towards biological and cybernetic work at the behest of the Glukkons, and within its vast depths huge laboratories where Sligs volunteered to series of experiments and testing to make them more able to serve their employers; captured Mudokons had their brains rewired and all possibility of rebellion ripped away (or tried to; none of that had worked but the Vykkers had fun doing it); bionic organs and limbs that were cheap to produce but intentionally inefficient were mass-produced and better versions for better-paying customers devised; androids and combat mechs of varying purpose and design were constructed on-site before being sent out to follow their programming; and many other such works, much of it beyond the simple administrators who did the leg-work here.

Few could say anything about _all _the things that happened here, in the secret depths of the Crown Towers, though word leaked out all the same. These buildings, reaching far into the skies as awe-inducing reminders of the cartels' power to make architecture like this a reality, were some of the most defining parts of Lulu's Fortune, and so it was perhaps appropriate that agents of those very cartels had been commanded to meet here, far from prying eyes or public threat, harassed and beaten down though it was.

The sub-levels went farther than public record indicated, assimilating the decommissioned buildings used as foundations below, using them as more space and going even further down, even underground and sharing space with the dreaded places underneath the city where all manner of refuse (literal and metaphorical, scrap and filth and misfortunate natives alike) was left to rot until such time as it simply couldn't be ignored and the City Sanitation force went down to cleanse it with flame and omnivorous cleaner-beast. Here, below legions of armed patrols flying in heavily armed ships around the towers and elite soldiers guarding the hallways and secret passages winding through the city near it, below all the business and daily affairs of the city above, below locked chambers and extremely private elevators and classified information, there was a secret chamber, more heavily protected than anything else the entire Oddworld save for Lady Margaret herself, matron of the Glukkons and sole reproducing female of the species.

It was not big, though the weight of over a thousand levels and massed buildings above gave the weight of claustrophobic heftiness; a round chamber lined with small screens and various luxuries suitable for the high-class executives who lived down here, safe from the dangers they had carelessly brought upon their home. All of it was centered around a slightly raised section of the floor that looked as though it had been bolted firmly over something underneath, protecting it from busy-bodies or intruders (if someone was crazy or skilled enough to _somehow _get down there).

Sitting at a large table on this part of the room, a mechanical and suitably impressive computer terminal and holographic projector capable of many different functions, was the hyena trio; Shenzi, Banzai and Ed. They looked nervous, and had good reason; sitting at the opposite side of the table were their immediate superiors, the respective ambassadors from the cartels who had entered into the service of Wuya and been granted the means to fully dominate Oddworld, and now were the masters of this world under Glukkon martial law. Beside these executives were several associates, the hardened bodyguards and adepts of fields so significant that their usefulness gave them a degree of autonomy unheard of in Glukkon society.

Shenzi stood at attention, muscles tensed and thinking hard. Social dominance was not her area of expertise, and she always hated these meetings. It was downright painful constantly having to calculate and weigh every single little thought so she didn't offend Wuya's allies or make any breaks in their alliance, to say nothing of how often they irritated her anyway. Honestly, she didn't see the point; these particular Glukkons were jumped up opportunists who threw in with Wuya when her messengers spoke with the cartels and benefited from being the first to try allying with her. She sincerely believed that they would try to usurp Wuya the first chance they got; they'd be crushed in an instant, of course, but Shenzi valued loyalty and loathed opportunistic treachery on principle. (Turning on a treacherous employer was a different matter.)

The Glukkons sat on big floating chairs shaped like big eggs with a large opening in the front but totally encapsulating its Glukkon otherwise, all the better to display their power and loom over them. That these chairs could plug onto dormant giant robots lying innocently behind them, and control those mighty juggernauts, was probably part of the point 'See the power I have' these chairs said, 'and be amazed!'. One of them flew down, even with Shenzi; the chairs were shaped in such a way that the Glukkon was propped up and his arm-feet against the controls (all the better to manipulate them), and the natural shape of the chairs combined with the extremely long amounts of time these Glukkon leaders have lived inside these chairs – as they came with life support systems tending to needs of nutrition, waste, sanitation and other matters – had curved them into bulgier shapes than the typical Glukkon, letting them spread out inside with more corpulence than was typical in their society.

The one that flew down was named Talich (originally he had been named Reggie, but he'd changed his name to sound more intimidating when he and his fellow cartel-ambassadors had formed this representative council) of the renowned Magog Cartel; his skin was fairly pale like most from the mining town he had come from originally and a radical health-extending treatment had attached a colony of barnacle-like symbiotes that kept him in the peak of health, building up his muscles and regulating his nutrition and even regenerating his organs, and these symbiotic creatures had a rather craggy appearance; combined with his pale skin, Talich looked a lot like a fat blinking boulder. To his lasting credit, he was the one who had brokered the first deals with Wuya's growing empire, opening the gates to full Glukkon domination. "So," he said, clearly disturbed by the news Shenzi and her men had brought to this council, and a small tube going into his skull kept trickling a calming hormone into his system. "You arrived at the site, and a raiding party of Mudokons was waiting for you. As we expected."

"They did not know what the Aetherite was," said another Glukkon cartel representative; named Baloret, he was an astonishingly bright combination of different colors; pale purple blended with striations of bright yellow over his eyes, mixing with splotches of green on his mouth and mixing into various shades of red upon his throat sliding over the back of his head to periwinkle-blue on the back of his head, and so on. His cartel, the Outlander-Walls, had gone through a fashion several years ago of implanting biologically-reactive dyes into the inner layers of the skin to alter their pigmentation into a more artistic design, giving themselves personal style and a way of identifying themselves without ID cards or retinas or fingerprints. Most had reverted after they decided it was a silly idea, but Baloret was one of the unlucky few whose body had totally adapted to the dyes and begun producing them on its own. He'd tried to mute his skin colors by wearing the absolute tackiest suits he could find, today favoring a pinstriped with gigantic shoulderpads and a checkered tie, to mixed results. Baloret was nonetheless respected; he had brought the first samples of a mutagenic substances called the Teragen Mists, famed for the powerful though unpredictable transformations it caused in baseline sentient life. The finest soldiers and trusted mercenaries in Glukkon employ had been transformed into meta-standard titans of godly might, all at his behest, and the trans-Glukkon philosophers of the time praised his forward-thinking, if not his fashion sense. "We can be sure of that!"

"Can we?" said the last cartel representative dubiously, an abnormally large Glukkon at least half-again the size of a typical Glukkon. Bent nearly twice over, he was disturbingly slender for his size, bony deposits over his body in the shape of his skeleton giving the impression that he was emaciated. This was Radix, representative of the Can't-Think-Of-A-Name Cartel (renowned for both their incredible straightforwardness and lack of creativity); in his heyday, at the very top of his cartel's success, he had become interested in the improved procedures that created the Big Bro Sligs and had gone through those very same sessions of regular steroid consumption, organ implantation and bone-enhancement surgery. Unfortunately, it had not gone well, and while he had grown tall he suffered a great deal of health problems from it, and was not expected to live for many more years. On the other hand, it was a success (of a kind), and despite his apparent frailty he was a good deal tougher and stronger than he looked; his wiry muscles produced strength even far beyond what they should have. Under his example, the process had been refined for use on the most physically superior Glukkons (not exactly a large number; the Glukkons disdained physical skill as a basic trait, though they disliked undue intelligence in the masses as well), and a new breed of super-soldier had begun to eclipse the long-time Slig employment contracts. "_Somehow _they knew about the convoy heading through that town. Perhaps it was only a coincidence… but it was _that _very town where we traced that specific deposit of Aetherite. Even if they did not see fit to collect it, as they certainly don't have the facilities to refine it, who's to say that they don't realize its purpose?"

"I dunno," Banzai said unhelpfully. "I mean, they weren't exactly in a hurry to grab it, if that's what you're thinking. They went after the captures and slaves as usual. Took some of our weapons and heavy vehicles too, the usual looting game. If they knew what the aetherite was for, I don't think they'd have gone for the stuff they did grab."

Talich's chair extended a robot hand, and waved a mechanical finger scoldingly. "Don't underestimate these savages and fugitives, my good hyena-sir!" Talich said, face creaking into a cheery grin. "Why, if our predecessors had given them due credit, and actually banded together to get down to brass tacks properly… why, perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess! Hem, hem!"

"Losing soldiers and potential workers is a bit of a loss," Baloret said, bringing up a read-out in his chair to check the numbers. "The six and a half hours it take to instruct new recruits into how to handle their weapons and armor, not to say costs for processing the corpses or grabbing anyone off the street who can hold a gun and _then _instruct them… wasted time if they just get killed straight off like that. And at this moment, we need every pair of hands that we can get; letting captures and slaves run off to join the Mudokon tribes before we can even put them out at market and make a bit of money off them is just _tacky_."

There was silence. Talich and Radix slowly turned to look mockingly at Baloret as he said 'tacky', as did Shenzi and her hyena-boys, and then so did the still-silent associates of the Glukkon leaders.

"Oh, you know what I mean!" Baloret said indignantly. "I know I look stupid, that's not what I meant by tacky."

Again, Talich waved a finger. "Prepare your words soundly, and speak forthrightly without a chance of misinterpretation… or else you look like a real idiot. As the masses would say. Hem-hem!"

Baloret snorted. Radix spoke next, his voice surprisingly soft and calm. "These are acceptable losses. Still, in our present situation, we cannot afford to throw _any _resource away, whether soldiers or workers or machines. Miss Shenzi, in the future, kindly endeavor to keep our assets intact, would you."

"Ah, we'll see what happens," Shenzi said noncommittally.

"If we can, we'll try," Banzai said.

Ed gibbered, and headbutted the table a few times, making some small dents. One of the Glukkons associated winced at the damage to precious machinery.

The three Glukkons looked cautiously at each other. "Ah," Baloret said. "Did he say yes, or…?"

Shenzi and Banzai looked at Ed, now staring in rapt silence at his palms, as if the striations on his fur held the secrets of the multiverse. "You know, I can't really tell," Banzai confessed.

"I gave up trying years ago," Shenzi said.

Another one of the associates coughed, and this one spoke up. "I beg your pardon, our noble and wonderfully fuzzy allies, but I don't think the gifts of the spirits agreed with his head very much," said the associate; standing right before the three Glukkons and an established bodyguard, she was a visibly female and humanoid sapient. Her name was Edhitha and she was an asari, a species native to another universe (but had migrated to many others in recent times) but had transformed quite drastically after earning a high place as a commando in the highest orders of the Glukkon Hegemony's military; she was one of the first to be permitted a bath in the Teragen Mists, and her entire physical form had been transmuted into a blob-like shape composed of a hyper-dense substance similar to neutron-degenerate matter, a substance normally found in the heart of stars. Currently, it pleased her to shape herself into a form much like her original appearance; a head shorter than Shenzi, humanoid and female, every movement and curve of her features instinctually by a psychically induced force field (that happened to prevent her unstable blob-body from touching air molecules and exploding) patterned to be alluring to nearly any sapient life-form, her figure stocky and molded into pleasant shapes resembling broad hips and fairly small breasts though she lacked definition. Long tentacles sprouted from her head like hair, lacking the traditional rigidity and flopping over her face and a rather somber expression. Parts of her force field had darkened to create the appearance of a fancy business suit, since it was impractical for her to wear real clothing but terribly tacky for her to look naked too.

"…No," Shenzi agreed after a moment. "No, it didn't."

The other associates, taking their cue from Edhitha's comment and almost certainly because she was their unofficial commander, mumbled their assent. "Why do you keep him around, then?" asked one of a pair of Big Bro Sligs; they were mostly identical, larger than most and wearing the same sort of powered armor suit (in this case, little more than mechanized body armor that amplified the wearer's abilities and equipped them with internal augmentations) with a set of arachnid-style legs below the waist instead of the usual 'Slig pants'. Before the Teragen Mists, there had been a single Big Bro Slig of great renown who'd volunteered for the Mist treatment, but during the transformation, he'd split into two Sligs that embodied different parts of his personality, and both were gifted with the psychokinetic power to manipulate weight and density in various ways. This one was named Inward, as his powers focused solely on manipulating his own weight and density, able to make himself an extraordinarily strong and heavy juggernaut at one extreme, or phase right through solid objects at the other.

Ed growled, and so did Banzai. "Hey, getting way personal there, man…" Banzai said, fur bristling. The air around him rippled, and inhuman shapes and faces shimmered around him, like the forms of something from _outside _stepping in for a moment.

Except for one, all the associates took half a step back, staring warily at this. The sole exception stared, fascinated by it.

"Knock it off," Radix snapped. "We got enough to deal with and you morons are already fighting. Save it for after this mess is over, then you can kill each other for ambition. Like normal sane people do!"

Reluctantly, the hyena men calmed down. Shenzi bristled, though, glaring at Inward with great dislike. "Please, forgive my other," the second Slig twin said hastily, waving his hands; he was floating slightly above the ground, held down by a set of arachnid mechanical legs that kept him still. Like his other, he had density-related powers; while Inward could manipulate his own density and weight, this one (named Outward) could do so with anything around him, whether objects or animals or sapient beings, to the same extremes as his 'twin', making them light enough to fly right off into the sky right through buildings or heavy enough to smash through the ground and squash themselves with their own immense weight, or even switch between those extremes with incredible speed. His skill and power at doing so had let others to believe that he was a master of gravity, and he cultivated the illusion in case someone tried to fight him using that erroneous conclusion; they would be woefully unprepared to deal with him properly. "He did not mean to offend-"

"Did a good job of it anyway," Shenzi said.

"He was merely stating the obvious! Why, I think it's quite nice that you keep him around! Here on Oddworld, we would have already eaten him if he was a Slig- oh dear, that's not making things better, is it?"

"No!" Banzai shouted, slamming his paws on the table and shaking it.

"Watch it!" one of the other associates cried, the same one who'd been fascinated by Banzai's spirit magic. "That is sensitive equipment!"

Banzai hesitated, just for a moment. He actually _liked _this particular associate. He settled back with a grumpy growl.

"Geez, so _tense_," Muttered another associate, a rather stunted-looking Glukkon with a strangely patchwork body, scales and feathers and fur and bony armor and other natural features sprouting from his body in uneven mixtures, shifting around and changing with every moment. His arms had thickened, more like legs than even the typical Glukkon, while his actual legs had lengthened and grown a few joints, the toes more dexterous than usual, and made fine manipulators. His face was oddly lengthened, various tentacles growing from the back of his head and his mouth hardened into something like a back, giving him a resemblance to the squid-like creatures it was thought that the Glukkons were descended from. Officially his name and title was 'The High Craftsman of Non-Sapient Resources and Bio-Weaponry' but generally he was simply called Fleshcrafter; originally a respected if eccentric biologist famed for breeding particularly savage and fierce animal soldiers and improving the biological technology the Glukkon Hegemony occasionally imported from other worlds, his bath in the Teragen Mists had turned him into a walking biological laboratory and storehouse of every animal he'd ever seen, able to shift a portion of himself into any capability or trait an animal had developed. He wasn't much of a fighter, though, but his real skill was in applying this same power to any non-sapient creature that he touched, permanently imbuing it with whatever qualities he could imagine, including massively increased size, strength, all manner of natural weapons or bio-technology. They passed these same traits onto their children, and he'd instituted a breeding program for creating an immense variety of soldier-beasts that bred fast, grew up quickly, and fulfilled the needs for tanks, heavy vehicles or infantry that would otherwise be a waste of valuable resources. Unfortunately, they didn't tend to live much more than a few seasons, limited their value. "You guys are going to, like, hurt yourselves or something. Be cool."

"But I don't want to," Shenzi said. She was standing up now, her fur on end and an eerie howling coming from the very air around her.

The representatives from the cartels frowned, but expressed no fear; they had no reason to be afraid of their allies. Their associates, though, might get killed, and that was a waste of resources. Silently, they wondered if just killing the hyenas now would be worth upsetting Wuya prematurely.

"Oh, stop it," said the associated from earlier who'd complained about hitting the table. There was a great mechanical clicking and whirling as she frowned at Shenzi. "You're acting like a lot of cannibal hatchlings! At least they have the decency to eat their siblings straight off, you're just making a lot of self-righteous complaining about it!"

_Bang, bang _went a set of massive mechanical legs designed like a crab's, tilting around a large machine similar in basic principle to the chairs that the Glukkon cartel representatives rode. It seemed a combination of heavy vehicle and life support machine, a slightly oblong craft bulging in odd places with exterior components and increasingly mysterious devices that were nonetheless as integral to it as a Glukkon's arm would be to him. The legs attached to ball-point joints on its underside, right under an assemblage of parts that could reconfigure into rounded wheels, and behind these were set of engines at both the sides and very back of the machine.

Mechanical tendrils of varying size and strength, ending in multipurpose tools and clamps and lasers, waved irritably from ports all about the machine. Its form was elegant and functional, the array of devices (sensors, analytical engines, aerodynamic surfaces, life support redundancies, nutrition synthesizers and waste-filtering baffles, and more mysterious things that even a highly skilled machinist could only begin to guess at) lending a curiously organic appearance to it; it was a living thing in its own right, a mechanical lifeform. At the front of this mechanical wonder, there was a small containment unit, part life support and part control center, shielding the core of the machine and its sole occupant, though now it was irised open, metal-and-glass interlocking panels spread open. Sitting in that unit was a rare sight indeed; a female Glukkon, though far smaller than she ought to be. An ordinary female Glukkon would have been a literal giant compared to the smaller males, and she was only a little larger than the other Glukkons present; more insectile than her counterparts, much of her was chitinous and terribly wrinkled, even desiccated in places, and it was plain that most of her termite-like body was concealed within her machine, and might even have been built around it. Her face, stern but not unkind, seemed permanently set into an unfocused glower. "Could we stop bickering and focus for a moment?" She asked.

"I don't know," Edhitha said dubiously. "Could we?"

Inward and Outward glanced at Edhitha, than at Fleshcrafter, and finally at one another. "Was… was that a joke?" Outward said. "Good grief, I don't think you've ever made a joke before!"

The glowing spots that had replaced Edhitha's eyes dimmed and brightened rapidly; a blink. "Was what a joke?"

"…So close, she was…" Fleshcrafter mumbled into his hands. Something whispered back. He giggled indistinctly.

The female Glukkon, who was sarcastically called Brain Lord by her peers and she'd liked it so much she'd legally changed her name to it, shrugged indifferently. Though the insides of her unit was exceedingly comfortable, she still shifted about; various cables and conduits plugging into her spinal cord flexed with her, a biometric-analyzing apparatus readjusted itself as she moved, and various calming hormones were pumped through ports in her skull and directly into her brain. The machine was a part of her, or perhaps she was a part of it, and a good deal of her was either cybernetic (wired directly as a processing unit into her wonderful machine) or was already mechanized.

A long time ago, she had been a very influential cyberneticist and scholar in service to the Hegemony; ordinarily, Glukkon eggs were put through conditions that caused them to invariably hatch as males to prevent any other queen females from appearing, reproducing and possibly usurping Lady Margaret, who was the sole Glukkon Queen and meant to keep it that way (so that all Glukkons would remain exclusively her direct children, and thus beholden to her), but somehow, impossibly, Brain Lord had survived as female. She claimed that she had been one of the thousands to volunteer for the Teragen Mists, and had emerged with intelligence vastly enhanced to the lofty heights of super-Glukkon levels as far above the baseline as this city's heights were above the lowest levels of its sewer processing facilities, and the slightest off-hand spark of ingenuity that she cast off in her many experiments was equal to the greatest labors of the past two decades of research and development; uneasy though the cartels were about her threatening Lady Margaret (and thus destabilizing their entire society, for the Lady Margaret was something that each Glukkon, from the lowest peon to the most glitzy executive, could revere and follow), she was simply too vastly intelligent and _useful _to simply terminate.

Shenzi blinked at her, mildly perplexed. The associates of the Glukkon cartel representatives had been slow to lower their defenses around the hyena trio, but Brain Lord was even more taciturn and withdrawn. For her to make such a sudden remark was unexpected.

Brain Lord stared at her calmly. Shenzi growled to herself, and after a moment, cool logic rose through the swampy regions of bloody-minded fury like a fortress of evil; it wasn't worth antagonizing them now. "Cool it, you guys," She said to Banzai and Ed.

"But, Shenzi-!" Banzai started.

"I said quit it," Shenzi snapped.

At such a direct order from a woman (their people being violently matriarchal), Banzai relented. He whimpered and flattened his ears.

"So! Baloret said, perhaps sensing that the argument had been mercifully forgotten. "So, back to business. Let's be clear; the Aetherite was shipped to the facilities specified?"

This had already been explained, but it helped to repeat important information. "Yeah," Banzai said. "Down to the letter."

He didn't bother asking what the Aetherite was for, since they already knew; the Aetherite was being refined, smelted and made into essential building materials for the Glukkon's latest fleet of ships. Quite why that was done had so far eluded the hyenas; aetherite was strong, but there were far stronger materials (Raritanium for one, as well as secondary adamantium, ceramite and plasteel, and many others) and they were already used in constructing ships, though were harder to find and recreate, and Aetherite was even rarer than those materials, and certainly impossible to recreate so far. It's use in interdimensional travel was its main selling point, as was doing harm to outsider-type creatures such as the Heartless.

Unless they really wanted to leave their planet in great numbers, or construct a fleet meant to specifically combat Heartless, Banzai didn't really see the point of it. There wasn't enough for that anyway. He'd never thought to mention this, not thinking it worth the trouble.

That going to so much lengths to retrieve the material, and the costs they'd made just finding it even before they were forced to fight over territory with the stuff, _did _bother him. "Don't see why we can't just buy the stuff from other planets," He said. "Not really enough in just this planet to work with the amounts you guys are demanding."

The room went very silent for a moment.

Eventually, with an air of great care, the Glukkon cartel representatives looked at Edhitha. She put her hands together, and carefully said, "The material _is_ on our employer's own planet. It makes sense to being looking here, as we consolidate control over Oddworld."

One of the other associates, not a cartel representative, just an ordinary soldier that Shenzi had never spoken to before, seemed interested by this. And something about him didn't quite smell right, he didn't quite smell like the cities of Oddworld.

"Apart from the acceptable losses," Baloret said. "The mission could be considered a success, I suppose." His expression turned dark. "…Except for whatever attacked the city shortly after you arrived."

Shenzi snorted dismissively. "So some nut-ball tribal stole a ship and crashed into the city walls. Can't be a big problem."

"Hmm. I wonder…" Baloret shook his head. "You are _certain _you saw no one following you back here?"

"'Course not," Shenzi said proudly.

"Hmm," Baloret said again. "…Fine, then. We shall have patrols increase aggression protocols and do more sweeps of the authorized places we allow official control of, then. If anyone _did _intrude, they shall have to stay in the publically permitted warzones, which will keep them nicely occupied if not already dead. On to other business…"

Fleshcrafter suddenly said, "You did say Jak was there, right?"

"Yeah," Shenzi said.

The Glukkons and associated winced, and shuddered. "…So, he's officially allied with the Mudokons," one the cartel representatives said. "This bodes ill for us all."

"Did you find out what he wanted?" One asked.

Shenzi shrugged. "He didn't say. I'd guess he's just allied himself with the Mudokons for… some reason. Who knows? Maybe it's just because you're with Wuya's people, and it's a revenge thing."

"So how did he, and his raiding party, know how we were coming?" Fleshcrafter pressed on. For some reason, he glanced at Brain Lord.

Brain Lord stared at him. "Almost certainly," She said after a moment. "They have friends and allies within our ranks."

"What self-respecting Glukkon would ally with those savages and that monster?!" Outward spat.

"A particularly ambitious one?"

"Yes… well, we're _all _ambitious here!"

"An interesting notion, but not one we can investigate immediately," Talich pointed out. "Best to consider other affairs, then." With some reluctance, the others agreed, and as they discussed this, the guard from earlier raised an eyebrow thoughtfully. All this, mentioned in bits and pieces throughout the cartel representative's complaining, seemed news to him.

Radix found something about him odd. "Who are you again?" He asked in the middle of a conversation. "Who is that soldier?"

"I'm Sergeant Arlet," the guard said helpfully.

Radix grimaced thoughtfully. "Continue," He said to the others, still frowning at Sergeant Arlet. It might have just been his imagination, but he thought he saw the sergeant's eyes turn red, under the clear regulation-issue visor he wore, for a second.

Nothing came of it. The Mudokon problem wasn't something that could be addressed so easily; they were too useful as slaves to just kill altogether (though it was an increasingly attractive notion). "We will speak with our fellows of the cartels," Talich said after some discussions that went nowhere. "We must devise a new plan of attack for finding more Aetherite and tending to our overall agenda."

Sergeant Arlet, Shenzi noticed, looked like he quite wanted to know what that was. Which was strange; she knew for a fact that he'd been here, as a face in the crowd, so he ought to know perfectly well what the agenda _was_. Personally, she thought focusing so much on gathering Aetherite from every possible crash site and importing it from other worlds was a stupid idea, but she was just brute muscle that followed orders. No one ever asked for _her _opinion.

It was agreed, though, that the defensive position they'd taken against the Mudokons in recent times was working well so far; annoying though they were, they didn't pose any significant threat… yet. Jak's presence was ominous, but it wasn't like he was anywhere where he could do real damage. (As far as they knew, anyway.) The general policy for the Mudokons, as established by the cartels, was to bide time and play defensive until a moment to strike a single overwhelming blow presented itself. With all their spies and scouts across the world, squads leading independent attacks on suspected Mudokon tribe locations and those suspected of harboring them, a breakthrough was bound to happen. Of course, executing Abe and Munch, the leaders of the collective tribal nation, would solve it too, but first they had to be found.

Other business presented itself, less pressing than the problem of the tribes, and Shenzi soon grew bored with this minutiae. Eventually, it got so boring, a scout mentioned something about how a pirate had shown up not too long ago making deals and selling a long-lost means of producing extremely strong glass to various manufactories, with ancient relics that proved they worked. And apparently he'd managed to start taking over parts of the city (but only the parts where people were allowed or encouraged to have gang wars over territory) with some manner of undead army. The associates didn't think it meant much, but the representatives agreed that such deals needed to be brought under the control of the Hegemony, and made arrangements to see how useful the glass supposedly was; if it worked, it would resolve a few construction problems they had and save quite a bit of money on costs.

As things went, in the affairs of men who commanded an entire planet and were eager to make more, this wasn't particularly important.

But it was still seen and heard, even this locked-down place of ultimate security.

One of the guards heard it all, and later that night, he happened to mention it to a buddy of his (this aspect of his work not being walled away by biomechanical implants that prevented him from speaking of secret matters). The buddy told some of his buddies, and they told some of their buddies. The news spread, that a space pirate with a revolutionary means of making glass had arrived and begun conquering gang territory.

Some said the higher-ups were pleased that some measure of stability were coming over the gang territories. Others said that the higher-ups didn't care one bit. And still others devised ever increasingly elaborate stories around it.

In the days to pass, the stories met many ears, and were told many more times. It wasn't that important, as things went in Oddworld, just a funny bit of gossip to tell people.

But the point was, the news would spread in the coming days.

Eventually, it would probably find someone who was genuinely interested in hearing about a space pirate who had come recently, or even someone interested in selling that sort of information.

* * *

In the segment of the Newbie's District of Lulu's Fortune, at the shuttle station just above a local greenhouse (which hosted fungi that fed on pollutants and made a sizable amount of the diet for some of the less poverty-stricken workers that lived around here), the shuttle from one of the docking tower stations had arrived around fifteen minutes ago and left without incident, a large crowd of people exiting.

Among them had been five newcomers, their mission temporarily forgotten as they were shuffling into the crowd with a lot of things on their minds.

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Zuko and Morte walked (or floated) tightly together, keeping others out of their collective personal space (a rare commodity indeed in cities like this), brooding on what they had seen when that arbitrator had opened fire. The sights seen while in transit hadn't much improved their disposition.

They had wandered with the crowds into the bridge that led to an elevator system that would take them anywhere above the unauthorized levels (where dangerous things had been left to roam), gone with them two hundred levels down and wandered out again, drifting with the crowds without much concern where they were going.

This city was an eclectic mix of different species mingling together and building as they went; not dissimilar from Traverse Town, but under the oppressive and distressingly disinterested grip of a centralized authority who seemed to care nothing for the people under their care; Zim's crew saw many things as they wandered in perhaps search of what this city – and thus, this world - was _really _like from a first-hand look.

They walked down tunnels made where old buildings had come together and had holes knocked through them for transit, and saw scores of vagrants and isolated bands of orphans huddling for warmth and savaging anyone who got too close to their begging bowls.

They took an elevator ride back up a few levels, where sunlight had been totally blocked out by construction efforts and several dozen feet of buildings wedged together so tightly they had made an walled-off part of the city, and saw a broken-down tank that had been refurbished into a home. It was empty now, and an official note of eviction was stained with blood and weapon discharges.

They split from the crowds they'd been traveling with and stood at the balcony of a restaurant for quite some time, humbled at the dizzying scope of this city. There was no light that was not artificially made, here in the darkness under the Glukkon's strongholds. And still there were hundreds of feet below them and screams echoing from there.

They went down there to see what the screaming was, rappelling down with makeshift tools, and when they got to a narrow and cramped chamber right inside a large metal box of a house, there was no one there, but blood and assorted flesh-bits. The shaft they had come down into was thousands of other buildings and homes tightly pressed together, and all they could do was go down some more to find a way out.

They traveled through abandoned tunnels and pathways, past broken catwalks and bridges that had fallen down there ages ago, surrounded by dead bodies that hadn't been cleaned up yet and fearful prospectors looking for treasures lost down here. They went through power plants guarded by suspicious arbitrators and hummed with lightning across massive dynamic coils housed on the outside that funneled precious energy to various districts, and only a tiny portion of it was reserved for the poorer districts. For some reason, Calvin and Zim brooded at this misuse of technological power at length.

They went up past putrid pits where waste had been left to rot, up elevators that were just barely functional, and right up into the middle of a vast market places where a hangar had once stood, and now crude tents had been pitched for hopeful salesmen to offer their wares and be offered goods in return. To the city's credit, there was a dizzying extreme of different things to be bought, and most of it imported from other worlds; weapons from dented swords to slightly illegal high-powered assault rifles, suits of crude powered armor, schematics on reproducing virtually anything on record, flavored soy dispensers (critical on long journeys with a tight budget), _very _illegal bio-augmentation mods, various holotapes to be plugged into a brain port and teach one how to do virtually anything on the holotapes, and even more. They wandered through, not buying anything (none of them trusted anything to be sold here) but it was still an interesting diversion. They asked a few questions here and there, but it didn't seem the right place to look for Darvhog, and in any event no one knew who he was, or at least didn't want to say. They even hit up a bar or two for the traditional 'beat bad guys up and ask questions' mode of interrogation, but given that all of them except for Morte were underage by nearly all the bars (Zim was fifteen by his people's count, Calvin was a preteen, Hobbes was probably sixteen and Zuko was too), they didn't get very far. Hobbes wouldn't even let Zim or Calvin burn down a bar as retaliation, he considered it a real jerk move.

Eventually, they decided that the first thing they needed to do was find a base to operate from while they were here, and worry about other things later. Zim felt mildly disgruntled when they just kept walking for a long time, not really going anywhere besides getting a mildly good idea of the way this cavernous city was structured. "This seems a suitable place to begin our work," He said as they wandered into a residential complex.

The five of them, indistinctly feeling like they were violating some unspoken rule of heroic conduct that they should look like a wandering band of noble heroes but feeling more like a bunch of pretentious hobos (their actual funds being somewhat limited, in spite of Hobbes' expense account), walked onto a short bridge between a shaft descending from the area immediately above them and down into the residential complex; a wide neighborhood dominated by a complex series of walkways over an thoroughfare for flying people-cargo carriers (so named for a joke that they carried cargo, and the cargo was _people_). The object of their interest was an apartment complex of several boxy towers squatting on a broken-down aircraft carrier that had been rebuilt into housing an air purifier and a food recycling processing plant. On one side, there was nothing but a steep drop to the lower level, and on the other there was a defunct warehouse marked with gang-sign.

The air was clean here, if foggy from the processes done by hundreds of filters digesting the air and making it fit for breathing instead of choked with pollution. Zim found it very refreshing; the air felt like home, not with the disturbingly uncontrolled form of 'natural' air, but tinged with a lovely artificial taste. It was soothing, and reminded him of Irk before it had been destroyed. Passed through the innards of hundreds of machines, it felt purified of the disturbingly non-artificial aspects of nature in general; terrible though this world was, at least this felt comfortingly familiar.

Savoring the nostalgic feeling (and wondering why Hobbes was looking so repulsed by the air), Zim noticed that they weren't being crowded for once; from the shuttle ride and on, they'd been constantly pushed about and sucked into one smothering crowd or another, but the people had dried up near this place. This wasn't a good sign, though; if no one wanted to be near here, it was likely dangerous.

He grinned. That sounded like fun.

"I think we're totally lost," Hobbes said, grunting his distaste for the air here. "Wait, no, that's just this city giving me a headache. Ugh, it _stinks…_" He sat down on a metal grill set over a dark shaft. He shuddered at the masses of buildings above and below and sideways, this town was a sprawling claustrophobic nightmare. Against the tides of thick smoke riding against the sky of massed metal and construction around them, raising his voice over the clamor of the crowds and vehicles screaming around, Hobbes growled and added, "It's worse than a hive-city back home! At least then the oppressive weight of several billion tons of city above you had _clean _technology!"

Calvin looked at the grill Hobbes was sitting on. "Uh, I wouldn't sit there if I were you!" He said, recognizing the smaller vents around it, a few cables connected to power boxes all around and a few other tells particular to his line of work.

"What do you-" Hobbes started to say as a screaming whine built up underneath. A terrible roar began to sound, and Hobbes leaped off the grill just as a huge blast of heat vented out from where he'd just been sitting, streaking up into the smoking clouds overhead and pushing out a good portion of them.

Morte sighed. "Close one," he said to Hobbes, who was lying on his side and whimpering.

Zuko nudged the grill. "What is this thing?"

"Heat vent," Calvin said. "I think the foundation of this particular area is a large life support system, probably purifying the air so people can breathe in it. Generates a lot of heat, so it's shunted out of that vent and directly into the smoke overhead." As he said this (with Zim nodding in agreement at his diagnosis), the smoke dissipated even more, sucked up into various purification baffles above. There was still more smoke than it could handle, pumped up from apartment complexes and the factories that made the very substance of this city. "Probably condenses the smoke and makes it easier to handle. But putting it here like this where it could kill people is just _lazy_."

"I begin to suspect that the administrators of this city are in need of a good instruction in proper management," Zim said, possibly trying to make a joke. If so, he was failing at it.

"So… any reason we should be stopping here?" Morte said.

Zuko scratched his chin. A few scrawny hairs (the beginning of proper facial hair) burned away under fingernails that blazed flame for a moment. "If we're going to accomplish anything on this world-"

"We're lucky if we can stand this city, let alone the rest of this planet," Hobbes said pessimistically.

"We need to establish a base," Zuko said, ignoring him. "A beachhead, if you will."

"Makes sense," Calvin agreed. "Why here?"

"Not many want to come here," Zim said, gesturing at the lack of people around them; the metal, ordinarily singing with all the weight of people moving about, was relatively quiet here. There was still great noise, but it was more distant and slightly tolerable. "That gives us a minor degree of secrecy to work with. Once we establish a beachhead, as Zuko put it, we ought to be able to bring in things from the _Paragon_. Not much, but at least things so we can build what we need and carry out our work!"

"Small problem there," Morte said. "Aside from the idea that we can just do that sort of thing for however long we're going to be here, what makes you think they're just going to give us an apartment or whatever on short notice?"

"Besides, I don't think they're renting," Calvin said, and pointed. Graffiti stained the walls of nearly every available surface, so much of it either obscene and badly painted or obscured by more recent graffiti; either way most of it was illegible. Over the apartments, though, a row of very clear graffiti notes indicated that this place was the property of one gang or another, each of them crossed out except for a recent one at the bottom that said 'THIS TOWER IS PROPERTY OF THE NEWBIE DISTRICT FACE-STOMPERS'. Obviously, it had changed hands a lot over time, probably by one gang usurping the last for and so on for who-knew how long.

"Ah," Morte said. "We've entered into the 'gangs of violent urban savages fighting for territory and traumatizing hapless civilians' trope."

"Actually I did some editing on the Guide's glossary of terms and I don't know if that's actually a trope-" Hobbes started to say.

"Too much talking, not enough tackling!" Zim said. "Heh. 'Tackling'. I made a pun. Because tackling starts with the same sound as talking. That's alliteration!"

"Yes," Zuko said flatly. "Thank you for spoiling the joke."

"You're welcome, but I don't know why you would express gratitude for that."

"So we're just going to go in there and beat people up?" Hobbes said. "That sounds kind of… jerk-ish."

"They're a gang that probably killed the last gang and terrorize everyone around," Calvin said. "Why care about them?"

"Because we can't just stomp in guns blazing!"

"Most of us aren't carrying guns-"

"Not the point, I just don't want to be in a group where we go and beat up everyone when it's convenient for us."

"Bah, fine, okay," Zim said. "We will _talk _first. But then with the tackling. Hah! I made another pun! For that directly references my earlier joke, which-"

"I get it, we get it!" Morte said. Zim scowled.

Somewhat reluctantly, though it wasn't as if they had anything better to do, the crew walked under a series of pipes that likely carried various essentials, moved under the shadows of inactive gun turrets and stepped over power boxes receiving electricity, and climbed down a short step ladder to a narrow tunnel to this building's lobby; there was more graffiti everywhere, and various broken containers of unwholesome products lying around, glinting sharply. Zim was glad his boots were too tough to be damaged by all the glass.

The doors to the place was lying wide open, totally broken down by some previous assault. A guard on duty, a small Slig with a gun, stood up to stop them from coming in, pointing his gun at them and clearly about to open fire.

Zuko growled, flames gushing from his nostrils and spat a well-aimed burst of flame; it struck the gun and knocked it right out of the Slig's hand. He gaped at Zuko, considering the situation. He shrugged in defeat, climbing up the wall to run away and leaving as fast as his mechanical legs could carry him. The crew walked past where he'd been sitting, and past the aged mechanisms trying and failing to work the automatic doors as they passed inside. Calvin picked up the Slig's fallen gun as he passed it, resolving to remove the 'PROPERTY OF SLINKY' writing on the side.

They entered a large and open lobby that had seen many recent battles, and Zim's shoes landed on old and weary carpet that broke under his boots. Hobbes wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came in, and Zim was inclined to agree with the sentiment. Though it was fair large inside, lit fairly well by electrical lights and several doors leading to various offices, the walls were stained and broken alcoholic drinks and various drug paraphernalia was lying all over the ground. The whole room seemed arranged around a large elevator shaft that went up to the various apartment floors, and it was wide open; several Glukkons were playing cards in it, with some harried people of varying species standing in a line to speak with a Slig at a desk and looking scared. Zim presumed them to be tenants. Sligs and Glukkons and other thugs of various species were lying around amusing themselves in various ways, and at least two looked like elf-ish things, close enough to human to discomfort Zim. "Hey, what's with the strangers?" one of these elves barked. "Wasn't Slinky on duty?"

"He ran," Calvin said honestly. A few of the gangsters looked suspiciously at the familiar gun he was carrying. "Who's in charge here? We need to talk."

Just as Zim observed that most of the people in here were wearing a tightly wrapped bandana over their arms – a gang allegiance thing, he supposed – the Slig at the table stood up. He waved the tenants away, and though they looked outraged at being shushed away after all the time spent standing in line, they scurried away into the staircases at the back of the room. Muttering quietly as they passed through, a few of them looked at Zim with strangely sorry faces.

"Oh look, you've gone and made the wussies that live under our roof cry," the Slig, whose name happened to be Old Ben (he claimed it was because he was the oldest Slig he could remember, though he was clearly making it up), said. He put his hand on his desk, paper folders filled with lists of who to kill next to advance their gang's agenda rattling around. Behind him there was a large chart detailing territorial changes in this specific sector of the city in color increments from allies to deadly enemies. Zim eyed it with interest. "What do you want?"

"First, information," Zim said. "Explain what you are doing in this place."

"We're new!" Hobbes lied quickly. "We need to get the run of how things work around here and you guys seem pretty successful."

Ben laughed. "I wish! Well, if you're into joining our ranks, you got another thing coming. First you need a sponsor from our elites, and then you need to kill someone we want dead to show you're good at whatever you claim your specialty is, and do a run as a scout on a shadowrunning gig-"

"No, we're not interested in joining your group," Zuko said bluntly.

"Oh," Ben said, drooping a bit. He really liked coming up with stupid missions for recruits. "Then what do you want?"

One of the Glukkons in the main elevator looked up from their card game. An augmented reality jack covering up most of his head (a method of inducing network access by overlaying it on real things and interacting with them through special devices, a method typically called 'augmented reality') clicked. He quietly waved his hand in mid-air, activating a silent 'be on alert' alarm throughout the building's computer network.

"Oh, many things," Zim said airily. "Proper retribution, the spread of great Good throughout the multiverse, for Evil to physically manifest so I can cut its head off and put it on my ship as a trophy, a decent hoagie for cheap, to totally dismantle the corrupt administration of this world…"

"What was that last part?" Ben said, blinking.

"A decent hoagie?" Zim said innocently. He'd meant that last one as a joke, anyway. "Ah, but in all seriousness, we are curious how the structure of things work around here. I wish to know, how did you come into possession of this apartment complex?"

Morte added, "And what was with the tenants?"

"Uh, okay," Ben said slowly. "It's just… tenants, you know, they come with the place. And so whiny! 'Blah, blah, blah, my power's not on, my fridge is broke, our network access is disabled, we haven't seen good shows in forever, you keep killing us on accident because you're lousy with the guns'… bah, whiny! Sometimes I think taking over this place was a mistake." He shrugged. "You know how it goes. Everything below the open-sky levels is free territory. If you want it, you take it! Anyone else wants it, you defend it. That's how you get the right to do whatever you want."

"I see," Zim said after a moment, a crazed grin starting to split his expression. "_I see!_ So if someone, say an incredibly handsome and charismatic stranger that you are talking to at this very instant, beat you all up and took over, there would be no official repercussions?"

"No, I guess not," said the Slig, who was apparently not all that bright. A few of his cronies waved desperately at him mouthing 'no!' and at least one guy facepalmed.

"Good!" Zim said, grinning like a maniac.

The rest of Zim's crew readied for battle. Zuko muttered, "Here we go."

Zim swung his arm back, as if for a heavy punch; fire and light erupted from his arm as he swung forward in a lazy arc, fist ripping through the table like it was made of paper instead of a plastic-metal composite and shattered it into several large piece that did not explode all over the room like shrapnel (because that would just be irresponsibly dangerous), but simply broke apart and bounced a few paces away. He struck Old Ben the Slig right in the chest, fire and light spiraling together into a compact ball against the Slig before it exploded and blasted him into the wall. Ben bounced, uttered a small squeal where all the air in his lungs was forced out, and fell onto the floor, wheezing a bit. Several charts and graphs and motivational posters came with him (along with a copy of the 'Do-It Yourself Propaganda' self-help book), fluttering over him. His metal pants jerked and whirred into life for a moment, bright radiance flitting around them; apparently Zim's light-based powers made machines more lively, or simply interacted with them strangely.

"Oh, Margaret damn it, we have a meta here!" The Glukkon with the augmented reality implants screamed. He scrambled up, tapping cyberspace commands to some very specific machines under his command. His companions in the elevator reached under their seats and pulled out their weapons; a few semi-automatic assault platforms of varying condition and size (large mechanized gauntlets fitted over a forearm or appropriate appendage, reshaping around it, enhancing punching strength and adding an array of arm-mounted guns and a few grenade launchers), a fully automatic repeating laser rifle, and even a small missile launcher.

"Strange, that table shouldn't have folded so easily," Zim said, not really bothering to acknowledge them (or, he had entirely forgotten about them). He glanced at his thickly covered fist. He winced, his knuckles still hurt and he thought he might have cut something from impact. "Ow, I should put some armor on there."

The Glukkons in the elevator rose up to open fire… and Calvin turned his cyrokinetic device on them, palm glowing and releasing a cone-shaped spray of frost right into the elevator. It washed over the gangsters and froze them in place, but with surprising delicacy, just enough to avoid damaging the elevator or the gangsters and locking them into place. Thin but strong layers of translucent ice rimmed their body, avoiding any mechanical portions of their augmentations (that could cause serious harm), preventing them from doing anything more than moving around. "The heck is a 'meta'?" Calvin wondered as he ran into the elevator shaft, melted the weapons free from the Glukkons and gathered his looted guns together.

"Slang in this sort of punk-ish world," Morte said, compartments on his harness sliding open and small automatic guns unsheathed. He opened fire on the few thugs who had been too slow to realize that a fight was happening and had only just gotten up; Morte used non-lethal ordnance, blunt bullets made of substances like rubber, and though it wouldn't kill them, it certainly stung. Two men so seriously transformed with outmoded augmentations that their original species was hard to identify went for cover, and three more got it together and grabbed their own guns, opening fire and spreading burning lasers through the lobby. "Means 'metahuman'… Or 'meta-Irken', I guess. No offense, boss."

"Some taken," Zim said, hoisting up his laser rifle, taking aim and firing. For some reason the lasers burst into fire. "I dislike generalism!"

"Basically, just means anyone with powers that humanoids in general don't have. Not speaking of the humanoids who do have powers naturally, or easily learn them through magic… yeah, I know it doesn't make sense."

"Cover me!" Calvin said, now wearing his transmuting bracelets and doing something with the guns he'd taken.

"Got it!" Hobbes said, stepping several paces in front of Calvin, swinging out his shield and clicking it into its defensive configuration. In the crowded space of the lobby, it looked unreasonably huge. "Everyone behind me!" Bullets and lasers and small grenades bounced against his shield as the remaining gangsters covered their friends that fled through doors to presumably get help, shooting at Hobbes with the small arms available to them. They did no damage to its incredibly resilient surface. Zuko and Zim hurried behind Hobbes, who slowly started advancing against the firing. Bullets crumpled into bits of metal at his feet and he winced when he stopped on them, the lasers dissipated harmlessly but heated up his shield painfully (its internal structure dealing with much of it) and Hobbes bounced his shield against the grenades, timing it so that they went places where they would hurt no one and exploded in small but shockingly loud blasts melting nearly through the walls.

"The hell was that?!" someone cried up from above. Hobbes recognized it as where the tenants had gone after old Ben the Slig had shooed them off. "Oh, damn it, is this _another _takeover?! Not more artillery again!"

"Everyone who isn't a gangster, hide away, we're not going to hurt you or interrupt your routine, we're just taking over this place!" Hobbes said. "…That sounded a lot less stupid in my head!" They didn't respond, but there was a lot of hurrying noises from their vicinity.

"Oh, hey, do-gooders," one of the gangsters said as the command from that one augmented Glukkon finally paid off, and to the horror of Zim's crew, several massive black-armored mechanical giants stomped in from the rooms where they'd been booting up, scooting into the room with surprising delicacy. "Haven't seen any of those in a while! Not since those Mudokons came in last month and stole a whole factory. Maybe they won't kill us if we lose! Hooray, bright side!"

The mechs slowly started advancing, great pneumatically powered musculature powering up for bone-pulverizing blows. There were five of them, so large they hunched over to avoid scraping their heads on the ceiling. The gangsters were firing all the while, giving the mechs time to advance, for the machine soldiers moved dreadfully slow.

There was a flash of light behind Hobbes. "Got it!" Calvin said, with the clanking sounds of machinery powering up.

Zim was staring at the mechanical soldiers, or rather at the unusually bulky shapes of their backs, and the cables running under their bony exoskeletons and exposing some of their innards (presumably to make it cheaper to make them, putting as little armor as necessary). He formed a fireball between his hands, intensified it until it forced his hands wide, and projected it as a missile right into the closest of the robots. He hoped it would disable it, and was sadly disappointed (though a bit relieved, he had forgotten to figure out if the robots were sapient or not) when the flaming projectile sizzled off its front, leaving deep scoring but not doing any real damage to it. Fortunately, before his projectile could melt through the floor, it exploded right under the robot's advancing foot; it was only a small explosion, pushing the robot off-balance and right onto its fellows; the gangsters cried as the fallen robots tried to get back up, too clumsy to do it well, their massive limbs waving around pathetically for purchase on the ground. Luckily, they were so large that they made a rough barrier in front of them.

"Quick question!" Zim called out as the gangsters cursed, trying to get around their robot minions. "These robots! Are they sapient?"

"What?!" A gangster yelled.

"Are they sapient? Self-aware? Can they _think_?"

"What? No, they're just machines to hit things! Drones, even!"

"Ah," Zim said. "Little more than trained animals, and not even self-aware! I CAN BLOW THEM UP!" Laughing maniacally, he leaped over Hobbes, bounced off his shield, and abruptly burst into brilliant light as lasers blasted out chaotically from his shining radiance.

He landed on the robots, shooting lasers at them without apparently making a mark. His current targets waved a ponderous arm at him, but Zim merely hopped over it, firing a laser that caught on fire into the space under its arm. By good fortune, that was not well-protected, and struck something vital; it's arm went limp, lifting up feebly. "Their insides are not so well-defended! A design flaw! _You make lousy robots! _No offense, robots." That said, Zim cheerfully went about blasting and trying to rip them apart for the sheer joy of it.

The gangsters fled as a few of them were swept aside painfully by the flailing robots. Most ran up to higher levels to rejoin their friends and find some proper numbers to fight with, and a few stood their ground, confident they could win. They threw themselves against the walls as far as they could, far enough from the robots to give a narrow window to shoot at Zim's crew (Zim himself protected by the massive bulk of the robots he was fighting, the few shots they tried had no effect on their strong metal) and pointed all their weapons at Hobbes, just waiting for them to make a move.

"I can get them, but I need an opening," Calvin said. "If I move, they'll blast me!"

"No trouble," Zuko said. "I have this."

He stepped forward, moved around Hobbes shield, his weapons still sheathed. The gangsters aimed at him, and he smirked; a crash-course in energy-based weaponry in the time since Traverse Town had prepared him for encounters like this, and he moved his hand to where a laser would strike him. It flashed against his palm and the laser's heat was absorbed into his flesh, Zuko's stance alone Firebending it perfectly. Zuko repeated this several times more, catching as many lasers as he could, most of them ripping through his thick clothes but dissipating harmlessly against him (as he was skilled at the technique for redirecting lightning, and these lasers were just projected beams of heat, they were even easier to redirect than lightning) and the gangsters stared in shock at this. They knew they had hit him, but he wasn't even hurt, those should have disintegrated him. Zuko swung his palm out, directing the lasers he'd soaked up into an unfocused burst he sent towards the wall behind the gangsters, diluting it so it wouldn't hurt them too much (Zuko didn't see the point in holding back, but Zim was having a thing about not killing enemies for some reason). The resulting blast knocked them over with varying degrees of injury; several of them were burned, though not severely, another had his hands over his bionic eyes as the light had overloaded them and blinded him temporarily, and one guy was so lucky he had been completely unharmed. A few others, the remaining gangsters there (only five or so) peeked out, weapons at the ready.

They cautiously aimed and then Zuko stepped aside for Calvin to march out. The gangsters openly gaped at the bizarre weapon Calvin had made from his looted guns, a massive bizarre mish-mash off all the guns molded into a pair of gauntlets similar to the assault platforms (and using them as a base) all the different guns merged to them and thrumming with lightning, power cells overclocked and ready to blaze, the energies of his own super-science wonders imbued into them so that they even glowed with elemental fire and ice. Calvin raised his arms (and his weapons were so heavy, especially on his wonders, that he was tipping over a bit) and opened fire, lasers and bullets from over half a dozen different guns he'd rigged for automatic fire ripping forward, each specially fired to cause maximum damage without doing any real harm; the bullets missed so narrowly that the gangsters panicked, and the lasers would not burn through but left quite nasty burns. They cowered just for a moment, bewildered at his technological power, and then the lightning hummed, and both weapons discharged the fire and cold energies they'd been overcharged with from concussive force blasters Calvin had jury-rigged into the weapons, blasting into the walls (and the gangsters) hard enough to leave a thick bowl-shaped dent with several thicker dents in random places. The gangsters slid down in a moaning and bruised (though very much alive) heap, weapons dropped.

"Our life sucks," said a blue-tinted lizard-like polar manzardill, wiggling his four legs about ineffectually and his shoulder-mounted humanoid-style augments (so he could hold guns and such) powering down.

"I hate power struggles when we're not winning," agreed a yellow cube-shaped ooze, speaking through a translator device imbedded in its gel-flesh. It extended a pseudopod to the polar manzardill, and they weakly high-fived.

"At least there's the robots to beat them up!" a human said, raising her hand hopefully.

At that moment, the robots powered down, falling over each other in an undignified heap. The cables running from their hunched backs, ferrying power to vital systems, had been burned right through and the robots had simply powered down without need to penetrate their powerful defenses. Zim sat atop a place where the robots fell together so that a head, a wayward arm, a hunched shoulder and a knee made a crude throne. "No there's not!" Zim said, and cackled malevolently. "A centralized power source is a _BAD _idea in your synthetics! I laugh at it. Look at me laugh!" He laughed some more.

Another one of the gangsters, a superintelligent shade of the color purple, flashed indulgently. "Yes," it broadcasted. "That's a very good laugh. I shudder at it!"

"You can't shudder," Zim said. "You don't have anything to shudder with."

"Bah! Mere bio-chauvinism!"

"That's for people who think meat is morally superior to mechanical life," Zim replied.

"Oh shut up," the living color said.

Calvin, Hobbes, Zuko and Morte checked the rest of the lobby and the other doors, finding nothing but a few deserted staircases, a spare elevator, and some rooms in which some hard-core partying had been done recently (and also an entire room full of tawdry romance novels). "The lobby is secured!" Zuko said as Calvin transmuted the doors into a thick solid piece so no one could escape, or sneak up on them through the entrance in case the gangsters had back-up, Hobbes gathered together all the weapons the gangsters had on them, and Morte gathered all the beaten gangsters into a group into a room and shoved them in there (including the ones that had been in the elevator, after they were defrosted; the augmented one was very upset to find that his robot drones had been so easily defeated).

"Very good!" Zim said, coming down from his throne of robots and not mentioned how achy he was now. His crew assembled around him, and he knocked on the door to where the tenants had fled. "Hey, it's us, the guys you probably hate less than the gangsters who terrorize you."

After a moment, possibly because the noise had died down without any horrible dying sounds, an elderly Glukkon dressed in a very tattered business suit he still wore because it reminded him of better days before his nondescript shipping company had been bought out, peeked out and apparently volunteered himself to be a spokesman for the tenants. One of his friends, a brutish reptilian that looked something like a humanoid wingless dragon (a dragonborn, specifically), held the door open and stood nervously, like he wanted more than anything to just hide in his apartment until the fighting stopped but desperately wanted to be by his friend's side. The large crowd of weary and anxious tenants, universally dirty and worn but of great diversity otherwise (Slig and Glukkons among them, and even one Mudokon who had earned his citizenship), seemed to share something of this stance. They stretched out into a long hallway lined with doors to their respective apartments, and several of them shuffled back to their broken down homes. Calvin frowned at the broken lights and rusted metal, the water dripping in the carpets, and worse; this gang were absolutely incompetent landlords.

"Yes?" The old Glukkon said cautiously, looking ready to run for his life if any of Zim's crew made a sudden movement. From the looks of him, he wouldn't be able to run too far, and the old bruises and scars suggested that he'd suffered quite a lot of mistreatment from this handicap.

Zim holstered his laser rifle and raised his hands to show they were empty. "We wish to take this complex over and establish a base to use for our own purposes," Zim said frankly. "So we need to kick out the gang that presently owns it. We took the guns of the ones down here. Do you wish to arm yourselves and help us defeat them?"

The Glukkon stared at Zim for a long moment. "Excuse me a moment," he finally said, looking frankly bewildered. He retreated to discuss it with his fellow tenants.

Zim waited patiently. He heard arguing and shouting, too indistinct to hear. At least for him; Hobbes tilted his hat up and quietly said to Zim, "Most of them don't like it."

Zuko raised an eyebrow. Calvin and Morte seemed indifferent. Zim shrugged, he could hear stomping and rattling overhead, and knew they needed to move out shortly.

The door opened. The old Glukkon stood with a much smaller crowd; more than half of them had gone, retreated to their apartments; Zim saw several doors open just ajar, and terrified eyes stared out before crawling back and locking the doors. It seemed rather perfunctory, though. They seemed far too used to this.

"We will help you," the old Glukkon said. "What will you have us do?"

Zim noticed the phrasing; they seemed unpleasantly eager to take orders. Even so, he gestured to the weapons they'd piled up. "Take those," he said. "Arm yourselves. We will move up and fight more of the gang as they come until we find their boss and defeat him as well. That is all."

"Ah."

"Are there any more of those robots?" Calvin asked, pointing to the ones Zim had beaten. "That might be a problem."

"No," A tired-looking asari said, shaking her head. The rigid tentacles on her scalp shifted slightly with the motion. "Those were all they had. I doubt they would fit upstairs anyway."

"Inefficient," Zim said, poking a robot with the toe of his boot. "They should have manned the front of the lobby, not been kept hiding away for emergencies. Such large and tough machines would make excellent front-line soldiers, not back-up!"

"We _are_ dealing with thugs, not military thinkers," Zuko said. He looked at the robots, Zim's remark opening his mind to the possibilities. He entertained himself for a moment thinking of formations of infantry machines that knew no fear smashing down vast numbers of foes; even a smaller number of these robots would be vastly more effective than ordinary soldiers.

Zim looked at the downed robots, and he thought of what they _could _be, in the hands of competent engineers. He imagined metal soldiers, battling alongside him, and a dream planted itself.

The residents who had volunteered to fight (Zim was already thinking of them as conscripts) went for the weapons and armed themselves. Thankfully, all of them had a basic knowledge of using these weapons (if not how to maintain them) but the slight suspicion most of them had towards the energy-based ones suggested that such weaponry was fairly new to this world. They fought for them, too; several brief fights broke out over the best ones, and Hobbes and Morte had to break it up. In short order, the residents stood awkwardly, their weapons at the ready.

Zim had a short discussion with the old Glukkon, who told him about the way this complex was set up, the arrangement of levels and floors, the best strongholds for a defensive force and therefore giving Zim ideas for tactics. Zim told the residents who had grabbed the heaviest weapons to wait in that little elevator for Zim's squad (himself, his crew, and the more experienced of the residents in combat) to clear the way up.

They charged up the stairs.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, and a few levels up…

Several of the gang's heaviest hitters, talented guards and fighters who had proved their worth in dozens of battles for territory and doing so as shockingly as possible, waited up the stairs, waiting calmly.

A mixed group, no particular species outnumbering the others, they shifted about in their body armor and weapons (mostly laser rifles kitted out for immense damage and power), keeping them pointed at the stairwell. Two others kept their guns on the elevators set into the walls each, just in case.

They breathed heavily. There had been a lot of noise underneath just a few minutes ago, but it was protocol not to rush in until they had a proper confirmation on the situation, even if they took some losses.

It had gone quiet. No one had reported back or called up, and none of the residents had been whining on the intercom, so something odd was going on.

The leader of this particular squad, a huge and hairy beastman of so many different sub-types that it was impossible to say what his progenitor species was (besides vaguely ape-ish and resembling a sasquatch), came back from the intercom. "Nothing from downstairs," He said, his voice surprisingly light and melodic. "First three levels are totally silent."

"You mean apart from the gunfire and screaming we just heard?" said the second-highest ranking of the squad; he was a drell, another sapient species from the same universe as the asari. Reptilian humanoids (and rather elegantly masculine) that were attractively similar to humans, green scales overlapping each other and large dark eyes blinking with worry. "This is _creepy_."

The beastman, who was named Yeoman (and no one had asked how he'd gotten a title for a name), grunted. Large sharp teeth glinted. "Yes. That is true." He pulled out a plasma rifle modified to shoot semi-automatic blasts (making it much larger in order to accommodate the mechanisms that made it possible) and kept it pointed at the ground. He gestured at the intercom. "Called the boss. Told him the situation. We're to corral the invaders, pin them down. Kill them if we can, push them out if we can't."

"No reinforcements?" said a human wearing so much mechanized armor, air filters and personalized environment equipment that he looked like a metal snowman.

Yeoman laughed, a harsh noise exactly like a bark. "To make a laughing sound! If we _need _reinforcements to fight a simple invading force, the boss does not want us in the gang. Adversity breeds strength, and strength promises success."

"That's mean."

Yeoman considered this. "Yes… yes, he is." There were quite a lot of stomping and charging sounds below… and a great mechanical thumping. They were used to that, the mechanical noise was just the background sound of their great city's many life-preserving machines working (usually more noisily if they were breaking down, costing hundreds of lives in the short time it took to have them repaired, but there were always more bodies to take their place), but it had been quite loud with battle recently, and only in the silence could the machine-noise be heard.

It was very worrying, like a great predator had just crouched overhead and made all the noisy things fall silent in the few moments before you felt its breath on you.

Something was moving up the stairs. Yeoman lifted up his rifle, bits of green lightning sparking from the bulky sub-components and the gaps between the spaces where he'd had to tape it together or bolt it. Ionized gas spun in the barrel, running hot, and a chorus of readied guns clicked up around him, ready to rain energized (or kinetic, or stabby) death on anything that came through.

The door, the one to the stairwell directly below, cast-iron and nearly a vault-class, shook on its hinges as something heavy and incredibly hit it hard. His gangsters panicked, opening fire, and Yeoman had to roar over the sudden squeal of firearms, "STOP IT, STOP IT, THEY'RE NOT THROUGH YET, YOU'RE WASTING AMMUNITION!"

They stopped, breathing hard and twitching in place as conditioning fought the urge to run, and the echoes of their firearms were still echoing when the door rocked again with fire-light from behind its crevices and cracks, and another massive blow struck it in a completely different area (something strong testing where different attacks wedged the door, Yeoman thought), and there was a five-second gap before the last blow come, and literally exploded right out of the wall _on fire._

The men jumped back, justifiably scared to have a ton-heavy door flying at them. They needn't have bothered, it smashed a few feet away from the wall and clanged heavily into the ground, bent partially on the insides. A few fires burned, and then guttered out. More importantly, in the open hole where the door had been, there was a massive taking up the entire space and coming out at a slow pace, whoever it was holding it moving it ahead of them.

"Belay that last one, OPEN FIRE!" Yeoman said. His men obliged, and the corridor they guarded was briefly turned into a horribly loud firefight, bullets and lasers and all manner of projectiles blasting at the advancing shield, so large it could have covered several men. Yeoman opened fire as well, and green light sprayed across the shield and splattered into molten goo on the shield, and he snarled in irritation as it just bounced off and sizzled into the floor. It left marks and scoring, but the shield was unharmed. Bullets flattened, lasers left tiny burns, and none of their firearms did anything to it.

The shield shifted aside. The gangsters had a brief sight of a large tiger beastman teen moving so that the smaller human boy (a nasty burn on one side of his face) behind him could get into position and shoved his arms out, and elemental fire roared down the hallway, a single large fireball blasting right into the gangsters and exploding, casting down just under a dozen gangsters into the ground, blasting their weapons away and destabilizing energy blasts that came there way. The metal walls did not burn, and the splash of liquid flame soon extinguished without any fuel, but the hapless gangsters still panicked by being on fire (even in body armor) and rolled right out of position trying to put the fires out.

"Bah," Yeoman said, opening fire again. The shield moved into place before his plasma could hit the pyrokinetic fighter and casting it aside, and then the tiger holding it began advancing again. "Oh, stop him, will you? What are we getting paid for?"

"Mostly just to sit on our butts and harass residents," the drell said. "And we don't get paid so much as we get a share of everything we get tithed or-"

"That was a rhetorical question," Yeoman rumbled. The shield had already made it past the fallen door. "Look, at this point we are the only ones between us and the boss, don't screw this up." Getting the point, all of his men opened fire on the shield, concentrating on it and firing, totally ignoring everything else.

Which was probably a mistake, as the elevators went 'ding!' and powered up, calling the previously absent elevators from below, coming on up. "Damn it, we forgot about the elevators!" Someone cried. "Train your guns on them, set up a firing block to hold off these geeks with the shield and-"

The floor rumbled, and a section of it behind them shone with brilliant light for a moment, blue and radiant; the floor then unraveled, coming apart as thousands of metal threads spun together, and slammed down and out on the gangsters who weren't quick enough to get out of the way; it didn't hurt them, only stunned them for while it was heavy it wasn't aimed to kill. The metal swept aside to both sides of the walls, bringing the gangsters with it, and pinned them to the walls, half-melting into a web-like metal mess and freezing them in place.

The drell whistled. Yeoman, his reserve forgotten, gaped at the realization that nearly his entire squad had been disabled; those who had panicked when caught on fire had also been snared, leaving him less than half a dozen men. "What the f-" he started to say.

The hole bristled with motion, and about a dozen people in crude armor and carrying looted weapons came out of the hole from below and opened fire, hitting the drell. He gasped, a laser hitting him in the knee. "Agh! There goes my fighting career!" He whined, and laid down. Several other gangsters, equally panicky, laid down their arms at once and surrounded.

The elevators opened, and the metal had conscientiously not covered the doors; more men and women in assembled armor and weapons came out, shooting with poor aim but much enthusiasm, nailing what few remained of his men. None of the injuries were fatal, but they were so panicked that they too surrendered, with all the numbers against them.

A human boy with odd mechanical devices on his wrists that resembled bracelets popped up, along with a small Irken. "Surrender! Or fight!" The Irken, Zim, said cheerfully. "Yes, please fight, _THAT IS FAR MORE FUN!_"

"Cowards!" Yeoman roared at his men, casting them out of his way as he charged forward. Zim grinned, making a motion for the residents to cease fire, and let the beastman come. At the last possible moment, before Yeoman was about to run him over, Zim leaped up and landed a heavy kick in the inner part of Yeoman's kneecap; he fell over, gasping in pain as the weight of his armor made his injury worse. Zim grabbed a few dangling components and belts on Yeoman, climbing up right onto his neck and swinging his legs around so they went over Yeoman's thick neck. He blinked, and Zim abruptly pinched him right in the nose, one of the few areas Yeoman's combat helmet did not protect, and when it landed, a blast of holy energies and light discharged from Zim's fist in a spectacular display.

Yeoman stumbled back, harsh sounds and condemning roars echoing in his head. Zim's second punch nailed him in the chin, and another light-blast knocked him halfway across the hall. A third, and Yeoman sank to his knees, squealing in surprise. Zim's fists reared back, light swirling around them and condensing into solid constructs looking like ridiculously oversized pneumatic gauntlets (complete with fizzling circuitry and misty vents), more energy blazing out from them. "No…!" Yeoman squeaked.

Zim's fists flew. They impacted right on the top of his helmet (where Zim judged that the minimum damage would be done), and in the sudden void of lightning and radiance, the entire hallway went blind just moments before the explosion deafened a few people.

There was a thump. The light faded, and the colors of the hallway metal were somewhat washed out and bleached, and Yeoman lay unconscious in a deep crater that almost went right through the floor, his tongue lolling out and some nasty bruises already forming. Zim was still glowing with light, and he gave Yeoman a kick. "That is it? A big man like you, and that's all the fight you had? I grow bored now!" He snorted, gave Yeoman a kick, and hopped out of the crater. Several of the residents stared at the massive hole in the ground, the crater, the battle damage everywhere, and the problem that a lot of the floor had been turned into a metal moss pinning down gangsters.

They glared at Zim. "We can fix this," he said quickly. They gave him a look that said 'you better!'. Ignoring this, Zim waved a hand. "Standard procedure now, you know the rules by now." The residents did as they had done for the last several floors they had taken, removing the weapons from the beaten gangsters (or extricating them from traps; Calvin helpfully moved the metal out of the way with transmutation, and then considerately transmuted it back to the floor, restoring it to normal and healing the battle damage as well), tying them up and sending a few people downstairs to lock them up with the others. By now they'd amassed a fair amount of weaponry, and the body armor the gangsters wore was duly confiscated and equipped by anyone of the right size.

Hobbes lowered his shield, downsizing it from pure defense to its portable mode; he and Zuko walked over, and Zim nodded at them. "Excellent work with the distraction," He said.

Hobbes preened. "Yeah, we're pretty awesome," he said.

Zuko grunted, trying not to smile. He awkwardly punched Hobbes in the shoulder in a hopefully chummy way, looking slightly terrified that he was doing it wrong. "Yeah… we make a nice team." Hobbes rubbed his shoulder; that had actually hurt a little bit. Zuko was a _lot _stronger than he looked.

The residents took the last of the gangsters, apparently pleased that the corridor looked so good now. The drell went with them complacently enough, but said, "Hey, you guys are the losers that live here! The hell are you doing taking us over? That's no way to run a living shelter."

"Well, you guys are jerks, so we're taking over," Calvin informed him.

The drell considered this. "Fair enough," he concluded.

Two residents on either side led him away, he and the rest of his fellow gangsters stripped of armor and weapons. "Well!" Zim said. "Now all we have to do is take down the boss!"

The intercom buzzed. "That's convenient," a harsh voiced said through it. "I was just about to come down and fight you guys. We may as well do this properly. Come up here and do me the politeness of talking."

A door clicked open from the stairwell above them. The intercom buzzed again, signaling that it was off. "…Hrm," Zim said. "Trap?"

"Trap," Zuko said.

"Trap," Calvin agreed.

"Trap," Hobbes said.

"Trap," Morte said, floating out from an elevator after helping escort previous enemies into custody (and therefore unable to attend the brief battle) but so genre savvy he already knew what was going on.

"Okay then!" Zim looked at the door. "Well, I _could _charge up there and pummel him into submission… or I could do the civilized thing and talk as he wishes, assuming he genuinely means to talk. What do you think, my crew?"

"It would be unheroic to just attack," Hobbes mused. "We can't take the chance that he's just lying."

"But he probably is," said a resident. They glanced at him, and nodded; realizing that his comment wasn't unappreciated, the resident said, "Hooray, I'm helpful!"

Zim considered it. "Ah, why not, I'll go talk with him. Just in case."

"Aww, you're gonna get blown up," the residents said, a bit miffed that their ticket to a non-tyrant landlord was gonna die.

"Am not! Zuko, Hobbes! You're with me, bodyguard detail."

"Hooray," Zuko said flatly. "From Fire Lord to a glorified bodyguard. My career as an adventurer is the envy of trillions."

The three of them walked up the stairwell, and cautiously opened the door. As might be expected, a hail of gunfire immediately greeted them; Hobbes swung his shield and deflected the bullets and threw it like a discus, knocking out the shooters responsible and catching it.

Zim walked into the room, a wide open space that had apparently been the landlord's penthouse and serving as private suite for the current landlord since the building had begun switching hands; the metal floor was covered in some very fine furs that Zim stepped around (making a very expensive but pretty carpet), various tables heaving with the weight of computer equipment and multiple screens displaying views of the complex from every level, and many more were suspected from the ceiling and running data about the various enemies of this gang to calculate appropriate measures to take against them (as well as when their allies might turn on them). Surprisingly fine art decorated the area, portraits and caricatures of famous figures lined up on the walls amid fabulous paintings and wall-mounted sculptures, and the lighting had been specially calculated to be as relaxing and elegant as possible. The rows of guns and implant-mounted bio-weapons rather disagreed with the cultured look.

Four small soldiers lay unconscious on the floor, their weapons dropped from their hands. "Well, that was rude," said a man sitting behind a massive round desk that was (on closer inspected) an inactive hologram projector and computer hub. It was impossible to tell what species he was, he was so drastically augmented and covered in cybernetic implants that he looked like a vaguely humanoid assemblage of machinery with the odd bit of bulging brick-red flesh squeezing out through the gaps. Zim screwed up his face; the man was so large that he was twice Zim's size even sitting down at a table, and a multitude of weapons extended from various ports in tactically advantageous ways, so that no matter where you attacked him a gun would be pointed at you. Zim felt nothing but disdain, though; he delighted in mechanical implantation, but it had been sloppily implemented here, the mechanical components had been badly cared for and sorely out of date with unsightly patches of rust and the leaking fluids of malfunctioning bio-circuitry, and as the man stood up with grinding and clanking, Zim felt inexplicably attacked on a personal level.

"Well, you just attacked by building, went through my men like a knife through hot butter, stole their stuff, got those incompetent residents to help you-" The man said.

"Hey!" The residents yelled.

"Geez, it's nothing personal, get a grip! Also, you trashed a lot of my building and I have no idea who you are. This is honestly hurtful. Who the hell are you?"

"I am Commander Zim of the Returners, crew of the Paragon!" Zim said. "And these are my lackeys." He indicated Hobbes and Zuko.

Zuko briefly turned a fascinating shade of indignant purple. Hobbes growled and said, "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response…"

The man tilted his head. "Never heard of you."

"We're new," Zim said.

The man seemed to think. "Aren't the Returners a band of rebels on some world somewhere? They have magic critters called Espers, as I recall. And a real thing for steampunk tech, too."

"No affiliation," Zuko said, looking annoyed.

"Well, then it's just confusing using their name? You should use a more recognizable name, and-" He stopped. "Getting off-track. My name's Mukluk, I'm in charge here. You trashed my gang and trying to take over. Gotta ask, why?"

Zim said, "Because you're there, your gang are all jerks, and it's tactically useful at the moment. Do we fight now?"

Mukluk looked down at Zim, a single cyclopean mechanical eye scoping down and peering at him. Various mechanisms clicked, registering body language and movement, predicting motions and formulating responses. "If you want to die, go ahead." He shrugged his square-shaped shoulders as hatches opened and missile launchers emerged.

"But!" Zim raised a finger. The shoulders lowered. Mukluk looked curious. "I must know. Why did you take over this complex in particular?"

"Why not?" Mukluk asked. "It was, as you said, convenient. It changes hands plenty often, so the corporation that owns it won't care as long as the annual rent is brought in. It's isolated, so the arbitrators don't bother coming down here much and let us run out affairs however we want. It's a nice headquarters to boot. Good for keeping our turf wars organized and expanding."

"I see," Zim said. "And what of the residents?"

Mukluk blinked. "….What about them?"

"Why bother with them at all? Why exploit them? It would be far more efficient to gain their aid and convince them to work with you willingly. If you protected them, and assisted them, you would not be conquering villains to them but liberating heroes they would gladly help."

Mukluk just looked confused. "Why bother doing any of that when we can just make them do stuff? They're just… there. Resources, even."

Zuko's eyes flared. Literally, a harsh yellow glow came from his eyes. Mukluk paused, his sensors reading a sudden surge of heat energy. "That's all they are to you. Just… 'resources'. Not conquered people that deserve your loyalty and strength, just things to use."

"Sure, why not," Mukluk said. "Why do you care?"

Zim gave him a sharp look. "Someone must care," Zim said, unexpectedly cold. He glared up at Mukluk with a look of intense dislike. He thought of how scared and beaten-down the residents had been, how afraid they had acted when Zim had enlisted them, how horribly _used _they seemed to be about being treated as commodities by urban warlords. How so many had refused to fight, either afraid or unwilling or just thinking that it wouldn't make a difference either way, and hiding wouldn't get them killed. How jaded the gang was about doing that, like it was just such an ingrained part of their lives they did it automatically. And, of course, how frighteningly eager the other residents had been when allowed to fight back.

He thought of how the Irken Empire had been before its fall, and it made his stomach churn.

"Well, whatever," the huge cyborg said dismissively. "I'm sure we can discuss terms of surrender or whatnot once I clobber you-"

"I think not," Zim said, and thought about how odd it was that such things like the condition of this apartment complex were commonplace and the ingrained social order of this city… and, possibly, this entire world. Or for that matter, that he cared at all. He supposed that someone ought to. "I do have one question though. Do you know the whereabouts of a space pirate named Disco Darvhog?"

Mukluk stopped. "What? That's seriously someone's name?"

"He came here a short time ago to sell forging secrets and artifacts he stole. I am looking for him. Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Ah, alright then." Zim's antennae twitched. "I have some bad news for you." He smiled. "We're taking over!"

He spun aside as Mukluk charged, weapons sliding out of ports at them. Zuko charged forward, shining orange as a halo of flames erupted out of his mouth and expanded over his hands, fanning out and so bright they were nearly blue-

Zim produced flames and shifted them into Zuko's own streams, and with Zim pumping up the flames as much as he could, it was a trivial matter for Zuko to shape the flames into a single massive bolt. Both Zuko and Zim launched the firebolt, briefly turning the room red. Mukluk buckled, looking quite astonished as the firebolt hit him square in the malformed chest (and slightly larger too) before it lifted him off the ground.

There was another explosion, following by a grinding squeal and a horrible shuddering sound. Cold air filtered it, and punctuated the noise was a long whooping scream that sounded more surprised than genuinely alarmed, cut off by a sudden crash.

Zim, Zuko and Hobbes hurried across the room through the large gaping hall that was now in the wall where Mukluk had stood, burned at the edges. They peered out through it and saw that Mukluk was lying several stories down on top of a crude warehouse he and his men had built for their weapons and vehicles, using several buses and a lost tank as the shell of it; Mukluk's great weight had ripped right through it, and he as now lying in a small crater at the very bottom floor of the warehouse, metal walls dented around him and several more holes where he had fallen through successive levels. "Owie," He groaned, before falling unconscious.

Zim scoffed. "Weakling."

The soldiers Hobbes had taken down got up, and hurried over. "Boss!" They cried out. "…Hooray, power vacuum!"

"No it's not," Zim said, and Hobbes lifted them up and knocked their heads together, and threw them after Mukluk. By now, attracted by the noise, Calvin and Morte came up, accompanied by the rest of the residents and a few gangsters who had volunteered to join up with them instead of getting beaten up.

The old Glukkon gaped. "You actually took him down! I… I didn't think that would happen."

"What did you think would happen?" Morte asked.

"Oh, that you'd die heroically, creating a brief opportunity for one of us to swarm in, incapacitate him and behead the gang and finally establish ourselves as our own power In the neighborhood for once." Zim stared silently at him. "Don't look so mad, we would rename the complex in your honor! A bit tricky, since I don't actually know your name, but details."

Zim grimaced. "Yes, jerk-ness is certainly ingrained into this city," He muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing." Zim turned to everyone else. "I want a squad down there to escort the rest of the gang out, and them shoo them off!"

"No executions?" The asari from earlier asked sadly.

"No, we're supposed to be heroes."

"Aww!" she pouted.

Roughly fifteen minutes later, amid a lot of whining and yelling and more things falling on him, Mukluk groaned back into consciousness. His eye refocused into operation, and found it looking into Yeoman's face. "Hello, sir," Yeoman said.

"The hell is going on?" Mukluk said, and sat up, dislodging quite a number of bodies off him. He blinked and realized that nearly his entire gang, for one reason or another, was lying on top of him. He shook them off and stood up shakily.

He didn't quite reach his full height and stopped in mid-stance, realizing that not only was he in the middle of his gang's warehouse, but the residents of his complex were standing around him in a circle with big guns pointed at him and his minions, and the five-strong crew that had beaten him were there too, looking smug. "Deactivate any weapons you may have," Zim said. "Or be killed now!"

Mukluk very carefully retracted his weapons; his armor was not thick, built to absorb certain kinds of energy to fuel him rather than protect him. His gangsters, getting the idea, threw their arms up in surrender once more. "How loathsome," Yeoman sighed.

"Good," Zim said. "Now…" he indicated the vehicles. Normally arranged in a grid based on the situations in which certain vehicles would be employed, they had been moved around completely out of order and several large transport vehicles were shoved right in front of the gang. "Under the usual rules of conquerors rights, I am confiscating your vehicles and weapons. You may have these, but you must leave immediately."

"But we like our weapons," the drell from earlier whined. Since he had defected and was with the residents now, this got him several stares. "…What? I was just speaking for my old gang."

"A bunch of old floaters and cargo-movers is no way for my gang to start anew!" Mukluk said indignantly. "Come on, give me something respectable."

"I'm letting you go with your lives, and trust me, it was hard convincing the residents to give you that," Zim said.

Mukluk considered this, and the bloodthirsty leers from the residents. Reluctantly, he sighed and said, "Point taken."

"Incidentally," Hobbes said. "We took the stuff the residents didn't want that was definitely yours – the territory markers and maps and personal effects we determined to be your personal property – and placed it in the cargo-movers." He indicated a large squat craft hovering above the ground, which could easily hold nearly half the gang if they squeezed. Since there were several of these craft, there was plenty of space for them all. "So, basically, all your stuff except the weapons. Including the information from your computers, we dumped that into some empty data-tracks we found for you. We're keeping the computers though."

"Why can't we have our weapons?" Yeoman said. "We're defenseless out there."

"…Come on, you're a gang with territorial ambition, I know you have a bunch of safe houses and stuff. And your leader is a giant cyborg and most of you are scary things one way or another. I don't think you have a problem."

Grumbling that Hobbes had a bit of a point, the gang reluctantly shuffled out and onto the craft Zim specified, getting in as quickly as possible; it was rare to survive a takeover like this, and they were grateful that they hadn't been outright executed as per the usual rules. Mukluk, less forgiving, said, "You haven't seen the last of us!" A laser from Zim's rifle burned off one of the antennae on Mukluk's head. "…Okay, you've seen the last of us!" He ducked into a cargo-mover, and one by one, his gang moved out and left the apartment complex behind.

Once the last of the craft were gone, the residents stared in disbelief. "They're gone… they're really gone…" the asari said, sounding amazed.

"I can't believe it!" a human said. "Free at last! And this time, not until the next jerk takes us over! They're really gone!"

"Except for that guy," Calvin said, pointing at the drell.

The drell, and several other gangsters who had switched sides, said "What part of 'defected' don't you guys understand!? Geez."

Morte raised a tendril. "Uh, hey, resident guys. Is it cool if we take the vehicles as spoils? We kind of have some war and stuff to do in general."

The residents conferred for a moment. "Perhaps we can do a seventy-thirty split?"

"Fifty-fifty," Zim said.

"Forty-sixty!"

"Done," Zim said. "…Wait, that's in our favor, right?"

"Yes," Calvin said before the residents could say otherwise. They went 'aw!' again.

There was a bit of the usual pointless banter before the residents wandered back to their apartments, making Calvin promise to help clean the stuff up before they left, seeming genuinely hopeful about their lives for the first time in a long while. Zim felt pretty nice about seeing them talk about a life where they had more to hope for than the next warlord being less cruel.

"Well," Zim said to his crew as they went back into the apartment complex, needing to do some organizing and send someone afar to gather information. "This was fairly profitable. We learned something of how this city works, we acquired weapons and vehicles, and we helped some random people in the process. Not so bad, I say."

"Yeah," Morte agreed. "Gonna take a while to sort out our winnings though. And fix them up, a lot of that stuff looked in really bad condition."

"I'm a transmutation alchemist, I can just fix that without any real effort," Calvin said.

"Point taken, but it'll take a while. Darvhog might skip town before we do any of that."

"Yes," Zim said. "A clear problem. We are partly responsible for everything he has done since we fought him, so we must take steps to fix that."

Hobbes frowned. "So… how do we get about finding him? This place is huge. Unless he does something really stupid, we won't hear anything about him."

"Excuse me…" The crew stopped and looked. The old Glukkon, who had been uneasily appointed as the new landlord (and thus the one to gather the rent and pay it to the corporation that owned the place so nothing unfortunate happened), was standing behind them and looking helpful. "I, ah, may have overheard what you said. You are looking for someone?"

"Yeah, a space pirate," Zuko said.

"A really _stupid _space pirate," Zim added. "He came here to sell loot."

"Well, even if he is a recent arrival, I know a number of contacts that would be useful in tracking down people. And, I spent a fair amount of years in off-world dealing, I know the ways where an outside trader would have to find the channels to talk to people and sell such things. And… it would take time as well."

Zim looked interested. "Ah, that _is _interesting! Tell us more!"

The old Glukkon chuckled. "Gladly! If you will return to Mukluk's penthouse… er, _your _penthouse, now, that is the right of conquest, we can get that old holographic map thing up and going and I can give you a list of my contacts to speak to, and show you the proper way to find things here in this city."

"Neat!" Calvin said.

"Not that I'm complaining, but why do we get the penthouse exactly?" Zuko said.

The old Glukkon looked surprised. "Why, isn't it obvious? You're in charge now."

Zim stopped. "Wait, _what_?"

* * *

Several weeks passed, and in the eyes of those who ruled Oddworld, nothing of great significance happened.

In the eyes of the heavens above, the mysterious entities that were pure Good of deed and will, the men who staked their lives and ambition on the future of the Glukkon Hegemony were sadly limited, and their vision myopic.

Just a few weeks, in a city the size of Lulu's Fortune, was far more than enough time for a hundred score worth of lives to be changed, won or lost. Time enough for new sub-routines to be implemented into the skin of the city, the bones cleansed and made anew against the never-ending battle of the Glukkon's ingrained refusal to ever give in to something as combative as their own pollution. Certainly time enough for the portions of the city not directly under the control of one corporation or another with enforcers and mercenaries so numerous and well-armed as to make military forces – and these portions were vast indeed, big enough to comprise cities in their own right – to shift and sway in the tides of low-scale urban warfare between gangs and warlords and clans desperately keeping their friends or family safe in the dangers of the city.

In those weeks alone, a long-struggling gang known simply as the Wasteland Weavers, once a corporation renowned for the violence with which their pollution practices wounded the world that had rejected the Glukkons so long ago (and thus earning the admiration of their peers, for a blow to the vicious eco-structure was a blow for the Glukkons) but since then subsumed and cannibalized in scores of hostile takeovers and their forces sorely damaged in various battles with the Glukkons, fell at long last. At the end, only a few hardcore soldiers and a weary ancient Glukkon were alive to remember the days when they didn't have to fight tooth and nail to secure a booth at the nearest food queue, holding mockeries of the old days splendor in a massive processing plant for scrap metal set like a crown upon a vast facility. Most unfortunately a troupe of Vykkers had bought the rights to the plant right under their noses and dropped the latest animal-soldier right on top of their heads, and for all their valor and fierceness, the Wasteland Weavers lasted only fifteen minutes before the bioengineered horror tore them to pieces. The last of them, a Slig who had been there when the Mudokon prophet Abe had broken out of Rupture Farms, had last been seen screaming like a madman and clawing at his own tendrils before jumping right into a smelting facility and diving into the molten fire as he proclaimed that he would atone for his failure with burning metal. The computers overseeing the process had paused, for a moment, and isolated the pieces of metal with his ashes mixed in. The attendant robots had buried it, for their own reasons. The plant was decommissioned and remade into a gladiator ring for fierce monsters deemed unsuitable for the war effort, and quickly became the subject of a mildly popular reality series about the lives of the monster's trainers.

In a small isolated corner of the city, buried deeply beneath eighteen metric tons of buildings lost with endless debates on who owned it, a small family of immigrant insectoids had hunched beneath crude shelters against a sudden spat of cold micro-weather when an air conditioner malfunctioned and set a bitter winter right on their neighborhood, burying the whole place in acid snow. For eight months they had labored to buy enough month for a ride on a freighter to a more hospitable world, but now all of their jobs were going to be missed because of this obstacle, and if they dared the flesh-melting snow they would most likely die, but if they missed their jobs, they would be put on the arbitrator's hit list for breach of contract. Awaiting certain doom, the snows suddenly melted, and a trucker came through with his flamethrowers, letting them pass through. He passed by them without a word; he did not know them, had never met them, and owed them no favors. Nevertheless, doing this cost him two hours of work and a chunk out of his paycheck. He didn't demand restitution from the insectoids, but went on his way, and never spoke of the occasion. Their eldest spawn wrote about it in a blog, and he had quite the popular one; in short order, truckers were given great respect and leeway, as well as the right of passing. Shortly many deliveries were carried out much easier, smoothing various problems that had gone on for time.

In the highest reaches of the city, in a particular segment where eighteen spires met in an proportionately thin bridge that was still larger than sixteen trains bound together, a pair of business rivals met, having plotting to assassinate one another. They caught the other by surprise, shocked they had planned this personal hit at the exact same time, and laughed about it, promising to never tell; their associates would scorn them for being so old-fashioned and inefficient as to personally carry out an assassination. They had a pleasant luncheon, chatting about the old days before the world had become smaller and it would have been honorable to slay another like this. They agreed to try again in a while, and left cracking jokes to the other how _definitely _one of them was going to get his company stolen after he died. Unfortunately, their building had been slated for demolishment, and when the demolition brigade sliced the towers up and blew the remnants up, the businessmen suffered a terrible case of explosions. Their companies had their military forces taken, and were tithed to Wuya's war effort as per the Glukkon's agreement with her secret multiversal empire.

On a particular dome-shaped office buildings that saw to the individual records of a subsidiary census organization that tried to determine who was coming in on the tourist ships these days and therefore suffered some crippling overwork status, an ordinary clerk who never really made friends or went out of his way to bother anyone listened intently to the gentle whispers he had heard since he was a small child from the beeps and whistles of sufficiently complicated electro-magnetic machinery. He thought of the great skies of metal and construction over the penthouse he rented from the company, the result of billions of engineers and architects planning in harmony, and thought of how it could be so much better. That night, he quietly took an application to enlist with the engineer corps of the 53rd Tertiary Maintenance Crew. They took him in, badly needing more men, and he resigned from his old job without any trouble. His regular visits to a psychiatrist ceased shortly thereafter, his troubled mind happy at last with the machines he loved so much, and the psychiatrist was overjoyed to have his immense workload relaxed a bit. The rate of catastrophic mechanical breakdowns decreased modestly.

Hundreds of lives changed by these events, and thousands more effected by the ripples that those lives made as they went on, dead or otherwise. Billions still would be effected by them, though by this point the social ripples had become so small they had no apparent relation to what had created them.

The interaction of billions of people was a tricky thing to understand and watch. It just seemed like things happened all at once, and had no real bearing with each other.

But then water looked still too, and shifted continually by influences outside and inside. So it was with the city.

The city looked like it was the same; expanding at the edges, parts of it going crazy all at the same time as veneer of civility on the surface, and all the while people lived their lives; some at the expense of others and still others simply making their way trying not to make themselves noticed. The city's sameness was the product of unmarked billions of people living and fighting and hoping and accomplishing and failing, all wound together into a vast web of events.

Great beings perceived this web, and saw the trends suggested by it, and unknown to those of the city, in the territories of the Mudokon tribes, an ancient oracle and wise being known only as the Almighty Raisin observed them and saw where they might most likely be going.

He wasn't awake enough to say anything about it, but his sleep seemed more distressed than usual.

* * *

"Eco?" Calvin said, several weeks since their arrival to Oddworld. "As in the prefix 'eco' relating to the environment?"

He grunted a bit as he said this; climbing down a ladder in a currently unused shaft (only a few months ago a secret entryway into a factory of uncertain purpose, built there by its owners before it had gone under) with a dozen feet below you and a hundred feet above was more than a little nerve-wracking. He had been… not _born _in a place like this, or at least that was what his parents had told him (and all the genealogical information he had been able to dig up over the years confirmed it), but he had spent the formative years of his childhood in a very dangerous hive-city even bigger than Lulu's Fortune that had covered an entire continent. In happier days, he had spent many months studying ancient secrets of machining and technological sciences in glorious Nocturne and with the blessing of the Salamanders, which was a fonder memory.

(_The Hitchhiker's Guide makes note that the Salamanders are one of the original founding Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, the gene-engineered super-soldiers that had been the Imperium of Man's most well-known weapons. They survived the ages since the Imperium's dissolution building a small but well-cared for mini-empire of planets with their home-world Nocturne at the head, some of the last remnants of the original Adeptus Mechanicus and Iron Hands Chapter preserved in their ranks, ensuring that they retained the vast store of scientific expertise that would be the envy of many. While the Salamanders had been few during the Imperium's time, ironically they had become quite populous since the Imperium gracefully fell, and today where among the most powerful allies of the Brighthammer Kingdom; while their brethren in the Ultramarines and Space Wolves are equally or even more populous, they lack the direct connection to the Kingdom that the Salamanders enjoy; the Ultramarines and their people live on a frighteningly gargantuan flotilla of ships with a population equal to many worlds and ignore the Brighthammer Kingdom for the most part, while the Space Wolves inhabit their old home of Fenris and many world in the former Imperium's strongholds; while they are considered allies of the Comic Kingdom, they are distant at best, but notably gave asylum to the survivors of the abhuman purges during the Brighthammer Kingdom's precedeccesor, most particularly the Kotirrim tribe who settled upon Fenris itself. Why this did this, given the Imperium's notoriously xenophobic attitude towards non-humans, has yet to be elaborated, though Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, did once remark favorably on the Kotirrim's resilience.)_

"Not quite," said the asari (who was named Gala) who lived in the Returner's new base, much further down the ladder than him. "You two get a move on! Best to be out of sight if anyone comes snooping!"

"All right, all right," Calvin said, moving down quick as a bug on the wall.

Above him climbed Zuko, grunting and mumbling to himself. He alone had come with Calvin on this little expedition that Gala had requested. Zuko, again, was a bit of a bodyguard for the two, since even though Calvin was almost certainly one of the crew's biggest powerhouses (as long as he had his wonders on hand), Zuko was simply a better fighter. "Stupid whiny ingrates," Zuko muttered, quietly so they couldn't hear, shimmying down the ladder and looking more than a little disturbed by how easy Calvin made it look. "Who can stand living at heights like this?! One slip and you're dead!"

"You can't have a giant factory and _not _have giant shafts," Gala said scoldingly. "It goes against the city construction guidelines!"

Calvin giggled immaturely. "Heh. You said 'giant shafts'."

Both Calvin and Gala giggled at that. Zuko rolled his eyes. The three of them descended down, deeper into the dark.

A short time later, though, not even halfway down the shaft, it was not so dark, and there was light blinking from small glass-orbs housed in the sides of the walls, a pleasant blue shade of electric-bright radiance that seemed almost alive. The lights illuminated a sturdy grating places into the middle of the shaft, bolting into the walls and strong enough to support their weight. "Come along," Gala said, dismounting the ladder and walking onto it. It clanged slightly with her metal-toed shoes, one step a bit behind the other, the limp she walked with making an almost musical pace. Calvin hopped off and followed her closely, keenly trying not to stare at her but having a great deal of trouble not; she was a good deal larger than him, and her rounded backside was roughly eye-level with him. She glanced back at him, smiling, and clapped him on the show as he got close enough. She gave him a warm smile, and behind them Zuko crashed into the grating on his back. "Ow!" He said as Calvin and Gala whirled around in fright. "I told you. One slip. Ow."

They helped him up, and the Firebender muttering ominous imprecations at lousy design sense, they continued on into a door smashed right through the side of the shaft (they were deep enough, now, to be within the factory's walls) and a framework around a sealed door bolted in. This door was locked into place, heavy pneumatic pumps bulging out of the frame, and an unobtrusive camera looked down at them, blinking slightly as it moved.

Gala waved at the camera and placed her hand on a print-reading terminal right next to the door. It analyzed her handprint, and chirped its acceptance. The pumps powered on, and the door slowly opened up, dislodging bits of rust that had acclimated from lack of care and the occasional acid rain shower.

The three of them hurried through it and into a twisting hallway built at jerky angles and odd bits of metal roughly hammered into place over a shoddy framework that had clearly been done at a very rushed pace. It moved downward, onto a more well-maintained elevator platform, set slightly at an angle on a rough but sloping surface. It seemed a little too big; Calvin winced at the deep gouges in the walls were the platform had pushed itself through.

In the darkness, the wheeled shape of large bulky security mechs bowed and retreated, hiding in the darkness to attack foes who might sneak in here. "Don't worry about them!" Gala squeaked as Zuko gave the glowing optics in the darkness a concerned look. "They're just here to make sure that anyone we don't want done here doesn't try to break in!"

"Huh," Zuko said as the three of them walked onto the platform. "Who don't you want down here?"

"You know… bad guys. Arbitrators, regular mercenaries hired by the corporations and cartels, Vykker press-gangs looking for people to drag into their chop-shops, Clukkers peeking around where they don't belong, spies of all kings, enforcers and other nasty trash like that… people that, like, jerks. Bad guys!"

"Uh huh." Zuko scowled as Gala pulled the switch mounting a waist-level stand, wires hanging out from a jury-rigged casing. "And what do happens when perfectly innocent people who don't know what's done here just happen to peek in?"

Gala stared down at the switch as the elevator powered on, and they grinded on downwards to the dimmer darkness awaiting them. She bit her lips, head lowered, and her shoulders slumped in defeat.

Zuko scowled worse, her silence telling a great deal. Calvin piped up, "And detailing things by species is kinda, well, speciesist."

"You guys are mean," Gala whined.

"And you're a coward," Zuko said curtly.

"Am not!" Gala frowned at him. "I'm bringing you guys down here to show you something I know you'll like a lot, you could act a little grateful."

Zuko said, "Well, you're growing a spine there, so that's a start." Gala pouted.

It was a long way down into the factory, but even so, it didn't seem to take very long. Soon, more lights beckoned overhead on a much larger space, and the darkness seemed deeper precisely because of the illumination. Their platform docked into place, sliding into a slot mounting upon a set of bolted-together frameworks that creaked ominously as the platform stopped. There was more evidence of low-budget remodeling here; there was a wall right in front of them, but it had been knocked out, and another sealed door like the one Gala had unlocked was in front of them. Spider-like robots crouched on the ceiling, bodies tensed for action but relaxing when they detected no intruders. Large back-mounted guns retreated into their bodies, and Zuko gave Gala a look when he saw that they were assault rifles and plasma cannons. Calvin looked at them thoughtfully and he said, "Those are some pretty quality robots and armaments you have here. What kind of set-up do you have going on that you can afford to get ammunition for that kind of stuff?"

Gala brightened. "You'll see," She said noncommittally.

She passed through the door. "This is weird," Calvin muttered. "This is… like revolution stuff!"

Zuko, though he had a distaste for the notion of revolution, said nothing about it. Instead he said, "You're the one he wanted to come down here."

"_She _wanted me to come down here," Calvin corrected.

Despite himself, Zuko laughed. "First that Jord on Darvhog's crew, now this Gala woman. What's up with you and older women?"

Calvin preened. "Natural charm."

Zuko thought of Hobbes and said, "Must run in the family."

Calvin and Zuko passed through the door. They quickly caught up with Gala, since she had waited for them, and soon determined that they were now in the actual factory itself. The lights were brighter, perhaps repaired or replaced, and the walls seemed cleaner and scrubbed down; they walked through what Calvin supposed was a makeshift lobby, several men and women of various species waiting for them. In this low-slung space, filled with desks and computer terminals displaying all manner of various maps and agendas and calculations of probable events in the near-future, there were control panels mounted under screens displaying the doors and elevator they had entered through. A play-back as one of the security guys here verified that it was the guys who'd come with Gala (because you couldn't be too careful) confirmed that they had been watching through the cameras, the screen showing Zuko and Calvin coming down with Gala. Near this was a computer system that issued instructions and situational responses to the robot guardians. Calvin judged it inefficient; if you had to give orders to the robots all the time just for them to do their job, they wouldn't be too useful.

Calvin thought of Zim, back at their new headquarters (and inexplicably none too pleased to be appointed the new landlord and boss of the neighborhood, though he'd arranged for payments and comfortable living conditions; he and Calvin used their superior technological skills to upgrade all the mechanical devices around there, from the life support systems and food recycling mechanisms to the entertainment network reception quality of in the area, and now everyone there enjoyed free food, electricity and running water, and all the entertainment videos and simulations they could want). He thought of the slightly shorter Irken hunched over those robots when he had time to spare, pulling out components and replacing them, getting Calvin to transmute plates of prototype metal exoskeletons based on what he'd learned from the pieces of the Umbra Eternis, doing small tests with experimental groups of synthetic muscles to test their strength, running simulations to test stimuli reaction and civilian protection protocols he had programmed for a basic AI, and though these robots downright _sucked _compared to what he was used to, Zim said he was building them into something better with his knowledge of robotics and mechanisms.

Darvhog had soldiers, undying zombie-mummy monsters. Zim had told Calvin that it would be good to have their _own _soldiers. Metal was stronger than dead flesh, technology more powerful than magic (or so Zim seemed to believe, and Calvin wasn't interested in telling him that arcane magic _was _scientifically quantifiable, it was just considered the softest form of physics around), and their metal soldiers would _beat _anything Darvhog had.

When they'd left, Zim had been building a little perpetual energy generation reactor based on what their ship used, what scant information they had found called a 'spiral engine', so named because the mysterious energy it powered and ran on was called spiral energy. Even before Zim had finished it as Calvin walked out, it had already been glowing with a light like viridian lightning, shining with a faint pulse like the beat of a newborn heart. One of the robots, or at least the unfinished mess of the very beginnings of a prototype Zim had made of one of the robots, already had a cavity to receive this engine and see if it could be powered by it. Experimentation, Calvin had agreed, was the heart of scientific endeavor.

Here and now, one of the people here stepped forward. "Gala, what's this about?" asked a tetramand woman; a nearly eight foot tall humanoid, skin red and leather with spikes in places, bulking with muscle over her broad body and four arms crossed over each other, her two vertically stacked pairs of eyes (four eyes in all) blinked at Zuko and Calvin. "You find some new recruits? Did we already do a background check-"

"No need, no need!" Gala said quickly as more people crowded around, suspicious and a little too happy to carry their big guns threateningly. "These guys are from out of town. Tourists! They kicked out the gang that was making my neighborhood a mess…"

Gala explained the situation to her friends. When she was done, they calmed down… slightly. "So, they wanna join?" The tetramand asked.

"Join what?" Calvin asked blankly.

"Nothing important," Gala said quickly.

"You live in an abandoned factory you've outfitted yourself to be protected," Zuko said, polite enough not to say that they were doing a lousy job at those things. "So it's important."

"Well, yeah, but… we have something here that I really wanted you to see! Not, uh, join us… unless you want too…"

The asari was sly, and almost hopeful. Calvin gave a noncommittal grunt. "We'll see," He said.

"Oh," She said sadly.

"You brought a bunch of tourists in here?" said a froglike humanoid. "Kinda dangerous… For what?"

"I wanted to show them the Eco," Gala explained as Calvin perked up. "Our Eco stores. The little guy is a scientist, and he wanted to know more, so-"

"Ah, it's a science thing!" The others relaxed.

"And also they might want to help make things better here," Gala added. "Help our goals. Make things work for us. Work _with _us. Or join us… wink, wink. Nudge, nudge."

"Ah," they said. Zuko and Calvin facepalmed.

The tetramand lady hit a button and a door in the back whistled open. Calvin wondered what sort of room this place had been before, and supposed it had been a terminal station. He had little time to ponder this, Gala hurrying them through the door.

They passed through several hallways and moved through a lot of rooms; Calvin and Zuko got brief sightings of firing ranges filled with people practicing their marksmanship, a reconfigured office now housing barracks filled with sleeping people who looked like soldiers, vehicle parts being moved around and shipped for assembly at a different location, a conference room where dirty children listened to a Mudokon preach eagerly about the horrors of the Glukkon Hegemony, and so on. There was a _lot _of things to be seen, and Zuko got the impression that they were seeing only the smallest fraction of something very big indeed. Gala made a point of getting them moving in a hurry and not talking to anyone, but they saw more than they needed to.

When they came to the elevator, Zuko casually said, "So… your friends here are revolutionaries."

Gala jolted. "What?! No… no they're not! Nuh uh!"

"Yeah-huh," Calvin said.

She hesitated, smiling awkwardly.

"You _wanted _us to see all that," Calvin said. "Why?"

"…Okay, this is a revolutionary place," she admitted. "But.. don't say revolutionary. It's such an ugly word. We're not throwing down the old hierarchy, we… um, I don't know what we're doing then, but it's not _bad_. We're not bad guys like the Glukkon Hegemony, we can't be bad guys! And revolutionary is kind of a dirty word."

Zuko groaned. "What are you trying to get us into!?"

"You've seen how bad it is here," she persisted. "Someone ought to do something. Why don't you guys help!? We could always use more soldiers-"

"Not now," Zuko snapped. "We can't… we can't make that decision for all our crew. Now just yet."

Gala bowed her head. "Okay," She said meekly, stepping into the elevator. Zuko and Calvin followed.

The elevator ride, Calvin noticed, was rather tense. Gala seemed nervous, like she'd tried to ask one of them out and had failed so badly that she was mortified to be in their presence.

Calvin thought that revolutions, by definition, involved getting other people killed. He felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. Zuko was silent, his expression mysterious.

Finally the elevator came to a stop, a good distance down, and they stepped out into a much larger space, the sense of discomfort fading. Zuko looked around while Calvin grinned at the sight of it; this area might have been a factory floor ages ago, and while much of the machinery was still in use and producing (massive forges smelting scrap metal into more useful forms, mechanized assemblers designing robots and piecing them together as programmers uploaded instructions to them, smaller workshops making scores of ammunition in automated processes, and so on), most of the space had been converted to a sort of supply depot. They saw heavier vehicles then the ones they had taken from the Newbie District Face-Stompers gang; small urban tanks, flying carriers, all manner of modular grenade machine-guns and rapid-fire artillery.

"Yep, revolution," Calvin and Zuko agreed. Gala said, "Hush, you two!"

She urged them over to a different area, where massive tankers sat isolated and protected from potential accidents. The tanks were gigantic, the size of aquariums fit for extremely large animals, and were filled with a glowing fluid, color-coded in green and red and yellow and blue. "Here we are!" She said proudly.

"…For what?" Zuko said, looking blank. The light from the tankers, seemingly generated from inside them, played over him in a marvelous radiance. The yellow flickered around his hands, glowing against his skin like flame.

Gala indicated the tankers. "That's what I wanted to show you." She grinned in excitement. "That's Eco!"

Calvin took a step forward, his eyes wide. Slowly, he walked to the closest tanker, which contained an entire lake's worth of this red fluid, this 'Eco'. And yet, fluid didn't seem the right word… "It's like my phlogiston," he said, palm pressed against the glass viewing-window. "Not quite liquid, not quite a solid, and certainly not like gas or plasma! It's like tangible energy, like what people mean when they say 'pure energy'!"

The red Eco shifted inside the tanker at his presence, moving in vibrant and excitable whorls. Rays of ruby and crimson and pink moved over him, painting his skin shades of red, and his skin tingled. It was moving like it was almost alive.

"What _is _it?" Calvin said.

Gala put her own hand on a tanker of green Eco. It flurried around, currents moving thickly and quick, like the after-images of wooden branches moving at lightning speed. It looked like a gentle thing, soft and warm, mostly a light green but darkened towards an almost primal shade of viridian at the inner folds of the currents. Green light shone from it, like colored light did from the rest of the eco, and for a moment Calvin fancied that eco looked like light made material. "It's an elemental power source from the worlds created by mysterious precursors called… uh, the Precursors. I don't suppose you've met any people from that world? The one world I know about, the people from there are elves… human-like, but with really long and dorky ears?" Calvin and Zuko shook their heads. "Oh well. Anyway, these Precursors seeded their worlds with Eco, to create life and terraform their worlds. All their technology was based around it!"

Calvin made an 'ooh!' noise as Zuko raised an eyebrow. "This stuff was used to _terraform _planets?!"

"Yeah! I dunno how, though. The elves who live there now, they don't know how to use it for stuff as big as that. They can use it to power machines though, generate electricity, mutate things in good ways… all kinds of cool stuff. Almost like magic, even. Some people can channel it, too."

"Neat! But why show me?"

She gave him a fascinated look. "You're a scientist, you tell me! I thought about you, and the experiments you're doing with powering those robots you and your buddy Zim are making, and I was wondering what you might do with some Eco."

Calvin stared up at the colored light. It shifted lazily in front of him. He smacked his lips dryly, and after a moment he said, "What can Eco do?"

"It depends on the color." She indicated the red Calvin was one. "Red is… uh, let's see… the Eco of strength. Sort of an elemental and technological representation of might. People make ammunition for really powerful firearms, and the very best augmentations use red Eco in the construction or power source. Sometimes you mix it with other Eco, and if you do it right, it gives a big kick. And injected into living things, it makes them… uh, strong and tough. Really, _really _strong."

Calvin considered this, wondered if it had any relation to the legendary Crimson Bands of Cyttorak he'd heard about (since they were both red and involved strength) which supposedly held the power of a juggernaut, and decided that it was an interesting hypothesis. "How can you make something like 'strength' an element?" Zuko asked. Gala shrugged, she didn't know.

Gala then turned to the emerald glory behind her. "Green Eco," she said, her blue skin painted more nature-themed shades by the green light. "It's associated with growing things, healing and regeneration; I'd say it's appropriate to say that it's the energy of life itself. It's one of the most common forms of Eco, so a lot of people believe that it was specifically implanted by the Precursors to encourage the evolution of sapient life. Animals that live around it do tend to be… different. Smarter, even. I once saw a bunch of robots around a pool of it, and it fixed their bodies up. It was pretty cool."

"So what does it do?" Calvin asked.

"It regenerates, mainly. Healing and stuff; just immersing yourself in it works, but medicine made from it is very common. It doesn't reverse mutations to your body, and if you have augmentations or mechanical parts it seems to treat them as natural parts of your body. We don't know why or how, but it does. It's also really good for adding into alloys; it strengthens materials quite a lot. It's a very versatile fuel source too, and it can be modified to induce benign alterations to the body."

"Keep going, this is really cool!" Calvin urged.

Gala indicated the next one. "Blue Eco," she said, and it looked like liquid lightning more than anything else, erratic and quick-shifting around itself. "The elemental energy of motion, I think. One of the very best fuels known to the multiverse-"

"What, the _multiverse_? Seriously?!"

"The Precursors were very good at things," she said meekly. "Blue Eco makes an extremely potent fuel; it's easy to use it to generate electricity or whatever you use to power things, and you can use a huge amount of power and hardly use up any Blue Eco at all, it's very energy-efficient. And it relates to motion, like I said; alloying it into things makes them move faster, more agile, and makes them lighter. Blue Eco is really popular for treating other forms of Eco too, very adaptable stuff."

"And the last one?"

"Yellow Eco," Gala said, pointing to it. It looked almost flame-like, and was moving in Zuko's general direction. He stopped moving, and it rolled away; Gala didn't seem to realize it, but Zuko had been unintentionally Firebending it somehow. He raised an eyebrow at the implications. "Yellow's the element of power-"

"I thought red was power," Zuko interrupted.

"What? No, red is _strength_. Physical stuff, this is more like… uh, powerful reactions, or things going boom. Sometimes it acts a bit like fire, but with less burning-" Zuko shied away from it, looking anxious. "And it's the most popular form of ammunition I ever heard of. Extremely efficient, and powerful. Plus it makes a very good fuel for vehicles, if you don't mind it going _really _fast. Red actually makes it go faster, but then it gets sort of rocket-ish."

"'Da red uns go fasta'," Calvin mused thoughtfully.

"What?"

"Nothing." Calvin looked impressed. "So… how exactly is this stuff used up?"

"Mostly through harnessing it or, hah, channeling it, really." Gala shrugged. "I don't really know the basics, but most of the technology they use to direct it sort of involves plugging in some Eco and manipulating it in some fashion. I've seen people do some seriously crazy stuff with it. It really does seem like a magical source of power sometimes."

"Nah, more like applied science, I should think. Which is much more interesting." Calvin returned his attention to the Eco. "Any other varieties?"

Gala paused for a moment. "Well… there's Light Eco, but I never have seen it in my life. It's extremely rare; supposedly all the true colors of Eco are used to generate it, so it has qualities from all of them, but no one has seen any in my experience. And there's…" Again she paused. "There's Dark Eco."

She shuddered.

"What's Dark Eco?" Zuko asked.

"You just… ooh, you don't even want to know. It… _does _stuff to people. If they're lucky enough not to be killed. It's not normal Eco, I don't know why the Precursors made it. It's used for power and weapons, but we don't use it down here, it's just way too dangerous. And you don't even want to know what happens to people who get mutated by it. If they're not lucky enough to die first…" she shuddered again. "I heard of a guy who actually channels the stuff-"

She stopped. "What about him?" Calvin said.

Gala started to talk, and shook her head. "I can't… no, I really shouldn't tell you." Calvin and Zuko tried to press her, but she refused to elaborate.

Zuko shrugged. "Well, all right then."

Gala brightened up, marginally. "…Thanks."

"So, where can we get a hold of this Eco stuff?" Calvin said.

Eager to change the subject, Gala started telling them about all the different markets they could go to.

Even afterwards, though, and as they bid farewell to the revolutionaries and hoped they wouldn't have to deal with them again, Calvin wondered what _exactly _happened to someone touched by Dark Eco.

* * *

Jak and Daxter, formerly of the village of Sandover and unwilling inhabitant of various diabolical laboratories where sacred eco-science had been twisted to make his life extremely complicated (for Jak) or just unlucky enough to drop into a pool of Dark Eco and somehow survive as a mutant ottsel (for Daxter), sat on top of a gigantic running from a liquid food producing factory to a shipping complex some eight fathoms below where it would be delivered to various shelters offering a food queue, as established by census takers. Due to the enormous flux of arrivals, tourists, and the constant death toll, there was either a surplus or lack of food, and it changed with every day.

That the factory was operated by slaves rather spoiled the idea for them, as did the audial hellscape screaming up from the city like the labored breathing of some multifaceted monster they were stuck inside.

Jak looked down the vast shaft the pipe ran through; the space was made of yet more massive buildings built right next to each other, and a space like a rickety canyon was open before him.

Metal grinded to them, and Jak leaped into the air into that canyon. An elevator was coming up, and he jumped right into it as it came, his cloak fluttering magnificently as he lighted atop it, waiting for the blur of metal around him to slow down. He jumped off before it docked into a threateningly flat space above, and landed in the middle of a crowd that was paying no attention, and hurried into a crowded marketplace established right in the middle of a wide space. Slightly upraised blocky constructions (air filters, he guessed, from the thickly pumping vents and visible windows of smoke being processed) formed a basic boundary around it, while sixteen catwalks of varying size mashed together into a ceiling overhead. Jak walked into this without fear of being recognized, and no one harassed him; he was in the dark depths, where few dared to go but many people had to live.

In this darkness where no light was natural, Jak walked with people who honestly wouldn't have batted an eye if he _changed _right here and now. They'd be reasonably cautious, but they wouldn't terrified like normal.

His cloak swished in the temperature-controlling cold air that was moving like a strong wind through this relatively isolated district; a short distance from here, at least a few streets over, there was a machine the size of a building, doing the double work of purifying the air thickened with industrial by-products and keeping things comfortably cool so that people would not die of heat exhaustion from the excess heat shunted off down here and up from more industrial machinery below. A lot of people got food and shelter here by working on that machine, and Jak understood that arrangements like this were common throughout this city and the countless others like it in Oddworld. Maybe it had been different before the Glukkons had finally seized control; it wasn't a question that interested him much.

Jak passed by a ramshackle booth filled up with automated cooking machines, piping raw product through pipes and various machines in a stage-by-stage refining process until what came out of a well-maintained refreshment engine was a piping hot beverage that while bland was filling and energizing. He passed the wary Glukkon manning the booth a few tokens worth about several dozen credits each (taken from the purse of a dead patrolman who had come too close to one of Jak's hiding places), and the Glukkon handed him a disposable cup full of the beverage (Jak thought it was called 'Nutri-Gulp', a sign that the Glukkon regime was using some lousy PR guys), giving it to him in such a way that he didn't have to touch Jak.

Jak gulped it down without any complaints, though it did warm him up some in the cold. He wondered grimly why these people didn't just give up trying to make a living and throw themselves at their oppressors in a final blaze of glory. It felt more attractive than this.

The idea that maybe they _liked _it, even if it was just because they had never known any other way of life besides scrabbling under the great machines that gave them life and avoided the notice of the corporations that frequently got them killed for minor profits, was a strange one to Jak.

"Hey, buddy," Daxter said, perched on Jak's shoulder under his cloak and huddling for warmth even through the heavy clothing he'd cobbled together for himself. "Got some of that for your old pal?"

"Sure, have the rest," Jak said, smirking at him and passing it over. "Don't blame me if you choke on the lousiness, though."

"Hey!" the Glukkon manning the Nutri-Gulp booth said. Jak whistled and pretended he hadn't heard.

Daxter took it, blowing on it even though the heat was a lot more welcome with the frigid temperatures of this area, and Jak adopted a swinging and steady pace, a rolling stride with his legs held stiffly above the knee. It was easy to slip into without thinking about it, and it let Daxter drink his Nutri-Gulp in peace without splashing it over himself by an unwary step from his friend.

"Yeah, that does an ottsel good," Daxter said, shaking himself around and grinning at having something hot in his belly. "You think our, uh, buddies here in the city could throw us some food, but nooo…"

By 'buddies', of course, Daxter meant the various forces here in town fighting against the Glukkon regime; revolutionaries, socialists, republic-supporters, Mudokon sympathizers, even foreign infiltrators intending to take over this world, and more; all of them people that opposed the Glukkon regime that the mega-corps embodied in one respect or another, and if they weren't constantly bickering and warring with each other under the pretext of gang wars, maybe they could have done something already. They certainly knew that Jak, no friend of the Glukkons, was an ally, but they certainly didn't want to keep him around unless he was killing one of their mutual enemies. And they thought Daxter was annoying (the occasional friend or good-hearted acquaintance in these groups not withstanding).

"Can't be helped," Jak grunted, choosing his words carefully. Even if he hadn't been found or suspected so far, he wanted to be careful. They didn't dare speak of their purposes directly, because someone might be overhearing them. "We're not a part of their group except as a resource. They don't owe us anything."

Daxter snarled. "Yeah, we're not a part of _anything_. Are we?"

Jak laughed sourly, thinking for a second how alone he felt even in a crowd so thick he had to push through for every other step. Shrouded in cloaks and equipment though they were, he saw them well enough to know that there wasn't a single elf here… or at least, any elves of his kind, like Daxter had been.

Even surrounded suffocatingly by other people, he felt alone.

He shrugged his shoulders and tried not to look at the rows of tents and crude shelters built right into the walls, entire family living in spaces not big enough for two. It was painful, seeing people live like this, and it wanted to make him force someone to _pay _for it-

His nails itched. His teeth ached, and his blood ran hot with a power that could transfigure him in moments. Jak forced it back by inches and bits, and every people moved anxiously around him even if they had no idea why.

The moment passed. Daxter totally ignored it, in no danger, and tossed his cup away into the crowd. It bounced off someone's head and Jak caught it as it rebounded. "Come on," he said. "Dax… littering? Seriously? That's low, even for this town."

Jak waded through a thick layer of discarded wrappers and junk food packages to deposit the cup into a recycling engine, various containers at its base ready to receive it and mold it into new and clean degradable plastic (not for environmental reasons, but because plastic that degraded was plastic you needed to buy things to replace). A voice to his side, corroded to barely above a whisper and ear-gratingly raspy for all of that, said, "Ah, socially conscious tourists. Don't see that often these days! Heh, heh!"

Daxter flinched. Jak resisted the impulse to cover his own ears. He turned aside, cloak brushing his shins as he stood still. Sitting on the steps of a down aircraft of uncertain origin (modified into a coffeehouse, by the sign outside and the chatty patrons within) was a… well, Jak had no idea what it was. It was roughly his size, if a lot broader, wrapped in layers of protective garments and cleansing equipment that seemed an extension of multiple out-moded augmentations. A cloak wrapped the speaker's body, arching up in the back at what was either a small hunchback or a fault power coil built into his spine. His body angled weirdly up at Jak in that sitting position; it gave the impression that parts of his body were sitting down and partly standing as well, but weren't in synch with each other.

Whatever he was, he definitely had a set of lips; fleshy, a bit protruding and almost reptilian, and the bionic eyes sat on either side of his head to face sideways, though by a trick of engineering they were capable of moving in different directions simultaneously. Presently, one was looking at Jak and Daxter and the other rolled around for threats. These lips slid over sharp monster's teeth in a surprisingly friendly grin. Jak said, "And who just sits around here and comments on random tourists?"

"We're not tourists!" Daxter said.

"Eh, close enough," Jak said.

The whatever-he-was chuckled with a noise like metal power scraping on sandpaper. "Just an immigrant that takes an interest." He gave Jak a slight smirk that suggested that he somehow knew _exactly _what Jak was doing here, and what his purpose of. "So, you looking for someone? I hang around here all day, know all the people."

"…Yeah," Jak said. He reached into his cloak and pulled out a picture. He consulted it and said, "Your name wouldn't happen to be… Urdnot Trog, would it?"

The fellow grinned. "Sure am!"

He rose up. Jak looked up as the alien loomed; he recognized him now as a heavily augmented krogan; no doubt there was reptilian skin under all that garb, though his species' legendarily strong muscles had gone to waste from malnutrition and his bulk kept intact by synthetic bundles of muscle fibers directly implanted into him. No doubt the hump on his back was a both a hunchback and a power coil generating power for his cybernetic mechanisms.

Jak flipped the picture around, showing it to Trog, before he returned it to his hiding place in his cloak. It was the face of a krogan, though one with much less augmentations then Trog had. "You don't look a lot like your picture."

The bulky krogan gave a shrug, mechanisms whirring around. "Bit out of date. Took a lot of hits a while ago, needed some emergency work." He shook his head and lifted his neck up; on his throat was a rattling voice synthesizer, rusted in places and vital components hanging loose or about to do the same. Now Jak understood why his voice sounded so terrible.

"Geez, buddy," Daxter said. "Fix your voice box or something. You sound awful!"

Urdnot Trog gave a laugh, that sounded like slime mulching up and producing swamp gas. Clearly unwilling to speak more than he had to, he gave another careless grin and a shrug, as if to say that if it was a choice between spending his extremely limited funds on food or fixing a voice synthesizer – funds he wouldn't see again in a while – he really didn't have much choice.

"So," Trog said after a moment. Both eyes snapped to Jak thoughtfully. "I know who you are."

"Yeah?" Jak said. He raised an eyebrow challengingly. "That bother you?"

"Nah."

"…You gonna report me?"

"'Course not."

Jak leaned in, and after he nodded, he said, "I was told to talk to you for information."

Trog paused a moment and looked around – his bionic eyes no doubt scanning for troublesome signatures or analyzing everyone nearby for body language and physical tells to see if they were listening in as spies or informants to his enemies – before he tapped the wall next to him. On it, nearly buried in the usual graffiti that rendered the original color of most surfaces in these parts of the city indecipherable, there was a small image of many abstract lines and whorls all coming together to make the shape of a humanoid figure standing upon a thick line. Jak had seen this insignia quite a few times in the graffiti, all in the places where his temporary allies claimed territory.

Trog then leaned his head up, to a sunken patch of preserved flesh below his voice box. He extended a small flashlight from his belt, and the light that came from it was invisible to Jak's eyes. Where it shone, though, a small tattoo appeared on Trog in the spot he indicated, a perfect match for the insignia. "On the level," Trog said, with an over-obvious wink.

"…That's what the marking means?" Jak said incredulously, giving it another look. The figure was, indeed, standing on a level surface.

"Bit of a way to go for a joke, or take it seriously," Trog conceded, clicking off the flashlight and the tattoo vanished. His credentials established (extremely loosely, but such was the practice of revolutionaries and guerillas all over the multiverse, and they had to use who they had), he stood up, as if to go for a walk. He gave Jak a look and muttered under his breath to Jak, "Wait a few minutes and follow me. Pretend you have nothing to do with me. Take the other way around, the path loops."

"Whatever," Jak growled, loud enough for several people to notice the overt hostility in his voice and scurried away. Even Trog look startled. "Just shove off, metal-head."

Trog looked like he had half a mind to pummel Jak for that; even if he didn't understand that reference, Jak put a lot of venom into the last word. Under Jak's cloak, just barely visible, Daxter winked at Trog. He stopped, his face slipping into surprised interest for a moment, and then he moved back into character as just another pedestrian. "Watch it, elf," he growled, his voice serving him quite well for acting menacing. He shoved through the crowd, knocking the unwary aside and the rest moving out of his way to create a wide but brief tunnel in the crowd for him to move through. He walked down a set of stairs, into a wide rounding platform moving around the rooftop in a series of vertical loops; sheets of metal were strung up from this, built on the back of the rooftop's building, and while not sturdy formed a decent series of alleyway-type shapes. Trog disappeared into this.

Jak sat down at a nearby bench, squatting down and looking for all the world like an angry young man who was doing his hardest to control his temper before he did something stupid. (Except for the look that he was angry at Urdnot Trog, this was an accurate impression.) He stared at his hands as people hurriedly returned to their business, at the thick gloves shielding his hands from the conditions of this city. He wondered dimly if the skin under the gloves was turning gray, or if the nails had turned black and were beginning to thicken into claws.

He never knew if the Dark Eco was going to come active; sometimes it came like the tide, rushing and screaming in his head, and other times it was as quiet as snow on trees, just waiting for the first thing to tip the balance to bring it all crashing down. (Jak was pretty proud of that metaphor, too.) It disturbed him, terribly.

Granted, there were _other _forces balancing that darkness, and with Daxter squatting on his shoulder and uttering silly insults at passerbys and watching them get into fights with the next person to them over it, it was easy to feel that light moving against the darkness. He winced, feeling the pain of that conflict, bits of his blood ripping into each other and _melting _inside him…

Jak endured it.

Before long, Daxter hissed into his ear that they should be going and they stumbled up, Jak looking like a man who was feeling irritated and just wanted to go back home and get away from this city. Since this was totally true, it was easy to pull off. He walked through the crowd, and without apparently realizing it people stepped around him and made way for him. Jak wondered if they subconsciously sensed his inner monster.

Daxter slapped him. "Hey! Are you thinking emo thoughts!?"

"What? No!"

"I bet you are! I can totally sense your emo!"

"No you can't!"

"WATCH ME, watch me sensing how emo you are! Does that sound creepy?"

"A little bit, yes."

"…Meh."

Jak walked down, moving the opposite way from where the krogan had gone. Sure enough, after the went on for a bit, just out of sight from the public marketplace, there was a corner covered by several sheets of metal fashioned into a crude cover. Jak walked around it, and kept going along the path. At the end of it was an large man-sized capsule, possibly a decommissioned suicide booth, sitting upon an arrangement of other discarded machines like a crude throne. Upon this was Urdnot Trog, waiting genially for Jak.

Jak walked over to him. He winced at the suicide booth. "Eh, you really sure you want your secret meeting place to be right on top of a suicide booth?" Daxter said.

"It's broken good and proper," Trog protested.

"It's a _suicide booth! _Kind of a bad omen, isn't it?"

"Bah, I made sure it's busted up. And besides, it's a Mark Six, straight from a parallel universe where Earth achieved high levels of technology and became part of a Neutral faction thing! That whole universe collapsed after the Heartless got in there, this thing is practically a collector's item!" He patted it, and a buzzsaw promptly jumped out, over-extended, snapped off its manipulator and went over the edge. Jak watched it clank and bounce on down until it stopped with a scream of pain.. Someone screamed, "NO, MY WHITTLING HAND! HOW WILL I TELL THE FUTURE WITH WHITTLING NOW!?"

Jak and Daxter stared at Trog. "I'll get that guy a prosthetic," Trog said quickly.

"…Right," Jak said, making sure to stay away from any suspicious parts of the suicide booth. Trog sat down, perched himself comfortably. Jak took a deep breath, steadying himself, and continued. "I was told you know the pertinent details for the people that directly deal with the highest levels of governance in this city, and more specifically… military operations."

"I know people," Trog said guardedly. "And they know other people. Things trickle down. I can't guarantee that it'll be genuine…"

Jak growled in irritation. "Figures," he muttered.

Trog coughed. "And you know… it isn't exactly easy, ferreting out information like that to our mutual friends in the 'not being evil jerkasses' business'."

"Yeah, I assumed," Jak said.

"…And giving information is how I make my money."

"Sounds like."

"…I'm asking you to _pay _me!"

Jak smirked. "I thought all the big revolutionary groups paid you to keep the information coming to anyone who needs to know."

Trog looked at him cagily… and then he laughed. "You're a smart one. Heh, can't blame a guy for trying!"

Jak held his hand out. "Information. _Please_."

"Well, let's get on with it." Trog was suddenly businesslike. "What do you need to know?"

"You know about the hyenas? The ones that showed up out of nowhere and started steamrolling over anyone who is a legitimate threat?" Trog blinked, mouth open. "I intercepted them a few days ago. They dropped all their slaves and lost a lot of loot, but they insisted on stealing supplies of something call aetherite and… you're not listening, are you?"

"Hyenas?!" Trog repeated, and slipped off the booth. "Those three… are real!? I thought people were just coming back with nasty stories! Those mercenaries I've heard about, those three hyenas with, bah, _magic powers_, they're real?!"

"Yeah, and they're real jerks, too," Daxter added.

"Yeah," Jak said. "They're real. Fought them."

"You _fought _them?!" Trog said. "But, everything I heard… those guys are _monsters! _You'd have to be a-"

Jak leaned in close. Just for a moment, when he exhaled, his breath was tinted with purple mist. It sparkling with violet lightning, and when it touched the ceiling, it melted through. "You'd have to be a worse monster." He laughed bitterly. "Trust me. I know."

The krogan shifted uneasily. His augmentations clicked together in his silence. Finally, his veneer of genial good humor punctured, he said, "Word has been trickling down from the bosses. The biggest of them. The representatives of the cartels that run this city and dominate the Hegemony, I hear."

"Go on…?"

"The bosses are planning something big. Something important." Trog paused, clearly thinking it could mean all the world, and he continued. "They've been commandeering factories left and right, converting them to ship production. And at the same time, they've been putting more manpower than they can afford into gathering supplies of aetherite. Stealing it from pirates, selling off huge amounts of weapons to buy smidgens off traders and geologists, putting all the big Vykkers labs on making artificial versions of without any real success… they're going a little crazy for it."

"They're making ships from aetherite?"

"Or using aetherite as a major component," Trog said. "Don't ask me, I'm not a shipwright."

"But why?" Jak asked. "What's the point?"

"Well, I'm an old hand in this business," Trog said. "I've been surviving in dumps like this since before this place was even a good notion. And I've heard from some _very _reliable sources that the bosses are gearing up for something big, and almost certainly the ships are a part of that plan, not the point of it."

Jak put his hand to his chin. "So… disrupt the ship-making plans, or find a way to derail it, or just use it to what I want… that would mess up whatever they're planning?"

"Mess it up, or threaten to with some good power backing you, and their whole game is smashed," Trog agreed. "Risky game, though. Here." He hanged Jak a small data-tube. "Here's all the information I have stockpiled on where all this is taking place. The factories, a list of brain lords behind the shindig… but I'll tell you, if you go after the aetherite, you're dead. They have it locked up nice and tidy somewhere no one is talking about."

"Well, it's good enough for me," Jak said. "…Thanks for your help."

"No problem. You're a nicer guy than the ones I usually get."

Jak thought of the patrolman he had killed to keep himself hidden. Daxter moved against him, and Jak shivered, thinking that years ago he wouldn't have killed anyone so casually. His stomach turned, and in an effort to think about something else, Jak said, "You mean like the ones who blew up the munitions factory south of the fifty-third slum district to slow down production and killed fifteen hundred people?"

"…Yeah," Trog said, faltering. "Like, like that."

Jak shook his head. He missed being a hero in Sandover; then, at least things had been easy. He didn't have to do things like _that _to stop the people he fought. He couldn't think of anything to say for a moment, and finally muttered, "Thanks," and started walking away.

"Take care of yourself," Trog said. "There's some weird stuff going around. I heard a space pirate came here with glass making secrets and he's selling the proof to secure the money rights to the patent. Taking over places, I think."

"Huh," Jak said. "That's interesting." He waved to Trog, and left without incident.

Trog waited a long time for him to leave. As soon as Jak was out of side, he let himself start shaking.

Eventually, when he felt up to it, he stood up to go back to the coffeehouse, perhaps to get some good Nutri-Gulp to calm him nerves, when a shadow fell upon him.

He looked up, shocked at the figure, who smiled benignly. He didn't say anything.

Trog stared up. "You here to kill me?" He said evenly. Trog looked around; there were no arbitrator ships, no gunners, no flying tanks, not the slightest signs of assassins anyway. That wasn't very helpful, considering you weren't supposed to see assassins.

"No," the figure said.

"…Then why are you here?"

"I hear you give information to people that are willing to buy it."

Trog frowned up at him. "…Who are you?"

The figure lowered his hood, revealing a handsome young teenage tiger-boy. "I'm Hobbes, special agent of the Comic Kingdom's elite forces, formerly of the planet Cadia and technically of Fenris but I'm not allowed there. High ranking member in way too many elite military units, and prior to all that nonsense member in good standing of the Knights of Aslan." Hobbes smiled winningly.

The Krogan was politely baffled by these titles and ranks. "…Huh," he said.

"Are you aware that your name sounds a bit like a slur used by some spacefaring people?" Hobbes said.

"Bah, yeah." Trog clicked his head. "What do you want?"

Hobbes tilted to the side; he was carrying a briefcase and he deposited it in front of Trog, nudging it to him with his foot just enough so Trog could see it clearly. Hobbes tapped it and it opened, and cushioned inside it were a little less than half a dozen different augments, freshly fabricated (by Zim himself, no less) from salvaged materials and still startlingly clean and several dozen magnitudes better than anything Trog would ever see in his life. Trog gasped, eyes wide at a pair of modular eyes with integral augmented reality sensors, a vocalization and communication (or vox, in the parlance of the Brighthammer Kingdom) unit with simplified structure a good deal cleaner than his own malfunctioning unit, a data-network jacking link to replace the one in the back of his neck that had very spotty linking these days; and more. It was like something out of a modding addict's fondest fantasy. "I've only seen some of this stuff in documentary-vids!"

Hobbes grinned, knowing he has the krogan's attention. "I'm looking for information on a space pirate named Disco Darvhog. I'm told you can help."

"…Let's talk," Trog said.

* * *

Now, in a small and largely unnoticed neighborhood in the Newbie District, for the people who lived there, life had been getting good.

In the weeks since the crew of the _Paragon _had decided on a whim to settle there until their mission on this world was done, the neighborhood had changed drastically. Gone were the battling gangs of thrill-seeking thugs and bullies, either cast out through threat of force or successfully convinced to follow the orders given to them (generally through threat of force again, or genuinely convinced that Zim's work would change their world for the better) and helped to clean up their home, and now the civilians here lived in relative peace without threat of being mugged. The machines that formed much of this area's structure and kept it habitable had been fixed or improved, and now the air was cleaner, the food production ramped up enough that they were making surplus food that could be sold for a little bit of money for this community in a joint effort.

For a team consisting of two extremely accomplished scientists, a well-versed planar traveler, and two guys that didn't know science much but certainly understood enough to do heavy-lifting, something like all that was fairly well expected. It was nearly trivial, something for them to occupy themselves with during their relatively fruitless attempts to locate Darvhog… though of late, Zim seemed more concerned with this town. If nothing else, he was prone to losing focus (as Calvin, Hobbes and Morte were coming to understand).

Their charitable endeavors had worked a change in the area; the metal was clean, the heating vents reengineered to be more effective and out of the way of anyone who might be accidentally hurt by them. Great siphons had been erected to suck the pollutants direct and process them into clean air or condense the particles of smoke into a crude material that was usable as a building block in various forms of construction. The apartment towers had been cleaned, all holes fixed up and electricity and running water free to everyone that lived there. As improving this city went, it was only a small step, but Zim thought this was sufficient proof of concept; the city was badly run, but it _could _be fixed.

Presently, up in the penthouse he'd been forced to inhabit, he was trying to create mechanical soldiers from the robots the Face-Stompers gang had (ineffectually) tried to use against him.

Zim's fingers worked quickly and fast, and the various technicians who happened to live in his current home base for Oddworld liked to watch him work when he didn't need them doing anything; they said they kept learning new things just watching him work, even if they had no idea what he was doing. Zim, using technical knowledge so advanced that it was nearly as ineffable to less technologically advanced societies as he considered magic to be, presumed that it wouldn't do them much good, but he still enjoyed the thought that he was teaching students in a roundabout way. Already, he had seen them tentatively produce a flying scout drone to guard the perimeter of their territory.

Zim paused in thought, one hand neatly over a hollow eye socket in the robot's head; one of four, stacked on either side of the slightly snout-like bulge on the front of its face where he had installed a crude sonic modulation system that could either allow it to speak from a selected database of words, or generate a powerful sonic weapon. Nothing as effective as he would have liked, not having access to military-grade hardware, though.

He considered it odd that he actually _had _a territory. The streets and layers directly adjacent to this apartment complex, both up and down and steadily expanding as they expelled gangs with force or coerced them into working for them (and Zim preferred the latter, he liked having muscle to do what he told him to), and as they went they had gone to work replacing the faulty or inefficient mechanisms of this city. Now, places that had been scrambling for power every day enjoyed running hot water, electricity, they didn't need to fear being mugged just as a natural course of things and actually felt safe. And their territory kept expanding.

With the heavy-hitters that now worked for them, Zim hardly needed to worry about keeping it stable. A message of 'don't be a jerk or I'll blow you up' tended to  
work well on the gangsters around here, and they spread the message nicely.

While totally unrelated to his own mission here (both finding more equipment to locate Gir and retrieving Darvhog to amend Zim's errors in unleashed him), it was nice to improve the lot of people in this city. But there was still something wrong there, it seemed inefficient just fixing things bit by bit. It didn't deal with the _source _of the problem. He wasn't quite sure who he needed to blow up to fix this world's problems, but he suspected that it wasn't anything as simple as that. This world had more engrained flaws. There needed to be a bigger fire to purge the impurities that had caused such terrible things as this city's cruel order.

Musing on these things, Zim inserted an optical sensor into the eye socket. It clicked into the appropriate nerve analogues, sliding neatly into place and holding firm. Zim stopped away and gave it a hearty smack, hurting his hand a bit. The eye didn't jiggle or move out of place, and he was satisfied that it was stable.

Zim hopped off the robot, and as high as it stood, he had a bit of a distance to the floor. "Nice work," Calvin said from behind an array of equipment; a computer terminal and several mechadendrites tipped with soldering and bolting equipment. Zim nodded, stepping back to admire the results.

Originally, they had been the mindless robots the gangsters had used upon them; having realized their potential, Zim and Calvin had been extensively modifying them in their off time. The armor had been stripped away and the inner mechanisms rearranged for greater efficiency while additional weapons and more synthetic musculature had been installed. They altered the robots entire structure, moving more of their overall mass and vital points into the area of the hips and belly for greater stability, giving them a bit of a feminine shape and suggestion of curves, not helped by Zim installing an engine and array of central processors (each one for a specific task, such as information analysis, aiming and reaction, and self-operation, so as not to overwhelm any single one) there. The basic shape of the robot remained, a hulking humanoid form, and perhaps while not very efficient, the engine they used had been derived from their own ship, and while it produced power on its own, it did so more effectively when attached to a humanoid shape. Zim wanted to study this effect later.

After altering the head so that it's 'brain' (as it was still a non-sentient drone, not a true robot) was decentralized and had no obvious weak point, Zim and Calvin had engineered the head to be a collection of sensors; then they had created new armor that they had allowed with various types of Eco and fused it to the outer frame, a bit slimmer in the shoulders but far tougher than it originally was, engineered with their superior knowledge of metallurgy. Then they had mounted as many weapons as they could into various ports and modular spaces on the body: grenade launchers on one side of the shoulder, a special made twin-linked laser right on the other. Both were main weapons, and non-lethal, the lasers diffused into concussive force while the grenades were made to blast out a sleep-inducing gas. The robot's real power was raw physical strength; they were fantastically tough and strong now, their broad forearms lined with close-range heat-blasters and repulsor emitters built directly into the palms to draw from their power source. The three-digit fingers were broad and stubby, rather claw-like and similar to Zim's own hands, and the broad legs were equipped with crude jets to enable powerful jumps if not actual flight.

Zim, a skilled weaponsmith, had placed reservoirs of Blue and Red Eco within them to power their various weapon systems and internal capabilities, while Green Eco formed the primary power source along with a spiral engine. Blue Eco seemed like it would have been better, but Calvin and Zim had tested it on various small camera-drones, and while Blue Eco had great promise as a power source, it was more unstable than they thought, while Green Eco (though less efficient) tended to seal breaks in the outer frame and made them something like a perpetual motion machine provided the channeling systems were intact.

Zim looked up at it. Though inactive, it seemed to be looking back; a rough holographic projector mounted the front of its face right over its sonic-speaker, vertically stacked eyes on either side of this and additional larger optics on either side of its narrow and helmet-like head. Fully a head taller than Hobbes was, these drones were giants to Zim, metal soldiers that would flawlessly carry out his orders, and he grinned at the thought of it, admiring the weapons mounted on these bodies, how one arm had a heat-blaster built into it and another was studded with impact points and venting excess heat for the mechanisms to power a punch. For all their broadness, bristling with mechanisms of no obvious purpose and elegant builds, he had made an effort for them not to be fearsome looking; he had no wish for bystanders to be frightened of his soldiers, They were designed to look noble, their forms calming and reassuring if strange looking.

A technician (a specialist in Eco technology, much to Calvin's interest after he'd managed to buy a few small barrels of green and yellow Eco), glancing at the heavy armor of the robot's lower bodies, hesitantly raised his voice. "Uh, sir?"

"Yes?" Zim said.

"What are you building these things for?"

Zim gave him a look. "Why not?" He said innocently. "Robots are awesome! Everyone loves robots!"

"I don't," a random child who probably shouldn't have been there said.

Zim recoiled in horror and pointed at the child angrily. "Anti-synthetic! Away with ye, non-believer!" The child slunk away, chastened.

"But seriously," the technician said. "Why?"

Calvin said, "Well, we need _something _to do while we're waiting to find leads on our quarry. Might as well do something constructive with it. And it never hurts to give yourself more assets!"

"Like killer robots?" Morte said, floating overhead and watching the proceedings dubiously.

"Bah! More anti-synthetic rhetoric. They are not made to kill!"

"Well, their programming could go bad, or they could misunderstand your orders."

Zim laughed. "How ridiculous!" He tapped the robot's knee, and the joint made an echo. "It would be inefficient to continually give a number of robots direct orders in the battlefield, even with dedicated communication officers."

"I'm the one who told you that," Calvin reminded him.

"Whatever. I have something a good deal more elegant in mind; I am programming them to immediately and obediently obey all orders they are given to the best of their abilities, but I am primarily programming them to respond to stimuli so they will react defensively or helpfully as the situation warrants, invariably using non-lethal force unless the situation is extreme enough to demand slaying our foes, but their primary interest and purpose shall be protecting civilians and infrastructure at all costs, as well as our own lives."

Morte, though ancient and very well-traveled and a living encyclopedia of nearly all things known to the cosmos, was not used to technobabble. It took him a moment to process this. Then, with a noise from his head-jar like it was spraying condensation onto his head to cool him down, he incredulously said, "You're programming your robot soldiers to be _Lawful Good?_"

Zim blinked. "I don't understand the reference." Calvin whispered something to him. "What? Oh! Yes, I suppose I am, then."

Morte shrugged. "Well, you know what you're doing… so at least I bet they won't turn evil or whatever. I will bet that they'll end up becoming sentient, though!"

"Sure, why not," Zim said indifferently.

"Hey," a krogan technician said, giving the robots a suspicious look now. A heavy cable of Eco-channeling cables was carried under one of her arms. "Why so easy-going? You _want _your robots to turn sentient?! Look at how big and heavily armed they are. That's just asking for trouble…"

Zim stared at the krogan and walked over to her, making it clear that he was tiny compared to her. "And yet there you are, heavily armed and very big."

"Huh? What's that supposed to-" she stopped. "Hey! That's not fair!" She said as she put the cables down on a barrel of Eco.

"Irrelevant," Zim said. "And I seriously don't think they'll become sapient anyway. They're just drones! Or they will be after I install the central linkage nervous system in them."

"And what will that do?" Morte asked.

"Just the source of their programming that will instruct them on what to do," Zim said.

"It'll exist between them," Calvin said. "Sort of like every drone will be a 'brain' for it."

"What's that?" Zuko said, poking his head through the door. "Something about brains?"

"Morte thinks the robots will go sentient," Zim said. "And people seem to think that's bad."

"…Really," Zuko said, voice suddenly devoid of inflection. He knew better than to press Zim on robots being a bad thing, but he was very suspicious of Zim's little project with the robots; he'd grown up with stories of the golems the Fire Nation had made in the days before the Hundred-Year War (and his great-great-grandfather banning their creation due to logistics issues), and most of the ones his father had taken an interest in had too many golems turning against their makers for him to be comfortable with the whole concept. (Granted, his father, Ozai, was not the most trusted authority on such things.)

"Yes," Zim said, sounding pleased. "We're nearly done creating these prototypes." He gave them a thoughtful look. "I would like to make their weaponry even more modular… perhaps design the forearms so they are a melding of various weaponry, and the fingers fold in for close combat so they won't be damaged… hmm…"

"Well, whatever it is you're up to, you'll have to save it," Zuko said. He tapped a small communication device in his ear; it was on a private frequency, though since someone somewhere was probably tapping all communications, they spoke in code as much as possible while making it sound innocent. "I've gotten word from Hobbes. Your little gambit with those improve body-gadget things worked; he got a _very _good lead on where those pirates are holding up."

Zim grinned, and the lighting in the room got a lot brighter, the electricity humming more vibrantly than before. "Excellent," he breathed. "When shall we move out?"

"I think first we should scout the area and make plans to attack," Zuko said. "Rushing in blind will complicate things."

"But I like rushing!" Zim whined. Zuko raised an eyebrow. "Oh, fine, we'll do it your way! Spoilsport." A few of the residents chuckled at this. Zuko rolled his eyes long-sufferingly. Zim snapped back to business and said to the technicians in general, "You! Go and hunt up your people here who like working with us, I need someone who knows the streets of wherever it is we're going. Assemble a group so I can select the people to take with us. You! Go to the storage place and prepare us… hmm, yes, a suite of vehicles, speedy and light but inconspicuous. We are scouting, not going to war. Just in case, bring a supply of weapons as per the specifications I laid out in the protocols during our last training session yesterday. Laser rifles and stun guns for the militia-men, please. And the rest of you who are interested, continue modifying my drones to the specifications I have laid out there!" He indicated a data-terminal with a holographic read-out. At Zim's gesture, it displayed a thorough but easy to follow schematic of the drones, the finished steps grayed out and the instructions to be carried out high-lighted in blue. "Do that, and when we get back…" Zim's voice became coy. "Perhaps I can see about getting everyone free entertainment transmissions and access to _all _the good feeds?"

"Deal!" A technician said, and the people scattered to attend to their details or just go home; a lot of them liked hanging out around Zim when he did stuff but otherwise had no official deals with him.

Calvin left to go get their protective outfits and equipment, while Morte followed the militia guys to help organize things. Zim and Zuko left, and Zim gave the robots a last lingering look; they seemed strangely lonely as he closed the door, as if the idea that had begun construction in his mind when he had seen those fallen mechs in that first fight in the lobby was now anxious for these machine soldiers to be born and carry out battle in his name.

Zuko gave Zim a rare honest smile as they walked into the hallway to get to the computer terminals in the lobby so they could track Hobbes' whereabouts and meet up with him. "You know, I think we're really doing some good here," Zuko said.

"You think so?!" Zim said brightly.

Zuko smirked. "When we accidentally took over this complex, it was a slum bullied by a gang of idiots; barely any running water, the electricity was almost all portioned out to the gangsters… the place was practically falling apart, and the residents thought that death threats were part of daily life." Zuko indicated the alchemically restored walls, the fresh carpets, and the pleasantly lit hallway itself as a Slig walked by them and greeted them excitedly, already hyped up to be on another mission today. "Now, we got part of that gang actually joining the residents, they have clean water and reliable power, they actually feel _safe_, and we're spreading that out every day just as a hobby."

"Indeed!" Zim said happily as they came to the elevator. "To say nothing of the technological power we have restored for them, and gotten them off their reluctant behinds to do something for themselves. The ruling powers here have so much technological prowess, and they let it rust and leak down here! I think I did a good thing, convincing them to learn more about it to do it better."

Zuko nodded. "…I'm surprised you wanted to recruit the people here into a militia for doing things."

"We need numbers if we're to accomplish anything," Zim said. "And they seemed pleased to help. And I admit I'm surprised they listen to me."

"Their goals happen to line up with our own agenda," Zuko said knowingly. "As long as we can help them get what they want, they'll help us out."

Zim said nothing, but looked thoughtful. He was wary of overly imperialistic behavior, but the fact was that his crew had knowledge and experience that many of the residents here simply did not, or if they did they had it in much lesser amount, too busy surviving to ply the craft they were heir to, and seemed increasingly frustrated once they realized just how badly behind they were compared to what people in the less slum-ish of the city had. Zim had come to believe that he was not exacting authority over them so much as being a useful resource for them. He didn't mind; not all relationships needed to be emotional in nature, and a mutually helpful alliance was refreshingly honest. Besides, he had come to genuinely like them, and thought his allies here felt the same. Calling them a militia, while not strictly accurate, was at least easy nomenclature.

Thinking of this, though, even with all they had accomplished, gave him an uneasy feeling. He thought of the vastness of this city, the hours it had taken to move across a relatively tiny space, and his stomach churned at how _long _it would take to repeat the good he had done for this one complex for even a tiny section of it. It was simply too big to work, and to an extent, something of the sickness at the heart of this very society that had enabled such disgusting tragedy seemed more important.

"Zuko," Zim said, his voice calm and flat.

"Yeah," Zuko said.

"I have determined our goal here," Zim said. "Even after we detain Darvhog and do whatever seems a good idea."

"…What are you getting at?"

Zim indicated the elevator in general as they went into it and it descended down to the lobby. "Consider this street we have taken. This layer of a second, this neighborhood, this district. It is only one of many! This city is immense, well-constructed, a habitat for many scores of immigrants and natives alike… but so many live in squalor and fear. The machines that should ease their lives and raise them up only provide a menace if they break down, or are left to rust except for those at the very top, who care nothing except for their own advancement. It is, quite simply, too big! And yet, such injustice requires… no, it _demands _correction! I have the power to repair and avenge wrongs such as that, such that my people might once have done!"

Zuko was silent, but his eyes were narrowed in understanding, if not quite as intense as Zim's fervor.

"This world suffers," Zim declared. "Something in the society that had laid claim to it, doing wars of extermination with other aspects of itself, that crush down its own people for such _stupid _reasons as we have observed… it is wrong. It is worse than that, it's… _evil_. Selfishness and stagnation at the expense of others seems to have become the hallmark of this… Glukkon Hegemony!" He hissed out a long breath, and his exhalation was tinted with vapor.

Zuko frowned. "Ah," He finally said, understanding what Zim meant.

"These people could be so much more. But they are oppressed and used as a matter of social custom. I cannot stand by and accept it, now that I have the power to do something about it." Zim stood firmly as the elevator came to a stop. "It needs to go. I intend to dismantle the Glukkon Hegemony however I can, and have it replaced with a more benign order. Bah, I don't know how these things work, I'm just good at breaking things, and I know what I must break next!"

Zuko closed his eyes contemplatively. After a moment, he nodded. "Okay. I'm in."

"And I want you to… eh?"

"I agree. I think that's a good idea." Zuko said. "We can't just leave this world like this. Not when we can do something about it." He paused. "…Did I just agree to help effectively declare war on an entire industrialized world?"

"Yes!" Zim said excitedly.

"…Yeah, I thought so." Zuko stepped out of the elevator.

Calvin was waiting for them, their equipment piled up on benches and sorted by person. "Thought what?" He said.

"I want to destroy the social order that has made Oddworld a complete mess," Zim said.

"Oh, cool! I want in on that!"

"What's this about?" Hobbes said, walking through the door, fur curled up strangely with the thick fur on his ruff braided into long and elegant shapes, and also he smelled of flowers. They stared at him. "I crashed through a septic tank for this neighborhood, dove into a deodorant factory to escape the stench and found out too late that those places stink terribly. Fortunately, a benign band of beauticians discovered me in my distress and helped me out. True story."

"Hey, I got all those guys ready to be selected for the mission!" Morte said, floating in. "Hey, we're assembling. Neat, what's up?"

Zim made a hand gesture, instructing them to deactivate any equipment someone could be listening to them through. They did so. He urged them closer, since he wasn't sure if he could trust anyone of Oddworld just yet, they were a little too close to the problem for his liking. "I want to overthrow the Glukkon Hegemony, preferably without complete and distasteful warfare," Zim said.

"Ooh, I was wondering when we'd get to be revolutionaries," Morte said. "Count me in!"

Zim tilted his head. "Curious. Given the scale of my intentions, our previous mission to bring in Darvhog and our overall quest of locating Gir (and the rest), I would have expected greater recalcitrance from the rest of you."

"Actually, these seems exactly like the kind of thing me and the little guy used to do," Hobbes said. "Good times!" He and Calvin high-fived.

"If we're out in worlds clearly out of balance like this, we should do something about them," Zuko said.

"And doing Good because it seems like a good idea is my creed," Morte said. "Hey, not really a creed, more like an overall agenda. Not organized enough to be an agenda, really. A habitual occupation. A hobby, even."

"Good enough," Zim said.

They moved out, a keen sense of purpose now that they had a pressing goal to deal with apart from long-term issues.

* * *

There was darker work afoul in Lulu's Fortune, often quite literally so, and in the great tower the hyena trio stomped right through everyone in their way, in too foul a mood to be polite about it, still a bit scorched and damaged from being sent to pacify the more aggressive Heartless they let run loose in the lower sectors. Immediately after returning from another Aetherite run, no less, a waste of their talents (at least in the minds of the hyenas).

"This sucks," Banzai spat as he slammed the door opened into the hyena-trio's private suite (an amenity afforded to them by their loyal, if not enthusiastic, service, and perhaps an attempt to mollify them). "We're actually being stuck doing glorified errand boy work!"

At the very least, it was a very spacious suite; walking into the hub, they had to pause a moment to adjust to the much larger space compared to the smaller hallways they had just gone through. Shaped like a ball, half a dozen crescent-shaped floors of varying size sticking from the walls to create several layers of appreciable size and connecting to the doors to the rest of their suite, the suite-hub was almost startlingly bright, the walls and floors made of a slightly translucent plastic material with the strength of steel. Already they were making it more like home, thick and heavy furs draped over every possible surface to make a plush carpet over the hard surfaces, the electric lights covers with colored meshes to dim the light and tint it a variety of interesting shades… even skulls from various foes they had killed or beasts slain while hunting for food on missions mounted the walls, some decorated with carvings Ed notched into them as a hobby in his off-time, offering them to the spirits of the land to appease them and gain their strength.

Shenzi suspect that Ed wouldn't have much luck there; though she didn't care for the belief that cities and technological societies had no spirits or lived apart from the land, she wasn't entirely comfortable in a place like Lulu's Fortune. She had no truck with the superstitious notion that machines and artificial dwellings had no spirits (or inherently malevolent ones), and traveling through the city she could hear the whispering song of the mysterious spirits of mechanisms and machinery at work, so incredibly complex and advanced that their workings were like miniature eco-systems. They weren't much like the elemental powers, ancestors or animal spirits she was used to, nor much like the denizens of the land that she spoke with at times. These… _machine-spirits_, they were strange to her and she wasn't sure what to make of them. Neither of her boys did, and while Banzai had mentioned that he felt that they seemed depressed or angry most of the time, he wasn't able to articulate it. Ed didn't know how to placate them or earn their regard, but he made a good try at it.

None of them were in a good mood, and though it was probably disrespectful not to acknowledge the skulls, the three hyenas shuffled it, barking and snarling and generally with nasty demeanors. They slammed the door shut (right in the faces of the squad that accompanied them at all times, Shenzi was happy to notice, and she so hated having those soldiers around all the time).

Banzai threw himself onto a furry carpet. "Huh," He muttered. "So this is what it's like to feel wasted."

Ed gibbered something incoherent. Whatever he said, Shenzi agreed. "We're soldiers and saboteurs, not… not whatever you call dogs that go and bring shiny rocks to people!" She said. "What in the names of all the orishas do those gray-headed idiots think they're doing ordering us around like this!?" She sat down on the couch extending out of the wall of the ball-shaped hub of their suite (several floors mount on ball-attachment to be reorganized as they saw fit and giving the hub several layers to do with as they pleased). "Got sent to mop up the Mudokons, and we're doing their dirty work."

Banzai flopped down on the floor. "The heck do you think is going on, man?" He asked, staring up moodily at the ceiling. "They're up to something. And they're having us do their work for them, too!"

Ed thought hard for a moment and zoned out, following the elusive thought. Shenzi leaned back, sighing. "They're making a play, all right…" Shenzi said. "I'll be damned if I know if it's treacherous or they're just being idiots about ordering us around."

"Well, not like we can just ask, right?" Banzai pointed out. "We say anything, that's grounds for dismissing us and sending us back! Mission failed, man!" He growled. "And just imagine what'll happen if we screw up the mission because they're _not _pulling anything…"

Shenzi shuddered, knowing perfectly well what the opposite problem was. "But if they are, it's borderline treason for us not to stop it cold." She grimaced. "What are we supposed to do?!"

Ed blinked. He gibbered.

"What, Ed?!" Both Shenzi and Banzai snapped. Ed gestured wildly, arm motions managing to indicate what he wanted to get across. "Harlot… car lot… Arlet!" Ed gibbered happily. The relatively sane hyenas tried to figure out what that meant. "…Arlet… why does that sound familiar…" Banzai snapped his claws. "That one creepy sergeant from last meeting!"

"What about him?" Shenzi said, listening. Ed was more or less insane by most conventional measures, but when something was important enough to him to attempt communication, it was probably important.

Ed gibbered some more, somehow managing to convey that he thought there was something off about him, suspiciously so… that he seemed like an actor, or an infiltrator.

Banzai and Shenzi wrinkled their noses at this. "…Well, now that you mention it," Shenzi said, standing up and cracking her knuckles meaningfully. "I'm sick of running around fetching rocks and losing assets for a plan the cartels won't even tell us about. I say we find Arlet and ask some questions-" There was a loud crashing sound from an adjacent room they had been using for storing trophies taken from killed enemies they wanted to take home. "The depths was that?!"

The three hyenas turned as one. Their ears twitched as they heard something moving. With a nod at one another, they leaped from floor to floor, landing in front of that hallway and barreling down it in a reverse arrow formation; Shenzi and Banzai at the front to take whatever they were hit with their superior endurance so Ed could jump in from behind and attack, delaying them long enough for a counter. Down the hallway, everything was perfectly normal… save that the hatch-style door to the storage room was open, recessed neatly into the wall and the lid of it still poking slightly into the grooves that met the floor and ceiling.

The light was on in there, when they had turned everything off earlier. The door creaked slightly as they approached, a few of the mechanisms grinding feebly, as if the door had been forced open with such strength that the operating mechanisms had nearly broke.

Ed took a deep sniff. He mumbled, shaking his head and obviously concerned. "Yeah," Banzai said, sniffing. "Do you guys…?" The question was left hanging.

"Yeah," Shenzi said, her fur standing on end. "I smell blood."

That it was old blood, at least a few days old, didn't make her feel better.

Slowly, they crept into the bathroom, keenly aware of how terribly silent everything was, and peeked in, so tense they were ready to explode into combat at a moment's twitch. The three of them froze at the sight in front of them.

The bathroom, apart from some blood, was untouched and left where it was. The big exception, of course, being the corpse Sergeant Arlet, stripped naked and lying the massive communal bathtub at the heart of the room. He clearly been dead for at least a few weeks, and he'd already decayed significantly; though kept in good conditions enough to stave off the worst of decomposition, he was still rotted enough to make them rather hungry. It was easy to see what had killed him; his chest had been caved in, some monstrous blow ripping a hole right through his chest. Some blood dripped around him and into the bathtub; not as much as would have if he'd been killed right here, and there probably would have been more viscera all over.

Shenzi peered at that hole. It had gone right through him, slightly larger in entry than in exit wound; as though he had been killed in a violently sudden attack by a scatter-gun to the chest… or had been punched extremely hard by something _very _strong.

Perhaps a bit more ominously, he was wearing a placard on his front, covering the worst of the fatal wound. Upon it, written in blood (perhaps the only writing material available at the time) was a raven imposed over the crossed out heart sign of the Heartless; the sign of Wuya's organization, and those loyal to her. Arlet, a firm follower of the Hegemony, had been barely aware of her at all, and thus had no reason to carry such a thing.

The three hyenas crowded into the room. "The depths?" Banzai swore softly. "What the… how did _he _get in here?! What's going on?"

Ed barked something to the effect of 'what's with the sign?'.

Shenzi laughed unsteadily, wishing dearly that she had something she could kill to vent some steam and get back the comfortable notion that she had a veneer of control here. "Someone… I don't know, someone's playing a game with us! I don't like this, I'm going to-"

There was movement. She froze. At once, the other two hyenas turned around at a heavy creaking noise directly behind them, and as if on cue, Ed shrieked in horrified bemusement.

Shenzi turned around, ready to rip the toilet out and beat the intruder to death with it, and immediately stopped in surprise. Someone who looked exactly like Sergeant Arlet, all in dress uniform and a good deal more cheeky than she ever recalled, was sitting on the counter, patiently waiting for them. "Evening," he said calmly, voice oddly feminine and harsh.

"What the… no way!" Banzai looked from Arlet to the corpse and back again; there was virtually no difference, aside from one being dead and the other. Shenzi sniffed; they even _smelled _the same, and it was like having a serious philosophical dilemma considered the effect smells had on her. "What are you?! What'd you do with the soldier?"

Fake Arlet looked at them. "Soldiers of Wuya's empire to be, doing menial tasks below our duty. Lame!" He sat straight up. "Who are you loyal to?"

"What?"

"Are you traitors to Wuya?" Fake Arlet bounced off the counter and landed on the floor. It crumbled beneath his feet, buckling as if a behemoth had smashed into it (though considerably more narrowed into a smaller space). He glared at them, and his eyes glowed a baleful red. "If you answer wrong… I'll kill you on the spot as heretics."

The hyenas froze. "So, I'll ask you one more time." Fake Arlet twitched, his visible skin sliding around like liquid. "Are you traitors to Wuya?"

"Hell no!" Shenzi snarled. "Who do you think you're talking to?! I ought to kill you for breaking into my place and talking like that!"

"We're Wuya's soldiers, through and through!" Banzai agreed.

Ed snarled something, probably on the same lines of what they were saying.

The fake Arlet looked at them a bit longer, his expression carefully blank, eying them closely with an obvious mind to decide if they were lying or no.

There was a tense moment, a sense of terrible judgment being passed down. Then, mercifully, he started laughing hysterically. The hyenas stared and glanced uncertainly at each other as the fake Arlet tossed his head back, laughing long and hard and completely insanely. After a moment, Ed joined in, and the bathroom echoed with the harsh noises. Shenzi and Banzai shrugged and started laughing too, it felt like the appropriate thing.

"Why are we laughing?!" Shenzi said.

"I don't know!" Banzai said.

Eventually, the fake Arlet stopped, chuckling a little. "Good," he said. "Good! I was wondering, if I was gonna have any allies here or not. Good to work with partners, you know. Not good to be alone, not good at _all_." He chuckled again, a bit insanely. "You like my work?" He gestured to Arlet. "Thought it would be a good way to get your attention."

"It did, but who are you?" Shenzi said.

The fake Arlet bowed mockingly. He walked to them, and as he did, his form shifted and morphed, transforming into a total different configuration; the skinny form of a Slig slimmed and straightened out, muscle mass melting and reshaping into a different pattern. Green slimy skin paled to human flesh. The tentacles vanished into a melting mass as the head became a rather pretty, if cruel-looking, human face topped with a shock of long dark hair falling to the small of the infiltrator's back; by the time the stranger finished walking to the hyenas, Arlet's form had transformed into a pale androgynous human… or at least something that _looked _human.

The new figure held out a hand. "Nice to meet a friendly face! Uh, muzzle. Heh!" It grinned, with a mouthful of sharp teeth like something that lurked in a nest to steal away the babies and eat at their soft tissue until they bled out. "I'm Envy the Jealous. Wuya sent me to fix the problems with this world and our alliance with the Glukkons however I see fit."

"Oh? You're back-up!" Shenzi said. "Nice!" She shook the creature's hand and winced at how inhumanly strong it was. "So… what's with the dead guy?"

"Needed to replace someone to sneak in," Envy said casually. "Bad time for him, hah!"

Shenzi noted that Envy actually _said _'hah'. That was odd. Banzai scratched his ruff, eyes blinking, and said, "Why'd you need to do that at all? What's the point?"

Envy gave them a significant look. "Because I have no idea where the Glukkons stand, you guys. I don't know if they're planning something against Wuya or working something or _what_." He shook his head in disgust. "I legitimately have no idea what's going on, and even sneaking into their meetings isn't helping. They're _hiding _something and I want to know what before I can do anything! Approach their leaders and give them assistance? Work around with this mess and force them back to Wuya's side? Exterminate the idiots?!" Envy grimaced, and extended his arms at them. "So… I'd like to know; don't you have any thoughts on this?" He smiled wickedly.

Shenzi thought of her own doubts, her own distaste for the tasks she had been forced into, and she grinned wickedly. "Let's talk, new guy."

"After we get this cleaned up," Banzai said, pointing to Arlet's corpse. "He's starting to stink!"

"Yeah," Shenzi agreed. She raised an eyebrow. "Was dragging his body hear and putting the sign necessary?"

"Nope, but it was fun! And besides, first impressions," And here Envy grinned, and though she was a hardened soldier of the Pride Land Territory Dispute wars, Shenzi shuddered at the sight of that awful thin-lipped fanged grin. "Are so _important._"

"Uh, question," Banzai said, ignoring Envy. "How are we supposed to dispose of this guy?"

"Uh…"

"I propose we eat him!" Shenzi said. Ed held his hand up eagerly.

"Wait, what?" Envy said. "HOLY CRAP!" He jumped back as all three hyenas eagerly jumped upon Arlet's corpse and started eating him right there on the spot.

Envy stood there, watching them in disgusted fascination. "…Huh," he said with a small shrug. With a touch of nostalgia, he muttered "Reminds me of my brother Gluttony."

* * *

Far from Lulu's Fortune, far from any Glukkon stronghold, nestled in the wild place of green growing things where the divinely ordained rightness of Oddworld still held sway, a great mind awakened.

Several pairs of large eyes opened in the secret chamber, far below the ground, luminescent fungi lighting it up for the rag-tag collection of Mudokon, Glukkons, Sligs, and numerous others of many different species assembled before it. Their clothes were largely singular, though they favored cloaks, and the Mudokons all had the feathery heads of their people in their natural state.

All of these men and women were members in good standing of the Mudokon Confederacy, all of them charged with being intermediaries between the very highest levels of their spiritual aides and the tribesmen who preferred to let them handle it in secrecy for the sake of protecting their interests. Few of them had been there since the very beginning of their war against the Glukkon Hegemony, though, and mingled in the crowd was the Mudokon who _had_ been there.

The shamans and spirit-talkers stood on the grass as cool wind blew, the cavern light resplendent against the moss-covered boulders that formed stepping stones to the exit chamber high above. And above them, the huge and sessile creature above them stirred, a beak-like mouth smacking wetly as its enormous bulk shifted in sleep.

Finally, the first of the free Mudokons stepped forward. A lighter shade of blue than the green colors that characterized much of his kind, he was stunted from years of labor in the now-destroyed Rupture Farms, and when he smacked his lips as he thought, the stitches sewn into his mouth long ago were still a bit loose. (He hadn't bothered to remove them. He looked quite distinctive with them, and the spirits seemed to approve of the look.) He tapped his fingers together and finally said, "How long has he been like that?"

Murmurs moved through the crowd, to the point that none of them were really sure. "The Almighty Raisin," a Glukkon scientist lured to their side and gone darker-skinned by magical mean spoke. "Has been less dormant for a matter of weeks now. He talks in his sleep, but none of us can translate his words."

"Okie-dokie," the Mudokon, who was named Abe, said forlornly. He felt that he was doing a bad job of being a totally awesome prophet to his people (the 'totally awesome' bit being self-appointed, too). He straightened up and walked forward, listening intently. He considered as the Almighty Raisin mumbled more, nothing coherently, and finally Abe said, "How long, exactly?"

"Several weeks," a krogan shaman said. "Almost a month!"

Abe, not exactly the most well-informed of Mudokons, had to ask, "Anything important happening since then?"

More murmuring. "That was when Jak left us to pursue the hyena-monsters to the city of Lulu's Fortune." Abe winced at the name Lulu (since he felt bad about scamming that particular Glukkon and taking everything he had), but he continued listening. "He and Daxter broke communications, but we have received word from intermediaries that he is looking for information on what the Glukkon Hegemony is planning with their recent change in action."

"…Jak's a good guy," Abe said. "Scary. But good." He nodded, as if that said everything he cared to know on what Jak was up to.

"We _are _entering a vital stage of warfare," another Mudokon said. "Maybe we shouldn't have let him go?"

"Jak does what he wants," a human said. She shrugged. "What are we gonna do, tell him he can't? He'd do it just to be annoying!"

"Whatever he's up to, I don't think it's a coincidence that he left just as the Almighty Raisin started getting weird," a towering fungoid creature of green vegetation and muscle-like structures said, mushrooms sprouting from his back and a hump-like body structure with a wide mouth set in a prime position for biting. He was a fungal-orc, a sub-species of the orc-type throughout the multiverse.

Abe stared up silently at the Almighty Raisin for a minute. "…We have guys coming up with more freed people, we should give them the orientation and figure out where they should-

There was a small rumble as the Almighty Raisin stirred, and everyone immediately fell into startled squabbling and crying, involuntarily backing up and tripping over each other. The Almighty Raisin, the mighty voice of Oddworld's overseer spirits, cleared his voice, and all fell silent, staring up in surprise and wonder.

Thus spake the Almighty Raisin, "I have good news, but it's also rather bad news."

As divine proclamations went, it was a little disappointing. A Mudokon or two shuffled awkwardly. "What's the good news?" Abe said timidly.

A long moment, then the Almighty Raisin's sonorous voice declared, "He who bears the Key that do all things has come to Oddworld."

Abe blinked in confusion. He looked around for help; everyone else had a similarly blank look and shrugged helplessly. "Okay…" Abe said. "That's… good, huh?"

"That's also the bad news," the Almighty Raisin said. "He who bears the Key has come, and Oddworld may yet regret his coming."

"Oh no," Abe said. "…I shouldn't have woken up this morning, I should have just slept in-"

"And yet, he may wish to fight alongside us," The Almighty Raisin continued. "At a time like this, such chaos that he creates can free Oddworld from our problems, and free the Glukkons from their own doom. And… perhaps burn away the beasts of the All-Shadow that haunt us now."

"…The what?" Abe said, blinking.

"You sincerely do _not _want to know." The Almighty Raisin coughed and spat for a moment, mumbling incoherently before it spoke again. "…A monster has come to help the Glukkon Hegemony as well. Beware! Red light in flesh and blood, the souls of a dead civilization made to give life to Jealousy enfleshed."

"What about Jak?" Abe said hopefully. "Is this about him?"

The Almighty Raisin mumbled, sorting through its vast instructions, and finally said, "Oh, yeah. Jak. The angry guy who punches things a lot. Maybe he shall encounter the Keybearer and bring him to us. It remains to be seen."

"Oh… good?" Abe said uncertainly.

"Yes, probably." Suddenly, the Raisin gave a great shift. "WAIT. One is missing from our ranks, one who is very important indeed! _Where is Daxter?!_"

A long pause. "You mean the funny otter… weasel… thing?" another human said. "He's with Jak."

"Ah." The Almighty Raisin relaxed. "Well, as long as he is with Jak, it should be fine, then." He gave a heaving sigh and fell silent.

The tribesmen looked around awkwardly. "Well," the human woman said. "That was… odd."

"I have no idea what's going on anymore," Abe confessed.

"But what do you suppose all that means?" The krogan shaman said, scratching his head.

"Guess we'll find out," another Mudokon said, and unsurprisingly this didn't really comfort anyone.


End file.
